Marni Baker Stein on What’s Next For Higher Education

You are listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and today we’re talking with Marnie Baker-Stein, Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Western Governors University. For over 25 years, Marnie has been designing and scaling programs to improve access, affordability,

and student success. Prior to joining WGU, she worked for educational institutions in the United States and abroad on the development and administration of pioneering high school, undergraduate, graduate, continuing, and professional programming models delivered through competency-based online and hybrid formats.

She was selected by the Department of Education to serve as a member of the National Technical Working Group, charged with expanding the 2016 National Education Technology Plan and using technology to transform higher education. Let’s listen in as Tom and Marnie talk about the future of higher ed and the role of advisors and skills.

Marnie Baker-Stein, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you. Super happy to be here. Hey Marnie, it’s great to catch up. It’s been a long time.

I want to go back in the way back machine and find out why you studied French and economics at Penn State. Well, that’s really a good question because the only reason I studied that was a total accident. I started at Penn State.

I was interested in architecture. I took a bunch of classes that I really liked. The last term that I, right before I was supposed to graduate in my mind, I went in to talk to my college advisor for the first time and I was like, how do I get out of here? And she was like, well, you know, you actually have a degree almost in French.

And if you take a few courses, you can get a minor in economics. And I was like, cool. That’s what I’m going to do. So that’s what I did. And I graduated on time.

That’s awesome. So sort of accidental. I’m glad that at WGU, you don’t leave advising to chance. And that’s right. That’s right.

It sounds like it was a bit of an accidental degree. So you did a PhD at Penn and that was in education leadership, right? Yeah. At that time, you knew you were headed for higher education. Was that the focus?

Yeah. After I did my undergraduate at Penn State, I also did my degree in teaching English as a second language and I was really lucky to be a part of a couple of institution building initiatives that USA- Those are crazy stories because somehow, like right after the Soviet Union fell, how did

you end up at Riga in Latvia creating a brand new MBA program? That’s what happened. I finished my master’s degree and I went out to a job fair in Vancouver and had a couple of interviews and I was young and idealistic and they sensed that in me and they decided let’s send her over there to try to help us set up these programs.

So I got very lucky to have that experience in Latvia. Then we did a similar institution building work in Japan, in Turkey and I just knew from all of that work in every single one of those situations. There were learners who desperately needed education to organize itself around what they needed to become.

I saw how hard that was, I saw how creative that was in terms of the work and I cut the bug and when I came back, really decided that I needed to get my PhD and commit myself to this at a deeper level. It’s interesting, Mane, I wonder what the big takeaway was for you as both the founding faculty of these different institutions and doing it in such interesting places and formative

times. It must have helped make you creative and more focused on learner needs. Do you think what were the big takeaways for you from those experiences? The biggest takeaway for me is that it sort of built muscle in being brave in the face of really big, hairy, systemic problems in environments that were very strange to me

and where I had to learn not only language but I had to learn culture, I had to learn systems and understanding that all of that was critical for solving for students and that we shouldn’t be shy and we shouldn’t be afraid and we shouldn’t back down in the face of those challenges. To have those experiences so young was really important foundation for me to take on challenges

in my career that follows. When you came back to the States, you led the curriculum at a UC, I’m curious if that was sort of frustrating after the flexibility and creating new programs to come back to a UC system which is really big and a bit bureaucratic. Was that probably a different kind of an experience?

It was a totally different scale of experience. It was for international programs and so we did have quite a bit of flexibility for what we were putting together for students but it was nothing of the scale that we had been doing overseas but it was an important first step for me because when I went to Santa Barbara which was beautiful, that was a great place to go, not a bad place to land but when I was

at UC Santa Barbara, that was right when Mosaic had launched and Netscape had launched and the internet was upon us and they did at that moment the UC and the UC extension had a really forward looking mindset around the promise of this new digital approach. I landed right in the right spot for me in order to start doing that work in a place that was really supportive of it in the 90s. That was lucky.

After your PhD, you helped Penn launch an online learning program back in 1998 so that was pretty early in terms of online programs. Interestingly enough, writer on the time at WGU was starting out in Salt Lake City, right? Did you have any visibility to that? I did. I remember so vividly sitting in my little office in the basement of this building on Penn’s campus and I remember sitting there and I was actually working on a fairly mundane

component of my job at the time which was to make sure that all of our programs inside the college where I work were meeting accreditation standards and I was really having a hard time with faculty, getting them to define learning outcomes. It was a constant battle to get them to define learning outcomes even for their programs, let alone their courses. I remember reading about WGU and thinking like, my stars, this is next level. This is amazing.

What they are trying to do with competency and the way that they’re doing program design at the time was shocking but exciting and I kind of fell in love with the idea of WGU at that moment and always followed WGU with interest throughout my career. So for our listeners, a little bit of background, the idea was hatched by Utah Governor Mike Leavitt and Colorado Governor Roy Romer. They first talked about it at a Western Governor’s

Association meeting in 1996. It was formed in 1997. First classes were launched in 1999 and a radical idea was really a competency-based, affordable university. And so you’re at Penn launching their online program. You then went on and did really interesting work at both Columbia and then at the University of Texas. You were the innovation officer for that major system. What would you highlight about that since at Texas in terms of progress you’re able to make?

We, that was an incredible experience in terms of the understanding of the problem space of higher education, the understanding of affordances and constraints around truly becoming learner centered in that kind of a large system, as well as the understanding of the problems to be solved by digital transformation of education and that. It was all of those things. So a lot of the work that we did centered on understanding how to try to exponentially move the downline success for

learner audiences in the Rioplex, Rio Grande Valley, but also a whole area of Texas that has is a microcosm of every problem that students in this country face today from the digital divide to lack of access to transportation to a large percentage of them that did not speak English as their first language, but were citizens who were moving back and forth across a contentious border every day to take care of family members who grew up in some of the poorest counties in the

U.S. They had it all. They had it all in terms of problems and they also had it all in terms of the ambitions and expectations and resilience of those communities. And it was super exciting to do the work of trying to understand how technology could move the needle for them and solve for all of those problems. So being able to do that, being able to work on that for three years with some of the best resources and people in the country was extraordinary. It’s also very, very hard.

Hi, Marty. My last call was with a faculty member from UTRGV. What an exciting institution. It’s a bilingual, bicultural institution that’s doing such interesting and important work and that got their start in part because of the important work you were doing there. So about three and a half years ago, you came to Western Governors. You’re the provost there. What did you find when you got there? What was the state of the institution? What were they

doing well and what did you see as the opportunity? So obviously, WGU is an amazing institution and when we say that we are the countries or the world’s most learner-centered institution, I believe that that is true. The way we’re structured, the culture of WGU, all underline that intention and that claim for us. That was absolutely true and that is definitely WGU’s greatest strength.

I’ve never actually experienced anything like it any place I’ve worked before. So that’s what I found that was great and with that kind of engine, I realized pretty quickly, well, we could do anything we wanted to at WGU to really transform education on the part of learners. In terms of challenges, one of the reasons I really wanted to come to WGU is I imagined WGU’s approach to

competencies over a couple of decades. I just imagined what it was and I imagined it because they didn’t really write much about it. They didn’t talk much about it. They weren’t out there with their model and when I got to WGU, I realized that some of the things I imagined were true. All of our programs are made through a design of basically stacking up playlists of competencies to build degrees that we work closely with industry to develop. That was true. But what I also

realized is that over the years and over the decades, as we sought to become accredited, as we sought to become more like traditional education than at start, we had also slid into a hybrid model where some of our competencies were truly aligned with what industry need and some of our competencies were straight up academic competencies that we needed to include in our pathways just because, just to be accredited, just to be similar to other programs

of the same kind. That was really interesting to me. One of my first realizations when I got there is we need to return. We need to go back to the future, return to our roots, and really investigate what we mean by competencies, reignite our sense of the power of competency-based education, and rethink in today’s technology landscape how we can dynamically track the relevancy of our programs in terms of employer needs. So how has that learning model changed in

the last three years? What are you working on now and what’s next in the learning model? So we have a couple of big vectors of work. One is our work on skills. So two and a half years ago we put together a skills architecture team that has been working with industry and competence national competency frameworks and third-party labor insight providers like MZ to come up with a universal, a common way to understand and describe skills,

tag them to our competency, and then do dynamic audits of our programs based on relevancy and marketability. And that may sound wonky, maybe it’s a little wonky, but what that means in effect is for each of our programs, which are basically playlists of competencies, we can now give a marketability score that we can even geolocate. So we can say this is the job opportunity or the career path opportunity that this program and this set of competencies

affords you in this zip code or in this region or micro region. And that has been a tremendous amount of work, but is incredibly, incredibly exciting. That’s super exciting. I mean just for our listeners I’ll underscore that’s sort of the holy grail of getting really clear about what do learners in particular career pathways need to know and be able to do. What’s the best way to teach that? And then how can we observe and assess and credential that skill

in a reliable way? We’ve for hundreds of years have just relied on past the class, and that’s such a lousy right, you never know really what’s in the class. And passing that class is such a bad signal, a weak signal of skill development. So you’re really trying to go right at what a learners need to know, how do we know what they know, how can we capture and communicate that. It sounds like you’ve made a lot of progress on that. We’ve made a ton of progress on that,

both in terms of being able to in a sense transcript that value that they’re learning at the competency level. So we have a, it’s called an achievement wallet that we’re rolling out in the spring that as students are earning these competencies we’ll be able to transcript that in a way that they can share it with employers. But also it helps us to really focus in on how we should grow our programming portfolios. That achievement wallet sounds super exciting. Are

there going to be a series of badges in there or will there be micro credentials? How will you denote the competencies that are included? Yes, yes. So every one of our competencies… Because that’s such an important movement and you’ve been an important leader in that space. But Marnie, I want to do a deep dive into the role of advisors at WGU. Marnie, at WGU mentors play a really important role in your program. Describe their role and how they guide the learning journey.

Okay, so every student has a mentor from the moment they matriculate into WGU. And that mentor’s role is to work with that student to establish, you know, what are your goals? What pace would you like to move to get to those goals? Because at WGU you can personalize patience, you can go faster, you can go slower. That may vary from term to term. What is your term plan, each term in terms of the courses you’re taking and the sequence of courses that you’re taking? And then as you’re taking those

courses, you know, what are you learning and how is this informing your path ahead? These mentors have regular meetings with students. Generally speaking, they are weekly. It varies from student to student in case to case. And the students form really tight bonds with these mentors as they move through the program, who in addition to guiding them academically and in terms of career, are also their clearinghouse to other services at WGU that they may need, whether they’re wellness services or

as we saw with COVID, when COVID rolled across the country, we had students who had lost their homes, lost access to internet, and the mentor becomes the clearinghouse or the portal to those services at WGU so we can make sure that we’re incredibly agile in responding to student needs and resolving friction. So that’s the mentor role. We do believe that that is at the heart of the success that we have with students. That mentor is part of a community of care that also includes course

instructors for each of the courses. It includes our evaluators who with every assessment this student takes give very personalized feedback to the student within 24 hours of taking that assessment, as well as our curriculum and assessment designers who are considered faculty roles as well. And we’re looking at student data to sort of drive the continuous improvement of what they do. Marni, just a basic question. How would a mentor help a learner figure out if they’re in the right

academic program? So we have a set of, well, in addition to just talking to them because that human connection is really powerful, as we know, and important. So they have protocols for talking to students to gather this information. We also give students before they enter any program a program level assessment that is really designed to understand student motivations for studying in a particular pathway, which gives us a lot of intelligence. And then actually at the beginning

of every course, students also take an assessment that really takes a deep dive into their readiness for that course. And all of that intelligence is shared with both their course instructor, as well as the mentor, to guide conversations. That’s what we’ve been doing historically. This our ability to surface competency based achievements and sort of really granular career insights around those is another tool that’s going to help our mentors guide students in ways

that we haven’t been able to in the past. Let’s a quick scenario. So a learner is struggling with a concept in a class. Do they go to their mentor? Do they go to their course instructor? How would they connect to academic support? That’s a great question. So if they’re struggling with the concept in their class, they will go to their course instructor. And the course instructor is accountable for making sure that that journey inside of the class, inside of a particular course, is as smooth

as possible. And that they’re doing personalized interventions with students or removing frictions that are keeping them from getting their goal to pass that competency, right? The course instructor and the mentor, however, are in close communication and share dashboards on student progress so that they are both in the loop on what’s going on with the student in that class. Because surely, with the strength of the relationship the student has with that mentor, they do go back and talk to

that issue with their mentor as well. And for that reason, all of our mentors for any given program are, have terminal degrees and field in that programming area. It sounds a little bit like a case management approach. Do you have software that helps the people that are connected to that learner stay up to date? That’s exactly what it is. With this community of CARAT, they need to be able to nimbly, effectively, and very quickly manage cases and make

sure the right person is really helping the student at the right time and that student never feels lost and never feels alone. So do we have technology for it? Yes, because we have been, we have been implementing this for, for some time. However, one of the big initiatives that we’re working on is a next generation approach to case management for that community of CARAT. Right now, there’s, there’s a lot of, you know, it’s phone calls, it’s emails, it’s a case management tool that has

limitations. We see it as being much more effective into the future with this new tool that we’re developing. Sounds like good tools and a lot of human care are important. Absolutely. Marnie, you recently launched with a set of partners, something called the Open Skills Network, what is that? So as we have over the last couple of years jumped into the pool of trying to figure out how to identify skills data, rich skills data that is tagged to real-time market intelligence

for the skills, you know, we’ve written about 10,000 skills in a format that we developed in house at WGU and we realized, wow, this is hard, it’s complicated, it’s expensive, and everybody else we talked to, universities, employers was doing the same work in their own silos. And we thought, what a shame, we’re all reinventing the wheel all the time. Let’s bring that group of skills warriors together, people, institutions that are really committed to this work and see if we

can get to shared understandings about how to describe skills, help each other in figuring out how to do it more efficiently and effectively at scale, and potentially agree to publish our skills in an open format so that other institutions that don’t have the same resources as we do can use them. So that was the seed that the Open Skills Network grew out of. When we first started it and started talking about it, which was really just before COVID broke, there were just a few institutions

involved. Now we have over 90 institutions who are actively involved in this work, including ourselves, Southern New Hampshire University, University of Maryland, University of North Texas, Georgia State System, we’ve got ACE and UPCA, which are big educational organizations, but we also have Walmart and Amazon and Udacity. So it is this and the U.S. Chamber Talent Pipeline Initiative. So it’s become this incredible community working on making this solution.

And we’re working with Concentric Sky to do that. Bright Hive is helping us facilitate the work as well that’s going to end up with an open tool set and an open capability for managed skill libraries that everybody can use. So it’s super exciting and to have the kind of diversity of big employers and medium-sized employers and education institutions of all ills really centered around this laser-focused project is really pretty thrilling actually and super exciting for all of

us involved. It’s an exciting development. Marnie, it feels like there’s two things happening simultaneously that might be a threat to traditional universities. One is shifting from degrees to specific skills as the signaling mechanism and two, the entrance of corporate players in this space. It’s great to see Walmart involved, but we’ve also seen the tech players becoming directly involved in providing skills-based training. Our friends at Amazon up the street from us here in

Seattle announced the $700 million reskilling initiative. I noticed they didn’t mention any universities in their in their press release. So it feels like companies are getting more involved and we’re moving more towards skill-based progressions and has become more important than degrees. What does this mean for traditional higher education? Well, I won’t say, I don’t think that degrees are going away. I think degrees as credentials are still important signals. However,

there are this notion that these very targeted micro signals related to certifications or related to competencies or related to skills are also important. Either along the way to a degree or apart from a post-degree as folks upskill and reskill into a future of work where that is going to be a requirement. So I don’t think anybody is saying degrees are going to go away, but I think what everybody is saying is regardless of the package that you are offering, whether it is a

degree or whether it is a certificate or a course or a competency, tagging them to a universal signal like a skill makes them transparent and their value understandable to anybody and any institution that wants to consume them or value them. So what I think about this is, you know, for courses and professional disciplines, it just makes 100% sense. Take all of your competencies or courses or certificates or degrees and tag them to marketable skills data so that

employers and students themselves can understand the value of what they are learning along the way. That’s just logical. And I think most universities, even though it’s not what we’ve historically done, can do that. That’s not impossible to do. I think it’s also, though, a really interesting capability to tag skills to liberal arts degrees and human plus degrees because many of the skills and our 10,000 skills, like a vast majority of them, are humanities, social sciences, human plus

skills that companies and employers are looking for. So to take a degree in French and economics and to be able to tag that degree to the skills and the competencies that employers are looking for for the jobs they’re offering now and the jobs they’re going to be offering into the future, I mean, what an amazing way to underscore the value of an education in the humanities and the social sciences. Yeah, that’s what I think the future is. Will degrees in some areas not be

required anymore, perhaps in very technical areas, perhaps. But I don’t think that’s what anybody’s talking about right now. Are we going to see in this more atomized world, are we going to see more learners mixing and matching to create unique pathways? I think that we are, we would be foolish to believe that higher education is not unbundling or not going to unbundle. That is the most or perhaps the only proven strategy slash phenomenon in digital is that unbundling will happen to provide

very targeted specific component parts that learners can put together to add value to build value as they’re building their brand in the knowledge economy. I believe that that’s already happening and it’s going to continue to happen into the future and that we all better get ready for it in higher education and make sure that we have the technology and the curriculum development prowess and the marketing, go-to-market prowess to continue to be viable as institutions into the

future. Marnie, you mentioned Udacity. We’ve seen Udacity and Attic and Coursera enrollments explode in COVID. I guess have you seen something similar at WGU and how does WGU play in the lifelong learning space going forward? So during the first months of COVID and up to today, obviously WGU is a totally online, very flexible opportunity for students and we have seen that students do value that opportunity. So I think anybody who’s offering programs online at this time

is really in a position to serve students in a moment where many on-ground institutions are just getting on their feet to do so. So that’s been positive for us and hopefully positive for the students that we’re serving. That said, right now WGU really only offers degrees. We have been laser focused on offering flexible degree pathways. That is our compact with our student markets. That is beginning to change as of the spring where we are ourselves starting to unbundle our

degree pathways, offering stackable certificates to degree as well as post-degree for students that are micro-targeted at the skills that we see are in high demand. Marnie, you have a huge school of education. I think you’re probably, are you the largest school of education in the country? I believe we are. I think you’re the largest provider of largest preparation institution for STEM educators in the country. So we appreciate your leadership on that front. We’re talking to

your Dean of Education in a week or two, but anything new on that front? Well, we have a new leader who is Mark Milliron. We’re very happy to have him on board with his background in K-12 education as well as education, the community college education ecosystem as well as all of his amazing work that he did on data analytics and data science in the education space to just sort of raise the bar for all of us at WGU. He has as well as the entire Teachers College leadership

has, of course, many things going on. One of the most exciting initiatives they’re working on right now is a global academy for next generation teaching skills competencies and coursework that we feel is just in time for anybody across the country who’s struggling how to make sense of teaching online in K-12, especially those who have never had to do it at all before. There was no digital experience in their schools. So that is work that is being piloted in different parts

of the country and that we’re rolling out this year that’s super exciting. That’s really exciting. So Marnie, where can people learn more about WGU? So folks want to learn more about WGU. They can go to wgu.edu online. We also have our annual report online that you can check out every year to learn more about our initiatives and our progress with students. Marnie, we appreciate your leadership at WGU. It’s a real innovator in the sector. We love the fact that it’s competency-based and

learner-centered. We appreciate the community of care that you put around each learner. It’s a terrific example. How many learners do you have enrolled right now? We have over 122,000 full-time learners right now. That’s extraordinary. We appreciate your leadership in the space and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. A big thanks to Marnie Baker-Stein for joining us on this week’s episode. We appreciate her dedication to creating a higher education system that works

for everyone. For more information on what’s next in higher ed, check out episode 228 with Michael Horn on Choosing College. We’ll be sure to put a link in the show notes. And for more on all things innovations and learning, be sure to check out our blog at GettingSmart.com. Lastly, don’t forget to hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future episodes. And so every Wednesday morning, our latest interview is ready to press play. That’s it for today, listeners. For the Getting Smart podcast,

this is Jessica signing off.