Education and the Economics of Inference

 If history is our guide then we go forward through the rearview mirror, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. There are many metaphors that help us make sense of the present. I like the skeuomorph, mostly because, as a practitioner of human centred design having worked on many projects involving UI, UX and behaviour change, these help orient ourselves to the present use case by mapping past grammars of action into the future. January is a fitting time to reflect on how the past informs the future. And we are at a critical junction in postsecondary education, and depending on your perspective this is either a beginning or an end. 

Education going forward will be defined by new ways of thinking that promotes better access and accessibility – using AI in teaching and learning, better credit mobility, a focus on affordable learning and open education, modular and micro-credential learning, including more effective use of physical space, and increasing the porosity between the private and public sectors. We are in the middle of redefining the business model of higher education. Here are some observations from last year that will help inform this year as eCampusOntario continues to support Digital Transformation – in Ontario and across Canada through our network of partners and Digital Campus Canada. 

Access: Accessibility

This year marks the full implementation of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). There is a still a lot of work to be done to meet the aims of the AODA, but there has been a lot of great work on accessibility across our sector.

Last year we worked with partners to produce two excellent resources to support accessibility. 

The Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University is a global leader in accessibility. Check them out – these have many useful resources, including this one: Framework for Accessible and Equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education. This report offers great guidance on AI – it is “a practical guide to the dizzying domain of artificial intelligence within the education ecosystem, with a particular focus on the impact on equity and accessibility. AI and accessibility are beginning to have an interesting conversation.” 

We also worked with the Business Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) on a roadmap for supporting Accessibility, Digital Transformation, and Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) – watch for this to drop soon.

Artificial Intelligence: AI

AI is a pharmakon: it is either a remedy or a poison. As such, it too is a fitting way to frame our discussion as with those described above. And AI is a resource extraction industry. It uses the raw materials of the Internet to build inference – the process by which harvested data produces meaning. Eventually the full cost of this will be apparent. But for now, beyond the hype cycles AI adoption is the big push – and education will be no exception.  Here are a couple of excellent resources on using generative AI in teaching and learning:

• York University: https://www.yorku.ca/teachingandlearning/gen-ai/  
• University of Toronto: https://ai.utoronto.ca/ 
• Contact North has a great suite of AI tools.

A credit granted anywhere is a credit granted everywhere 

Humber Polytechnic demonstrated leadership on seamless credit transfer by announcing late last year that there will be “Automatic and no fees for credit transfers and prior learning assessment and recognition starting Fall 2025.” This is a game changer for Ontario. It is the first domino to drop as Ontario continues system evolution toward a bigger focus on learners and value for money – for learners and for the system. Bottom line: Learners should be provided with “no wrong door” into the educational system that will enable credential completion across all areas of the economy. 

Affordable Learning: OER Uptake at Scale

The Ontario Virtual Learning Strategy (VLS) invested $35M in open education. As the Minister Nolan Quinn of the Ministry of Colleges and Universities said in his opening remarks at the eCampusOntario annual Teaching and Education Seminar and Showcase, OER saves students money. Our Open Library has a student savings tracker that includes an opportunity to learn how much faculty can save their students and to share an adoption.  And there is good news from across the sector: Check out this story from Trent University Open Educational Resources Pilot Project Saves Students an Estimated $390,000 in Textbook Costs. And from Fanshawe College the OER Design Studio enlists students to work and learn that saves students millions in annual costs. Both of these were supported by funding from the VLS.

Want to learn more about open education in Ontario? Check out these two recent reports:

• Brock University’s Inclusive Education Research Lab and eCampusOntario have released On a Path to Open, a new report detailing key results from a study conducted with Ontario’s publicly-supported colleges, universities, and Indigenous institutes about their capacity to support open educational practices (OEP)
• Affordable Learning, Lasting Impact: How OER and Partnerships Save Students Money, a new report detailing how Open Educational Resources (OER) are emerging as a critical tool in addressing education affordability, promoting equity, and fostering innovation across Ontario’s higher education sector.

Modular and Micro-Credential Learning

Here’s two excellent examples of leadership and the future of learning. We recently had the opportunity to visit Dario Guescini and Radha Krishnan at Seneca Polytechnic. Among other highlights they showed us the Hyflex Classroom design. This digital by design space enables full hyflex learning – it does not matter if the students are in the class or attending remotely. A significant percentage of classroom at Seneca Polytechnic are outfitted this way. They started building these during the pandemic. That’s foresight in action.

And on a recent visit to College La Cite I learned about their approach to modular curricula: all courses across all programs are modularized and translated to outcomes based learning. This gives them enormous flexibility on supporting multiple and myriad learning pathways, including the potential to create micro-credentials. This is a great example of future-focused extensibility. Again, exceptional foresight that future proofs learning design forward.

And on the topic of micro-credentials, eCampusOntario continues to support our members to align programs with local labour markets to fill specified labour market gaps.

The official Ontario upskilling platform – the Micro-Credentials Portal operated on behalf of the Ontario Government by eCampusOntario supports Ontario’s Micro-Credential Strategy. The MC Portal continues to provide members with innovative labour market tools to ensure program alignment. It is also an example of AI in action.

The AI back end of the Micro-credentials portal helps institutions assign labour market information (LMI) to their courses and programs with a click of a button. Institutions can be supported in aligning their courses/programs at scale with NAICS, NOC, and CIP data, as well as structured skills taxonomies, associated job titles, and local job market data by geographic region, to ensure local labour market alignment of programs prior to international recruitment. The AI front end provides learners with clarity on eligible programs and job market alignment and easy to use features to find the right program at the right time in their career. 

These tools can be expanded to support targeted international student recruitment. Institutions gain clarity on how their programs align with labour markets and IRCC regulations, and MCU gains clarity on the scale and scope of programs offered as part of fulfilling local labour market openings. New program development can also be supported with these data.

Please reach out if you are interested in learning more and being part of our national expansion in providing a LMI-informed upskilling platform that provides incremental new revenue to PSE institutions. 

Private:Public 

A while ago I explored some educational ratiocinations – some reasoned random thoughts (and linguistic ratios) on the future of education. The takeaway for me there is how we position the sector to address Canada’s three-legged productivity problem, which is helping employers to:

• Conduct research and innovation
• Derisk new technology adoption, and
• Engage in education and upskilling.

Postsecondary education is a primary enabler of the innovation economy. Private:public partnerships are key to realizing the benefits of both private and public investments in education. eCampusOntario supports partnerships through micro-credentials and upskilling and through research and innovation via the Ontario Collaborative Innovation Platform. 

Within this discussion we should be asking ourselves: is PSE a public or a private good?

Most working in the sector would say it is both. York University President Rhonda Lenton nicely outlines the public value of postsecondary education in supporting personal resilience, the ability to continue to learn and to use technology systematically through disruptions and career changes. Higher education is no longer a scarce resource for many. And the current no- and slow-growth economic context has made the public value of postsecondary education more diffuse and difficult to define for a generation reared in an environment that has seen reduced per capita incomes, housing expense volatility and strained public services like healthcare. Or, to put it in Nate Silver’s terms, the river is washing away the village. 

In this context, it is incumbent on us all to continue to take what is usefully learned from the past while remaking the postsecondary education system for the future. Partnerships and porosity of institutions are paramount, as is the need for new models and ways of doing things. We have pedagogical and technological debt to amortize. We can do this without mortgaging our future any further.

Our past informs the value of our credentials. Our future is meeting learners at every age and stage of life. Our present is adapting how we deliver our credentials.

At eCampusOntario, we are focused on supporting our members to leverage foresight, embrace digital transformation, drive affordable learning, all while pivoting to the new normal of supporting our learners for the future. This includes supporting the economy with reskilling, upskilling and micro-credential learning, supporting economic resiliency with international learners and local workers, and scaling digital transformation and digital by design education.

Expanding the Scope of Postsecondary Education

Where, when, with whom and what we learn is changing

Here are a handful of education trends worth watching as we embark on the new calendar year:

Digital First Design.

Today’s learners are digital first. Meeting the evolving learner needs means providing effective and high-quality digital experiences in all aspects of higher education, with programs that are career-focused and that support job-readiness.

Our postsecondary education system was designed to support learners coming from secondary school. These are now the minority of learners when you consider the system as a whole. The non-traditional student is now the norm. With Canada enjoying one of the highest tertiary education attainment rates in the OECD the majority of learners are now returning to education to upgrade skills and competencies in support of career and wider lifestyle engagement. As outlined in the (excellent) CDLRA’s 2023 Pan-Canadian Report on Digital Learning Trends in Canadian Post-Secondary Education, all learners expect greater digital by design learning options. These options render extensible learning location: online, hybrid and fully face to face – all oriented to supporting skills and competency acquisition. These options also reinforce the importance of digital transformation: using technology to empower trailblazers, improve learner experiences, strengthen resilience to sustain growth across the sector and prepare the workforce of the future to thrive.

Competency over content. 

And speaking of competencies, 2024 will mark increasing progress of competency over content. Higher education as we know it today is largely based on learning content. Vocational programs in professional faculties (medicine, law, skilled trades) focus on developing competencies, but generally speaking our model of higher education produces content experts based on programs of study (majors). The focus on skills that has arisen the past two decades has slowly disrupted this; the advent of generative AI has accelerated this disruption. In a world where Artificial Intelligence helps mobilize the widespread public availability of content (with many downsides given baked-in biases in this public content) we will see a renewed focus on competencies emerge. These competencies may well be in the effective use of AI, but themselves will be AI-proof. And by making content more context-aware, AI provides the scaffolding to support learning by doing at scale. Work integrated learning is the best fulcrum for learning competencies and legitimate peripheral participation in communities of professional practice. 

Missions not majors. 

Content knowledge is still going to be important even as we shift more to focusing on competencies. It is the operationalization of content that is key, and this will be important as we support a much greater emphasis on mission-oriented education instead of focusing on majoring in subject areas. Think learning ecosystems linked by shared values that enable learners to obtain credentials in a subject area that is defined by a social or economic purpose versus the content area itself. We already have this in the form of entrepreneurship education, where learners can stand up their own social venture or company as part of business school curricula. But it will become increasingly common, particularly as new generations of (re)learners seek to participate in addressing social, cultural and economic priorities such as climate change through social purpose and business incubation. Significantly, this trend helps to promote the increased porosity of postsecondary education institutions, for work integrated learning and research partnerships. This is part of a broader embrace of demand-driven innovation across the postsecondary environment. 

Micro- and bespoke credentials

Commensurate with an increased focus on competencies and the mission-oriented education model sketched above is the continued growth of micro-credentials, including stackable micro-credentials that cohere into larger credentials over time. This includes innovative pathways for credential completion and support for lifelong learning comprised of fast-track educational pathways in areas of critical need for the economy (healthcare, AI/ML, automotive innovation, climate change mitigation, entrepreneurship). Features of this theme include: employer partnerships; easy credit transfer and stackability of micro-credentials into degrees comprised of courses from any participating institution; newcomer credential recognition and scaffolding into Ontario credentials; digital access to a suite of supports, skills transcripts and industry engagement. À la carte curriculum journeys will enable broader engagement with education contiguous with personal career management. Providing the tools to do this will support social and economic resilience. eCampusOntario is supporting the development of AI tools that enable learners to identify competencies obtained via content-oriented credentials, figure out gaps in career mapping, and find micro-credentials to scaffold these gaps. 

Subscription models of education.

The economics of postsecondary education are under significant pressure. The mission of higher education – creating informed citizens capable of navigating increasingly complexity – is more important than ever before. 

The business model of education is evolving to meet the current and future social, economic and cultural demands of society. Some will decry focusing on the economics or using terms like business models in education, but the reality is that educational institutions must balance public funding, public missions and mandates, the need to embrace digital transformation and the reality of meeting rising costs. The trends outlined above are part of this evolution. The evolution of subscription models as applied to education will mark a significant step forward in helping institutions realize new and different models of educational delivery with revenue diversified streams.

It is fair to say that majority of people today stream music, movies and other media. I read various news sources to which I subscribe. Doing so lowers the per item cost and provides the media organizations with (relatively predictable) recurring revenue. Subscription models make sense.

Applying subscription models to education takes advantage of the evolution of micro-credentials that disaggregate learning into more discrete bits that scaffold learner engagement over time. More people need to access higher education in ways that better fit their lives with family care obligations, working, and lifestyle considerations that complicate the ability to spend 2 or 4 years dedicated to full time study. This is still important, but not the norm going forward. By providing subscriptions to education our institutions can help frame lifelong learning within current contexts and paradigms of curation and consumption while fostering affective investment in learning itself. These models are effective for companies – large and small – seeking to future proof their workforces, as well as for individual learners seeking to grown and manage their careers. Engagement of alumni networks is one simple step to realizing the value of subscription models for lifelong learning. 

Disruption, digital by design.

Education in the digital by design era is going from anywhere, any time, to everywhere, all the time. Disruption is ubiquitous. Higher education is increasingly focusing more on experiential and work integrated learning, and on more bespoke educational paths and credentials. Experiential and work integrated learning can be aided by AI that can also help us make better sense of the competencies we gain from our content-based curricula by analyzing what we learn and how the credentials we confer also infer competencies. We can help learners to make sense of what they learned, but also what they learned how to do.

Dx and Strategic Foresight: innovation you can implement.

As technological, social and contextual changes emerge higher education is embracing Digital Transformation to more fluidly engage with learners. You can learn more about how eCampusOntario supports the Six Dimensions of Digital Transformation with our Digital Transformation Guides:

• Explore digital futures: Co-design the future of education with Strategic Foresight.

• Empower digital leaders: Engage academic teams with professional development.

• Investigate digital technologies: Discover, Pilot, Review, and Adopt educational technologies.

• Find strategic partners: Build capacity with partners and access new networks.

• Expand Open Education: Adapt, Adopt, and Create Open Educational Resources.

• Develop tomorrow’s workforce: Align new programs to labour market demands.

Stop by our Strategic Foresight practice to tap into the wealth of knowledge included in the excellent series of Foresight reports: tools to support the navigation of uncertain and complex futures. 

Reach out to engage and learn with us. 

digitalcampus.ca

On marketing and micro-credentials

I had the great pleasure of being a guest on the Marketing News Canada podcast with marketing and  podcast expert Darian Kovacs from Jelly Academy. We talked about

• How the rise of micro-credentials is similar to streaming music 
• The importance of micro-credentials in upgrading and upskilling one's career, and how it serves as a form of continuing education 
• The demand for both a combination of technical and soft skills

It was a great discussion about the importance of micro-credentials and the role of collaboration and innovation in post-secondary education. 

And in an esprit de l'escalier I am really interested in discussing and learning more about the role of marketing and education more broadly, particularly as it relates to partnerships that support collaborative innovation, upskilling outcomes and work integrated learning. 

My thanks to Darian and Jelly Academy for the opportunity to join the discussion. 

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Virtual learning is real learning

Sharing my TESS 2020 opening remarks as we kicked off TESS2020 today. If you missed day 1 you can catch some of the presentations on our social – it was an exemplary day.

Thank you for joining us at The Technology and Education Seminar and Showcase 2020!

We at eCampusOntario are delighted you’ve taken the time to be part of TESS this year. I’d like to extend a special welcome to our colleagues from Kenjgewin Teg, who recently joined eCampusOntario as our 46th member and, significantly, our first member Indigenous Institute. 

As Lutfiyya and Daniel have said we have a great lineup – discussions, panel presentations, and breaks with a variety of entertainment. We have benefitted from support and help from many people – not the least of which is our fantastic team who have worked behind the scenes to make this event what it will be. We are also indebted to Jennifer Gordon from Humber College who provided key input and advice on running a virtual conference – thanks Jennifer. 

In this virtual conference we are all convening from different places. This is one of the things that makes the online environment special. The land acknowledgement Daniel read is an important way for us to begin our proceedings-- and we can build on today’s acknowledgement. Each of us can acknowledge the traditional territories from which we join the event today. To do this, I’ll ask you to go to the site posted in the chat

https://native-land.ca/territory-acknowledgement/

and find out which traditional territories you are on. Then please share this with everyone through the chat. 

I happen to be in east Toronto: the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinabewaki, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, part of the larger Mississauga nation. I’ve lived in many places in Canada, and was born in Saskatchewan, on Treaty 4 territory, traditional home of the Cree, Blackfoot and Sioux. 

It is important to acknowledge our relationship to the land and those that have lived here before us. Doing so is an important reminder of our responsibility to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls To Action.

This social context informs our work. It includes the imperative to join the fight against anti-Black racism and anti-BIPOC racism, and to support Equity, Decolonization, Diversity and Inclusion in everything we do. 

Above all, we can seize this moment to rebuild and support an environment that prioritizes inclusion, representation and voice. 

Taking time to remember and invoke the land outside is an important way to remind ourselves that our lives are so much more than technology at a time when so much (including this conference) is mediated by screens. 

This is a significant time for all of us. We collectively have been navigating unprecedented changes due to COVID 19. We know that the pandemic has disproportionately affected those already experiencing marginalization. And so our theme this year – Humanizing Learning – is an appropriate way to think about the ways in which we can work together to make learning as human as it can be.

Because most of us are now teaching and learning online as our default mode, we are navigating the different tools and approaches we can use to help ensure our online courses are as engaging as our face to face ones. 

We have to remember a very important point: Virtual learning is real learning. 

Many of you joining us today are leaders in creating innovative, interactive and above all high-quality online learning experiences that result in meaningful learner engagement. We have the ability to ensure not only that our learners can access these quality experiences, but they can do so as part of their lifelong learning journey.

The online learning experiences continue to get better and better, precisely because we convene at conferences like this and share our stories, our successes, and our failures. These events – virtual or otherwise, are important conduits for our own professional development, that in turn have positive effects on our collective ability to model learning as an active way of engaged living. 

Our sector – with rest of the world – went through a sudden pivot when the pandemic first hit. You are all to be commended for navigating this sudden turn. The work we have done together over the past five years provided our sector with guidance and leadership on creating quality online learning environments, which greatly benefited this sudden shift to remote learning.

We now turn to the challenge of scale: how do we build on the work we have done, to continue to provide high quality learning environments that generate enthusiasm, engagement, and a sense of connection in our learners. We can do this by embracing the principles of human centred design that remind us to put the needs of the learner and the social contexts in which we all live at the centre of our curriculum design. 

So welcome to TESS 2020 – I am certain you will enjoy the program!

From Digital First to Digital by Design: Education for the Post-Pandemic World

I’m truly excited to be joining eCampusOntario today. Thanks to everyone for the warm welcome to this integral organization.

The eCampusOntario team has done an amazing job of managing the pandemic pivot, led by Interim Co-Executive Directors Lena Patterson and Jamee Robinson. Their message from 3 August 2020 outlines the critical role eCampusOntario plays in the Ontario post-secondary education system, from supporting the student experience and faculty innovation in pedagogy and the use of educational technology, through to broader strategic goals such as furthering the development of micro-credentials and sector collaboration. We really are all in this together.

As we go forward we need to be mindful of the current social context. This includes the imperative to join the fight against anti-Black racism and anti-BIPOC racism, and to support Equity, Decolonization, Diversity and Inclusion in everything we do. The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated challenges for people experiencing marginalization in our society. We will seize this moment to rebuild and support an environment that prioritizes inclusion, representation and voice.

I take the helm of our organization at a time when what we do at eCampusOntario is more important than ever before. The team has done a superb job of helping the PSE sector pivot into digital first. This work will take on even more resonance as eCampusOntario leads efforts to enhance the learner experience across all campuses in Ontario.

And we should remember that while we are navigating a wholesale transformation of society, not least the post-secondary education environment, these changes are not necessarily all new. The internet has been with us for several decades. My own undergraduate learning experience in the mid-1990s included online video conferencing classes with learners from across northern British Columbia campus connection sites. This enabled learners to access courses and credentials without travelling far from their homes. These were formative experiences for me, confirming that we could take new technologies and ways of communicating and create meaningful learning and access opportunities.

Having worked in Ontario’s post-secondary education sector for the past 20 years--10 years in colleges and 10 years in universities--I am struck by the incredible opportunity before us. We can position Ontario PSE to collaborate to compete together, supporting pandemic recovery and resilience.

Following the pandemic pivot, our focus can now shift to Digital by Design. Where the pandemic forced us all to scramble to put everything online, we now have the opportunity to more mindfully and artfully design digital learning environments that support all learners. For the future of digital learning must be about options: options to facilitate learning in distributed, online environments, to scaffold face-to-face and in situ learning via mediated communities of practice, and to provide ways for learners to access microcredentials that ladder into certificates, diplomas and degrees in support of ongoing career progression.

Over the next three months, eCampusOntario will consult broadly with stakeholders as we create a new strategic plan to take us through the next 3-5 years. How can we support system transformation and stability through digital by design learning? How can we create meaningful education when face-to-face interaction is limited? How do we ensure all learners can access education and support for ongoing career and personal development?

I look forward to learning with and from our community in this process. We are interested in your thoughts, your innovations, your caveats and cautions, and the excellent research that will help guide the way. Stay tuned to hear more about ways you can get involved, including at our upcoming annual conference, being held 20-21 October 2020.