Driving Innovation in Higher Ed Through Data
CT: In a recent interview between you and Maryville President Mark Lombardi on his Disruptor in Chief podcast, you said, "The revolution in higher education is going to be led through data." Could you talk more about what that means?
Komarny: In my work at Salesforce, I've seen how well they can use data to really inspire their customer to have a great relationship with them. In the education sector, we use that data to power our business, and that's great — but it's very episodic. We see students as admissions, where we allow them in, and graduation, where we let them out, which is an episodic business model. We graduate, or fire, our customers at the end of this relationship — it's not seen in any other industry. Graduation is a ceremony that should be celebrated. There's nothing wrong with that degree, and that's really a celebratory moment. But it should be continuous.
We're trying to look at, how do you learn across a lifetime? Four years and out is not enough anymore. How can we engage with people to allow them to understand the skills they have, and also what's needed in the world, around a lifelong-learning journey? How can we stack the technology up to power our future vision? Wouldn't it be great to have a community of learning that's constantly interacting with those people who have graduated, but now need to be upskilled across their careers? How can we use tech to create a relationship around learning that persists across the lifetime?
We have a moral imperative to really look at what's needed to move our country forward. And degrees are great, but they're not really meeting the bill right now. There are other things that we can do, but it's going to take a deviation from our current business model in higher ed. This can get a lot better, a lot more inclusive, a lot more equal for a lot of people, if we just think about admissions and graduation a bit differently.
CT: Are you talking about being able to tap into data that might, say, help Maryville develop programs that are most needed by its alumni?
Komarny: Absolutely. Think about what we do now. We create a course catalog with a bunch of curricula in it and try to guess what people want in their future. Here are our degrees, this is the curriculum we're going to have, you're going to be a computer science major, here's a computer science degree. That all works; there's nothing wrong with that. What I'm saying is that same content can be broken up into very small modules, and can be aligned to somebody's learning pathway.
We admit students into school and they're going after a degree — that's one pathway. Another way would be to allow them to see the skills that they already have in their profile — ingest their LinkedIn profile or their résumé and output the skills that come out of that, so we have a language to speak to the world of work with. What's missing between academia and industry is a Rosetta Stone. And we've been working on that Rosetta Stone with the Open Skills Network or some of the things that Emsi [now Lightcast] has put into the world around open skills. So we can create that language that gives people a representation of what they're learning and what's valuable in the world today, and what employers are going to look at and ask for. If we can build that language, or that Rosetta Stone, we can inspire not only learners, we can inspire universities and companies to start to come together. We're really going after these open skills taxonomies and networks that are going to be what everybody can use to move into this new way to deliver education across the lifetime.