Campus Technology Insider Podcast August 2021
Listen: The Future of Online Learning Is Flexible and Stackable
00:12
Rhea Kelly: Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast! I'm Rhea Kelly, executive editor for Campus Technology, and your host.
Over the past few years, online learning in higher education has gone through a period of disruptive change. Not only did the pandemic trigger a massive shift from in-person classes to online, but it also brought new models of hybrid learning to the forefront. And micro-credentials, programs certifying specific competencies that can stand alone or be applied toward a larger degree, have gained momentum as learners have needed to reskill and compete in an evolving workforce. For this episode of the podcast, I talked with Dr. Betty Vandenbosch, chief content officer at Coursera, about the state of online education, the future of the traditional four-year degree, and what universities should be doing to keep up with alternative credential pathways. Here's our chat.
Hi Betty, welcome to the podcast.
Betty Vandenbosch: Such a pleasure to be here, Rhea.
Kelly: I'd love for you to tell me about your role at Coursera. And what does it mean to be Chief Content Officer? And also, I know you have an extensive background in online education, so I'd love to hear all about that.
01:36
Vandenbosch: Well, Rhea, I have to tell you, it's kind of a comedy. I seem to keep getting jobs that nobody knows what that job is or does. Right now, I'm the chief content officer at Coursera. Who is the chief content officer, what do they do? Well, this is the best job on the planet. I have the distinct privilege to lead a group of folks who work to understand what the learners on our platform are looking for, and the best content that the partners on our platform have to offer them, and making sure that there's a match: that our partners are providing the content that they're most able to provide, and that our learners are getting everything that they need. That's really what my job is. So I work with partners, and we talk to learners and we make the connection. Why am I qualified to do that? Well, because I've had a lot of other jobs, where I did things that nobody knew what I was doing. I was the chancellor at Purdue University Global. Now in the education space, people know what a chancellor is. But I told my mother I was a chancellor, she wasn't really all that impressed. So as the chancellor, of course, at Purdue University Global, I oversaw the learning of 32,000 students who learned predominantly online. And Purdue University Global was the acquisition by Purdue University of Kaplan University. So we took Kaplan University over to Purdue Global, because Purdue University recognized that they needed to have more online education. So that's the transition there. But before that, I was a provost, another job that my mother doesn't understand. And of course, I've been a dean, and so on and so forth. So yes, I have a long academic background. And certainly for the last, easily the last 15 years, it's all been pretty much online.
03:45
Kelly: I think higher education has a lot of titles that people outside of higher ed maybe don't know what that means. So I want to talk about current events. You know, lately, I've been seeing new announcements from like UT Austin and others, that are announcing they're going remote for the first few weeks of the semester, despite, you know, all intentions to be in-person. And so I'm kind of feeling like it's an echo of this time last year, where we saw, you know, a massive pivot to online learning out of necessity. So I'm just wondering what your take is: Do you think we'll be seeing a lot of that kind of pivoting just across all kinds of institutions? And do you think institutions are more prepared for these sudden transitions, than they were last year?