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President LeBlanc (SNHU)
President Paul LeBlanc: For a long time, we've been thinking about how to make
college more affordable, particularly to working adults. Increasingly it's 37 to 40 million
adult Americans with zero to few college credits. 70 percent of jobs require a two year
degree or its equivalent. It's a huge issue in workforce development. It's a huge issue in
terms of the growing gap between haves and have-nots. It's all the stuff you know about
our need to educate our workforce better. We've had a long standing institutional
commitment to try to create new and innovative models, new ways to serve people. We
have the fourth-largest not for profit online operation in the country, in terms of degrees.
I was on a flight from Asia. I wrote a white paper for my staff, that was titled 'The Next
Big Thing?' I can send it to you, if you like.
David Cutler: I would love that. That would be great.
President LeBlanc: Sure. If you just email me after this call, that will spark my memory
when I get back to the office. In that paper, I envisioned, what would it be like -- could
we do a competency-based model? Competency-based education is not new, it's been
around for a long time. We had been looking at western governors, and we had been
looking at Excelsior and Charter Oak, and other innovative places. What we wanted to
envision was something that was even more fully detached from courses and credits, and
really address the fundamental issue we think is at work in terms of higher ed, which is
that we're really good at telling people how long students have sat in a classroom, but
we're not really very good at saying what they've actually learned. That's embedded in the
Carnegie unit.
I also call the Carnegie unit the Higgs boson particle of higher ed. I don't know if you
know its history, David, but it was created by the Carnegie foundation as a way of trying
to figure out how to pay attention to retired college professors.
David: Yeah.
President LeBlanc: It has come to integrate itself into every facet of higher ed. It's how
we organize knowledge. How we chunk knowledge, if you will, in the form of a three
credit course. It's how we schedule, it's how we allocate room resources, it's how we
think about workload. It's everything. Most importantly, it's the basis upon which federal
financial aid is given. 53 billion dollars a year, all tied back to [inaudible 02:30] .
David: Recently, you were just approved for financial aid.
President LeBlanc: While we're not the first competency-based program, we're the first
competency-based program to be fully untethered from the credit hour, and to be given
approval by the Department of Ed. The Department of Education has this little-known
provision for direct assessment of learning. You can call it the direct assessment of
learning provision, in Title 4. It really was, by everyone's agreement, written with WGU
in mind. I think WGU may have had a very active hand in crafting the legislation. Then
WGU never actually used it. It sat, unused, and there are simply no institutions who had
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ever applied for it, or received approval, obviously. When that was called to our attention,
we had been working on the program anyway, we thought, wow, we could get access to
federal financial aid dollars for our students in this manner. We applied for it a year ago.
The first step in applying is you have to get approval by your accreditor.
We went before the commission of higher education, as part of NEF, which is our
regional accreditor. We received approval in September. In the following month, we
submitted our application to the Department of Ed. In this past month, I received
approval under direct assessment. It's a very big deal. A lot of people think it's a historic
moment in higher education history, because for the first time ever, federal financial aid
dollars will accrue to actual learning rather than CPAK.
David: That's amazing. That's so cool. Is it the first time that there's federal aid being
given to a program like the one you're offering?
President LeBlanc: Correct.
David: That's so cool.
President LeBlanc: Our students don't take courses. There are no credit hours, and no
courses. Our students show mastery of 120 competencies, 120 can-do statements. By the
way, have you looked at our website, which is called collegeforamerica.org?
David: Of course, yeah.
President LeBlanc: OK, so you'll see a lot of this outlined in there as well. I don't want
to be repetitive or redundant.
David: No. I was going to ask you about those. Those 120 competencies, I think that's so
great. Even at the K through 12 level, I often wonder whether we should be teaching what
we're teaching. Should we not be teaching some things that we are teaching for preparing
students for twenty-first century skills? I wanted to ask you, again, what these
competencies are and how students are mentored through them? Because it's not like
they're taking a traditional MOOC or online lecturing course, right?
President LeBlanc: That's right. Every competency is...120 competencies in 9 clusters,
if you will, 9 groupings of competencies. Those clusters are things like communication or
quantitative reasoning, [indecipherable 05:39] set of math and applied statistics and other
competencies. Students show their mastery by completing tasks. These are real-world
hypotheticals. They're not exams, they're not the kind of isolated assignments you might
get in a college class. They're meant to be hypothetical, which mimic more closely how
that competency is used in the real world.
David: Love it.
President LeBlanc: For example, there's a competency around using spreadsheets to do
analysis. In that hypothetical...the hypothetical, I'm going to get this in general terms is,
you're recently been employed. You're a new employee at company X. The person that
you're replacing was halfway through this project. Here was the project. Here are the
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spreadsheets that they were working on. They're only half done and there may be errors
in the spreadsheets, the parts that are completed. If you have questions, you need to
answer, and here are the materials need to work through.
What they have to then do is go in. They have to decide what data they're looking for to
answer those questions. Thy have to go into and put that in the form of the spreadsheet.
They have to make sure that the calculations in there are correct so they're displaying a
certain level of mastery over math concepts, etc.
That feels like the kind of work you might do in the real world, as opposed to, here's a
little subunit on how to calculate percentages. In our version, you would be calculating
percentages, but you'd be doing it in context, and that's really important. For our
[indecipherable 07:13] population, especially.
You show mastery by completion of tasks. There are 72 of them. You could complete the
whole program so that...Let me back up one second. The tasks are at three levels, level
one, level two, level three.
A level one task may account for between one and three competencies. You might have
said to me, "Well, 120 competencies. How come there are only 72 tasks?" Because at
level three, a level three task might account for six competencies by itself.
David: Sure, depending on what you're doing. You're using more than one competency.
President LeBlanc: Exactly. Because again, we have this real belief about the mastery
should be demonstrated in real-world ways, so it's not simply studying for a test, for
example. You could, conceivably, earn the whole associate's degree by completing only
22 level three tasks. You could also complete the degree by completing a larger number
of level one and two tasks. In that scenario, there's no way to graduate without
completing at least some level three tasks because that's a pretty higher order things that
we want to make sure you know.
David: I guess I'm interested, though, in learning more about the mentoring and how
students actually are assessed and to what degree and how they learn online.
President LeBlanc: If you were to come into the program, you would first be working
with your coach, who's assigned to you for the whole of your time with us. That coach is
really, in many ways, frankly, is much a life coach as they are an academic coach.
Because for our learners, there's such a big psychoemotional dynamic for all of this.
These are people who have not been to school for a long time. They're paid mostly on an
hourly basis. They're juggling work and family, so they've got a lot of hurdles to get
through.
What we've learned in our very large online program is that our advisors are not only the
critical chart that holds us all together, but so much of their time is spent encouraging,
inspiring, cajoling, helping schedule, directing, really getting people through.
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You hear this from our students all the time, "My adviser's the reason I completed my
degree. They got me through. She got me through." Your adviser would work with you,
David, to say, "David, let's talk about what you bring to the table. What are you good at?
What do you think you're good at? Where have you always struggled? What were your
worst subjects in school? What were your best subjects in school?"
Then we'd start at...Then we'd identify where you wanted to work first. You might say,
"Hey, now, I'm a bookkeeper. I know I don't have a college degree. My small business
for which I work, I keep the books. I'm pretty good at math. I think I really know this
stuff." Then we'd say, "Oh, you know what? Let's plug you in at level 3? Let's see if you
can knock out some of those math competencies quickly.
You might say, "Oh, my God. I've always been a terrible writer. I can't write." A typical
comment that somebody makes. We'd say, "Let's put you into level one, our lowest level
of writing, and we'll work our way up. We'll do some assessments in the process, and
we'll get a handle on your skills."
You would say, "OK. I'm ready. I'm going to do a level 2 task in communications." You
would plug into those competencies we have agreed upon, where you're going to start.
You would get a competency packet and they'll pack it online electronically. It's not a
physical pack.
It would be, here's a competency, here's the rubric by which you will be assessed. Put
another way, here's the way we define this competency so you're never guessing. You
don't have to guess what the competency is. So highly defined.
Here are a whole set of materials that help you sort through..."I'll open this case from
you," so it's a part of the way we drive up [indecipherable 11:04] . There might be
simulations or maybe a CON Academy video. We have a lot of them.
All this stuff that we've curated. When we say there's no faculty, while there is no
instructional faculty, we've had academic expertise in curating the content.
When you are ready. You've looked at it. You might say, "You know what? I think I've
got it." Or you might say, "No. Oh, there's this one piece of the rubric I don't think I
understand." Well, you might spend a little time on that content.
At some point, you're going to decide you're ready. When you are ready, you take the
task. When you're ready to submit, it gets sent into the system. In an automated way, it
goes out to a pool of faculty so you have [indecipherable 11:47] of faculty come in who
are reviewers. Our goal is that within 48 hours, you would get it back.
You would have only two responses. One is, "Congratulations, you have achieved
mastery," and move on, or "Not yet." If it's the latter, you would get feedback from the
reviewer.
p.5
The feedback would say, here's everything on the rubric that you nailed, here are the
things you didn't. Here's some feedback about what, I think, is going on. Here are some
links to learning content you will find useful to help you get this done. [crosstalk 12:22]
David: Sorry. Are the reviewers various faculty at Southern New Hampshire, or are they
people from other areas outside the school?
President LeBlanc: The latter. We have a huge pool of adjunct faculty that teach for us.
Many of them are full time at other schools. We use a pool of qualified faculty, they're all
qualified, for different competencies. We look for people who have worked with rubrics
before and who have a comfort level with this kind of feedback. By the way, our
feedback is averaging 30 hours, even though our target's 48.
David: That's amazing.
President LeBlanc: Students really love that. What we know about adult learners is that
they do better with immediate, clear feedback.
David: I think, at any age that's true. I wanted to ask you a few more questions about this
system. I love CON Academy. I love online learning materials, even MOOCs that are
free. I imagine that one criticism you might get is, that these aren't good enough? It's still
not as good as having an instructor on an online course. Do you, as the president of
Southern New Hampshire, do you have faith enough in these free online sources to act as,
I guess, adequate supplements to whatever a traditional online course might be?
President LeBlanc: Sure. It's a multipart answer. One is that, we've been really careful
in curating material so we think we're picking really good learning material. Two, we
won't have to guess at...We're collecting data all the way through. One of the things I
think is innovative about what we're doing is that we're not using any conventional LMS.
We're actually building everything in Salesforce which is an incredibly robust platform
for collecting data.
We will be able to track and correlate student success with what kind of content they use
and what they go back to. We'll always be looking to close that feedback loop and seeing
[indecipherable 14:23] to something. Do we see students always stumbling on the same
thing? We can log, we can track what contents they're accessing. We'll be able to ask
questions like, "When students access this piece of content over the other, is there any
difference in their success rate?"
David: Oh, that's amazing.
President LeBlanc: We'll start to get some understanding about the quality of the
content. It's not a question of standing alone or in isolation with the learning material.
The other thing that supports their instruction and helps fill in the absence of traditional
faculty teaching is a robust peer-to-peer. What we know, what people like "OpenStudy,"
and others have shown, is that students are incredibly effective learners with each other.
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Part of the, I think, beauty of this platform is that when you log on and you are working
at a competency, you'll be able to see everybody else is working on that same
competency concurrently. You'll have each other. It's allows me to say, "Hey, David, I
see you're working on this, on a math competency, blah, blah, blah, or this spreadsheet, or
this Excel function. I can't get it. I keep going back and looking at the content links, but I
still don't understand it. Have you figured it out?"
You get to say, "Oh, yes. Absolutely. I struggled with it, too. Here is the key." Then
there's that peer-to-peer instruction that's going on. It's really powerful.
David: You can share online?
President LeBlanc: Yes. You'll be able to text each other, email each other, lot's
of...Everything's being built for mobile platforms, as well.
David: That's awesome.
President LeBlanc: You might be working on this on your iPad in a park somewhere or
on break at work. The other piece is that we asked students to identify mentors in their
workplace who, also, can be a learning resource. Not just their workplace, but in their
life.
It's really interesting as we did a lot of design testing, we worked with a business
integration factory out of Providence on student based design. They helped us think
through how students would experience the program with the same target population.
One of the things we learned is that students in this profile think they don't really have
much in terms of learning resources in their life, but in fact, they often have a lot.
When someone says, "I'm not really good at math." You say, "Well, do you know
anybody that's good at math? Anybody in your life?" They say, "No, I really don't." We
say, well, wait a second. Is there anybody who worked in accounting, or bookkeeping or
these other examples that you know and still lives in the neighborhood or in your
family?" "Oh, yes, there's my neighbor, so-and-so. She's retired, but she was a
bookkeeper forever." "Yes, well, good, is that somebody that you..."Oh, yes. I used to
mow her lawn every year at summer for her."
David: That's awesome.
President LeBlanc: She might be a math resource for you. [crosstalk]
President LeBlanc: ...type of thing.
David: Are these the people that act as the mentors?
President LeBlanc: We help the student identify all of those mentors in their life who
could be helpful in their learning. That's just one example. I'll give you another quick
example. We had somebody say that they're really good at math. We asked about
neighbors, co-workers, if you know anybody in the business office at work? No, no, no.
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blah blah blah. "He's a good kid. How old are they?" "Blah, blah, blah." "Are your kids
good at math?" "Oh yeah, they're really good at math."
Well, that's a good learning resource and no one thinks about turning to their kids for help
on their math, right? It's really interesting how people respond to them.
David: That's awesome.
President LeBlanc: The other thing we help them to identify in this mix is
accountability partner. Accountability partner is based on the idea of a gym buddy. If you
are trying to work out every day, your likelihood of being committed goes up
exponentially if you're going with other people. If you know someone else is there,
expecting you to be there at seven in the morning, you're going to get out of bed to go.
We ask them who, in their life, that holds them accountable. We took this idea from an
Ed Tech called Fidelis. I don't know if you know it.
David: I don't.
President LeBlanc: That it works with people in the military to help advise them and
move them towards college, started by a really bright guy named Gunnar Counselman.
We liked Gunnar's idea and we applied it in our own studies. Everyone had to identify an
accountability partner. One of the women in the design study last summer, who like in
week two was thinking to herself, "Oh shoot. What was I thinking? I don't have time for
this. Blah blah blah. Why did I sign up?" It was her 11 or 12-year-old daughter who said
to her, "Hey Mom. You've always been talking about the college degree. You've got to
stay involved." She described it as like a splash of water on the face, like, "You're right"
and so got re-committed to finishing and working on her stuff.
Accountability partners, mentors, peer-to-peer, all of these things are very powerful
helps, are aides to the learning beyond simply the content.
All of that said, David, I think one of the questions that we're looking at, and we'll still
reserve the right there, if you will, is we may have to have some disciplinary resources in
a couple of key areas available to students who still, with all of that, can't get something.
What we're talking about it is, it wouldn't be the high cost. We could have a math teacher
or a writing teacher, and they might simply be available every evening from 5 to 10. You
know on your writing competency and you're just struggling, that that person's available
to you either online or through texting or Skype or whatever.
I wouldn't be surprised if we end up going down that path, though. We're going to wait
and see.
David: That's awesome. This sounds so great. It seems you you've found a magic key to
using all these great online tools and providing guidance for students to use, sources that
are already right there with them, making the learning even more intimate. I'm
wondering, though, to what extent to do you think that what you're doing with College
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for America should inform how we teach in a traditional classroom? You focus on
competencies and life skills. What do you think about the traditional college experience?
President LeBlanc: I think one of the things that colleges have been working, getting
better at for a long time, is identifying outcomes. The accrediting agencies have, for a
long time, been hammering on institutions to be better about their learning outcomes at
the course and program level. I think competency-based education is the highest
expression of that. As competency-based education gets traction, I think it will impel our
pull up, the quality of that work in more traditional-looking programs of more traditional
courses.
I think that's one piece, that will it be impactful? Because in reality, what we know in
most places is that institutions are just not very good at identifying learning outcomes and
competencies.
We see them in a couple ways. There was a Chronicle report that came out a week or two
ago that talked about the gap and perception between institutions, where 65 percent of
them, I think the number, think that they're doing a good job preparing their graduates for
the work force. Whereas only 35 percent, really quite the inverse of employers, thought
the colleges were doing a good job.
David: Yeah, I saw that, too.
President LeBlanc: When you are clear about your outcomes and competencies, you
can then have that conversation more fully and easily because everyone gets to look at it.
What we say to employers and there's always this magic moment when we talk to them.
One of the things I say and it's like hitting a hot button is, I ask them, "Have you hired
college graduates that don't write very well or don't do math very well or you wouldn't
put in front of a room with important customers? Why does that unleash a flood of
frustration?"
The second thing I say is, "When you look at a college transcript, it's a black box. When
you see that somebody got a B in sociology, all you really know is that they did better
than somebody with a B- or a C+."
In our program, when you look at a competency-based transcript, you not only see the
120 competencies, you can see the rubrics, so you'll know exactly what we need when we
say somebody can present well. We'll tell you exactly what that looks like.
Every student has a web-based archive of their task, so you can also go and take a look. If
you want to see it, when we say somebody can present well, we'll define it for you. We'll
share the task that was completed. You can watch their video and you decide for yourself
if we've got it right or wrong.
That's so helpful in terms of accountability. Competency-based education is not easy,
because there's no sliding by with a C.
David: It's either pass or not, right?
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President LeBlanc: Mastered or not yet. Those are our two states, it's binary.
David: No grades.
President LeBlanc: No grade. No grade inflation.
David: No grades at all, right? There are zero grades.
President LeBlanc: Exactly. There's no grade inflation and there's no sliding by. That's
really a powerful thing as well.
David: I know that your program right now is geared more towards working adults, but
do you think that this could ever be an alternative, or an even better alternative, for
graduating high school seniors going into college?
President LeBlanc: I think a couple of things. One is we are piloting in September at a
high school in Providence. One question is now, could we see high school seniors
graduating with associate's degrees in hand? We think that's an intriguing notion for
piloting with the Met school, which is a very reform-minded, creative school in
Providence, Rhode Island, in a very poor neighborhood. They're a crack-infested South
Providence neighborhood. It's a remarkable high school, by the way, if you ever have a
chance to visit.
David: They would get their associate's while they're in high school and when they
graduate?
President LeBlanc: It'd be quite possible, yeah, because we don't care about how old
you are and we don't care about how much time you take. If you can demonstrate
mastery, you've earned your degree. What they're going to do this summer is work with
our team to map the courses of the junior and senior year to our competencies and see to
what extent they can align them. Then as a result, they will be preparing their students to
do the tasks that are required to earn their degree.
David: That is really amazing.
President LeBlanc: Then one more thing -- because we're not connected to time, we
actually have probably 25 percent of the 275 students currently enrolled are in a category
we would call sprinters. They are on pace for going from zero credits to an associate's
degree in under 12 months. They'll earn their associate's degree for $2,500.
David: Because they can show their competency at level three and they get quicker
credit for that, or quicker completion for that.
President LeBlanc: Right. In reality, it's really not so much of what level you are, but
basically how fast you tick off the competencies. We've got one woman, we were betting
that she might even do it in six months. Now, she's getting up against some of the harder
ones, so she's slowing down a little bit.
I think we will routinely have people earning their associate's degree in under a year.
p.10
David: What kind of degrees do they get, though? Is it an associate's degree in business?
Associate's degree in...something or other?
President LeBlanc: It's an associate's degree in general studies with a concentration in
business. The thing that will vary is that we will do various iterations of the program,
where the concentrations change. Those concentrations are kind of like a major, but the
real major here is general studies. We're working with a couple of big healthcare systems
to do one for non-clinical workers in the health system. 80 percent of your interactions
with the healthcare system are with hourly paid employees at a low skill level.
The person who greets you when you walk in, the person who walks you down the hall,
the person who takes your medical card and Xeroxes it, the person who makes your
appointment, the person who makes the referral, the person who traces down your
insurance question, something close to 80 percent of your interactions are with those
people, not your doctor or nurses.
Orderlies, attendants, and all that stuff.
David: Not to go so out of order, but the next thing I want to ask you. Any plans for a
BA?
President LeBlanc: Yeah. This summer, we'll begin working on the design for a
four-year degree. That will also be in general studies, probably with a focus on business
as well, at first. Though just like the associate's degree, we would then work towards
other iterations. That will require us to go back to our creditor and back to the
Department of Ed for approval.
I'd be delighted if a year from now, we were rolling out the bachelor's degree. We don't
control the timing on the regulatory approval side. We control the timing of our
submission. We will submit by spring of next year.
David: That's amazing. I know you said something about posting work online. I've done
a lot of work with eportfolios and students putting up their own blogs. Are you using
your own software? Out of curiosity, are you using something third-partied to do this?
President LeBlanc: I don't know the answer the question, David, though I can find out. I
don't know if we're building it into our Salesforce platform or if we're doing something
different. I think we're probably building it ourselves.
David: That's so cool.
President LeBlanc: One of the things we've done is, our intention here is not to serve
10,000 students. Our intention is to really have an impact on workforce with the hopes of
serving tens and tens of thousands of students. We talk about how fast we get to 250,
350,000 students. We've hired, really I think, an all-star team of people to lead the effort.
Everybody has worked and managed at scale. Even though they're small right now, that
they're just starting up, our chief technology guy came to us from Monster and
Jobscience. They work only on scale.
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The executive director of the unit is a woman who headed up a higher education division
for Houghton-Mifflin Publishing, and that was a $400 million operation.
From the beginning, this has been built for scalability.
David: I've got to ask. It seems like $2,000 and under a year. That's nothing, really, in
terms of what college costs today. How are you able to fund all of the research, all of
your initiatives, all the effort that you're putting into this?
President LeBlanc: We had a little bit of help from the Gates fundage, had a million
dollars last year investing [inaudible 28:49] . We spent two million dollars investing in
[inaudible 28:52] resources as well for a total of three million in the fiscal year just
ending. We go to our board in another week to increase that expense to about eight
million. We are lucky to have the resources to invest in this.
It becomes all sustaining at scale, because it is a low-cost education and we've been able
to drive enormous amount of cost out of the bottle, so we think we can be self-sustaining
by 2016. We have a couple years to go before this thing can really pay for itself.
We think at large scale, we think it can generate enough surplus to start re-investing and
building out further and doing other things.
David: That's so great. One more question. This is the last question I wanted to ask you
before I let you go. Did you think of this? Was this a group effort of this initiative? How
did it get off the ground to begin with?
President LeBlanc: The initial concept was mine. Again, based on that very long flight
from Asia, and this paper. I do these when I travel a lot. I'll create these flight papers for
my staff. They're just platforms for thinking about stuff. That one, I felt like, you know
what, I think we've got something here. I carved out some money to create something
called the innovation lab, then started hiring a couple of key people to start fleshing this
out. That team that is still together really is responsible for making this thing go. Then
hired more people, and we've ramped up since then. I think around 16 people on the team
now. While the innovation lab still exists, CFA is kind of its main work. We're looking at
some other things. We've been talking to the foundation about...because so many of our
tasks are hypotheticals, they really would lend themselves to immersive environments,
like game design. We're talking to them about that now. We do some of this already in
our online program, where we're using avatars in our nursing program online.
We're going to push out in that way. Even though we're working only with employers at
this point, we want to push out to more community-based organization, even faith-based
organizations. In poor communities, those are often stable community centers. It's all
about how do you reach more people, and how do you impact more people and give
opportunities.
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Transcription by CastingWords