Transforming in an Age of Disruptive Change | Draft …...Transforming in an Age of Disruptive...

Transforming in an Age of Disruptive Change | Draft May 28, 2013 | 1



Transforming in an Age of Disruptive Change | i

Transforming in an Age of Disruptive Change by Donald Norris, Robert Brodnick, Paul Lefrere, Joseph Gilmour, Linda Baer, Ann Hill Duin, and Stephen Norris

© 2013 by the Society for College and University Planning All rights reserved. Published 2013. ISBN 978-1-937724-26-9

About the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) The Society for College and University Planning is a community of higher education planning professionals that provides its members with the knowledge and resources to establish and achieve institutional planning goals within the context of best practices and emerging trends. For more information, visit www.scup.org. What is Integrated Planning? Integrated planning is the linking of vision, priorities, people, and the physical institution in a flexible system of evaluation, decision-making and action. It shapes and guides the entire organization as it evolves over time and within its community.

Transforming in an Age of Disruptive Change | ii

Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1

Part I: Snapshots From the 2020 Future ............................................................................. 2

Part II: Revisiting 1995, then Zooming to the 2013 Present ................................................ 11

Revisiting What the Future Looked Like in 1995 ...................................................................... 12 Tracking Other Voices from 1995 to the Present ....................................................................... 14 2013 Is Our New Vantage Point for the Future ......................................................................... 16 Watering the Green Shoots of Change ....................................................................................... 25

Part III: Starting in 2013, Getting it Done .......................................................................... 26

Reinventing Strategies, Business Models, and Emerging Practices ......................................... 26 Getting Started and Getting it Done .......................................................................................... 29

Create a sense of urgency, build a winning coalition ........................................................................... 30 Practice planning from the future backward ......................................................................................... 32 Combine strategy, organizational development, innovation, analytics, and performance .................. 34 Employ measurement, analytics, and performance excellence ............................................................ 35 Deploy the power of “radical incrementalism” ..................................................................................... 36 Achieve new levels of collaboration, sharing, and partnership ............................................................ 36 Execute strategies to engage the disruptive future ............................................................................... 37 Develop a performance excellence culture ............................................................................................ 43

Part IV: Vignettes From the Future, Stories From the Frontlines of Transformation ........ 44

References ....................................................................................................................... 101

Selected Readings ........................................................................................................... 104

Author Biographies ......................................................................................................... 109

“New circumstances . . . call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.”

Thomas Jefferson

Transforming in an Age of Disruptive Change | 1

IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn We begin with a simple thesis: American higher education is facing an Age of Disruptive Change—as are all other industries. Higher education needs to realign its programs and experiences to the needs and changing value propositions of learners, their families, employers, public policy makers, and other stakeholders in these new conditions. In this context, six major challenges face higher education.

Challenges Facing Higher Education

1. Many students and their families can no longer afford a traditional college degree. 2. American higher education institutions are facing a sea of red ink—declining state support, burdensome institutional debt, unrealistic instructional costs, plateauing tuition revenues, and intense competition for adult learners. 3. American higher education has failed to assess student learning, competencies, and performance. 4. Most institutions lack the organizational agility and will to meet rapidly changing student learning needs and the needs of the U.S. economy. 5. Higher education has been unable to leverage technology to truly transform learning and competence building to be more accessible, relevant, challenging, and aligned with workforce needs. 6. Higher education has failed to learn from the disruptive innovations pioneered by the for-profit institutions.

To communicate the transformation imperative in the Age of Disruption, this monograph presents four perspectives:

Part I: Snapshots From the 2020 Future. A series of thumbnail sketches of the lives of learners, board members, presidents, faculty, employers, and policy makers.

Part II: Revisiting 1995, then Zooming to the 2013 Present. Revisiting the pressures for transformation that existed in 1995, then exploring the current pressures in 2013.

Part III: Starting in 2013, Getting it Done. Presenting a set of aggressive actions to respond to the transformation imperative.

Part IV: Vignettes From the 2020 Future, Stories From the Frontline of Transformation. A fuller description of the lives of learners, board members, presidents, faculty, employers, and policy makers.

These sections paint a portrait of the coming transformation in the Age of Disruption.


PPaarrtt II:: SSnnaappsshhoottss FFrroomm tthhee 22002200 FFuuttuurree

““TThhee ffuuttuurree iiss aallrreeaaddyy hheerree——iitt’’ss jjuusstt nnoott eevveennllyy ddiissttrriibbuutteedd..””

WWiilllliiaamm GGiibbssoonn Between 2013 and 2020, the disruptive forces buffeting higher education are likely to cause/enable many adaptations by institutional leaders, managers, faculty, staff, alumni, employers, venture capitalists, and policy makers. Traditional barriers to change will be weakened by the recognized need to address the six major challenges facing higher education. How rapidly will these changes occur? More rapidly than in the past. Many of the adaptations will be driven by depleted family finances and unsustainably high costs, and several learner adjustments are already underway. However, for many of these new approaches to scale, new offerings (institutional, other providers, and free range) will need to appear and be accepted by the marketplace. By 2020, this process should be well underway.

In the Part IV of this monograph, we present a series of vignettes in which we tell the stories of people who will have experienced changes in higher education by 2020. We summarize these vignettes in the following set of postcards from the future. 11.. SSttaannttoonn ((SSttaann)) FFaarrlleeyy aassssuummeedd ooffffiiccee aass KKiirrbbyy UUnniivveerrssiittyy’’ss 1122tthh pprreessiiddeenntt iinn 22001133,, aafftteerr hhaavviinngg bbeeeenn aassssuurreedd hhee hhaadd tthhee ffuullll ssuuppppoorrtt ooff tthhee BBooaarrdd ooff TTrruusstteeeess ttoo uunnddeerrttaakkee wwhhaatteevveerr rreeddiirreeccttiioonn wwoouulldd bbee nneecceessssaarryy ttoo rreessttoorree tthhee

uunniivveerrssiittyy ttoo ffiinnaanncciiaall ssuussttaaiinnaabbiilliittyy.. With active board support, Stan led Kirby University in a broadly participatory process of planning, assessment, reinvention, and organizational development. This program was based on the seven key principles of performance improvement: (1) strong and persistent leadership, (2) a laser-focused strategic plan, (3) a deep understanding of stakeholder needs, (4) valuing faculty and staff, (5) a commitment to collaboration to enhance organizational performance, (6) continuous improvement of instructional and support processes, and (7) a focus on performance measures and results. By 2020, Kirby University had significantly enhanced revenue and performance and reduced cost. The cumulative change was a 30–40 percent shift. The university’s approach is being copied by other institutions in the region.

22.. IInn 22002200,, tthhee pprreessiiddeenntt ooff CCooyyoottee UUnniivveerrssiittyy,, DDaavviidd OOvveerrhhuurrsstt,, hhiirreedd MMaaddeelliinnee WWeellsshh aass sseenniioorr vviiccee pprreessiiddeenntt,, wwiitthh aa ppoorrttffoolliioo iinncclluuddiinngg ssttrraatteeggiicc ppllaannnniinngg,, iinnssttiittuuttiioonnaall aannaallyyttiiccss aanndd rreesseeaarrcchh,, hhuummaann rreessoouurrcceess,, aanndd tthhee nneewwllyy eessttaabblliisshheedd ddiirreeccttoorraattee ooff iinnnnoovvaattiioonn aanndd cchhaannggee.. With the president’s backing, she implemented a personalized methodology of change management based on personalized learning development and supported by the Change Style Indicator® and 360-degree evaluations. After a slow start, her initiative succeeded in creating a


community of practice around innovation and change. The university experienced growth, improved student success, and increased professionalism among faculty and staff. 33.. IInn 22001133 AAnnggeellaa DDuummoonndd wwaass eelleevvaatteedd ttoo tthhee ppoossiittiioonn ooff pprroovvoosstt aatt MMiiddwweesstt UUnniivveerrssiittyy,, aa mmuullttiiccaammppuuss ssyysstteemm.. Her predecessor had successfully undertaken and led a systemwide strategic positioning process, merged six colleges to create three new ones, and decentralized graduate and professional education. However, Angela found that the decentralization proved very expensive and instituted reinvention and use of shared services to improve performance and reduce costs. Through a consistent focus on shared leadership and expectations of excellence and with faculty and academic support, Midwest University successfully weathered the storm caused by a $100M upgrade in enterprise systems. The university ended up spending less through even greater focus on partnering with external enterprises/solution providers to access the capital, culture, and talent necessary to create consistent innovation and deployment. 44.. TThhee lleeaaddeerrsshhiipp ooff AAllggoonnqquuiinn UUnniivveerrssiittyy hhaadd bbeeeenn wwrreessttlliinngg wwiitthh aa rraannggee ooff HHRR iissssuueess oovveerr tthhee ppaasstt ddeeccaaddee—— tthhee pprrooppeerr uussee ooff aaddjjuunncctt ffaaccuullttyy,, cchhaannggiinngg ddiisscciipplliinnaarryy nneeeeddss iinn rreeaaccttiioonn ttoo ssttuuddeenntt ccoouurrssee cchhooiicceess,, ggrreeaatteerr pprrooffeessssiioonnaalliissmm aammoonngg ssttaaffff,, aanndd ssoo ffoorrtthh.. BBuutt bbyy 22001133 tthhee nnaattuurree aanndd ssccooppee ooff tthhee

cchhaalllleennggeess aahheeaadd rreeqquuiirreedd aa mmoorree pprrooaaccttiivvee rreessppoonnssee ttoo tthhee cchhaannggiinngg ttiimmeess.. Allison Simmons, VP for HR, worked closely with the provost to institute leadership development, offer new opportunities for professional development for faculty in learning engagement, and increase professionalism among staff. By 2020, these programs were part of the culture at Algonquin and had paid real dividends in the capacity of the university to lead and navigate change at all levels. 55.. KKrriisstteenn KKuunnkkllee iiss ddiirreeccttoorr ooff iinnssttiittuuttiioonnaall eeffffeeccttiivveenneessss aanndd aannaallyyttiiccss aatt PPrraaiirriiee SSttaattee UUnniivveerrssiittyy aanndd hhaass mmaaddee tthhee mmoosstt ooff hheerr ooppppoorrttuunniittyy ttoo ssuuppppoorrtt mmaajjoorr cchhaannggee iinniittiiaattiivveess aatt PPrraaiirriiee SSttaattee.. Her provost declared that the university was going to reconsider its structure of academic disciplines—perhaps even doing away with departments. Using analytics to illuminate faculty work patterns, scholarly endeavors, and interactions, a working group led by Kristen radically reshaped the academic organizational structure in 2013. Working in a highly unionized environment, the group followed all union rules to a “T” and was still able to make the needed changes in academic structure. Building on this success, the institution continued to leverage analytics to optimize student success and support greater productivity by faculty and support staff. By 2020, significant gains had been achieved in all these categories. 66.. KKyyllee JJoonneess iiss aa rriissiinngg sseenniioorr iinn aa ttoopp ssuubbuurrbbaann hhiigghh sscchhooooll oouuttssiiddee


NNaasshhvviillllee eevvaalluuaattiinngg hhiiss mmaannyy ooppttiioonnss ffoorr aa ppoosstt--hhiigghh sscchhooooll lleeaarrnniinngg ssttrraatteeggyy.. While in high school, he has been exposed to personalized, competence-based learning using a statewide platform established by the state of Tennessee that replaced textbooks and created an adaptive learning environment with embedded analytics. He has acquired a substantial portfolio of competences, including concurrent college-level credit. He is considering a wide range of choices for his postsecondary journey, including Do-It-Yourself (DIY) learning, a freelance approach, opting out of institutional learning altogether, or taking an immersive, institution-based route. He is still sorting out which route is right for him. Does he “owe it to his parents” to go to college? Or will he take a more flexible route with a shorter time to full employment? Many of his friends have chosen alternative pathways. Kyle’s choices are being played out in hundreds of thousands of families in 2020—or more. 7. In 2020, many students still choose an immersive learning experience at a traditional institution, but with important differences. Students regularly make choices between institutions of equal reputational quality based on their capacity to meet their individual value propositions. MMaaddhhuu JJoosshhii iiss aann eennggiinneeeerriinngg ssttuuddeenntt ffrroomm DDeettrrooiitt ssttuuddyyiinngg aatt HHuurroonn UUnniivveerrssiittyy.. Madhu was able to enter postsecondary education having already attained substantial course credit during high school. Through programs like those offered by Pathways.com, Madhu and many students like him are exposed to opportunities for advanced

credit that can be applied toward their degree attainment as they enter college. Madhu is very interested in accelerating his learning path in order to attain the knowledge and skills needed to enter the workforce as quickly as possible while keeping tuition costs at a minimum. Huron University fulfilled these requirements while other institutions he was considering did not. So, he chose Huron over the others.

Keshia Brown graduated from an inner-city high school in Philadelphia and is enrolling in Tuscarora University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Keshia saw Tuscarora as the perfect fit for her because of its stellar track record of success among minority students, like her, who have often struggled when entering higher education. The university prides itself on its above-average mentoring programs that have helped many students to succeed not only in degree attainment, but also in employability. The mentoring programs use both faculty and Tuscarora alumni to enrich student development. These programs also link students with the experiential learning, shadowing, internship, and social entrepreneurship programs that are important features of the Tuscarora experience.

JJaannee FFiittzzggeerraalldd iiss aa nnoonn--ccoommmmiissssiioonneedd ooffffiicceerr iinn tthhee AArrmmyy rreettuurrnniinngg ttoo ccoommpplleettee hheerr ddeeggrreeee aatt VVaannddeennbbeerrgg UUnniivveerrssiittyy.. She specifically chose her place of study because of its policy of admitting prior learning experience as credit toward graduation. Her training and leadership experience as a member of the military police while deployed have given her demonstrable knowledge and skills that are directly applicable to her intended degree in the field of criminal


justice. Allowing Jane to apply these skills to course credit has shortened her time to a degree and significantly lowered her cost of education. Vandenberg University also offers a number of mentoring and support programs for veterans that were instrumental in her choosing it over other institutions with comparable academic programs.

88.. BByy 22002200,, mmaannyy iinnssttiittuuttiioonnss wwiillll hhaavvee rreeffiinneedd aanndd eexxppaannddeedd tthhee fflleexxiibbiilliittyy ooff tthheeiirr ddeeggrreeee ccoommpplleettiioonn pprrooggrraammss ffoorr aadduullttss,, wwhhiicchh wweerree eesssseennttiiaall ffoorr tthhee UUnniitteedd SSttaatteess ttoo rreeaacchh iittss eedduuccaattiioonnaall aattttaaiinnmmeenntt ttaarrggeettss.. BBeetthhaannyy CCaappuuttoo iiss oonnee ssuucchh ssttuuddeenntt.. She found Mountain University, a 35-year-old institution that had remade itself about five years ago. Mountain University had not gone the way of pure online education and, in fact, had no online programs of its own design. What it did do was certify and articulate online learning, or on-ground learning for that matter, from accredited institutions. But what stood out to Bethany were two important characteristics—Mountain U. stressed a faculty mentor learning model based on coaching and awarded degrees based on competences driven by learning analytics. Bethany explored the cost and personalized learning path the school offered and decided to enroll in a program that would award a bachelor’s degree in creative content & writing with a professional master of management—a perfect match to her needs. 99.. BByy 22002200,, tthhee ccoommppeelllliinngg ddeemmaanndd ffoorr pprraaccttiiccee--ffooccuusseedd lleeaarrnniinngg,,

ffiilllliinngg tthhee nneewweesstt kknnoowwlleeddggee ggaappss iinn rraappiiddllyy cchhaannggiinngg ffiieellddss,, hhaadd ssppaawwnneedd tthhee eemmeerrggeennccee ooff aa nneeww bbrreeeedd ooff lleeaarrnniinngg aanndd ddeevveellooppmmeennttaall eexxppeerriieenncceess ffoorr pprraaccttiicciinngg pprrooffeessssiioonnaallss.. These are based on communities of practice of various kinds, shapes, and sizes. AAllllyyssoonn GGoollddeenn iiss aa ffiifftthh--yyeeaarr eelleemmeennttaarryy sscchhooooll tteeaacchheerr aatt DDrraanneessvviillllee EElleemmeennttaarryy SScchhooooll iinn HHeerrnnddoonn,, VViirrggiinniiaa.. She has been teaching there since her graduation from Patriot University. While at Patriot, she entered into a Community of Reflective Practice in elementary education. Allyson used the community to support her undergraduate learning, her student teaching practicum, and a mentoring program while achieving her baccalaureate. She continues to use the next level of the Community of Reflective Practice to further develop teaching skills and classroom competencies.

LLuuzz DDeell SSaannttooss iiss aa ssoocciiaall mmeeddiiaa ffrreeeellaanncceerr lliivviinngg iinn AAuussttiinn,, TTeexxaass.. Over her career she has been associated with some of the top social media enterprises in the industry, including Facebook, Google, and others. As a freelance autonomous professional she has contributed to the magazine Fast Company and has served as an advisor to local universities and several online for-profit learning enterprises based in Texas. Her major focus has been on South by Southwest (SXSW) activities in Austin. The SXSW film, interactive, and music festivals held every year have grown to encompass conferences and trade shows including symposia on educational innovation and the environment. Luz uses the SXSW Community of Practice to stay current on


industry news and learn what she needs to know.

KKwwaammee NNddoonnggoo iiss aa ffoooodd ssaaffeettyy ssppeecciiaalliisstt iinn LLaaggooss,, NNiiggeerriiaa.. HHee ppaarrttiicciippaatteess iinn tthhee FFoooodd SSaaffeettyy KKnnoowwlleeddggee NNeettwwoorrkk ((FFSSKKNN)) llaauunncchheedd bbyy SSuuppeerriioorr SSttaattee UUnniivveerrssiittyy aanndd tthhee iinntteerrnnaattiioonnaall ttrraaddee aassssoocciiaattiioonn rreessppoonnssiibbllee ffoorr ffoooodd.. This network is dedicated to spreading the standards and knowledge necessary to ensure food safety around the world and to harmonizing practices and competences in a global food market. By creating a system of accreditation and education in the field, the knowledge network is able to reduce costs and increase safety. Kwame had attained an associate degree-level credential before joining the network. Through his participation in the FSKN he was able to achieve certification. 1100.. BByy 22002200,, aa nneeww bbrreeeedd ooff ssoolluuttiioonn pprroovviiddeerr hhaadd aarrrriivveedd oonn tthhee hhiigghheerr eedduuccaattiioonn sscceennee,, pprroovviiddiinngg ppeerrffoorrmmaannccee eennhhaanncceemmeenntt aanndd ccoosstt rreedduuccttiioonn sseerrvviicceess nneevveerr bbeeffoorree ppoossssiibbllee.. AArrwwaann SSwwaannssoonn iiss pprreessiiddeenntt aatt NNoorrtthhwweesstteerrnn SSttaattee UUnniivveerrssiittyy.. FFiivvee yyeeaarrss aaggoo sshhee lleedd tthhee eexxeeccuuttiivvee tteeaamm iinn ffooccuussiinngg oonn ppeerrffoorrmmaannccee eexxcceelllleennccee,, ppeerrssoonnaalliizzeedd lleeaarrnniinngg,, aanndd hhuummaann ddeevveellooppmmeenntt.. Following a comprehensive review of technology and partnering options, the Northwestern team elected to use a mash-up of personalized and adaptive learning services offered by Academic Value Partners (AVP). These services use a

hosted, in-the-cloud utility that engages learners in self-paced adaptive learning experiences that can be integrated into the institutional experience. AVP’s learning and talent management utility supports hundreds of institutions, enabling rich data mining and analysis of “what works” in improving learner performance. This transition enabled Northwestern to migrate from its existing technology infrastructure, improving performance and reducing costs. Employers have been especially supportive.

EElliizzaabbeetthh BBrreennddeell iiss mmaannaaggiinngg ppaarrttnneerr ooff AAccaaddeemmiicc VVaalluuee PPaarrttnneerrss ((AAVVPP)).. AAVVPP’’ss mmiissssiioonn iiss ttoo mmaakkee ppeerrssoonnaalliizzeedd// aaddaappttiivvee lleeaarrnniinngg eexxppeerriieenncceess aanndd sseerrvviicceess aavvaaiillaabbllee aaccrroossss tthhee eedduuccaattiioonn aanndd kknnoowwlleeddggee iinndduussttrryy.. AVP’s value proposition is based on three factors: capital, culture, and capacity. Elizabeth is working with leaders at a wide range of institutions who are using AVP’s in-the-cloud, hosted services to introduce personalized/adaptive learning to their academic programs. AVP currently serves a community of 150 institutions that have adapted its service, some that use a common core of courses and others that have had their courses converted to personalized/adaptive learning by the AVP team. These personalized courses are made available to other institutions in the community. 1111.. BByy 22002200,, tthhee aavvaaiillaabbiilliittyy ooff ttrraaiinneedd wwoorrkkeerrss ffoorr aaddvvaanncceedd mmaannuuffaaccttuurriinngg aanndd tteecchhnniicciiaannss aanndd pprrooffeessssiioonnaallss iinn SSTTEEMM ffiieellddss hhaadd iimmpprroovveedd ddrraammaattiiccaallllyy tthhrroouugghh


aacccceessss ttoo ddoommeessttiicc aanndd iinntteerrnnaattiioonnaall ttaalleenntt;; cclloosseerr ccoollllaabboorraattiioonn bbeettwweeeenn KK––1122,, ccoolllleeggeess aanndd uunniivveerrssiittiieess,, aanndd eemmppllooyyeerrss;; aanndd tthhee uussee ooff tteecchhnnoollooggyy--ssuuppppoorrtteedd ttoooollss ttoo mmaattcchh ttaalleenntt wwiitthh ooppppoorrttuunniittiieess.. JJoonnaatthhoonn MMccGGiillll iiss tthhee ccoooorrddiinnaattoorr ooff rreeggiioonnaall mmaannuuffaaccttuurriinngg wwoorrkkffoorrccee ddeevveellooppmmeenntt iinn DDaayyttoonn,, OOhhiioo,, ooppeerraattiinngg iinn jjooiinntt aappppooiinnttmmeenntt wwiitthh KK––1122 eedduuccaattiioonn,, SSiinnccllaaiirr CCoommmmuunniittyy CCoolllleeggee,, WWrriigghhtt SSttaattee UUnniivveerrssiittyy,, tthhee SSttaattee ooff OOhhiioo,, aanndd llooccaall mmaannuuffaaccttuurreerrss.. Using advanced knowledge/talent management environments, he orchestrates a Community of Practice that facilitates and accelerates competence and career development spanning K–20 and focuses on specific manufacturing skills and career path development for manufacturing enterprises in the Dayton region. His operation is part of a network of CoPs in regional manufacturing hubs across the Upper Midwest.

JJoocceellyynn GGrraanntt iiss VVPP ffoorr ttaalleenntt mmaannaaggeemmeenntt aatt GGooooggllee.. FFoorr tthhee ppaasstt sseevveenn yyeeaarrss sshhee hhaass bbeeeenn uussiinngg aa vvaarriieettyy ooff iinnccrreeaassiinnggllyy nnoonnttrraaddiittiioonnaall mmeeaannss ttoo iiddeennttiiffyy ttaalleenntt tthhaatt GGooooggllee ccaann hhiirree aass eemmppllooyyeeeess oorr ppaarrtt--ttiimmee ssttrriinnggeerrss aanndd tteeaamm mmeemmbbeerrss aaccrroossss tthhee gglloobbee.. Google recruits from a limited group of top-tier universities and carefully follows the success of its hires to determine which institutions are best and which skills and experiences differentiate the most successful employees. But Jocelyn has been pursuing a

series of alternative paths, using a combination of augmented intelligence tools to scan for and identify potential top talent—scanning MOOCs, ongoing design competitions, university-based entrepreneurship and innovation projects, and international talent banks like Monster.com. In all of these efforts, the emphasis is on demonstrated problem solving, leadership, and team building capabilities rather than academic credentials. By 2020, many of the people who rise to the top of the Google talent pool have dropped out of traditional education to pursue entrepreneurial ventures, pursued DIY or free-range learning experiences, and/or started ventures in high school. 1122.. BByy 22002200,, ppuubblliicc ppoolliiccyy mmaakkeerrss aatt ffeeddeerraall aanndd ssttaattee lleevveellss wweerree ccrraaffttiinngg ppoolliicciieess tthhaatt iinncceennttiivviizzeedd ppeerrffoorrmmaannccee eennhhaanncceemmeenntt iinn aa wwiiddee vvaarriieettyy ooff wwaayyss.. DDrr.. AAllssaaccee JJoonneess,, ddeeppuuttyy uunnddeerrsseeccrreettaarryy ooff tthhee UU..SS.. DDeeppaarrttmmeenntt ooff EEdduuccaattiioonn,, hhaass ffoorr tthhee ppaasstt sseevveenn yyeeaarrss pprrooggrreessssiivveellyy sshhiifftteedd tthhee ffooccuuss ooff hhiigghheerr eedduuccaattiioonn ppoolliiccyy ttoowwaarrdd iinnccrreeaassiinngg ccoommpplleettiioonn rraatteess rraatthheerr tthhaann aacccceessss.. This was supported by research from leading foundations and think tanks. It was apparent that open enrollment was not the panacea to degree completion and that efforts needed to be taken to increase student success. The first step in restructuring the department’s approach was to modify the existing financial aid program reflecting different modes of payment to not only assure affordability for students but also to establish for universities a policy that emphasizes efficiency to graduation and affordability.


MMaarriiaa GGoollddmmaann,, tthhee eexxeeccuuttiivvee ddiirreeccttoorr ooff tthhee SSttaattee CCoouunncciill ffoorr HHiigghheerr EEdduuccaattiioonn iinn aa ssoouutthheerrnn ssttaattee bbeeggaann aa ppiioonneeeerriinngg pprrooggrraamm sseevveerraall yyeeaarrss aaggoo iinn tthhee mmeeaassuurreemmeenntt ooff eemmppllooyymmeenntt bbyy iinnssttiittuuttiioonn aanndd ddiisscciipplliinnee.. The study sought to understand which institutions were producing the most employable graduates, in which departments, and how, in order to transfer successful practices throughout the state system. The council supported universities that embraced the need for change in ways that fostered student success while emphasizing efficiency to degree completion and lower costs. In that vein, the state council promoted plans that linked funding to degree completion. This incentivized colleges and universities to create novel ways to increase the efficiency with which students reach certification. The council mandated that colleges and universities work together to develop acceptable course credit from classes taken through community colleges or MOOCs after a student proved proficiency through a proctored test.

Bert Wolfson, the executive director of the Higher Learning Commission, a regional accreditation body in the Midwest, also took up the challenge of linking the value of higher education with its affordability. The commission reinvented the way in which universities prove their worth in seeking accreditation. It linked the process to the value of individual programs in terms of their employability and also required institutions to provide evidence of efforts to contain costs and accelerate completion.

1133.. BByy 22002200,, ccoolllleeggeess aanndd uunniivveerrssiittiieess wweerree mmuucchh mmoorree iinnvvoollvveedd iinn eennttrreepprreenneeuurrsshhiipp aanndd iinnnnoovvaattiioonn.. They had discovered how to improve the ecosystem for innovation and increase the flow of commercializable ideas and the revenues they brought to institutions. BBrryyccee JJoorrddaann iiss aann uunnddeerrggrraadduuaattee ssttuuddeenntt aatt SSoouutthheerrnn HHiigghhllaanndd SSttaattee UUnniivveerrssiittyy mmaajjoorriinngg iinn nneeww mmeeddiiaa aanndd ccoommpplleettiinngg hhiiss sseenniioorr yyeeaarr.. For the past three years, he has been directly involved in several formal and informal entrepreneurial experiences. In his second year, he joined the student entrepreneurship club through which he engaged in the Southern Highland State Entrepreneurship Community of Practice (SHSECoP). He was also able to participate as a freelancer in several projects for ventures at the Southern Highland State Corporate Research Center. The SHSECoP also enabled him to work with other SHSU students and visit other linked entrepreneurial communities. Last year, the SHSECoP had 10,000 active participants, 7,500 of them students.

DDrr.. SSaannddrraa BBuullllaarrdd iiss pprroovvoosstt aatt SSoouutthheerrnn HHiigghhllaanndd SSttaattee UUnniivveerrssiittyy.. Under her leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation have become an important part of both the formal curriculum and the informal curriculum of co-curricular activities (student clubs, competitions), projects, and participation in real-world ventures. She regards entrepreneurship and innovation as “the new liberal arts”—an essential set of perspectives and habits of mind, body, and spirit necessary to success in 21st-century society. In Sandra’s eyes, the students are way ahead of the faculty in


demanding such activities, and the SHSECoP has provided a vehicle for students to be active leaders in building pathways and enjoy a valuable set of experiences, global exposures, and outcomes-focused assessment. More is needed in the future.

BBrriiaannaa NNeellssoonn iiss aann eennggiinneeeerriinngg aalluummnnaa ooff SSoouutthheerrnn HHiigghhllaanndd SSttaattee wwhhoo hhaass rreettiirreedd ffrroomm aa ddiissttiinngguuiisshheedd ccaarreeeerr wwiitthh DDooww CChheemmiiccaall,, wwhheerree sshhee rraann aa rreesseeaarrcchh ooppeerraattiioonn rreessuullttiinngg iinn ccoommmmeerrcciiaall pprroodduuccttss.. She is serving as a member of the Angel Funder Network associated with the Southern Highland State Commercializable Idea Marketplace. She was screened and invited to become a member of the SHSCIM. She agreed to pay a membership fee, potentially invest $50,000–$100,000 a year in ventures, and serve as a champion for ideas as they become commercializable. To fulfill this role, she is actively engaged in working with the SHSCIM team to identify and nurture promising ideas and mentor these ideas once they achieve funding. Briana is spending, on average, a week a month on the main campus or in one of the regional technology centers.

14. Buoyed by the examples of Southern New Hampshire University, Western Governors University, Capella University, and others, a new movement developed—student success makers. Students and their families, employers, public policy makers, and other stakeholders have strongly supported the “success makers” movement. AAnnddrreeww BBooyynnttoonn iiss ddiirreeccttoorr ooff ccuussttoommeerr eexxppeerriieennccee aatt

PPaatthhwwaayyss..ccoomm.. His primary responsibility is to create seamless, powerful experiences for students and employees participating in Pathways.com services—hosted, personalized learning offered through K–20 education in seven states; related personalized advising and success-making services; research-based insights on new job and career trends; and match-up services for freelancers and free agents seeking assignments. There is tremendous competition for the attention of learners, their parents, and employees who want to fill emerging knowledge gaps in their industry or profession. Pathways.com works with a constellation of knowledge networks and emerging communities of practice in industries and professions, scanning and skimming information using sophisticated artificial intelligence-powered agents to discover and reveal new trends to its clientele. Its customers demand dependable, automatic access to information on which they can base their ongoing knowledge development decisions.

GGhhaazzaallaa PPaarrvveezz iiss aa ffrreeee aaggeenntt wwoorrkkiinngg iinn tthhee kknnoowwlleeddggee aanndd iinnffoorrmmaattiioonn tteecchhnnoollooggyy iinndduussttrryy.. Since she was a sophomore in high school she has managed her education and career planning using an app provided by Pathways.com and substantially improved over the past seven years. She manages a dynamic record of her competences and is continuously involved in filling new knowledge gaps that emerge due to changes in the field. She started on her information and communications technology (ICT) learning track in high school, secured a co-op position with a local firm, and completed the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree while employed. She has since moved to free-agent status where she works for her core firm 50


percent of the time and accepts other assignments to complete her employment needs. She spends about 10 percent of her time filling new knowledge gaps and positioning herself for additional opportunities.

Moving on to Understanding 2020—and How to Get There For readers wishing to hear the full stories of these educational citizens of 2020, go to the final section of this monograph, Part IV, Vignettes From the 2020 Future, Stories From the Frontline of Transformation. The stories are spun in greater detail and richness. For readers wishing to understand the forces and conditions that enabled these breakthrough events, proceed to Part II of the monograph, Revisiting 1995, then Zooming to the 2013 Present.

To go even further in understanding how to navigate and lead into the future, proceed to Part III, Starting in 2013, Getting it Done. This section describes what individuals and institutional leaders can do today to position themselves for success in the Age of Disruption. It suggests that success will require thoughtful and fundamental reinvention of our strategies, business models, and emerging best practices, guided by the seven principles of performance excellence.

“As for the future, your task is not to

foresee but to enable it.” Antoine de Saint Exupery


PPaarrtt IIII:: RReevviissiittiinngg 11999955,, tthheenn ZZoooommiinngg ttoo tthhee 22001133 PPrreesseenntt Almost 20 years ago, the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) published Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century written by Michael G. Dolence and Donald M. Norris. Transforming Higher Education (THE) served as a manifesto for how the teaching, training, experiences, and perspectives offered by higher education needed to be realigned with the needs of society and then redesigned, redefined, and reengineered (Dolence and Norris 1995). The following iconic diagram portrayed the interconnected nature of the 4 R’s of Transformation used by Dolence and Norris. The 4 R’s served as a lens through which to explore the elements of transformative initiatives that would move beyond the incrementalism of typical attempts to improve institutional performance one issue at a time.

Figure 1 The 4 R’s of Transformation

Source: Dolence and Norris 1995, p. 20.

Today, higher education is pressured to transform broadly and rapidly, partially because we have failed to achieve significant and needed change. We are starting to face multiple combinations of challenges. In previous decades, these challenges occurred singly and independently. If the multiple-challenge trend continues, then higher education could face a new “perfect storm”: declining authority, unfavorable economics, new competition, and reduced career opportunities for new graduates. This could translate into declining value propositions for stakeholders all around. Taken together, these factors are truly disruptive to business-as-usual approaches in higher education. They call for fundamentally different strategies, business models, and emerging practices to deal with the Age of Disruption that extends forward toward 2020 and beyond. Our perspective is that all institutions will need to reinvent their legacy programs and experiences in the face of these and other disruptive forces. Even the top “medallion” institutions and leading research universities will need to reinvent their core processes and practices and seek new revenues to establish financial sustainability. Less distinguished institutions will face existential threats if they cannot convince a more discerning public of the real value they continue to provide in the face of fresh alternatives. Community colleges will need to invent and scale fresh practices to serve the tidal wave of cost-conscious, pragmatic learners beating paths to their doors. Greater openness, flexibility, and adaptability will be required by all as American higher education moves forward to 2020.


This section sets the stage for this conversation by

Revisiting what the future looked like in 1995

Tracking other voices from 1995 to the present

Establishing 2013 as our new vantage point for the future

Watering the green shoots of the future

Reinventing strategies, business models, and emerging practices

Getting started, getting it done

REVISITING WHAT THE FUTURE LOOKED LIKE IN 1995 THE began with a simple thesis: that global society was undergoing a fundamental transformation from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Moreover, this paradigm shift required a realignment of all enterprises—including higher education—to the imperatives of this New Age of Disruption. For higher education, this translated into using Information or Knowledge Age tools—pervasive information and communications technology—to meet the needs of the New Age: universal learning throughout life, personalized and suited to current needs. Clearly, this would require evolving beyond the so-called “factory model” of education, which was lock-step, based on seat time, and insufficiently flexible to meet the needs of lifelong perpetual learning. Further, the factory model focused on the teacher, not the learner, and on throughputs and outputs rather than outcomes. Moreover, while the factory model yielded certain efficiencies, it was still too expensive to scale to meet the global level of demand for basic and continuing learning required by the emerging Information Age. To portray the elements of this transformation to the Knowledge Age, Dolence and Norris (1995) deployed the metaphor of “jump shifts” as shown in the figure that follows. These elements describe the requisite performance leaps to achieve the transformation in perspectives, policies, and practices required to align with the Knowledge Age. These jump shifts called for learner-centric, perpetual, just-in-time, personalized, and unbundled learning experiences along with the seamless systems, processes, and services needed to facilitate them. These principles resonated with educators grappling with the demands and challenges posed by growing populations of adult learners. There were also dissenters. At the time, most college and university leaders of traditional institutions thought that higher education was responding to the needs of the times. And quite aggressively, thank you very much. In the mid-1990s, many institutions were undertaking retrenchment, reorganization, restructuring, and reallocation activities in response to resource shortfalls and changing learner demands. They were also responding to the increasing opportunities to serve growing populations of adult learners, primarily by using expanded and extended versions of traditional approaches.

“The only way to predict the future is to have the power to shape the future.”

Eric Hoffer


Figure 2 Transformational Jump Shifts

Source: Dolence and Norris 1995, p. 4. However, these incremental changes were largely occurring at the margins. They did not redefine higher education’s institution-centric approach or alter its fundamental business model. Getting back to THE’s basic thesis: To truly meet the needs of the Knowledge Age, it would be necessary to genuinely redefine, redesign, and realign higher education. That was why transformation, not tinkering, would ultimately be needed. Dolence and Norris made certain that a core element of THE’s manifesto contained the admonition:

Remember: Just because we are changing a great deal does not mean we are transforming.


It’s as true in 2013 as it was in 1995. The difference now is that the colleges and universities of today are familiar with one form of academic transformation and should therefore find it easier to contemplate wider transformational change. The “canary in the mine” (indicator of change) is open (free) access to content. Examples of this include publishing in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals and creating or taking courses based on Open Educational Resources. Open access to knowledge could come next.

TRACKING OTHER VOICES FROM 1995 TO THE PRESENT

At about the same time that THE was published, other voices were capturing the promise of the era. They called for fresh perspectives, new approaches, and organizational change. They triggered a series of movements and technologies that have continued and are growing in strength even today. These form a solid foundation for a revised examination of “Transformation in an Age of Disruption.” The descriptions below present the nature of the suggested innovations in 1995 and how they have grown by 2013.

William Baumol and Sue Anne Blackman wrote “How to Think About Rising College Costs” in Planning for Higher Education, which suggested that both higher education and health care needed to use technology to transform their practices and dramatically reduce costs—or risk becoming unaffordable for individuals and our nation (Baumol and Blackman 1995). Many applications of technology reinforce existing practices and actually increase costs rather than reduce them. Baumol’s new book, The Cost Disease, explores why this continues to be a great problem today and into the future and what to do about it (Baumol 2012).

Carol Twigg and Robert Heterick founded the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII), leading to pioneering work in leveraging technology to reinvent courses and change patterns of faculty-learner-mentor-peer interaction; this work grew through Pew Foundation funding into a widespread course redesign initiative by the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) (see www.thencat.org). Hundreds of institutions have benefited. NLII lives on today as the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and is focusing on the transformative potential of personalized learning environments and learning analytics.

The Sloan Consortium was formed in 1995 to advance the emerging practice of online and

asynchronous learning. Through the leadership of Frank Mayadas and his colleagues, this movement has grown over time to reach millions of learners worldwide and to raise the acceptability of well-crafted online learning experiences as “just as good as” face-to-face learning experiences (Mayadas 2009). Many institutional ventures into online learning started by digitizing existing learning practices and business models. However, later generation online learning efforts have taken more transformative approaches (Norris and Lefrere 2010). It is estimated that over five million students in the United States are today taking at least one online course.


In 1995, The Open University (OU) in the United Kingdom was recognized for having deployed a fresh strategy and business model for remote learning, initially (since the 1970s) based on printed materials using a correspondence school approach combined with broadcasting and face-to-face tutorials, but later expanded online. The OU invested in high-quality learning materials developed by expert teams, which were sent out to remote learners who completed them with the support of mentors who were not subject matter experts and peer-to-peer interaction (see http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/osc/). In the 1990s, a variety of institutions serving adult learners were aligning their practices to the needs of the marketplace and to learners who wanted accelerated learning, schedules, and services more suited to adults. These institutions began to deploy variations on the OU strategy and over time introduced online learning and support services into the mix. Today, over a million learners in the United States engage in learning through the revised business models offered by U.S. for-profit institutions and not-for-profits, like UMUC and Regis University, that deploy these techniques.

A rising professor named Clayton Christensen published “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave” in Harvard Business Review. This seminal article introduced the notion that disruptive technologies are seldom pioneered by market leaders in an industry since they cannibalize current offerings (Bower and Christensen 1995). Typically, disruptive experiences are offered by new or marginal players who address unmet needs and then leverage their position as their offering becomes mainstream over time. Christensen refined these ideas in other books and eventually applied them to the higher education industry in The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. He has recommended that higher education encourage online education as a technology-based enabler of disruptive innovation (Christensen and Eyring 2011) and that universities transform their business models to support the research/commercialization of innovation and community-based learning.

John Kotter’s 1995 article in Harvard Business Review, “Leading Change: Why

Transformation Efforts Fail,” was followed in 1996 by his book simply titled Leading Change. Kotter (1995, 1996) pointed out the need to lead and navigate change in ways that would overcome organizational inertia and the importance of building compelling coalitions to support change. Since that time, his work has become the gold standard for launching successful, large-scale organizational change. His most recent work, “Accelerate!,” in Harvard Business Review calls for enterprises to dramatically extend and speed up these efforts in the face of disruptive forces and multiple challenges and opportunities (Kotter 2012).

The technology environment of 1995 has morphed in ways that continue to amaze. The World

Wide Web, developed in the early 1990s under the leadership of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was made accessible to the masses with the introduction and evolution of the Mosaic Web browser developed by Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois in 1993. The continuing evolution of the Internet and the World Wide Web has created a seamless, global ecology of online interactivity and a sharing of information and knowledge that has exceeded the imagination of even its founders. Over time, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and even Web 3.0 applications have developed, spawning a tsunami of knowledge sharing, social media, social networking, crowd sourcing,


and communities of practice whose latent potential is waiting to be tapped for learning, competence building, innovation, and success making.

In his book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin argued that society was potentially entering a

new phase in which more sophisticated software technologies would dramatically reduce the need for workers, even skilled professionals (Rifkin 1995). Since then, this theme has been embraced by leading economists like Michael Autor at MIT and authors like Martin Ford (2009) in The Lights in the Tunnel in describing the so-called “hollowing out” of advanced economies as middle-level jobs are eliminated through the leveraging of artificial intelligence, productivity tools, and reinvention of processes/practices.

We can listen to the voices of 1995—Baumol, Twigg, Heterick, Mayadas, Christensen, Kotter, Berners-Lee, Rifkin, and others—and hear the promises and perils of the future. The development and acceptance of their ideas since 1995 illustrates the rapid advance of initiatives designed to create a totally new service or experience that meets unmet needs. They also suggest how difficult it can be to change existing organizations, especially if the new offerings challenge sacred cows. So, THE served as a manifesto for the potential of a technology-enabled, truly transformative approach to higher education and the lifelong development of skills, competence, and know-how. Over the intervening years, the world of learning and work has changed a great deal. The compounding effect of many of the movements cited here has produced substantial progress and proof of the power of transformed learning and talent development. However, the pressures for change and the pace of change are accelerating. Organizational and cultural resistance to change in higher education was the greatest barrier to the implementation of the principles espoused in THE, and it remains formidable today. As with academic publishing, the advent of open content makes it more obvious that educational practices have not yet been broadly transformed, and new alternatives to today’s business models are challenging the prevailing marketplace leaders. The time frame for responding to such challenges is shrinking. The next section explores how the higher education enterprise has changed since THE and uses today’s world of learning, work, and competence building as the new vantage point for describing the future through the lens of the 4 R’s of Transformation.

2013 IS OUR NEW VANTAGE POINT FOR THE FUTURE

William Gibson, author of Neuromancer (Gibson 1984) and other forward-looking, near-science fiction, observed, “The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed.” So it is with educational transformation: it is here in many places and in many ways but neither broadly nor consistently distributed. Its green shoots can be seen in many places, but its roots are shallow.


To the eye of the long-time advocate of change, the world of 2013 is chock full of both disappointments and causes for celebration. Every turn in the road holds another set of contradictory revelations. Looking through the lens of hopeful expectations crafted by THE we see that:

Information and communications technology (ICT) has transformed the way in which many people live their lives; it has been deployed to enrich all academic and administrative processes and experiences, but it has not yet been leveraged to transform educational practices, broadly speaking. The communications element of ICT has had the greatest relative transformative impact on behavior. Technology has transformed the patterns and cadences of social engagement and the way people manage and fuse their personal lives, schedules, finances, work, and leisure. It enables people to interact with one another using smart phones, iPads, PDAs, and other gizmos in extraordinary ways. Leading institutions are devising more open policies for allowing the use of mobile technologies and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) approaches in campus communications. Over the next few years this will expand substantially as privacy and safety concerns lessen.

Technology has revolutionized knowledge sharing in research and innovation. While the casual walk-in observer

of many face-to-face classroom experiences would detect only relatively minor changes from past practice, what goes on in the spaces between classes has changed more dramatically. Learners can interact online with faculty, peers, and formal and informal troves of online resources. Course information at most institutions has been digitized, and many leading institutions offer rich combinations of e-learning (digitized resources), hybrid learning combining face-to-face and online experiences, and fully online learning. Many online providers have embedded analytics and competence-based learning into their offerings to detect at-risk behavior and intervene to improve student success. These techniques are spreading and are poised to scale.

At the front of technology-enabled course design, NCAT’s proven practices of reinvention and the substitution of

technology for labor have been deployed successfully in many institutions, leading to enhanced productivity and improved outcomes. Moreover, many successful examples of active and experiential learning are working their way into course experiences.

However, despite these examples of success stories and best practices, most institutions have not deployed these

techniques in a systemic and systematic way. They have not taken technology-enabled innovation to an enterprise level. They have supported successful innovations, but they have not scaled or purposefully innovated business models in ways that could reduce costs.

Put simply, institutions have layered technology over existing practices, tinkering with them but not

transforming them. They have sponsored individual innovations, but have not yet used their ICT investment to innovate systemically or to purposefully reduce costs. Christensen calls these sustaining innovations—they actually sustain current practices, making them more expensive. Most other industries are using analytics and technology far more transformatively, and we have far to go to catch up. But at least we have other success stories from which to learn.


Remember: Just because we are changing a great deal does not mean we are transforming.

From an economic perspective, the cost of education has continued to grow at unsustainable rates. The cost of learning has continued to rise at rates greater than the starting salary of new graduates or the consumer price index, as has the cost of health care. Education and health care have come to consume a larger share of the GDP, straining both public and private finances (as predicted long ago by Baumol). These conditions have been exacerbated by the Great Recession and the resulting declines in family wealth and the job prospects of recent graduates. This situation will likely worsen over time.

The financial crisis in higher education is multifaceted, involving learners, families, institutions, and governments.

- Put simply, many students and their families can no longer afford a traditional college degree—and more

and more are coming to that realization. - Parents are increasingly concerned about cost. - Further, the state of institutional finance is in a shambles. Across the United States, institutions are facing

a sea of red ink caused by declining state support, increasing investments in costly campus amenities (an amenities arms race), burdensome institutional debt (as reflected in declining Moody’s bond ratings), unrealistic instructional costs, plateauing tuition revenues, and intense competition for adult learners. Some institutional leaders are calling for “right-sizing” institutions in the face of growing online learning. Others are still investing in costly amenities to attract learners.

- State governments have been reducing the public investment in higher education since the 1970s. Neither

federal nor state governments will have the resources to dramatically increase investment in education, research, and other infrastructure in the coming years.

One result of these conditions is that students are becoming much more concerned and discerning about the

real value of what they receive from their education. This concern about value is validated whenever one talks with students applying today to the wide spectrum of institutions, from community colleges to medallion universities. Each learner creates his or her own value proposition based on a combination of factors:

Figure 3 Value Proposition Equation

Learners and their families are becoming much more discerning and demanding in their consideration of learning and developmental opportunities. They scrutinize outcomes, experiences, and costs. The financial

Value = Outcomes (Learning, Development, Employment) x Experiences (Meaningful) Cost


predicaments foretold by THE, Baumol, and others in 1995 have come to pass in 2013. Moreover, we are running out of time for discovering and deploying solutions.

Fortunately, individual institutions and other learning enterprises have developed

economical learning/developmental solutions, and these are poised to be taken to scale. These prototype efforts take a variety of forms.

First, a number of institutions have created low-cost, accelerated, competence-based models for baccalaureate

degrees. These institutions have changed both their strategies and business models to achieve these solutions. Much attention has focused on a variety of examples:

- Western Governor’s University (unbundled resources, learning, assessment, and mentoring, $15,000

degree, 2.5 years); - Southern New Hampshire University (competence-based, accelerated degrees); - So-called $10,000 degree programs being developed by a variety of state institutions (Texas, Florida,

Wisconsin); and - Online programs offered by community colleges and other providers at market-competitive prices.

Second, many other institutions are using bridge programs, concurrent enrollments, and credit for prior learning arrangements to enable accelerated completion of baccalaureate degrees. Some are achieving a three-year baccalaureate in selected disciplines.

Third, many institutions, both public and private, are beginning to control costs by limiting tuition increases and

introducing operational efficiencies. Enhanced articulation and awarding of credit to the growing number of transfer students will also help. In addition, some institutions are moving to needs-based financial aid, and some highly selective, well-endowed private universities are moving to free tuition for learners from low-SES families. Students are receiving better counseling on the true cost of college completion, and the demand for this will grow. Many states have implemented or are considering performance-based funding, paying institutions for successful completion, not enrollment, in an effort to improve success and reduce costs.

Fourth, community colleges are redoubling their efforts to serve mushrooming numbers of learners and improve

student success through a variety of means:

- Improving remedial education and gateway courses using proven self-paced, personalized learning techniques;


- Enhancing advising, degree planning, learner relationship management systems, and the use of analytics to optimize student success; and

- Providing targeted collections of courses that shorten time to employment, enabling learners to achieve

their associate degrees after they are employed. Fifth, new learning and development providers are emerging to provide credits that can be transferred and

cobbled together to reduce the time and cost of completion. These include course aggregators that aggregate course offerings from a variety of sources; providers such as StraighterLine that offer low-cost, transferrable courses; organizations like LearningCounts, which evaluates and awards credit for prior learning; and a variety of advising, career counseling, and success-making services being marketed by existing or new providers.

Sixth, some disciplines are limiting time-to-completion for graduate degrees, especially doctoral study. This

initiative is likely to gain even greater strength in the near future.

These efforts are poised to grow considerably as families become more concerned about affordability. The best

practices in this area can be rolled out to scale by institutions nationally. Personalized learning is on the cusp of becoming a major, transformative movement; it is

coupled with a greater interest in competency-based learning and the measurement of developmental outcomes. Moreover, analytics and performance measurement and enhancement have captured the attention of institutional leaders and are poised to receive even greater attention and investment. Personalized learning environments with embedded learning analytics are being prototyped by many institutions. Substantial funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other sources is focusing on techniques and analytics to support the optimization of student success and to develop the interoperable technologies necessary to support open, transferrable learning and competence building that crosses the boundaries between institutions, other learning providers, and free-range, DIY learning. The NMC Horizon Report suggests that the combination of personalized learning and learning analytics will become a highly significant force within higher education within the next few years (Johnson et al. 2013).

Personalized learning systems will require fundamental changes in the way we view teaching and learning. Tools will soon enable students, teachers, and advisors to know the learning profile of an individual learner, including past experiences, competencies, and test scores. This information can align with where the student needs to go in a personalized learning path that leads to successful course taking, one that is competencies- and mastery-based and mapped to the student’s individual progression and pace.


These developments will impact all of education, K–20, but are being taken more seriously by K–12. At a recent conference, the American Society for Curriculum Development and the Council of Chief State School Officers met with the Software & Information Industry Association, SIIA (see www.siia.net/PLI/presentations.asp#summaries). Participants determined that we will need to redesign, redefine, and reengineer in five key policy-related areas:

1. Use of time (Carnegie unit/calendar)

2. Performance-based, time-flexible assessment

3. Equity in access to technology infrastructure

4. Funding models that incentivize completion

5. P–20 continuum and non-age/grade band system

Of the educational leaders at the conference, 91 percent very strongly or strongly agreed that “We cannot meet

the personalized learning needs of students within our traditional system—tweaking the teacher/classroom-centered model is not enough, and systemic redesign is needed.”

The application of analytics, predictive modeling, “Big Data,” and the tools of continuous performance

improvement in higher education is finally providing institutions with the ability to understand and optimize learner performance. These offerings will enable institutions to enhance their investment in measuring, understanding, and improving the performance of individuals, departments, and the institution itself.

Most institutions lack the agility and resilience to transform their operations to align with

the needs of the Knowledge Age. Nothing in the training and long-term experience of our institutional leaders or the prevailing shared governance culture prepares institutions for rapid, enterprise-wide adaptation to truly disruptive changes.

In his essay “The Challenge to Deep Change: A Brief Cultural History of Higher Education,” Sanford Shugart (2012) points out that “culture trumps strategy” (p. 2) and that culture-changing leadership must take seriously the deep roots of the attitudes and behavior of faculty and those institutional leaders who have come up through the faculty. It is not surprising that past successful efforts to change strategies, business models, and best practices have either created new institutions (“skunk works”) where new approaches could be developed or have focused on new offerings that were not seen as substitutes for core institutional programs. Nor is it a surprise that most of the disruptive applications of the principles espoused by THE have occurred in a collection of new institutions, for-profit providers, and other new enterprises providing learning and development services.


This being said, the current disruptive forces and the existence of scalable prototypes suggest that we can hope for—even expect—better results from higher education in the future. Moreover, a cadre of existing institutions has demonstrated that traditional institutions can both create transformed business models and maintain their traditional offerings. For example, the Chapman University System was established in 2009 to build on Chapman University, a 150-year-old, fully accredited private university in Orange, California, by creating Brandman University, a separate, fully accredited institution dedicated to extending the Chapman education to working adult students online and through a network of 26 campuses in California and Washington.

While the literature emphasizes the threats that disruptions pose, it also talks about the opportunities they

present. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, “Two Routes to Resilience,” Clark Gilbert, Matthew Eyring, and Richard N. Foster argue that to reinvent themselves in a world increasingly characterized by disruptive change, organizations in all sectors should craft a two-track approach to transformation as the best path to organizational resiliency (Gilbert, Eyring, and Foster 2012):

- Transformation Track A (Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model) should reposition the core business of the

enterprise, adapting the current (or legacy) business model to the altered marketplace. For higher education this means adapting existing programs, experiences, and outcomes to be competitive with emerging alternatives.

- Transformation Track B (Discover Future Business Model) should create a separate disruptive business to develop innovations that will become the source of future growth. For higher education this means discovering offerings to address new or unmet value propositions that were not possible in the past but that are now possible in the Web 3.0 world of the 21st-century Knowledge Age.

The demand for significant change in American higher education will require most, if not all, institutions to

adopt variations of the two-track model to thrive in the years ahead. At the very least, institutions will need to take seriously the adaptations required by Track A in order for their legacy programs and experiences to remain competitive.

A deep gap exists between the sense of urgency felt by institutional leaders and that felt by

the campus community—especially faculty. Most institutional presidents and members of the cabinet are acutely aware of the urgent state of institutional finance and the difficult imperative of achieving financial sustainability in these times. Most executive officers also appreciate the challenges facing learner and family finances and the need for greater efficiency and effectiveness in their institution’s instructional programs.

But on most campuses, the rest of the campus community—especially faculty—does not feel a comparable sense of urgency. After the initial rounds of budget rescissions and furloughs, many institutions have weathered the recession with enrollments at comfortable levels, even if the financial picture of the institution is not rosy. So why must we contemplate change that will take us way past our comfort zone?


Boards of Trustees are coming to the conclusion that the institutions under their stewardship may not be positioned to weather the Age of Disruption. While last summer’s brouhaha between the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors and President Sullivan may have been a case study in how not to express a board’s emerging belief that the times require greater dynamism and aggressive action, this incident mirrored similar conversations between boards and presidents across the nation—and globally.

On most campuses, undertaking a Track A and B reinvention program will require a commitment between the

board and the president to push the campus community beyond its comfort zone, risking the slings and arrows of campus pushback in order to fulfill the responsibility of stewardship for the future of the institution in the Age of Disruption.

Leaders need to focus attention on making their institutions more responsive and resilient. Careful assessments

over the past several decades of why enterprises fail have pointed to strategic blunders as the cause of over 80 percent of these failures. Being caught flat-footed by a major industry shift is the first category of such blunders (Dann, Le Merle, and Pencavel 2012). Institutional leaders should not dismiss the possibility of shifts in the education and knowledge industry.

Higher education institutions have weathered wars, depressions, and other calamities over the centuries. Some

universities are among our most long-lived organizations (Keller 1983). But they have never been confronted by the “perfect storm” (Popenici 2012) of external factors that is affecting the decision calculus of learners and their families today and that may increase in intensity in the future: (1) increasing unaffordability of traditional higher education, (2) growing unemployment and marginalization of recent graduates, (3) continuing changes in marketplace conditions and the possible hollowing out of the economy in the long term, (4) emerging alternatives that can displace parts of traditional higher education, and (5) increasing desire of learners for a blend of real-world, practical, innovative, and entrepreneurship-rich experiences that many institutions may not be able to provide.

“In all affairs, love, religion, politics, or business, it’s a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.”

Bertrand Russell

Why transformation? Why not cautious incremental improvement? Terry Brown’s essay in Inside Higher Ed, “In Defense of Incrementalism,” sounds a cautionary note. Quoting a college administrator on change, “we don’t do nimble,” Brown (2012) calls for more thoughtful, less ready/fire/aim-style leaders and less rapid, sweeping action. The challenges may be great, but ill-considered, throw-the-spaghetti-against-the-wall approaches have sent people scrambling in different directions. The result has been institutional Brownian Movement, with different change efforts moving erratically, leaving everyone exhausted and frustrated.


Brown is right in several ways. Many institutions have responded reflexively and unwisely to the change imperative and future opportunities. The examples are legion. The first wave of online learning ventures launched by major medallion universities failed miserably—remember Fathom, Universitas 21, and e-University in the United Kingdom? They shot into the future like a laser—and missed. Moreover, other institutional efforts at change have taken a thousand-points-of-light approach and then failed to reward successful innovations and scale them to departmental and college levels, let alone enterprise-wide.

But, our view departs from Brown’s in two important ways. First, we differ in our understanding of the methods

needed to build organizational capacity and successful offerings in disruptive times. Since the competitive environment does not contain ultra-agile organizations with dramatically superior cost structures, no laser shots into the future need apply; instead, there is time to create sound, well-understood strategies that can be followed and adjusted as necessary over five to seven years. These are created through expeditionary initiatives that are launched rapidly and continuously refined, attracting users and discovering how to fulfill changing learner value propositions. Rather than lengthy planning to launch programs that are expected to be immediately successful, a more proven approach is to rapidly launch prototypes that through five years of continuous adjustment uncover how to meet emerging expectations in ways that could not be foretold five years earlier. The current evolution of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is following this path.

Second, we differ in our comprehension of the strategic intent and scale of innovations. Most of higher

education’s innovations have been what Christensen calls sustaining innovations. They are layered atop existing processes, creating improvements, but typically raising costs and failing to reinvent the core business model. The strategic intent of expeditionary innovations should be to reinvent the three types of business models (Christensen and Eyring 2011) found in higher education:

- Value-added processes (remedial, core, and foundational learning);

- Facilitated user networks (student services, co-curricular activities, and learning communities); and

- Problem-solving/solution shops (research, extension, community-problem solving, and

entrepreneurship/innovation/commercialization of ideas).

Unbundled, redesigned online learning has been used to reinvent the business model for undergraduate learning; this has scaled to the entire institution in some settings. Facilitated communities of learning and practice are being deployed to enable lifelong, continuing professional development at reasonable prices. New approaches to innovation, entrepreneurship, and commercialization are being prototyped to greatly expand the participation of students, faculty, researchers, and alumni, changing the business model and liberating entrepreneurial experiences associated with universities. Tremendous opportunities exist to leverage business model reinvention over time in many settings.


WATERING THE GREEN SHOOTS OF CHANGE

In 2013, the future is already with us, but it is unevenly distributed and has not grown to scale. Variations on reinvented strategies, business models, and practices are being field tested by institutions, new learning and competence providers, and free-range learners finding their own DIY paths. Many of these efforts are innovation 1.0, and it will not be until version 3.0 or 4.0 that the innovations will meet the emerging needs of learners. It will take time for many of these new variations to mature. These green shoots of change will be watered by institutions that do not enjoy the security of unassailable competitive advantage and whose boards and leadership recognize the imperative for action. Such institutions can be identified from among the private universities that offer an undifferentiated experience, are losing market share and competitiveness, are experiencing a pernicious increase in tuition discounting, or are suffering a loss in their Moody’s rating. Or, from among the public, comprehensive universities that are not highly selective, produce large numbers of unemployed graduates, or are undifferentiated from similar competitors. Or, from among proprietary schools that are not fulfilling their promise of employment. The next section presents a blueprint for how this can get done.

“If you can imagine it, it probably will happen. If you can imagine it, it probably already exists, somewhere.”

Bruce Judson


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REINVENTING STRATEGIES, BUSINESS MODELS, AND EMERGING PRACTICES

The good news is that there is ample opportunity for institutions, even as they face the challenges that 2013 presents, to respond to—and even embrace—disruptive forces. The two-track model allows an institution to focus effectively on the two major types of change efforts at one time. However, the two tracks should be led and operated separately, allowing each the focus and leeway necessary to carry out the transformation that has been assigned. Gilbert, Eyring, and Foster (2012) maintain that the challenges and skills needed for the transformation of core programs (legacy business) are very different from those needed for the development of a new, disruptive model. Moreover, the new offerings may reduce demand for the old offerings, even if they are adapted to disruptive forces. These two approaches also require the expression of two different types of leadership:

The leader of Track A (Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model) initiatives needs to be someone who not only can cut costs and improve value, but also who has the capability to take a broader view and rapidly find the strongest competitive advantage the legacy programs can sustain in the disrupted marketplace. For example, a traditional liberal arts program may “double down” on its belief in the value of a challenging liberal arts education, but infuse the experience with digital scholarship, international experiences, experiential and service learning, internships, and entrepreneurship opportunities that would ground the learner’s critical thinking skills in real-world experiences.

The leader of Track B (Discover Future Business Model), on the other hand, needs to identify unmet needs in the current or emergent marketplace, develop new programs that will fulfill those needs cost effectively, and then carefully implement and evolve those programs. The idea is to organize a group that is unencumbered by the past and the contents of core programs and that has the moving room to create a truly disruptive model that assures the institution’s future in the face of the next wave of disruptive opportunities.

The good news is that there is ample opportunity for institutions to respond to —and even embrace—disruptive forces.

Institutions have three significant levers for responding to the opportunities presented by an Age of Disruption: strategies, business models, and emerging practices, as portrayed in figure 4.


Figure 4 Reinvention Strategies, Business Models, and Emerging Practices

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Strategies enable institutions to deploy adaptive, focused efforts over time in order to realign to the changing needs of learners, parents, and American society in the 21st century. Four particular strategies appear promising for institutions facing disruptions over the next decade:

Focus on and promote the real value of a college education and associated developmental experiences, enabling learners to make choices that personalize their experience and manage the total cost of completion of developmental objectives.

Develop organizational capacity for analytics-enabled personalized learning, performance measurement and improvement, and optimization of learner success.

Build flexibility into the completion and certification of learning and developmental

objectives, including certification for prior learning, seamless articulation and transfer, acceptance of open and DIY learning, and competence-based certification.

Double down on what the legacy programs and experiences at traditional institutions do best—provide social and business networks for life, forge learner/faculty relationships, facilitate personal development including leadership and co-curricular experiences, and filter and identify talent.

Business models use insights into human motivation to translate strategies into actions that will appeal to learners, their families, and other stakeholders. The four strategies above inform the generation of new business models necessary to establish sustainable bases for strategies and emerging practices. Three are shared here:

Reinvent the business models for education and developmental experiences in the face of disruptive activities—not just learning, but human development, research, commercialization, public service, and economic development.

To reposition existing core activities, consciously reinvent legacy programs and experiences to maintain competitive position in the face of the disruption of existing value propositions to provide real value and discover new revenue streams (Track A: Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model).

Create separate disruptive businesses and develop innovations that will become the sources of future growth. Discover offerings that address new or unmet value propositions that have not been viable in the past, but are now (Track B: Discover Future Business Model).

Emerging practices appropriate to the Age of Disruption will result from fresh strategies and reinvented business models. Institutions that will thrive in the Age of Disruption will learn to capitalize on emerging practices and hone them to sharp, differentiating points. Here are four promising


areas where emerging practices will arise that connect to the strategies and business models already described:

Seamlessly link learning with real-world experiences, globalism, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Achieve excellence in supporting and achieving personalized learning, enhancing

performance, and optimizing student success.

Liberate the innovative, entrepreneurial, and problem-solving capacities of college and university communities.

Make peer-to-peer learning and communities of practice the epicenters of knowledge stewardship and perpetual learning.

Reinvention of strategies and business models is never easy, although it is easier for some organizations than others. A fundamental principal of organizational development describes the inertia imposed by organizational complexity and its supporting bureaucracies. Clay Shirky’s blog posting, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models” (Shirky 2010), referenced Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies (Tainter 1990) in questioning whether complex organizations could become sufficiently flexible and adaptive to respond to tectonic changes in their societies and marketplaces. There are many examples of those that did not—the Romans, Lowland Mayans, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and others. Today’s large and complex universities are precisely the sort of complex, bundled, interconnected, and distributed enterprises that cannot turn on a dime in response to disruptions in their environments—or from within. Can they find a way to thrive in the Age of Disruption? The challenge of transformation in an Age of Disruption is for each college and university to craft a new set of strategies that nurtures greater flexibility, enables enhancement in performance, and spawns fresh business models and emerging practices that appeal to stakeholders. The following section describes how to get started on that path and get it done.

GETTING STARTED AND GETTING IT DONE

Since Transforming Higher Education (Dolence and Norris 1995) we have learned a great deal about how to accelerate strategic transformation. We have developed new tools and practices for reinventing and leveraging the institutional processes of planning, resource allocation, program review and accreditation, and assessment. Taken together, these can enhance institutional effectiveness. We have also learned the importance of comprehending uncertainty and risk in the face of the Age of Disruption and the need to consciously build strategic resiliency.


In our judgment, every U.S. institution needs to reposition itself to play its part in national success in the Age of Disruption. We must pay attention to the risk of incremental tinkering in the face of disruptive change. Institutions need to redirect and reinvent existing visions, processes, and practices as part of strategic campaigns of planning, execution, and organizational development. And we must find ways to continuously resource, refine, and rescale innovations in the face of scarce resources. Successful strategies will differ dramatically among different types of institutions. Here are some approaches that we suggest:

CREATE A SENSE OF URGENCY, BUILD A WINNING COALITION

The first two steps in Kotter’s (2012) process for accelerating change are to create a sense of urgency and then build a winning coalition. These steps can be applied both to particular initiatives and to the overarching initiative of positioning the institution for success.

Figure 5 The Eight Accelerators for Institutional Strategies and Initiatives

Source: Kotter 2012, p. 10. In most institutions, the development of a sense of urgency and strategic direction will start with the board in collaboration with the president, provost or chief academic officer, and chief financial officer. When an institution needs to move beyond its comfort zone, committed leadership from these players is key. Then the sense of urgency should widen to include the entire executive team, including the critically important deans, and from there spread to the entire institution.


New kinds of participatory processes are needed to engage campus participants in symposia, forums, and continuing conversations about the emerging future and the urgent nature of the challenges we face and then to follow through with the execution of strategy and building of capacity. Institutions as different as University of the Pacific (Brodnick, Luu, and Norris 2012), George Mason University (George Mason University Office of the Provost n.d.; Probst and Rich n.d.), and Valencia Community College have created participatory engagement events to support their strategic thinking and planning. These cascading events often involve several hundred participants at a time, meeting at facilitated conversations around tables of rounds of six to ten participants. One approach to ensure participation is to include board members in such conversations and extend invitations to the campus that communicate that. In executing Kotter’s framework, a wide variety of engaging processes will be required to create vision, discover change initiatives, and win immediate victories. These processes will build an understanding of the imperatives of the times, their implications, and the appropriate pathways to reinvention. Continuous engagement is also needed progressively to change the culture and demonstrate the effectiveness of new behaviors, strategies, business models, and emerging practices.

In addition, existing planning processes can be redirected toward strategic transformation. Existing organizational planning and resource allocation processes should be redirected and reshaped to serve as the instruments for building commitment to Track A (Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model) and B (Discover Future Business Model) type reinvention. All of these processes must be aligned to the strategic intent of reinventing legacy offerings to maintain competitiveness and discovering fresh offerings that meet previously unobtainable needs.

In the coming Age of Disruption, institutions must develop their capacity to deal with a greater number of challenges and opportunities at the same time. Kotter’s framework illustrates the importance of continuous, persistent, interwoven attention to capacity building and the processes of planning, resource allocation, accreditation and program review, and assessment.

Further, strategic planning can be reinvented to deploy design thinking. Today’s planning processes apply design thinking to ensure that emerging strategies meet the realignment and redesign needs of strategic transformation. The following is a typical design thinking shell for a year-long strategic planning process that can be tailored to meet the needs of a particular college or the entire institution. Design thinking plays a critical role in the “planning from the future backward” methodology described below.


Figure 6 Design Elements That Form College Strategy

PRACTICE PLANNING FROM THE FUTURE BACKWARD

In “The Timeless Strategic Value of Unrealistic Goals,” Vijay Govindarajan notes that “strategic intent takes the long view: the act of such intent is to operate from the future backward, disregarding the resource scarcity of the present. … Realistic goals promote incremental moves; only unrealistic goals provoke breakthrough thinking” (Govindarajan 2012, ¶1, 4). In some cases these are called “stretch goals.” Experienced planners have found that a planning team can be stymied by the prospect of truly substantial, multi-threaded change and by organizational obstacles that have halted breakthrough thinking in the past. Inertia and perceived barriers can freeze participation and thought processes, leading to the lament, “We cannot get there from here!” (so we will not try). Another familiar refrain: “We tried


that 10 years ago and it failed.” One approach that unfreezes participants is to leap into the future, describe the necessary future states, and then plan from the future backward. This can be used to liberate thinking and focus on fulfilling the future value propositions that will be demanded by stakeholders and the marketplace.

Figure 7 Planning from the Future Backward

Remember: Attempting to predict disruptive futures with precision

is a losing proposition.

The goal should be to position the institution for competitive success in a range of future conditions.


COMBINE STRATEGY, ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, INNOVATION, ANALYTICS, AND PERFORMANCE

In the past, strategic plans were typically five-year extrapolations of current programs, adjusted for relatively minor environmental changes. The reinvention of today’s strategic planning processes places greater emphasis on four components:

Strategy—focused behavior maintained and adapted over time (five to seven years) and reshaped in the face of emerging conditions;

Organizational development—building the organizational vision and capacity to practice Track A (Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model) and B (Discover Future Business Model) reinvention and thereby thrive in the Age of Disruption;

Innovation—nurturing and then scaling innovation to make a difference, department-,

college-, and enterprise-wide; and

Leveraging analytics and performance excellence to levels never achieved before. Strategy execution and organizational development must be key elements of strategic plans in an Age of Disruption. A major challenge involves how to nurture and resource the innovations and reinventions under Tracks A and B, refining them in the face of new insights and changing conditions. In particular, the challenge of resourcing innovations that have the potential to generate fresh revenues may require new investment pools and practices.


Figure 8 Making it All Work

EMPLOY MEASUREMENT, ANALYTICS, AND PERFORMANCE EXCELLENCE

Higher education is on the threshold of a leap in our capacity to support and assess personalized learning and optimize student success. These tools and capacities will enhance our ability to understand and improve learner performance. Over the next three to five years, next-generation systems and tools will enable institutions to reinvent their approaches to personalized learning and whole-person development. Reinvented strategies and business models will incorporate these insights.

Higher education is on the threshold of a leap in our capacity to support and assess

personalized learning and optimize student success. These performance leaps will be facilitated by a substantial investment in capital and talent by external solution providers and by a migration of many analytics solutions to the cloud. Today, the major ERP and LMS providers are investing in performance management, retention, and student success solutions. Moreover, a whole new constellation of providers of learner relationship management and personalized learning network solutions is being created, deployed, and refined. Big Data and data mining solutions are on offer and will grow. Analytics illuminating the linkages between K–20 education and employment will be facilitated by public and private sources. Many of these analytics solutions are being offered as hosted services in the cloud. Progressively, institutions will turn to these solutions and the talent provided by


these vendors as extensions of their organizational capacity for analytics. Within three to five years, these constellations of vendor solutions, institutional federations and consortia, and public analytics utilities for students, parents, and employees will greatly facilitate analytics and the achievement of a culture of performance measurement and improvement.

DEPLOY THE POWER OF “RADICAL INCREMENTALISM”

In discussing “the big shift” in practices being experienced by all societies, industries, and enterprises in their book The Only Sustainable Edge, Hagel and Brown (2005) use the term “radical incrementalism” to describe a new breed of incremental, expeditionary initiatives guided by radical, transformative intent. We are still in a discovery mode regarding the gestating strategies, new business models, and emerging practices that will be successful in the Age of Disruption. Even with a transformative vision of the future, most institutions will need to build their organizational capacity through a successive series of expeditionary initiatives that achieve Track A (Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model) reinvention. As they build capacity, the dimensions of future strategies, business models, and practices will emerge in sharper relief. Radical incrementalism, embedded in reinvention and deployed over strategy horizons of five to seven years, is a sound prescription for these times. The time to get started and get it done is now. ACHIEVE NEW LEVELS OF COLLABORATION, SHARING, AND PARTNERSHIP

To achieve the levels of reinvention necessary to thrive in the Age of Disruption, new levels of collaboration, sharing, and partnership will be critical. In the past, colleges and universities have used relationships with technology solution providers, public/private partnerships, federations and consortia, shared services, and institutional collaborations to create innovative offerings and experiences. These collaborations have provided individual institutions with technology solutions and services, scarce talent, innovation know-how, and diminished risk. In their study of emerging analytics applications in American higher education, Norris and Baer (2013) describe a substantial “analytics talent gap” that can only be filled by collaboration, turning to technology-based solution providers who can afford the scarce and expensive talent needed today for advanced analytics. Even now, companies such as e-College, Blackboard, Ellucian, Workday, and others are providing in-the-cloud solutions to hundreds of client institutions, enabling comparative analytics among them. As more cloud-based, personalized learning and learning-analytics solutions emerge over the next few years, the importance of these constellations of solution provider communities will increase dramatically. Another instructive example is the predictive analytics reporting (PAR) project undertaken by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), which is creating a federated data set for six institutions and almost 800,000 student records that will enable cross-institutional data mining. The project is deconstructing the problems of retention, progress, and completion to find solutions for decreasing loss and increasing momentum and success. The PAR partner institutions (initially American


Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois–Springfield, and the University of Phoenix but now expanding substantially) are federating and aggregating de-identified online student records and will apply descriptive, inferential, and predictive analytical tests to the resulting single pool of records to look for key variables that seem to have an effect on student achievement (Smith 2012). Look for more of these partnerships. Consider also the example of the emergence and evolution of MOOCs. The efforts of early MOOC pioneers like George Siemens and Stephen Downes and breakthrough demonstrations like Sebastian Thrun’s 100,000-plus student MOOC at Stanford presaged the formation of solution-provider partnerships between enterprises like Coursera, Udacity, and MITx and groups of leading universities. Over time, these universities will place their content on MOOCs, which will evolve in an expeditionary way to create a cloud-based utility that can be accessed by independent learners and colleges and universities across the globe. Individual institutions will find themselves participants in many overlapping collaborations of this sort as they open up to more flexibly incorporate other learning options. Rio Salado College recently hosted a gathering to encourage the incubation of creative ideas for optimizing student success. The participants explored the use of technology to enable these ideas and practices and shared fresh reconceptualizations that can be used to alter the way higher education views the landscape. Examples included partnerships to serve oversubscribed institutions; course and credit exchange in an SOC-like (service-members opportunity colleges) network; research, analytics, and metrics for student loss and momentum; and competency-based design of courses, programs, and degrees (Smith 2012). As institutions grapple with fresh strategies for the Age of Disruption, greater collaborations and partnerships will open new possibilities and stretch institutional resources.

EXECUTE STRATEGIES TO ENGAGE THE DISRUPTIVE FUTURE

A strategy is a consistent, focused pattern of behavior that unfolds over time. Emergent trends, conditions, and strategic elements require a strategy to be continuously adjusted. The realized strategies that emerge can best be understood by looking backward at how the strategy has been executed over time. Our description of the emergent, realized developments between 1995 and 2013, observed from our current vantage point, illustrates this principle. What will observers in 2020 conclude about higher education strategies between 2013 and 2020?


Figure 9 7-Year Strategies for an Age of Disruption

Confronting the Age of Disruption will require enhanced strategic skills and know-how. The board and the core leadership triad of president, chief academic officer, and chief financial officer will need to lead and energize initiatives to develop institutional capacity through doing and engage the campus community in new ways. Collaborations, shared resources, and partnerships will attain even greater importance. Getting started needs to begin immediately. Getting it done will unfold over time—especially the next seven years.

A strategy is a consistent, focused pattern of behavior that unfolds over time.

Resilience as a Conscious Long-Term Strategy. In order to reinvent an institution’s legacy offerings (Track A: Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model) and/or discover breakthrough business models (Track B: Discover Future Business Model), institutional leadership must prepare for continuing disruption through building the capacity for resilience. As was discussed earlier, our institutions currently do not possess the resilience, the agility, or the investment resources to pursue reinvention on their own. But, they can achieve resilience in partnership with external partners and by consciously making resilience their long-term strategy. The following steps are necessary to establish resilience as a conscious strategy:

Establish a sense of urgency, mobilizing a guiding coalition and champions. Follow Kotter’s principles to raise the consciousness of the campus to the need for reinvention and make it a major strategic initiative aligned with other strategies.


Craft a conscious reinvention strategy, including the resourcing of new initiatives and the reinvention of processes and practices. Clearly state the strategic intent of reinventing processes and legacy offerings to maintain competitive positioning in the face of disruptive innovations. Identify the need for investment capital.

Use multiple methods to raise reinvention capital from institutional-based sources. Levy a tax on existing programs, institute cost savings and continuous improvement, make reinvention a part of capital campaigns or launch a special campaign, practice reallocation.

Partner with external enterprises/solution providers to achieve the capital, culture, and capacity (talent and know-how) needed to create breakthrough innovations and deployments. External partners are proving critical to the next generation of solutions, both for reinvention of legacy programs (Track A: Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model) and truly new business models (Track B: Discover Future Business Model).

Make certain that investment flows to the innovations and pilot programs that have the greatest potential to establish defensible value propositions, scale to institution-wide application, enable growth, and unleash new revenue streams. Many of these investments, especially Track B innovations, will be driven by external venture funders; in that case, the institution will be more like a customer.

Institutional leadership should be preparing to develop conscious resilience strategies and the vision, innovations, and capacity building necessary to make them happen. Understanding the Constellation of Track A (Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model) and Track B (Discover Future Business Model) Innovations. Many of the first green shoots of Track A and Track B reinventions are visible today to the trained and curious eye. The appendix contains a six-part matrix that portrays the array of Track A and B reinventions that are possible. These innovations are organized based on their capacity to address the six major challenges facing American higher education (Gilmour, Norris, and Speziale 2013).

1. Many students and their families can no longer afford a traditional college degree.

2. American higher education institutions are facing a sea of red ink—declining state support, burdensome institutional debt, unrealistic instructional costs, plateauing tuition revenues, and intense competition for adult learners.

3. American higher education has failed to assess student learning and performance.


4. Most institutions lack the organizational agility to meet rapidly changing student learning needs and the needs of the U.S. economy.

5. Higher education has been unable to leverage technology to truly transform learning and competence building to be more accessible, relevant, challenging, and aligned with workforce needs.

6. Higher education has failed to learn from the disruptive innovations pioneered by the for-profit institutions.

This arsenal of possible reinventions contains the arrows that higher education could use to confront disruptive innovations. But what is the bow that institutions can use to fire these arrows into the future? Put simply, a conscious strategy of resilience building and performance excellence (Gilmour, Norris, and Speziale 2013) focused on fulfilling the value propositions that students, their families, employers, and public policy makers find compelling to meet the needs of the nation in the 21st century. Understand and Focus on Your Value Propositions. A rising chorus of voices is questioning the value provided by higher education. Recent articles in the trade press signal the importance of this issue:

“Push to Gauge Bang for Buck from College Gains Steam,” The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2013;

“New Sheriff in Town,” Inside Higher Ed, January 21, 2013;

“Higher Ed’s Biggest Problem: What’s It For?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January

24, 2013;

“A Call for Drastic Changes in Educating New Lawyers,” The New York Times, February 10, 2013.

Institutional leaders must be more reflective in considering how their value propositions are seen by learners, their families, employers, and makers of public policy. This requires honesty, insight, and the willingness to consider difficult trade-offs in positioning the institution for success in the face of withering competition. Reinvented/reshaped strategies should be grounded on compelling value propositions that use some combination of:

Doubling down on existing legacy value propositions,

Increasing the emphasis on other value propositions made more attractive by disruptive conditions, or


Introducing new value propositions to the equation.

No institution can be good at all value propositions that appeal to stakeholders. Indeed, the accepted wisdom is that institutions succeed by focusing on a core identity. Let’s consider the following value propositions:

Affordability. Learners and their families are concerned about price and net cost. They will become increasingly sophisticated about all elements of cost and accumulated debt upon completion. Progressively they will demand to know the total net cost of completion and debt burden for desired certificates of educational attainment.

Talent Filter for Employers. Institutions serve as talent selectors and filters. Employers of all kinds rely on the selectivity of institutions and the proof of certificate and degree completion to cluster talent. More selective institutions score higher on this value proposition, but many institutions are relatively more selective in particular disciplines.

Immersive Educational/Developmental Experiences. A full-time, residential campus experience provides a valuable opportunity for 18–22 year olds to immerse themselves in developmental experiences—educational, social, leadership, co-curricular, and the like—that have lifelong impacts. These can lead to social and employment networks for life.

Social/Employment Network for Life. These networks may be as valuable, from an economic point of view, as the educational value added by many selective institutions, and savvy students and their families recognize this.

Convenience for Adult Learners. Adult learners who juggle work, learning, and family commitments are looking for convenience—shorter courses (accelerated learning), online learning and services, learning linked to employer needs, and support services. Over the past 30 years, even traditional institutions have increased their enrollment of adult students, so the capacity to offer convenient, accelerated learning for adults must be understood by all institutional leaders.

Creation of New Knowledge. Many learners in the STEM fields and professions want to be part of dynamic research and learning activities that are discovering new knowledge and preparing them for the accelerating pace of knowledge change that characterizes today’s world.

Access to Specialized Fields (Professions, STEM). Many learners desire an institution that offers access to a wide range of disciplines and specialties such as those in the professions and STEM fields.


Real-World Developmental Experiences. Increasingly, learners want to enrich and

broaden their personal development by engaging in learning experiences that are linked to the real world. This includes experiential learning, service learning, and participation in innovation/entrepreneurship. It can also include internships and cooperative education programs. Study abroad programs and exposure to a global perspective are other facets of this value proposition.

Deep Faculty/Student Relationships. One of the benefits of an immersive experience is its capacity to forge strong faculty/learner relationships. This can be reflected in undergraduate research and problem-solving experiences, design competitions, and co-curricular programs that contribute to the relationships/networks for life value proposition.

Critical Thinking Skills. Everyone from CEOs to philosophers agrees on the importance of critical thinking skills for learners who aspire to lives of thoughtful development and leadership. The issue is how to measure critical thinking capacity and which developmental environments are best at adding to learners’ critical thinking skills. In addition to critical thinking, today’s graduates should also possess the so-called 21st-century skills of teamwork, inclusiveness, global perspective, and capacity to perpetually learn.

Certification of Competence. This is valuable to both learners and employers. Graduating students demonstrate their capacity to complete a course of study. Certain fields and institutions tie completion to demonstration of measurable competences and skills.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Increasingly, learners and their families and employers want institutions to provide more experiences that develop innovation and entrepreneurial skills. This includes the commercialization of new ideas.

Increasingly, traditional institutions will need to clearly articulate their value propositions and demonstrate the favorable outcomes they produce. This will be necessary to differentiate themselves from competing institutions and from disruptive alternatives such as MOOCs, especially those that have evolved to feature personalized and adaptive learning, training that is tightly linked to employment, practically-focused experiences, and new, truly disruptive experiences yet to be invented. Moreover, most successful institutions in the future will double down on the most compelling of their current value propositions, such as immersive learning, developmental, and leadership experiences. But they will enrich them with external opportunities, new approaches to personalized development, and success-making skills offered by partnering enterprises and embedded in the institutional fabric, both physical and virtual. External solution providers will provide the innovation needed for institutions to reinvent their legacy programs and experiences.


DEVELOP A PERFORMANCE EXCELLENCE CULTURE

In the Age of Disruption, successful strategies must be responsive and resilient. Current institutional practices are inadequate to the challenge. A pervasive performance excellence perspective needs to be a fundamental element of the solution. Joseph Gilmour, Donald Norris, and Michael Speziale (2013) have developed a parallel monograph to this one titled Performance Excellence in a Time of Disruptive Change. It focuses on a framework of seven proven principles that can be adapted to any institutional setting in order to build responsiveness and resilience into an institution’s processes and culture:

Leadership

Strategic Planning

Understanding Stakeholder Needs

Valuing People

Collaboration

Instructional and Support Processes

Focus on Information and Results

The Vignettes from the 2020 Future presented in Part IV demonstrate the value of consistently pursuing strategies of performance excellence, resilience, and adaptability to the needs of learners and other stakeholders. Looking from the 2020 future backward, we can see how adaptive strategies grounded in performance excellence have yielded reinvented strategies, business models, and best practices, all leading to competitiveness and success in the face of withering competition.


PPaarrtt IIVV:: VViiggnneetttteess FFrroomm tthhee FFuuttuurree,, SSttoorriieess FFrroomm tthhee FFrroonnttlliinneess ooff TTrraannssffoorrmmaattiioonn Tales from the Not-So-Distant Future In order to “Plan from the Future Backward,” institutional leaders must engage their colleges and universities in explorations that articulate alternative future scenarios, vignettes, and stories. Participants must be able to experience what the future “feels” like in an age of disruption, new competitors, and fresh value propositions.

“The most successful leader of all is the one who sees another picture not yet

actualized.” Mary Parker Follett

Storytelling is essential to having a conversation about the future in an age of disruptive change. People understand the future best through stories, anecdotes, and tales. This is especially true when the future is a “jump shift” from the past. Douglas Ready observed that, “Storytelling, when linked directly to an (organization’s) strategic and cultural

context, is a powerful means of simultaneously building strategic

competence and strengthening organization character.”

The following vignettes from the potentially disrupted, not-so-distant future tell the tales of a wide range of characters participating in learning, competence building, work, and human development.

Vignettes from the Disrupted

Future A Leadership Team Aggressively

Pursues Reinvention of Core Offerings/Performance Excellence

A Vice President at a Reinventing University Develops Personalized Change Management

A Provost Deals with Faculty and Academic Support Roles

A HR VP Deals with Staff Development and Performance in an Age of Disruption

A High School Student Transitions to His Postsecondary Experience

A Traditional College Age Student Commits to an Immersive Developmental Experience

An Adult Learner Completes Her BS Degree

A Practicing Professional Builds

Competence and Fills Knowledge Gaps

Venture Capitalists/Solution

Providers Bring Next Generation Products, Services, Experiences

Employers Seek New Options for Finding and Evaluating Talent

Public Policy Makers Encourage Innovation, Reinvention, and Disruption

Entrepreneurs and Innovators Play a More Substantial Role

Existing and New Providers Emerge as “Success Makers”


The green shoots of the future are present today in the first generation of new offerings, value propositions, patterns of behavior, incentives, and changing cost structures. Where necessary, some of these vignettes set the context for change by telling about the green shoots that existed in 2013. Then they leap into the future to either describe the situation in 2020 or to portray the actions that were taken over the next seven years to arrive at the 2020 future.

“We are entering a new era of design: new objects, new metaphors.”

John Gage For the moment, let us pretend that the date is 2020, these green shoots have grown and spread, and the forces of disruption have caused substantial change. All of these examples and names are hypothetical, but plausible. They are possibilities, not predictions. Leadership, organizational capacity, smart policy, collaboration, and unforeseen developments will actually decide what happens. “Here’s to the future! The only limits are the limits of our imagination. Dream up

the kind of world you want to live in, dream out loud, at high volume.”

Bono

The pace and distribution of disruptive influences will be very uneven—although the globalization of knowledge and competence has eliminated many of the protected markets for traditional approaches to learning. Some elements of traditional practices, in some settings, will continue and may even flourish. Some institutional leaders will double down on proven values and practices, but with some adjustments to new conditions and needs.

But by 2020, a variety of new approaches and alternatives will have emerged, tested and improved through years of feedback and refinement. These new choices will include alternatives that look like evolved versions of current practices, while others may be totally new. By 2020, if traditional higher education has not significantly transformed, it is likely to be substantially disrupted.


A Leadership Team Aggressively Pursues Reinvention of Core Offerings/Performance Excellence President Stanton (Stan) Farley assumed office as Kirby University’s 12th president in 2013. He accepted the position because he was impressed with the university’s strategic directions and shrewd actions: In the previous five years Kirby had initiated

several promising academic programs for adults that were now bringing in a third of the university’s revenue;

His predecessor had, as a parting gift, reallocated 10 percent of the university’s budget from low to high priority areas, significantly improving the university’s financial position; and

The university’s campus and facilities were

highly attractive and deferred maintenance was well on the way to being addressed.

As Stan talked with Bill Miller, his board chair, however, he began to realize that there were serious shortcomings that had to be addressed immediately, especially because it was apparent that Kirby, like most colleges and universities, was only a few years away from being seriously challenged by disruptive change on many fronts. The shortcomings included an uneven leadership team, a faculty that was deeply threatened by the changes wrought by his predecessor, and a legacy academic program that either was not focused on student learning needs or outcomes or was highly inefficient. Support programs also were not operating in a cost-effective fashion, and, although the

university had made significant investments in technology, the payoff had been disappointing. As he talked with Bill Miller, Stan began to see that if Kirby University was going to thrive in the coming decade, it would have to adopt a performance excellence model for its operation. Stan and Bill knew that the performance excellence model adopted by Kirby should contain seven interconnected principles, based on other models with which they were familiar and shown in the figure below. If fully implemented, these principles would bring about the development of an institution that would operate more systemically and simply, improving performance and reducing costs at the same time.


The seven principles include: 1. Strong and persistent leadership 2. A laser-focused strategic plan 3. A deep understanding of stakeholder needs 4. Valuing faculty and staff 5. A commitment to collaboration to enhance

organizational performance 6. Continuous improvement of instructional

and support processes 7. A focus on performance measures and

results Stan Farley knew that the performance excellence model would frontally challenge much of what was sacred in Kirby’s culture, but he also knew that if he did not begin implementing the model as soon as possible, Kirby would die a slow death over the next five to seven years. Obtaining Board Commitment and Active Support for the Leadership Team to Do What Is Necessary. The good news for Stan was that Bill Miller, his board chair, completely agreed with him and assured him that the board would actively support him in his efforts to make major changes. Bill also suggested that Stan retain a mentor with significant performance excellence and change management experience to help. Bill recommended a small consulting firm, the Douthat Group, which had a small stable of retired presidents with performance excellence and change management experience. After some discussion with the Douthat Group managing partner, Stan was assigned Sam O’Brien as a mentor. The importance of board/president consensus on the need for change cannot be overstated. Without this consensus, it is very difficult if not impossible to meet the requirement of strong

and persistent leadership called for in principle one of the performance excellence model. From their first meeting, Stan and Bill knew that Sam O’Brien was a perfect fit. He had a great sense of humor and used a Socratic mentoring approach. Sam’s questions confirmed for Stan his assessment that the university would have to implement the seven key principles of performance excellence. Sam advised inaugurating the effort through a widely inclusive strategic planning process to create a sense of urgency for change throughout the organization; he also advised implementing the plan using the performance excellence model. In addition, Sam strongly urged adopting the model in manageable chunks so as not to overload the organization with change. It would be a tricky process that would have to take into consideration Kirby’s idiosyncrasies, but Sam was also certain that a comprehensive, all-at-once implementation would fail. The sequence of implementation steps and the timeline Stan and Sam defined were as follows: Year One: In fall semester, build a

leadership coalition—the Kirby Task Force for 2020—with representation from all institutional constituencies. The coalition would be charged with developing a 2020 Strategic Plan for Kirby that would be widely understood and supported and with overseeing its implementation.

The plan would set Kirby apart from its competitors, be laser focused on the needs of the university’s stakeholders (in keeping with principle two of the performance excellence


framework), and include initiatives and programs that would disrupt its competitors’ current operations. It would also include specific strategic initiatives for achieving plan goals. In the spring semester, major divisions, academic departments, and administrative units would be asked to describe how they would implement the initiatives and in what time frame. After a rigorous feedback cycle all of this thinking would be folded into a formal strategic plan with a project management plan for implementation over the six years between 2014 and 2020. Throughout the 2013 to 2020 period, the

Kirby Task Force for 2020 would be charged with guiding the plan’s implementation and any course corrections needed. One of its main roles would be to communicate and communicate again the basic elements of the strategy to every Kirby constituency.

Also throughout the period, Stan and his highly capable provost, Bonnie Waldner, would evaluate the university’s leadership from top to bottom with eye to strengthening it and weeding out weak personnel. A key component in this evaluation would be how well the leaders did in the 2020 planning process. Years Two to Three: Begin to implement

“ruthlessly”—in Bill Miller’s words—the strategy and the initiatives associated with it.

o In keeping with performance excellence principle four, begin the systematic development of Kirby’s faculty and staff so that they have

the capability to think and operate in an environment of disruptive change.

o With regard to principle five, begin to build partnerships with other institutions and organizations to develop programs and approaches to rapidly enhance Kirby’s effectiveness and efficiency.

o With regard to principle six, starting

with high-priority existing and new programs and processes, form teams well versed in process design and assessment for improvement principles to develop and relentlessly improve programs and processes to enhance the university’s performance, competitiveness, and efficiency.

o In keeping with principle seven,

create a system of measures, performance goals, feedback, and accountability to ensure that Kirby and all its units are performing at projected levels and continuously improving.

o Most difficult, and in keeping with

principle one, address head-on the issue of traditional shared governance, in particular the faculty’s belief that they have a de facto veto over any of the president’s decisions.

Both Stan and Sam realized that this was an ambitious agenda. But they also believed that it was essential to move quickly on multiple fronts


to build the foundation necessary for Kirby to cope with the disruptive change it would face during the period. Years Four to Seven: Continue to build

faculty and staff capacity, create additional new programs and further strengthen existing ones, and establish additional partnerships. Make adjustments as appropriate to the strategic plan, taking into account new developments.

Setting Expectations and Strategic Intent. Stan knew that the implementation plan, which clearly took on the tough issues early in his administration, established a scope and pace of change that was very much at odds with the slow-moving and cumbersome organizational culture at Kirby University. From what he had learned from Bonnie Waldner, the strongest resistance would come from the full professors, certain deans who were unwilling to buck the established culture, and old-guard administrators protective of their domains. He also knew that he would have to implement this change openly with widespread community participation to gain trust and set a clear timetable for each step to ensure its timely completion. As Sam O’Brien said, “Once you start, neither you nor the board can look back.” Developing a Framework for Strategic Thinking. With Sam’s help, Stan constructed the broad outline and schedule outlined above for developing a 2020 strategic plan and implementing performance excellence at Kirby. At the next board meeting, he presented this outline and the significant challenges the board and university leadership would face if it chose

this path. He was surprised at the passion he felt for his proposal and even more surprised at how strongly the board supported his recommendations. It was as committed as he was.

Transformed Elements Attain board commitment to greater

dynamism, investment in reinvention, and active support for leadership team to do what is necessary

Raise expectations of leadership

Take on tough issues early

Develop a framework for performance

excellence and create a performance excellence culture

Focus on value, double down on

sustainable value propositions, reinvent core offerings, and discover new offerings

Address shared governance head-on

and create a sustainable model Increase utilization of collaboration

and partnerships Stan’s first step was to build a leadership coalition for the process, which he named the 2020 Committee. Based on Sam’s advice, committee membership was held to 12 members and balanced among all constituencies including the board. Equally important, some of the members were those who were likely to oppose change, but who could be depended upon to listen to reason.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

Albert Einstein


Stan, with Sam’s advice, retained a facilitator for the 2020 Committee. Susan Tremayne worked with the committee during its first six months, persuading the members that they had to help define and sell Kirby’s strategic directions for 2020 and recognize that the strategy ultimately would be defined by Stan and the board. In addition, Stan would chair the committee and take an active hand in leading it. With the help of Susan and Sam O’Brien, the 2020 Committee developed a process for crafting the strategic plan that was highly inclusive from the outset. In fact, throughout the development of the plan, members of the university community were provided opportunities at periodic all-hands meetings to raise issues and concerns and learn more about the challenges and opportunities facing the university. Throughout the process, the 2020 Committee worked hard to communicate with its constituencies why it felt that the 2020 Strategic Plan was so important and to understand how the constituencies were reacting to the committee’s proposals. It was a testament to committee members that this process had the desired result—an institutional understanding of the situation and its urgency and a committee understanding of the concerns among various stakeholder groups about the changes being considered. Wherever possible, these concerns were taken into consideration as the plan was constructed. Susan was a strong and effective advocate of Janis Forman’s idea that stories are the best way to sell people on new strategies and change. Forman holds that “A strategic story that incorporates the language representing people’s shared experience of the organization’s core values is likely to be a story that is heard.”

In the course of the 2020 planning process, some great stories were found. One of the best was about a popular graduating senior—president of student government and honors student in biology—who constructed her own academic program with the help of her advisor. Her program included six MOOCs from Udacity, Coursera, and edX that provided her with a significantly enriched course of study. For some reason—perhaps it was her brilliance or the serendipitous collection of respected faculty who supported her—her story became a symbol of the extraordinary things Kirby could do for a student and was used to illustrate the enormous potential of technology to make Kirby a place where students’ modest means could do great things. With this story in mind, numerous other efforts to use technology to improve things were deemed acceptable by the culture. Developing a Focused Strategic Plan. The plan the 2020 Committee developed called for dramatic change at Kirby, including a laser focus on six medallion programs for both current and new markets, the development of an exciting and coherent general education program that would provide students with the basic knowledge and skills employers and graduate schools were seeking, and the transformation of virtually every support function to enhance service and increase efficiency. It called for the adoption of a two-track approach for bringing about this change—one to significantly improve the university’s existing programs and processes, and another to develop disruptive programs and processes to challenge the university’s competition. And, it called for greater operational efficiency across the university. Virtually all of the changes proposed were derived from stakeholder feedback that was solicited throughout the planning process in


keeping with principle three of the performance excellence model. Ultimately—from a list of 86 proposals from all units—40 initiatives (20 from each track) were selected to achieve these aims. A series of performance measures to gauge progress toward plan goals and hold appropriate units accountable for achieving performance targets was also established. These measures were incorporated into a performance measurement system that was interconnected and operational at all organizational levels. Stan Farley and his leadership team regularly used the system’s department and unit profiles to focus the institution on continuous improvement and greater efficiency, with a principal focus on student learning. Susan and Sam urged Stan and Bonnie to adopt an idea from John Kotter and Dan Cohen. Kotter and Cohen stress that, “Successful change leaders identify a problem in one part of the change process, or a solution to a problem. Then they show this to people in ways that are as concrete as possible …. But whatever the method, they supply valid ideas that go deeper than the conscious and analytical parts of our brains—ideas with emotional impact.” Kirby had a powerful example of a solution to a problem—its Student Services Center. The center is a “one stop” location for nearly all student support services. But the key was that it was a truly transformed operation, and the manner in which the change was achieved was a textbook example of how to do it. In addition, key center staff members were strong advocates for assessment and process improvement and could provide concrete examples of how the change involved was good for their organization.

They were also willing to mentor other units that wanted or needed to undertake such change and over the course of the 2013–20 period became key change leaders. Changing the Mix of Talent and Perspective to Fit the Circumstances. Stan Farley, Bill Miller, and Bonnie Waldner used the 2020 planning process to observe and assess the capacity and performance of university leaders—all of whom were charged with bringing about change within their areas of responsibility. Throughout the process, Josephine Brown, the dean of the College of Business and Entrepreneurship, stood out as a thought leader, particularly for her understanding of disruptive change and how it could be turned to Kirby University’s advantage. Based on her leadership, Stan and Bonnie recruited Josephine to head the university’s efforts to develop disruptive programs and processes. She needed no persuading. The fact that she had founded a successful start-up company prior to joining Kirby and was well respected among her senior administration colleagues made her an excellent choice. Stan, Bill, and Bonnie also found that two of four deans and three of five vice presidents lacked the leadership skill and will necessary to operate in a time of disruptive change. Over years two and three, they would phase these people out and bring in a new, significantly better-qualified cohort of leaders. Indeed, from the vantage point of the year 2020, this was probably the most important element in Kirby University’s long-term success. Over the next five years, these new leaders replaced a third of the department/unit- level leadership, which led to a much more competent and dynamic leadership approach—


one that was much more in keeping with Kirby’s needs in disruptive times. Initiating an Assessment and Process Improvement Program. Next, Stan, with Sam O’Brien’s help and significant input from the 2020 Committee, formed a university-wide assessment and process improvement committee to develop and oversee implementation of a process design and improvement paradigm for use throughout the university. Key members of the committee included staff from the Student Services Center. The paradigm was applied in manageable bites to high-priority programs and processes, and all process design and improvement teams received the training they needed to use it to guide their work. Concurrently, faculty and staff were provided with the developmental opportunities they needed to function effectively in the new, rapidly changing, and disruptive environment and to carry out the initiatives in the strategic plan. A merit compensation and annual bonus plan was developed to incentivize faculty and staff to take part constructively in the development and implementation of the 2020 Plan. Stan and Bonnie had some extremely difficult and contentious meetings with the full professors group. Joining them was Professor Jane Ammons from the 2020 Task Force, who, with great courage and force, let her colleagues know that Kirby had to change and that they, at a minimum, should not obstruct that change. Two companion steps relating to shared governance and academic freedom were undertaken in 2014. The first was the appointment of a Trustee Committee to revamp

Kirby’s institutional governance system so that the board and president had unquestioned authority to implement the difficult changes called for in the 2020 Plan in a timely fashion. This required a soul-searching revision of shared governance to what was ultimately called “inclusive governance.” Under this approach, faculty (and all stakeholders) had significant input into decisions that affected them, but their consent was not required on key issues as it had been in the past and their participation and input had to be provided in a timely fashion. Stan Farley, the 2020 Task Force, and the entire Kirby Board of Trustees saw this change as essential if the new realities that demanded organizational accountability, agility, and transformation were to be addressed. As if revamping shared governance was not difficult enough, the board asked Stan Farley and Bonnie Waldner, with the assistance of the university counsel and a small faculty committee selected by Stan and Bonnie and appointed by the board, to revamp the definition of academic freedom at Kirby to limit the freedom to protection of subject matter taught. In addition, the board asked the committee to revise the tenure policy to include both reciprocal obligations between the institution and faculty members and a post-tenure review process that contained provisions for dismissal for either non-performance or inadequate demand for a particular faculty capacity. While faculty comments were sought at a university faculty meeting, it was made clear that this was an action that would be taken by the board. Taking on Tough Issues Early. Taking on these issues early in the game was a deliberate decision by the Kirby board, after extensive consultation with the university counsel and


faculty governance leaders. These changes were embedded in a larger set of significantly improved human resource policies for the university and a long-term commitment to make university decisions with extensive but timely faculty participation. There was strong resistance by the full professors group and a threat of a vote of no confidence for Stan Farley and the board. But through Stan and Bonnie’s proactive meetings with the full professors, it became clear to all involved that the board was resolved to make these changes. The voices of reason began to be heard throughout the university and the support for the full professors opposing change began to wane. In succeeding years, many of the full professors were offered generous early retirement contracts, most of which were accepted. Achievements by 2020 and More to Come.. In 2020, the Kirby success story is well known. The highly focused 2020 Plan has resulted in the achievement of results far beyond the dreams of the 2020 Planning Committee. FTE enrollments increased from 2,500 to 10,000, student learning significantly improved, and employers and graduate schools sought out Kirby’s graduates. One key achievement was Kirby’s new core curriculum, “Tools for a Successful Life.” One of the best things to come out of the effort was a map of the curriculum provided to students that showed how each of the tools was relevant to success and delivered through the courses included in the curriculum. It was presented in accessible and interesting language. In addition, the curriculum had to be completed by the end of the student’s sophomore year and included a high-stakes comprehensive exam that had to be

passed before the student could continue his or her studies. Through aggressive curriculum management, Kirby was able to reduce instructional costs by 30 percent. With additional reductions in support programs, savings totaled 40 percent. Half of these were allocated to high-priority areas like new program development, incentive-based compensation, marketing, and faculty and staff training. The other half were passed on to students in the form of a 20 percent reduction in tuition, making Kirby highly competitive in the marketplace. Kirby’s programs for new markets have been enormously successful and have accounted for most of the enrollment increase. The ones that really took off featured partnerships involving some of the medallion programs identified in the 2020 planning process. The idea of medallion programs at first was resisted strongly by the senior faculty, many of whom thought their program would lose support if the medallion concept was implemented. Their mantra was, “Aren’t all of Kirby’s programs medallion programs?” Bonnie, Stan, and Bill stuck to their guns, and the enrollment and revenue results more than justified implementation of the concept. The medallion program with greatest success involved a programmatic partnership with the education arm of National Geographic magazine. Kirby developed a customized master’s program in instructional technology for school teachers who wanted to mentor their peers in the use of digital material from National Geographic. The magazine benefitted because more faculty were trained in using its materials, resulting in greater demand for, and better


utilization of, those materials. Kirby benefitted because educator demand for the master’s program was much greater than anticipated and continues unabated. But the most important result of the hard work over the last seven years is that Kirby is positioned for even greater success in the future. Taking the difficult step of adopting the performance excellence model has provided Kirby with the organizational self-confidence and capacity to thrive in the years ahead. Selected Readings Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. n.d.

2011-2012 Education Criteria for Performance

Excellence. Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute

for Science and Technology. Retrieved July 23,

2013, from the World Wide Web:

www.nist.gov/baldrige/publications/upload/201

1_2012_Education_Criteria.pdf.

Christensen, C. M., and H. J. Eyring. 2011. The

Innovative University: Changing the DNA of

Higher Education from the Inside Out. San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Collins, J. 2001. Good to Great: Why Some

Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t.

New York: HarperCollins.

Downes, L., and P. F. Nunes. 2013. Big-Bang

Disruption. Harvard Business Review, March,

46–56.

Gavetti, G. 2011. The New Psychology of

Strategic Leadership. Harvard Business Review,

July–August, 118–25.

Gilbert, C., M. Eyring, and R. N. Foster. 2012.

Two Routes to Resilience. Harvard Business

Review, December, 65–73.

Higher Learning Commission. 2013. AQIP

Categories. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the

World Wide Web: www.ncahlc.org/AQIP-

Categories/aqip-categories.html.

Johnson, G., G. S. Yip, and M. Hensmans. 2012.

Achieving Successful Strategic Transformation.

MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring, 25–32.

Katzenbach, J. R., I. Steffen, and C. Kronley.

2012. Cultural Change That Sticks. Harvard

Business Review, July–August, 110–17.

Kotter, J. P. 2012. Accelerate! Harvard Business

Review, November, 2–13. Retrieved July 23,


http://hbr.org/2012/11/accelerate/ar/1.

Kotter, J. P., and D. S. Cohen. 2002. The Heart

of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People

Change Their Organizations. Boston, MA:

Harvard Business School Publishing.

Mehaffy, G. L. 2012. Challenge and Change.

EDUCAUSE Review, September 5. Retrieved

July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web:

www.educause.edu/ero/article/challenge-and-

change.

Morrill, R. L. 2007. Strategic Leadership:

Integrating Strategy and Leadership in

Colleges and Universities. Westport, CT: ACE

Praeger Series on Higher Education.


A Vice President at a Reinventing University Develops Personalized Change Management In 2013, change management in higher education was typically associated with implementing projects involving new technology applications, process improvements, or new policies. Or, with broader institutional initiatives that did not require disruptive change or fundamentally change patterns of behavior. Change Management Comes of Age. By 2020, the challenges of disruptive change had inspired new approaches to change management among institutional leaders. Consider the following example. The year is 2019. Three years ago, Coyote University hired a new president who promptly initiated a year of strategic thinking and reassessment. This process focused on both covering the ground it had lost to some of the large publics in the region and looking to the future to set a fresh course for this well-respected private school that was experiencing a slow erosion in its competitive and financial position. A major new strategy, endorsed and enforced by the board, was to radically and rapidly evolve the institution’s capacity to change and better adapt to the disruptive national and regional environment for higher education. President David Overhurst was building his leadership team and had just hired a new provost. He was also redefining leadership roles, including the traditional vice presidencies, and had converted an undergraduate-focused

student life position to one more focused on developing the institutional capacities needed for success in the new environment. In short, the challenge was to develop and implement a new approach to change management responsive to the environmental whitewater. Dr. Madeline Welsh was hired a year ago as one of five VPs on the senior leadership team reporting to the president. Madeline’s portfolio included strategic planning functions, the newly established office of institutional analytics and research, human resources, and the newly established directorate for innovation and change. She set to work by exploring institutional culture and change readiness through interviews and casual conversations with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders. This informed her deployment of a personalized methodology for change management that she had developed and refined at her previous institution. This personalized methodology for change management was a fresh approach in higher education. It hinged on a deep focus on proven concepts of personalized learning and development that had been successful in both corporate and student cultures.

“Culture trumps strategy every time.” Jon Katzenbach

Madeline used assessments like the Change Style Indicator® and embedded 360-degree evaluations paired with individual strategy and leadership coaching. Old-school performance appraisals were replaced with staff performance and learning analytics systems, and each individual employee, from the president to the


grounds crew, was coached on institutional and personal alignment. Innovation was highlighted as an institutional and personal competency.

Transformed Elements

Strong performance excellence

expectations Personalized change management

strategy Innovation as an institutional capacity

New kinds of intrainstitutional

collaboration and partnerships Learning analytics applied to faculty

and staff development It was a slow start, but when the faculty and staff realized the change was for the good, small groups of enthusiasts began to form, often meeting over their lunches or free time to discuss how the change might help them personally and help their department move forward. This process was reinforced with personal pay increases and departmental budget allocations. Madeline established several innovations and leveraged change through the reinvention of performance assessment and appraisal using individualized learning plans, assessments, inventories, and coaching relationships. The president’s support for a heightened attention to institutional alignment guided by strategy and driven by HR and staff learning analytics was critical.

“The reason so many change initiatives fail is that they rely too much on data

gathering, analysis, report writing and presentations instead of a more creative approach aimed at grabbing the feelings

that motivate useful action.” John Kotter

One of her biggest wins was the Innovation Learning Community that grew as a community of practice around innovation and change management concepts. Faculty and staff believed the change was real, and the culture slowly turned. The pump was primed for the change strategies to come, those that would transform the learning environment and the regional landscape for employers and the community. Selected Readings Golden-Biddle, K. 2013. How to Change an

Organization Without Blowing It Up. MIT Sloan

Management Review, Winter, 35–41.

Katzenbach, J. R., I. Steffen, and C. Kronley.

2012. Cultural Change That Sticks. Harvard


Kotter, J. 2012. Accelerate! Harvard Business

Review, November, 2–13. Retrieved July 23,


http://hbr.org/2012/11/accelerate/ar/1.


A Provost Deals with Faculty/Academic Support Roles A New Provost Hits the Ground Running. It’s 2013, and Provost Angela Dumond accepted the position at this major public research university for several reasons. First, she was impressed with Midwest University’s new president—always a good place for a provost to start. Moreover, she was taken with the work of the previous provost (now a president elsewhere), who had led a systemwide strategic positioning process, merged six colleges to create three new ones, and decentralized graduate and professional education. She also was intrigued by the financial model that returned tuition to colleges and then charged them for central services; in theory, such a model should increase collegiate attention to student success while making transparent infrastructure costs and potential areas for greater efficiency and effectiveness. Soon after she arrived, however, she realized that the decentralization of the graduate school had resulted in millions in additional costs for collegiate units; further, the university was facing a three-year enterprise IT upgrade that would need an additional $100M in funding to come largely from increasing charges to colleges. A focus on generating new revenue from eLearning ventures was stalled amid a decade of consultant reports, and the creation of a business competency center (for academic analytics) was likewise stalled amid a decade of internal reports and shelved plans. Overcoming the Urgency Gap. Initial meetings with faculty leadership and senate committees showed that a deep gap existed

between the sense of urgency felt by the president and vice presidential leadership and that felt by the campus community. After weathering the previous strategic positioning years and surrounded now by glowing reports about the thousands of students who were applying to the institution, the faculty had largely settled into a comfort zone. Angela knew that she would need to create a sense of urgency and focus attention on making the university more responsive and resilient. While being well aware of the major shifts underway in higher education—massive open online courses, Big Data and academic analytics, rigorous accountability, and movement from credit-based to competency-based credentialing—she also knew from previous experience that established universities need to create sound, well-understood strategies that can be followed and adjusted as necessary over five to seven years. Considering this, she saw her ultimate deadline as 2020. If done well, she could rapidly launch prototypes that through five years of continuous adjustment would uncover how to meet emerging expectations in ways not fully understood or yet embraced by this institution. Shared Leadership—But Tailored to New Times. Over her previous 15 years in higher education administration, Angela had worked to build shared leadership across academic and administrative realms because she believed it to be imperative to the future of higher education. Although criticized by some as being a bit slow, she began by taking time to reach out and form strong relationships with faculty leadership and academic support units, often bringing disparate units together for lunchtime conversations. At each meeting, she made sure to end by stating,


“We are in the midst of a new era and need to build resilience into our

university. I need your help. Please stay in touch with each other and with me.

Think future.” To this end, she provided numerous forums for people at all levels to share input, ideas, and direction. She urged faculty, academic support staff, and students to engage in crafting the future, and through consistent meetings with faculty governance, she worked to build and maintain a guiding coalition. Communicating through multiple media outlets, she stressed that speed of response to the increased expectations of students and citizens ultimately depended on shared vision, shared agreement, and shared leadership. She emphasized that people at all levels should no longer wait for leadership decisions to be pushed up to the top for action. Instead, in collaboration with faculty governance, new models in which leadership was more evenly shared across the organization could be created to ensure faster response times to emerging demands. Mobilizing the IT Directors Across Campus to Reinvent. By paying careful attention to the many institutional groups, Angela identified a key support group that was visibly sharing leadership: the information technology directors across the colleges and campuses. This group, while sharing leadership in providing IT services, also understood much about the unique faculty in their units and the deep roots of their attitudes toward previous changes and future ones. Angela partnered with them to read “Two Routes to Resilience” by Clark Gilbert, Matthew Eyring, and Richard N. Foster and talked about how Midwest University

might reinvent itself in a world increasingly characterized by disruptive change. Angela then expanded these conversations so that they included increasing mixes of faculty, academic support staff, and students. She challenged each group by asking, “What’s our route to resilience?,” all the while focused on developing the capacity to think and operate in an environment of disruptive change. Her office kept track of questions asked and ideas suggested, following up as to how each might be answered via the academic analytics capacity across the institution. Change Management Strategy: Commitment to Reinvention—Routes to Resilience. A strategic vision began to take form. The next year was labeled “Commitment to Reinvention: Routes to Resilience,” and every faculty, academic support staff, and student governance group was rewarded for delving into ways in which they might reinvent programs and services for resiliency and/or create new innovations that could become sources of future growth. Everything was communicated in all ways possible. As part of the change management strategy, the Provost’s Office kept track of these conversations of consequence, and five themes began to emerge: digital opportunity, analytics, value, innovation, and distinction: Faculty and students urged the provost to

take strategic advantage of digital opportunity: cloud technologies, social media, and bring-your-own-device (BYOD). IT leadership also saw great opportunities in leveraging BYOD to diversify and expand the


teaching, research, and outreach environments.

Angela stressed that budget and spending

decisions would be based on data and analytics, not on rumor or collegiate/campus opinion or perceived impact. To confront the challenges noted earlier, the institution consistently used Diana Oblinger’s set of guiding principles:

- Use data to change the conversation; - Move from the past to the predictive; - Empower choice, don’t restrict it; and - Use data for gateways, not just

gatekeeping.

Attention to analytics enabled Midwest University to think anew and, through doing so, to enhance its investment in measuring, understanding, and improving the performance of individuals, departments, and the institution itself.

As part of reinventing existing programs, the

institution used the value equation put forth by Donald Norris and colleagues to scrutinize outcomes, experiences, and costs. As a result, faculty and academic support units became much more discerning in their development efforts.

Value = Outcomes (learning,

development, employment) X Experiences (meaningful)

÷ Cost

Angela referred to innovation as including attention to and interpretation of disruptive forces and their impact on Midwest University. She emphasized how imperative

it was for collective leadership—faculty and academic support—to understand these forces, interpret the reality of them for Midwest U., and share leadership as they worked to reinvent the institution for both resilience and relevance. Processes and practices were reinvented, in most cases resulting in funding to put toward innovative initiatives.

Thus the institution, over its year of Routes

to Resilience, came to identify areas of distinction that should be adapted as well as routes toward innovative, new offerings. Each route came with a clear set of objectives, outcomes, and associated measures to guide its iteration across the years. And each came with an associated investment in faculty and staff development to develop new skills for this evolving environment.

Understanding the Resulting Strategy, From 2020 Looking Backward. One Saturday morning as the new year 2020 approached, Angela sat back in a short moment of reflection on the past seven years. Through a consistent focus on shared leadership and expectations of excellence and with faculty and academic support Midwest University had weathered the $100M enterprise upgrade storm. In fact, the university ended up spending less through an even greater focus on partnering with external enterprises/solution providers to achieve the capital, culture, and talent necessary to create consistent innovation and deployment. She chuckled at the MOOCs begun back in 2013; instead of generating revenue as many had hoped, because of shared leadership and transparency, they had instead infused new life


into the university’s teaching and learning mission, paving the way for still more international partnerships and intergenerational learning. Radical Incrementalism in Practice. In essence, she had deployed the power of “radical incrementalism” as expressed by Hagel and Brown, a set of incremental, expeditionary initiatives guided by her “DAVID” strategy: embracing digital opportunity, analytics, value, innovation, and distinction. The resulting set of initiatives was slowly but surely reinventing Midwest University. She was most pleased with the outcomes of the in-depth work on academic and learning analytics: the most brilliant minds across the faculty and academic support staff had come together to develop tools that took high-dimensional data and revealed complex relationships or led to predictive models that when applied to specific work with students had led to outstanding increases in retention and graduation rates. Technology indeed had been the key to collecting detailed student data across the curriculum. Databases of learning objects—quiz questions, homework problems, and MOOC materials—now collected longitudinal data on student learning. Learning objects regularly were combined to form modules, which in turn were combined and delivered as credit-bearing courses by Midwest University or as part of the many innovative partnerships and consortia it was now part of nationally and internationally. Over time, the curriculum across Midwest’s system of colleges and campuses came to be represented by a network of modules, each with its own learning objectives and concepts. As

students interacted with the curriculum through a curriculum delivery system linked to this database, a rich dataset continually emerged that was then mined for multiple purposes. More Sophisticated Data Analysis is Now Possible. Of course, now in 2020, a much more sophisticated approach to data analysis continues to evolve exponentially. Tools take high-dimensional data and reveal complex relationships that then lead to even more sophisticated predictive models. Using these methodologies, Midwest University’s faculty and academic support staff could now turn educational data into actionable knowledge. She pondered over the many groups using these systems daily, many unaware of the seven-year iterative effort. Above all, she was most proud of students who consistently took control of their own learning. Selected Readings Abele, J. 2011. Bringing Minds Together.

Harvard Business Review, July–August, 86–93.

Adler, P., C. Heckscher , and L. Prusak. 2011.

Building a Collaborative Enterprise. Harvard

Business Review, July–August , 95–101.

Benkler, Y. 2011. The Unselfish Gene. Harvard


Duin, A. H., and L. L. Baer. 2010. Shared

Leadership for a Green, Global, and Google

World. Planning for Higher Education 38 (4):

30–38. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World

Wide Web:

www.scup.org/blog/scuplinks/2011/03/shared-

higher-ed-leadership-for-a-green-global-and-

google-world.


Gilbert, C., M. Eyring, and R. N. Foster. 2012.

Two Routes to Resilience. Harvard Business

Review, December, 65–73.

Golden-Biddle, K. 2013. How to Change an

Organization Without Blowing It Up. MIT Sloan

Management Review, Winter, 35–41.

Hagel, J., III, and J. S. Brown. 2005. The Only

Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy

Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic

Specialization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Business School Press.

Neuhauser, C. 2012. From Academic Analytics to

Individualized Education. In Cultivating Change

in the Academy: 50+ Stories from the Digital

Frontlines at the University of Minnesota in

2012, ed. A. H. Duin, E. Nater, and F.

Anklesaria. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota. Retrieved July 23, 2o13, from the

World Wide Web: http://purl.umn.edu/125273.

Oblinger, D. 2013. Analytics: Changing the

Conversation. EDUCAUSE Review, January 28.

Retrieved July 23, 2o13, from the World Wide

Web: www.educause.edu/ero/article/analytics-

changing-conversation.

Pearce, C. L., and J. A. Conger, eds. 2003.

Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and

Whys of Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.


A HR VP Deals with Staff Development and Performance in an Age of Disruption In 2013, institutions were facing multiple challenges related to changing student demographics, fiscal structures, and technologies that were disrupting the delivery of information and education. There was not only an aging workforce but also a troubling pattern: institutions were not consistently developing leaders or approaches in support of the changing practices and policies needed to sustain future growth. Dealing with an Unsustainable Model. In the eyes of many observers in 2013, the traditional business model was outdated and unable to deal with the rapid changes and disruptive forces facing higher education. The cost of services was out of reach for many students. The half-life of knowledge was measured in months, not years. The work of faculty required change as disciplines changed, students changed, and the economy changed. The demands on higher education of the new Knowledge and Competency-Based Age were very different than those of the agrarian and industrialized age. It was apparent that skill sets must now include clear competencies, authenticity, and the ability to deal with complex polarities. Algonquin University had been wrestling with many HR issues over the past decade: the proper use of adjunct faculty, changing disciplinary needs in reaction to student course choices, greater professionalism among staff, and so forth. But the nature and scope of the challenges

ahead required a more proactive response to the changing times.

“Everything is ‘in play,’ as practically every aspect of the life academic is being

driven by a host of interrelated developments: dazzling technological

advances, globalization that continues to permeate academic boundaries, rapidly increasing numbers of tertiary students worldwide, unprecedented expansion of proprietary higher education, a blurring distinction between public and private or

independent higher education, and innumerable entrepreneurial, market-driven initiatives on and off campus.”

Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein

A More Proactive Approach to HR Planning. The human resources vice president and the provost at Algonquin University determined that they must monitor and plan forward given anticipated retirements and the rapidly changing nature of higher education disciplines. A focus on leadership development resulted in investing in the participation of faculty and deans in the HERS (Higher Education Resource Services) and Harvard Business School Executive Education leadership programs. Coaching and mentoring of new faculty and new deans was expanded with special attention to onboarding sessions. A major investment in Excellence in Teaching and Learning resulted in certificates in innovative teaching and learning methods. However, the vice presidents have acknowledged that the efforts are fragmented and lack strategic direction.


The campus engaged in a dialogue about developing leadership skills for the future that focused on four key questions: What skill sets will our future leaders need? How do we identify those people within the

institution that exemplify these skill sets? What programs and practices will provide a

basis for the development of the skills needed?

How can the institution systematize leadership development across all divisions and at all levels?

This dialogue became the basis for ongoing conversations and developmental programs.


Leadership development and

sustainability

Change management as a major skill set

New importance of the human resources role—valuing employees

Increased professionalism and expectations of staff

Partnering with provost to create new opportunities for professional development for faculty

Community of Practice-based development

Need for a New Professionalism in HR. One of the biggest issues with HR was the need for improved policies, processes, and workflows to move from an industrial age framework to a rapid response model. Such a model will enable

efficient and effective recruiting, hiring, and retention of staff, faculty, and administrators. The new HR professionalism requires a change in the approach and role of HR in general, including long-term value over time and a comprehensive approach across the organization based on a plan focused on integration that overcomes fragmentation and disconnection and finally centers on issues critical for organizational success. “The concept of predictive HR analytics

is looking forward: it focuses on the future and involves environmental

scanning, workforce planning, analysis of process, and predicting future trends

through strategic, operational, and leading indicators.”

Alvin Evans and Edna Chun

As Evans and Chun note, the HR scorecard assists in measuring strategic performance. It includes:

1. Clearly defining the institutional strategy

2. Creating a business case for HR as a strategic asset

3. Developing a strategy map 4. Identifying HR deliverables in the

strategy map 5. Aligning HR architecture with HR

deliverables 6. Designing a strategic HR measurement

system 7. Implementing management by

measurement Balancing Outsourcing/Insourcing/ Managed Services/Shared Services. Higher education has participated in a long


series of outsourcing models including food service, book stores, housing, counseling, technology, and cloud computing. In 2013, a legislator in California suggested outsourcing higher education to for-profit MOOCs given that close to 475,000 students are turned away from California colleges and universities each year. MOOCs make many, if not most, of the gateway and general education courses available online, free to students, and highly integrated. However, a counterpoint was raised: “There are several fundamental problems with mandating that colleges bypass their normal curricular processes and outsource gateway courses for undergraduates to private entities.” (See http://obrag.org/?p=71920.) While the conventional operating systems of the past, composed of traditional hierarchies and managerial processes, have been sufficient to run day-to-day activities, they are not enough to enable organizations to develop and implement strategic initiatives or react to unexpected impediments to organizational goals. John Kotter, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and a pioneer in the field of change leadership, suggests a new approach to dealing with this ever-pressing problem: create a dual operating system. In other words, maintain current organizational hierarchy systems to sustain daily operations and, in addition, create a concurrent “network-like structure” to carry out strategy. This new network or “volunteer army” composed of employees at all levels of the organization serves as a “guiding coalition” to swiftly address inadequacies and manage change.

A More Vital Role for HR.

“We’re living in a time when a new economic paradigm—characterized by

speed, innovation, short cycle times and customer satisfaction—is highlighting

the importance of intangible assets, such as brand recognition, knowledge,

innovation, and particularly human capital. This new paradigm can mark the

beginning of a golden age for HR.” Alvin Evans and Edna Chun

The new economic realities demand a stronger, more vital HR operation that can align workforce strategy with institutional vision and mission. This is most likely a new role for HR, which has often been seen in the past in a supporting role rather than in a contributing and leadership role, taking the institution into the future. The Situation in 2020. The future success of Algonquin University required mapping the skills and talents of all staff and conducting an assessment of both current and anticipated future needs. The university president established an integrated HR operation that uses the smart talent pool and “Good to Great” principles to map the current skills and competencies of faculty, staff, and administration. Based on the strategic plan for 2020, the institution is creating a gap analysis of what talents exist for future teaching, learning, research, and service activities given the changing needs of disciplines, students, regions, and communities. The Good to Great tool includes smart agents that identify key skills that bridge to the current state of practice across the institution from academics to student support, human resources, finance, and facilities and


technology. It identifies the gaps and maps solution sets on which to base future strategic planning, budgeting, hiring, and professional development. An adaptive learning utility from XYZ Company will determine professional development needs and identify opportunities to continually assist faculty, staff, and administrators in upgrading skills. “What is the single biggest error people

make when they try to change? They did not create a high enough sense of

urgency among enough people to set the stage for making a challenging leap into

some new direction.” John P. Kotter

Selected Readings Evans, A., and E. Chun. 2012. Creating a Tipping Point: Strategic Human Resources in Higher Education. ASHE Higher Education Report, vol. 38, no. 1. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Kotter, J. P. 2008. A Sense of Urgency. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing. Kotter, J. P. 2012. Accelerate! Harvard Business Review, November, 2–13. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: http://hbr.org/2012/11/accelerate/ar/1. Rethinking Higher Education’s Leadership Crisis. 2011. Higher Ed Impact, June 6. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: www.academicimpressions.com/news/rethinking-higher-educations-leadership-crisis.

Schuster, J. H., and M. J. Finkelstein. 2006. The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.


A High School Student Transitions to His Postsecondary Experience Seeming like forever ago, Kyle recalled the beginning of middle school when a neighbor showed him and his friend a funky site that talked about how learning would change in the future. The neighbor was pretty pumped up about it all, but he remembered caring mostly about just getting connected to games and the best possible free apps. He did, though, start to wonder how the sites he used came to know so much about him. The idea of helping friends figure out how to live with this online world appealed to him. But college? Who thought about college in middle school really? Wasn’t college a place that looked like a combination of old churches, high school buildings, and a bunch of art strewn around? But after visiting this one online site his neighbor had showed him, he started to get the coolest messages encouraging him to join a program that linked students in middle school to college course content, something called a massive open online course (or MOOC) designed for middle school students around the world. Yeah, right, college courses? But this sounded pretty out there … something about cognitive prosthesis and how software assistants and feedback systems influence and improve learning. He was fascinated with future cognitive assistants and whatever was meant by contextual feedback systems. It intrigued him just enough to create a user name and password and begin. Fast forward. Here he was at the summer of 2020 and, reflecting back, so thankful for his

international study partners. They had studied brain processes, cognition and motivation, and how to understand different ways of learning across their cultures. He now found himself almost too accustomed to data analytics, dashboards, and visualizations to show him where he should focus his time and attention. The blend of “home/online/community” school and public experiences had been great, and he wondered how he’d fit in with a residential college. When he’d met with his college advisor, it was odd to hear about the apparent difficulty the institution had experienced when moving from something called credits to competencies. He thought it somewhat odd to talk about competencies; why not just let students share their learning systems, their networks of awesome dudes across the world, with the college, and then be networked with the best faculty there who would help them extend their journey? But he trusted this institution. As he explored the many collegiate options, he’d looked most for a place that would appreciate his interests, acknowledge the work he’d already done, provide him with an even greater network of international experts, and, most of all, allow him to invent his degree. Yeah, “degree.” It sounded a bit quaint, given that based on his online study over the past seven years he could already be striking out on his own as an online learning agent. But his parents, who had not gone to college, kept reminding him that he needed to go to the “college” they envisioned, that is, an old-fashioned school. So here he was, with little money, but thrilled that he had qualified for the federal smart scholars program so that his “degree” would cost


just $10K. Living on campus would cost triple that, but his parents kept pushing him to do so as they thought that he needed more “real” versus “virtual” friends and more “real life” experiences. His stomach sank just a bit. One of the hardest transitional things would be making friends and getting used to a new crowd of real people. He’d already connected with most of the people in his dorm, but he really wondered what it would be like to actually live with these people. Most of his friends were going to continue studying from home or move into apartments together and share their experiences as they worked and studied or took part in internship programs.


Exposure to personalized learning,

competence-based Substantial portfolio of competences

already established; learner has taken concurrent college-level credit

Wider range of choices

- DIY learning, freelance approach, opt out of institutional learning

- Shortest possible path to employment; complete learning while employed

- Immersive developmental option at traditional institution: make choices among traditional institutions based on their degree of reinvention, flexibility, and focus on value propositions important to me

- Select from non-traditional institutions responding to demand for affordability, flexibility, competence-based programs

Clear understanding and articulation

of value propositions

He could always opt out of institutional learning altogether, but then again, he owed it to his parents to just buck up and “attend” college. Selected Readings Knowledge Works. n.d. Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Learning Ecosystem. Retrieved July 23, 2o13, from the World Wide Web: http://knowledgeworks.org/futures-thinking. P-TECH: Pathways in Technology Early College High School. n.d. Welcome to P-TECH. Retrieved July 23, 2o13, from the World Wide Web: www.ptechnyc.org/site/default.aspx?PageID=1. Westrich, K. 2013. Pathways in Technology Early College High School: Preparing Students for Success. Expect Success. March 27. Retrieved July 23, 2o13, from the World Wide Web: http://edworkspartners.org/expect-success/2013/03/pathways-technology-early-college-high-school-ptech/.


A Traditional College Age Student Commits to an Immersive Developmental Experience In 2013 it was clear to most observers that traditional college age students were evaluating college choices based on a portfolio of value propositions, such as those enumerated below: Providing immersive educational and

developmental experiences Offering an attractive campus, amenities,

sports, and extracurricular activities Delivering affordability Serving as a talent filter for employers Participating in a social/employment

network for life Offering convenience for adult learners and

flexibility for individual learners Participating in the creation of new

knowledge Providing access to specialized fields of

study Building deep faculty/student relationships Instilling critical thinking skills Certifying demonstrable competences Developing competences in innovation and

entrepreneurship.

Not all of these value propositions were equally valued by individual students. Moreover, each institution offered a different combination of value propositions at which it excelled. And, it was difficult for prospective students to get beyond reputational hype and campus amenities to figure out how to evaluate prospective institutions based on more enduring value propositions.

In 2013, federal and state governments were already pressuring institutions to be more open and forthcoming in providing comparative statistics. In July 2013, President Obama made college affordability a major part of his campaign to rejuvenate opportunity for the middle class, and college cost comparisons were featured on White House-sponsored websites. These efforts gained strength over the next few years, and students and their parents became increasingly persistent and competent in evaluating the value offered by institutions. Better Information, Greater Sophistication, and More and Enhanced Options. By 2020, learners and their families were armed with better information and had achieved greater sophistication. Moreover, new providers had appeared to address affordability, specialization, and employability concerns. Existing institutions had enriched their value propositions by a combination of doubling down on existing strengths and mitigating weaknesses.


Select institution based on

demonstrated performance in assuring student completion and success

Demand credit for prior learning;

offer accelerated learning path Demonstrate affordability, ability to

reduce total cost of completion Allow the ability to mix and match

experiences—practical, real world, innovation, MOOCs, and entrepreneurial experiences

Offer adaptable curriculum, links to

employment


In spite of new providers and fresh options—accelerated completion, reduced costs, direct links to employability—many 18–22-year-old learners still opted for institutions that provided a residential campus experience offering the opportunity for an immersive developmental experience, be it educational, social, leadership development, co-curricular, or a combination. But even in these cases, most students were looking for a 21st-century experience. In 2020, students opting for the immersive university experience were doing so on their own terms, as seen through these examples: Madhu Joshi is an engineering student from Detroit studying at Huron University. Madhu was able to enter postsecondary education having already attained substantial course credit during high school. Through programs like those offered by Pathways.com, Madhu and many students like him are exposed to opportunities for advanced credit that can be applied toward their degree attainment as they enter college. Madhu is very interested in accelerating his learning path in order to attain the knowledge and skills needed to enter the workforce as quickly as possible, while keeping tuition costs at a minimum. Huron University fulfilled these requirements while other institutions he was considering did not. So, he chose Huron over the others. Madhu’s major interest is in the realm of green energy and alternative fuels. He is able to gain knowledge and experience in this field through numerous communities of practice that expose him to innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities. Huron’s encouragement of such activities and its linking of them to the curriculum was another factor in his choice. Madhu also favored Huron for its affiliation with

the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a consortium of universities in the Big Ten. Through this cooperative partnership he is able to obtain specialized training and courses in esoteric areas of his specialty through MOOCs and other shared resources. All of these programs have allowed him to shorten his track to graduation, and by taking advantage of these cheaper options he has lowered his cost of tuition significantly. Equally important to Madhu, he has enriched his practical experience and learning dramatically and is able to offer tangible demonstration of these competencies. Keshia Brown graduated from an inner-city high school in Philadelphia and is enrolling in Tuscarora University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Keshia saw Tuscarora as the perfect fit for her because of its stellar track record of success among minority students, like her, who have often struggled when entering higher education. The university prides itself on its above average mentoring programs that have helped many students to succeed not only in degree attainment, but also in employability. The mentoring program uses both faculty and Tuscarora alumni to enrich student development. These programs also link students with the experiential learning and social entrepreneurship programs that are important features of the Tuscarora experience. This network has an amazing track record in helping students succeed and in aligning them with an unparalleled employment pipeline throughout the eastern Pennsylvania job market.


Jane Fitzgerald is a non-commissioned officer in the Army returning to complete her degree at Vandenberg University. She specifically chose her place of study because of its policy on admitting prior learning experience as credit toward graduation. Her training and leadership experience as a member of the military police while deployed have given her demonstrable knowledge and skills that are directly applicable to her intended degree in the field of criminal justice. Applying these skills to course credit has allowed Jane to shorten her time to a degree and significantly lower her cost of education. Vandenberg also offers a number of mentoring and support programs for veterans that were instrumental in her choosing it over other institutions with comparable academic programs. Jonathan Brown is a freshman student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, seeking a career in medical research. Jonathan made the decision to attend Johns Hopkins not only for its exemplary record in the medical field but also because of its programs that offer experience and involvement in medical research to undergraduates. This early exposure allows many students to gain skills and knowledge in a way that can streamline their training process and to create networks that they will be able to use to refine their expertise later in the training process. Jonathan was promised the opportunity to work at the Bayshore Research facilities at Johns Hopkins, where he did a summer internship while a student at Severna Park High School. He also participated in several talent and science

problem-solving exercises sponsored by Hopkins while in high school. Selected Readings Beecroft, A. 2013. The Humanities: What Went Right? The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 3.


An Adult Learner Completes Her BS Degree By 2013, adult learner degree completion programs had been staple offerings for decades, especially for universities located in metropolitan areas and for-profits. Even so, such learners required a different combination of learning options, as pointed out by Louis Soares in Post-traditional Learners and the Transformation of Postsecondary Education: A Manifesto for College Leaders. By 2020, a wide range of options was available to such learners. Many Options for Degree Completers in 2020. One Saturday morning as the 2020 new year approached, Bethany sat back in a short, fleeting moment of reflection on her situation in life. She was a mother, a wife, and a daughter living in a multigenerational household. She was also a successful writer and consultant with a firm specializing in online content management. In her free time, she was a triathlete who had won local races and was competing well on the regional level. She was happy, but as her husband prepared for a career transition she knew that she needed more income security and that her firm was recruiting for a management position. Her supervisor suggested that if she had the right credentials (the firm required managers to be college graduates), the job was hers. With an associate’s degree and two years pursuing three different majors behind her, it seemed like an impossibly long road. Bethany decided to explore some of the schools that were advertising new customized life planning and degree attainment options. She knew she needed preparation for the next leg of her career, but also knew she could not sit

through endless general education lectures on irrelevant topics, $75,000-a-year programs offered between 10am and 2pm, or sterile MOOCs without human contact. Already a knowledge worker on the fringe of evolving news, data, and information, she needed a highly customized degree that would recognize what she had already learned, augment it, and push her a bit further. She also needed an on-demand support system with reasonable cost and convenience. But what she really craved were meaningful social interactions and experiences matched to her learning goals. Mountain University Emerges as Her Best Bet. She found Mountain University, a 35-year-old institution that had remade itself about five years ago. Mountain University had not gone the way of pure online education and, in fact, had no online programs of its own design. What it did do was certify and articulate online learning, or on-ground learning for that matter, from accredited institutions. But what stood out to Bethany were two important characteristics— Mountain U. stressed a faculty mentor learning model based on coaching and awarded degrees based on competencies driven by learning analytics. Bethany explored the cost and personalized learning path the school offered and decided to enroll in a program that would award a bachelor’s degree in creative content & writing with a professional master of management—a perfect match to her needs. It would be a lot of work. While it was estimated that it would take more than two years to complete the program, her employer would recognize the bachelor’s degree she would be awarded after the first year and move her into the management position she wanted.



A variety of academic and support

elements required Many choices—for-profits, MOOCs,

institutions specifically catering to the adult degree completer

Competence-based model is especially

attractive Faculty as learning coach and content

advisor Multi-institutional degrees (one home

sponsor institution) How did Mountain U. attract Bethany? Through its strong faculty coaching relationship and learning model based on social interaction. The institution took her personal needs into account and offered a flexible program to meet them. She knew she needed coaching to grow into her new career. She also needed a customized degree where she could take the best courses from multiple institutions. She wanted to target specific competencies to gain new skills as part of her career plan. And, she knew she needed help navigating all of the credits she had transcripted and the new types of learning available. Mountain U. was 85 miles away from her home, but she contracted with it to sponsor her degree. Mountain U. recognized nearly a decade ago that students of the future would need to have their career plans drive competency attainment. It also realized that having a faculty team that coaches learning experiences and arranges curriculum into potent learning packages was the best approach. It found a way to integrate courses from multiple institutions and recognize

asynchronous and online learning even though it didn’t offer such courses itself. But at the heart of what Mountain U. did was focus learning on the human dynamic. The faculty-led model of social interaction was the final factor driving Bethany’s decision. Selected Readings Soares, L. 2013. Post-traditional Learners and the Transformation of Postsecondary Education: A Manifesto for College Leaders. Washington, DC: American Council on Education. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Soares-Post-Traditional-v5-011813.pdf.


A Practicing Professional Builds Competence and Fills Knowledge Gaps

In 2013, practicing professionals were filling their needs for continuing professional development in a variety of ways: Traditional master’s degrees, especially in

professional fields with defined career tracks requiring them—teacher education, engineering, public policy.

Specialized post-baccalaureate certificates, specifically tailored to address emerging hot topics.

Formal knowledge networks being established by organizations like the National Institutes of Health.

Participation in professional societies and associations offering program-based learning and continuing education units— American Society of Training and Development (ASTD), American Medical Association (AMA), and a host of others in general and specialized fields.

Formalized requirements for continuing professional education in a variety of professional fields—medicine and allied health, law, engineering, and others.

On-the-job learning, based on communities of interest or practice within their place of employment. Major companies like IBM, Exxon/Mobil, and others used constellations of hundreds of such communities across the multinational enterprise to define and share new learning that filled emerging knowledge gaps.

Specialized communities of practice focusing on learning sponsored by John Seely Brown and others like him to demonstrate the power and potential of this new mode.

These options were useful, but still seemed like prescribed pathways rather than flexible learning approaches that met the immediacy and openness needed to address the requirements of the 21st-century economy. New knowledge gaps were forming all the time, and successful practitioners needed to frame, understand, and fill those gaps with greater immediacy than possible through institutional or association-based curricular efforts. 2020: Community of Practice-Centric Learning. By 2020, these requirements had spawned the emergence of a new breed of learning and developmental experiences for practicing professionals.


Community of Practice focus

Superseding the Bachelor’s–Master’s

–PhD track with other alternatives Open, peer-to-peer, participatory

learning Real-time identification of “what’s

important?” and “what do practitioners need to know?”

Focus on filling fresh knowledge gaps

Allyson Golden is a fifth-year elementary school teacher at Dranesville Elementary School in Herndon, Virginia. She has been teaching there since her graduation from Patriot University. While at Patriot, she entered into a Community of Reflective Practice in elementary education. Allyson used the community to support her undergraduate learning, her student


teaching practicum, and a mentoring program while achieving her baccalaureate. After graduating Allyson continued to use the CoP for insights on reflective practice. She was able to continue active contact with Patriot faculty both on the physical campus and virtually. In this way, she was able to work with a cadre of teachers to receive a master’s degree in reflective practice. As her career progressed, Allyson kept in constant contact with the program to complement her knowledge and apply it to her teaching technique. She participated as a mentor in the program and received numerous badges from Patriot, achieving mentor status, senior mentor status, and, eventually, master practitioner designation. In this way she was able to add to her own knowledge while helping other teachers to hone their skills. Allyson and other participants in the program keep in contact with the network by receiving push information on new developments by way of e-mails, texts, tweets, and various other options. Luz Del Santos is a social media freelancer living in Austin, Texas. Over her career she has been associated with some of the top social media enterprises in the industry, including Facebook, Google, and others. As a freelance autonomous professional she has contributed to the magazine Fast Company and has served as an advisor to local universities and several online for-profit learning enterprises based in Texas. Her major focus has been on South by Southwest (SXSW) activities in Austin. The SXSW film, interactive, and music festivals held every year have grown to encompass conferences and trade shows including symposia on educational innovation and the environment.

Luz uses the SXSW Community of Practice to stay current on industry news. The network of collaborators allows her to manage larger assignments at breakneck speed. She is also able to use the network to make global connections that allow her to find new assignments and apply her expertise to a wide range of projects. Kwame Ndongo is a food safety specialist in Lagos, Nigeria. Kwame participates in the Food Safety Knowledge Network (FSKN) launched by Superior State University and the international trade association responsible for food. This network is dedicated to spreading the standards and knowledge necessary to ensure food safety around the world and to harmonizing practices and competences in a global food market. By creating a system of accreditation and education in the field, the knowledge network is able to reduce costs and increase safety. Kwame had attained an associate degree-level credential before joining the network. Through his participation in the FSKN he was able to achieve certification. The network has been designed to help bring practitioners, even those with grade-school educations or less, up to standard in knowledge and practice through mentorship and exposure to best practices. Kwame’s continued participation in the network has allowed him to stay current on new knowledge and practices in the field. His credentials have also allowed him to leverage corporate support by proving his knowledge and application of best practices in food safety. Dr. Jonas Sabin is a practicing cardiologist engaged in networks sponsored by NIH in Berkeley, California. Jonas participates in two


knowledge communities sponsored by NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute dedicated to hypertensive disease and diabetes. The knowledge communities include personal learning tools that allow participants to search for new materials of interest or to have these materials pushed to them through various media including e-mails, texts, tweets, and other venues. These tools also perform unobtrusive scans of conversations and knowledge traffic and summarize new issues and emerging treatment insights automatically. The knowledge networks spin off webinars, eLearning offerings, blogs, and other products on new and emerging protocols and offer them to participants in the community. Participation in the community dramatically reduces the effort required to stay up-to-date with current and innovative practices and helps expose Jonas to participants from around the world. The tools are organized around emerging new knowledge and needs and can support every kind of engagement. Constellations of these knowledge networks are available to practitioners in a wide range of disciplines. Selected Readings Johnson, G., G. S. Yip, and M. Hensmans. 2012.

Achieving Successful Strategic Transformation.

MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring, 25–32.

Norris, D. M., and P. Lefrere. Transforming

Through Online Learning and Competence

Building. 2010. White paper, Strategic

Initiatives, Inc. Presented at the Lumina

National Productivity Conference, November

15–16.


Venture Capitalists/Solution Providers Bring Next Generation Products, Services, and Experiences In 2013, higher education is experiencing a burst of activity in new ventures, bringing new technologies and practices to institutions and taking a greater role in their dissemination. Consider the following green shoot examples: Embedded, Predictive Analytics have been pioneered over the past decade by leading institutions such as American Public University, Capella University, and University of Phoenix, as noted by Norris and Baer. Products like Course Signals, developed by Purdue University, have been commercialized by Ellucian. Major learning management system providers like Blackboard and Desire2Learn are offering embedded analytics and integrated planning and advising services. Personalized/Adaptive Learning based on learning science is being piloted on many campuses. Institutions like Carnegie Mellon, through its Open Learning Initiative, have developed a body of knowledge on open, personalized learning available for deployment. As Kolowich reports, Arizona State University’s use of Knewton for remedial learning in conjunction with Pearson’s knowledge services was recently showcased as a hint of things to come. Integrated Planning and Advising Systems have been developed by institutions like Sinclair Community College (also taken to market as Student Success Plan) and by companies like Starfish Retention Solutions. The

Gates Foundation is providing funding to accelerate the development of this sector. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were pioneered by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and other individual faculty. By 2013, funded ventures like Coursera, Udacity, and edX have brought a dramatic infusion of energy and funding into higher education, attracting institutional partners and making new waves of MOOCs available for mash-up into the curricula of traditional institutions. Plans call for the introduction of personalized/adaptive learning into the emerging MOOC offerings. Hosted, Multi-Purpose Solutions and Mash-ups have been growing. Many institutions now use Pearson/eCollege to host their LMS and partner in developing and funding eLearning offerings. Embedded analytics are made available to hundreds of institutions in this fashion. The leading ERP and LMS providers are all offering hosted, in-the-cloud solutions, each serving clusters of institutional clients. Federated, Shared Solutions have been featured in the PARS Project, funded by the Gates Foundation, which has created a federated database for data mining and analysis of student success involving the records of over one million students. Expectations are that this movement will grow and spread. Performance Enhancement Services are being offered by technology partners like Ellucian and a variety of other shared and managed services providers. Some are outsourced; others are insourced, moving onto the campus.


Disruptive Practices from Other Sectors have begun to impact higher education in 2013. For example, a number of new ventures are seeking to deploy performance enhancement and cost reduction skills honed in the health care sector into higher education. These began in the back office but also include value-focused academic services and solutions. In 2013 educators were pushing back, railing against the limitations of the current generation of MOOCs and warning about issues of privacy and unintended consequences if corporations played a larger role in the dissemination of innovation. As reported by Young, at a recent South-by-Southwest education conference, the tension between educators and entrepreneurs drew attention from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Pragmatism Triumphs by 2020. By 2020, however, most of these objections have been overtaken by pragmatism. Venture capital-funded innovations have taken an even more significant leadership role in the transformation of higher education in the face of disruption. Arwan Swanson is president at Northwestern State University. Five years ago she led her executive team in focusing on performance excellence, personalized learning, and human development. Following a comprehensive review of technology and partnering options, the Northwestern team elected to use a mash-up of personalized/ adaptive learning services offered by Academic Value Partners (AVP). These services use a hosted, in-the-cloud utility that engages learners in self-paced adaptive learning experiences that can be integrated into

the institutional experience. AVP’s learning and talent management utility supports hundreds of institutions, enabling rich data mining and analysis of “what works” in improving learner performance. This transition enabled Northwestern to migrate from its existing technology infrastructure, improving performance and reducing costs. Employers have been especially supportive.


Through venture funders/solution

providers, provide access to capital, culture, and capacity (talent and know-how)

Create constellations of in-the-cloud solutions, shared services

Bridge the talent and capacity gap through these new offerings

Raise the strategic importance of partnerships, collaboration, sharing

Enable individual institutions to scale innovation enterprisewide at a reasonable cost; enable the education and knowledge industry to scale innovation across the industry (personalized learning)

The development of hosted, in-the-cloud utilities that mash-up e-learning, LMS, and analytics services has grown significantly since 2013. By 2020, most institutions have migrated significant portions of their ERP, LMS, analytics, personalized advising, and related tools and services to variations on these themes. Constellations of these solution provider-based communities have enabled individual institutions to reinvent processes and practices with minimal direct investment.


Elizabeth Brendel is managing partner of Academic Value Partners (AVP). AVP’s mission is to make personalized/adaptive learning experiences and services available across the education and knowledge industry. Its value proposition is based on three factors: Capital. AVP has made a substantial

investment in technology and support infrastructure.

Culture. AVP has created a performance-based culture and the behaviors to support it.

Capacity. AVP’s team is experienced in running a human capital development operation richly supported by measurement and demonstration of competences.

Elizabeth is working with leaders at a wide range of institutions who are using AVP’s in-the-cloud, hosted services to introduce personalized/ adaptive learning to their academic programs. AVP currently serves a community of 150 institutions that have adapted this service, some that use a common core of courses and others that have had their courses converted to personalized/adaptive learning by the AVP team. These personalized courses are made available to other institutions in the community. Similar dynamics have guided the emergence of a range of venture capital-backed enterprises. These include enterprises that focus on academic services and experiences and those that focus on support and/or administrative services. One successful venture has enhanced so-called back office operations and services and is available through a shared or managed services model. These services have increased performance and reduced costs through

continuous process reinvention and a focus on performance excellence, using tools and practices honed in the health care industry and other commercial sectors.

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave

themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from

it.” Marc Weiser

Selected Readings Gavetti, G. 2011. The New Psychology of

Strategic Leadership. Harvard Business Review.


Hill, P. 2012. Online Educational Delivery

Models: A Descriptive View. EDUCAUSE

Review, November–December, 84–86, 88, 90,

92, 94–97.

Kolowich, S. 2013. The New Intelligence. Inside

Higher Ed, January 25.

Norris, D. M., and L. L. Baer. 2013. Building

Organizational Capacity for Analytics in

Higher Education. Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE.

Sinfield, J. V., E. Calder, B. McConnell, and S.

Colson. 2012. How to Identify New Business

Models. MIT Sloan Management Review,

Winter, 85–90.

Young, J. R. 2013. At South-by-Southwest

Education Event, Tensions Divide

Entrepreneurs and Educators. The Chronicle of

Higher Education, March 7.


Employers Seek New Options for Finding and Evaluating Talent By 2013, employers had perfected their message to colleges and universities: “Many graduates of associate and baccalaureate degree programs are not prepared for employment. They do not possess the soft skills necessary for success— effective communication, both verbal and written, team work, the capacity to think critically and solve problems, and the intrinsic capacity and curiosity to learn all the time. Moreover, in many cases graduates also lack up-to-date hard skills given rapid changes in their disciplines.” As a result, employers were unable to find qualified applicants for many skilled positions. For example, in 2013 the U.S. manufacturing sector was growing for the first time in two decades, yet there were 600,000 manufacturing jobs vacant nationwide. Many of these were high-paying jobs requiring technical skills and baccalaureate-level training. In addition, substantial talent gaps at all levels made STEM workforce development a national priority. Even in 2013 there were substantial initiatives already underway to close the talent gap in STEM fields at the federal, regional, and state levels and to address the workforce needs of the newly reviving manufacturing sector. Active public/private partnerships were formed such as the Business Higher Education Forum, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the National Association of Manufacturers and its affiliate, The Manufacturing Institute, and many other trade associations and employer groups.

Further, governmental workforce measurement

agencies were redoubling their efforts to reflect

the new and emerging competence and

workforce needs of the 21st-century economy.


STEM workforce initiatives

- National, regional, state programs

and public/private partnerships focusing on increasing STEM skills

- Immigration reform provisions for skilled professionals

- Local consortia/federations/ communities in manufacturing competences and careers

- Broader participation of students in STEM, innovation, and entrepreneurship across disciplines

Increased options to find and attract talent

- Shortened pathways to

employment; continuing training after hire

- Mining of MOOCs, design

competitions, and crowd-sourced projects for specialized talent

- Differentiation among traditional

institutions based on past performance of graduates (like Boeing)

- Certification of competence-based

approaches, DIY, and free-range learning/competence building

Analysis of determinants and

pathways to success—focus on success making


Yet, many of these efforts felt like 20th-century solutions to 21st-century problems. By 2020 a variety of new wave solutions will have emerged

that will yield excellent results.

Developing Options by 2020. By 2020 this

combination of existing initiatives and new

approaches had achieved substantial success.

The throughput of STEM certificates and

degrees available to the U.S. economy had

increased through traditional domestic

production and the availability of

internationally-trained talent. But new

mechanisms have also multiplied the impact on

the STEM workforce.

Jonathon McGill is the coordinator of regional manufacturing workforce development in Dayton, Ohio, operating in joint appointment with K–12 education, Sinclair Community College, Wright State University, the State of Ohio, and local manufacturers. Using advanced knowledge/talent management environments, he orchestrates a Community of Practice that facilitates and accelerates competence and career development spanning K–20 and focuses on specific manufacturing skills and career path development for manufacturing enterprises in the Dayton region. His operation is part of a network of CoPs in regional manufacturing hubs across the Upper Midwest. Since its inception, this CoP has stimulated a substantial increase in interest in manufacturing careers in high schools and at Sinclair Community College, Wright State University, and other institutions. The CoP network facilitates the sharing of equipment for training in company and K–20 settings, including the use

of advanced simulation. These efforts are in partnership with The Manufacturing Institute, and its competence guidelines have been embedded in all programs. Manufacturing employment is up, especially in advanced and high-tech areas, and a large proportion of individuals employed in this sector began pathway programs in high school that led to immediate job placement after high school or following one or two tailored programs at Sinclair. Continuing training and development is facilitated by the CoP, leveraging resources from Sinclair, Wright State, and local manufacturers as well as international resources made available through an international network of advanced manufacturing CoPs. Jocelyn Grant is VP for talent management at Google. For the past seven years she has been using a variety of increasingly nontraditional means to identify talent that Google can hire as employees or part-time stringers and team members across the globe. Google recruits from a limited group of top-tier universities and carefully follows the success of its hires to determine which institutions are best and which skills and experiences differentiate the most successful employees. But Jocelyn has been pursuing a series of alternative paths, using a combination of augmented intelligence tools to scan for and identify potential top talent: Scanning top MOOCs in talent areas like

artificial intelligence, advanced programming, and the like to identify top performers;


Scanning ongoing design competitions and international crowd-sourced projects and commissioning Google-sponsored crowd projects to attract and vet talent;

Scanning university-based innovation and entrepreneurship ventures and start-ups emanating from them for exceptional ventures and performers; and

Scanning international talent banks like Monster.com and others based on proven success factors gleaned from an analysis of the factors required to succeed at Google.

In all of these efforts, the emphasis is on demonstrated problem solving, leadership, and team building capabilities rather than academic credentials. By 2020, many of the people who rise to the top of the Google talent pool have dropped out of traditional education to pursue entrepreneurial ventures, pursued DIY or free-range learning experiences, and/or leavened their traditional learning with considerable real-world experience like co-op programs, entrepreneurial ventures, social entrepreneurship, or other problem-solving exercises. Selected Readings Gavetti, G. 2011. The New Psychology of

Strategic Leadership. Harvard Business Review,


McNelly, J. 2011. Testimony on Innovative

Approaches to Meet the Workforce Needs of

Small Business. Given before the House

Committee on Small Business, September 8.

Reeves, M., and M. Deimler. 2011. Adaptability:

The New Competitive Advantage. Harvard



Public Policy Makers Encourage Innovation, Reinvention, and Disruption In 2013, it was clear that public policy makers were discovering new ways to create incentives to develop innovative approaches to affordable, accessible learning leading to student success as reflected in certificate/degree completion and employment. Examples of policies, incentives, and programs included: Increasingly aggressive accountability

requirements at all levels—regional accreditors, federal and state governments, grant-making organizations—focused on outcomes. This included performance funding at the state level with different models from state to state.

Mandated experiments to create $10,000 degrees, greatly facilitated articulation agreements for transfer, and degrees with accelerated completion times (three-year baccalaureates and more).

Pioneering efforts by institutions like Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Capella University to focus emphasis on demonstrated competency.

Federal requirements for easily accessible comparative institutional data on cost, completion, and employment.

Aggressive funding of new techniques to improve access, affordability, completion of learning objectives, and links to employment by the Lumina Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and others.

Increasing public/private dialogues to discover how to encourage greater investment in innovation by the venture

capital community and the knowledge industry.

Increasing use of analytics and Big Data not just for accountability, but also for performance improvement and cost reduction at the process level.

Taken together, this impressive array of green shoots grew into new approaches to policy by 2020. Deploying New Mechanisms and Interventions. By 2020 policy makers had tested through deployment a range of new mechanisms and incentives. Different approaches at the federal, regional, and state levels created a range of different incentives and initiatives. Consider the following examples. Dr. Alsace Jones, deputy undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Education, has for the past seven years progressively shifted the focus of higher education policy toward increasing completion rates rather than access. This was supported by research from leading foundations and think tanks. The wide success of programs designed to open enrollment to all students through student loans, grants, and scholarships had served to highlight the underlying gap between enrollment and completion. Though the programs were successful in opening the door to higher education to many students who would otherwise be unable to afford it, there were still significant numbers of students who never attained a degree. It was apparent that opening enrollment was not the panacea to degree completion and that efforts needed to be taken to increase student success.


The first step in restructuring the department’s approach was to modify the existing financial aid program reflecting different modes of payment to not only assure affordability for students but also to establish for universities a policy that emphasizes efficiency to graduation and affordability. Alsace and her colleagues in the department began championing programs taken up by universities that were seeking to revolutionize how higher education operated. Pilot programs that showed promise in lowering costs, speeding up time to certification, and demonstrating student success were given federal funding to defer costs and incentivize further innovation. Programs that were particularly effective were showcased by the department as best practices that other universities were encouraged to adopt. This focus included competence-based approaches. By 2020, competence-based programs had progressed in popularity and had “worked the kinks out.” Supported by federal jawboning, many states required institutions to accept transfer of competence-based learning and rigorous assessments of and credit for prior learning. Partnerships were established between the secretaries of Education, Labor, and Commerce to create meaningful plans and initiatives aimed at promoting education that has a direct correlation to employment post-graduation. In this way, linkages were made between how students were trained and the skills the business world was looking for in its employees; further, those employers were networked with the students who best suited their needs.


Focus on accountability, performance

improvement, innovation, and completion rather than access

Partnerships and collaboration, shared services

Reinvented accreditation to enable innovation and reinvention and focus on learner value

Required articulation and transferability of MOOCs and credit for prior learning

Differential tuition and fees for MOOCs and alternative pathways

Strong linkage between K–20 and employment

Pervasive use of Big Data to understand student success

One program originally developed for use in a K–12 setting proved exceedingly effective when applied to higher education. External database platforms were established that provided automatic, ambient data collection of competence and performance among students. This allowed for a very personalized portfolio of a student’s knowledge, skills, and, most importantly, the way he or she learned. All of this was collected automatically, without the need for extensive faculty engagement. Such approaches enabled adaptive/personalized learning to be deployed by external providers rather than by institutions acting one school at a time. When applied to higher education, these tools allowed universities and students to recognize patterns of learning in order to craft efficient


curricula and degree pathways for each student. By 2020, many students were arriving on college and university campuses already having had such experiences. Maria Goldman, the executive director of the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia, began a pioneering program several years ago in the measurement of employment by institution and discipline. The study sought to understand which institutions were producing the most employable graduates, in which departments, and how they were doing so in order to transfer successful practices throughout the state system. The council also introduced incentives for Virginia institutions to develop programs to foster innovation and entrepreneurship. It supported universities that embraced the need for change in ways that fostered student success while emphasizing efficiency to degree completion and lower costs. In that vein, the state council promoted plans that linked funding to degree completion. This incentivized universities to create novel ways to increase the efficiency with which students reach certification. The council mandated that universities accept course credit from classes taken through community colleges or MOOCs after students prove proficiency through a proctored test. Initially, this requirement only pertained if the student was unable to obtain the necessary credits in a timely manner through the university. Over time, as MOOCs improved and were used more creatively, this stipulation was dropped and MOOCs were integrated into the option scheme for students.

In this way, students are able to finish degrees more quickly, with fewer having to take extra semesters to complete their final credits. The other benefit is that community college and MOOC classes are far more affordable than traditional university classes, creating more affordable cost pathways for students. This differential billing was required by the state council. Bert Wolfson, the executive director of the Higher Learning Commission, a regional accreditation body in the Midwest, also took up the challenge of linking the value of higher education with its affordability. The commission reinvented the way that universities prove their worth in seeking accreditation. It linked the process to the value of individual programs in terms of their employability and also required institutions to provide evidence of efforts to contain costs and accelerate completion. This spurred many universities to reevaluate the way that they assessed the success of their departments. Many schools adopted new analytic and Big Data programs to maximize their ability to measure, analyze, and prove the value of departments. Institutions also reimagined the ways in which students were able to reach their degrees, including accepting course credit for classes from community colleges and MOOCs and for experiences in the workforce or military. This restructuring of the attainment pathway opened a much quicker and more affordable way for students to earn their degrees. Big-Bang Disruption Confronts Policy Makers. By 2020 policy makers had begun to


grapple with disruptions that were even more

threatening to traditional educational practices

than the threats posed by cheaper online

learning. The new breed of disruption addressed

unmet learner needs and was actually superior

to existing learning in demonstrating

competences and preparing learners for

successful employment. For example, the

deployment of personalized, adaptive learning in

K–12 supported by embedded analytics has the

potential to prove far more effective than current

lecture- and classroom-centric techniques. It has

the potential to become what Downes and Nunes

have styled a “big-bang disruption.”

“You can’t see big-bang disruption coming. You can’t stop it. Old-style

disruption posed the innovator’s dilemma. Big-bang disruption is the innovator’s disaster. And it will keep executives in every industry in a cold

sweat for a long time to come.” Larry Downes and Paul Nunes

The challenge posed by big-bang disruptions will

be clear by 2020 as the current green shoots go

through several generations of evolution and

mutation. Policy makers will share George

Mehaffey’s observation:

“Higher education’s challenge is whether it can transform before it is disrupted.”

These challenges confront policy makers and

leaders in a range of industries that have so far

escaped large-scale disruption:

“Even in industries where regulations limit competition, there is growing

competition from big-bang disruptors homing in on large-scale inefficiencies.

Education is being privatized and moving online, exposing how little our

public institutions have invested in technology that visibly advances their

core teaching mission.” Larry Downes and Paul Nunes

Selected Readings CollegeMeasures.org. n.d. Economic Success

Measures—Virginia. Retrieved July 23, 2013,

from the World Wide Web:

http://esm.collegemeasures.org/esm/Virginia.

Downes, L., and P. F. Nunes. 2013. Big-Bang

Disruption. Harvard Business Review, March,

46–56.

Fain, P. 2012. Majoring in Outcomes. Inside

Higher Ed, October 17.

Fain, P. 2013. Transformation From Within.

Inside Higher Ed, January 21.

Gardner, L., and J. R. Young. 2013. California’s

Move Toward MOOCs Sends Shock Waves, but

Key Questions Remain Unanswered. The

Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14.

Kolowich, S. 2012. Texas MOOCs for Credit?

Inside Higher Ed, October 16.


Entrepreneurs and Innovators Play a More Substantial Role By 2013, many public policy makers, employers, businesspeople, and alumni were calling for institutional leaders to place a greater emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation. This was seen as essential to America’s competitiveness, a return to the elements that made our economy the envy of the world. But there were impediments to this goal. In most colleges and universities, entrepreneurship and innovation were not a central part of the curriculum or were limited to a few students majoring in these subjects in engineering or the business school. In most research universities, the emphasis was placed on research and commercialization received short shrift. As a result, the real deal flow from commercializable ideas was low as were the opportunities for students to learn from and gain experience with entrepreneurial ventures. While some breathtakingly successful ventures emerged from universities and created a financial bonanza for their institutions (think of Gatorade, plus many drugs and medical devices), the success rate of such ventures was low and fell far short of its potential. Institutional policies and Intellectual Property (IP) practices created many perverse disincentives and obstacles that exist even today. In 2013, successful green shoots were visible. Entrepreneurship and innovation programs and MOOCs were growing. Through its i-Corps program, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was supporting regional entrepreneurship and innovation centers using Professor Steven Blank’s Lean Start-up methodology and a

support community called LaunchPad Central. Universities were aggressively seeking ways to catalyze entrepreneurship and innovation on campus and to create fresh revenue streams and employment opportunities.


Many employers view entrepreneurship and innovation as “the new liberal arts”

Institutional efforts facilitate and accelerate the flow of commercializable ideas, plus improve the success rate of ventures

Entrepreneurs-in-residence are attracted; students and faculty participate in start-up ventures

Communities of angel investors and alumni are attracted back to campus to champion new projects and serve as mentors

Communities of practice for entrepreneurship and innovation reach out to include students from other colleges and universities

Every student is given great opportunities for real entrepreneurial experiences and demonstrated competences

The curriculum is opened to encourage such experiences and provide experience in parallel to the formal curriculum

Linked constellations of knowledge networks support continuous professional development and entrepreneurship

Artificial intelligence tools search and scan for new commercializable ideas and share insights across knowledge domains

Universities increase their income from entrepreneurial ventures by an order of magnitude


Bryce Jordan is an undergraduate student at Southern Highland State University majoring in new media and completing his senior year. For the past three years, he has been directly involved in several formal and informal entrepreneurial experiences. In his second year, he joined the student entrepreneurship club through which he engaged in the Southern Highland State Entrepreneurship Community of Practice (SHSECoP). He was also able to participate as a freelancer in several projects for ventures at the Southern Highland State Corporate Research Center. The SHSECoP also enabled him to work with other SHSU students and visit other linked entrepreneurial communities. Last year, the SHSECoP had 10,000 active participants, 7,500 of them students. In his third year, Bryce competed for a slot in the popular “Lean Start-up Course” and teamed with two graduate students in designing, refining, and launching a New Media application for smartphones. He and his partners received Angel funding from the Southern Highland State Commercializable Idea Marketplace (SHSCIM) and are being mentored by several of the funders. When Bryce graduates, he and his partners will continue to work on their venture, which they hope to move into the SHSCRC when they receive Stage 1 Venture Capital funding. Todd Heaven is a senior in health care administration at Mill Mountain College. While his institution does not have an active research program or entrepreneurship curriculum, he and other students at Mill Mountain College have been able to participate in the SHSECoP, enroll in entrepreneurial courses and competitions at Southern Highland State, and engage in collaborative innovation

efforts fostered by the Regional Technology Council. Dr. Sandra Bullard is provost at Southern Highland State. Under her leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation have become an important part of both the formal curriculum and the informal curriculum of co-curricular activities (student clubs, competitions), projects, and participation in real-world ventures. She regards entrepreneurship and innovation as “the new liberal arts”—an essential set of perspectives and habits of mind, body, and spirit necessary to success in 21st-century society. In her eyes, the students are way ahead of the faculty in demanding such activities, and the SHSECoP has provided a vehicle for students to be active leaders in building pathways and enjoy a valuable set of experiences, global exposures, and outcomes-focused assessment. More is needed in the future.

“Innovation, entrepreneurship, and design are the new liberal arts for the

21st century.” Armand Ghoulsby, entrepreneur-in-

residence at Southern Highland State University

Sandra has worked hard to recognize commercialization and entrepreneurship as desirable qualities that can be given credit in promotion and tenure decisions and to attract entrepreneurs-in-residence and other serial entrepreneurs to campus. Briana Nelson is an engineering alumna of Southern Highland State who has retired from a distinguished career with Dow Chemical, where she ran a research operation resulting in


commercial products. She is serving as a member of the Angel Funder Network associated with the SHS Commercializable Idea Marketplace. She was screened and invited to become a member of the SHSCIM. She agreed to pay a membership fee, potentially invest $50,000–$100,000 a year in ventures, and serve as a champion for ideas as they become commercializable. To fulfill this roll, she is actively engaged in working with the SHSCIM team to identify and nurture promising ideas and mentor those ideas once they achieve funding. Briana is spending, on average, a week a month on the main campus or in one of the regional technology centers. Currently, there are 100 champions/angels such as Briana, and the number is expected to grow as more opportunities emerge. They serve as sort of “roving entrepreneurs” and complement a number of entrepreneurs-in-residence who have been brought on campus to increase the program’s visibility.

“If you look at the Nobel laureates, in case after case after case, the critical

event was a surprise.” Herb Simon

Selected Readings Basken, P. 2012. Scientific Discovery, Inspired

by a Walk to the Restroom. The Chronicle of

Higher Education, October 29.

Fain, P. 2012. Mr. MOOC Comes to Washington.

Inside Higher Ed, October 2.

Freed, B. 2012. Techbeat: U-M Business School’s

Entrepalooza Attracts Students with Networking

and Words of Wisdom. AnnArbor.com,

September 21.

Guinan, E., K. J. Boudreau, and K. R. Lakhani.

2013. Experiments in Open Innovation at

Harvard Medical School. MIT Sloan

Management Review, Spring, 45–52.

Hoge, P. 2012. Cal and Stanford Create Very

Different Models for How to Build and Run

Incubators for Startup Businesses. San

Francisco Business Times, June 8.

King, R. 2012. Google for Entrepreneurs

Launching Worldwide to Serve Local

Communities. ZDNet, September 24.

Kopelman, J. 2012. The Dorm Room Fund.

Redeye VC, September. Retrieved July 23, 2013,

from the World Wide Web:

http://Redeye.firstround.com/2012/09/the-

dorm-room-fund.html?awesm=frc.vc_bl_.

Lowrey, A. 2012. High-Tech Factories Built to Be

Engines of Innovation. The New York Times,

December 13.

Madrigal, A. C. 2012. These Students Love

Startups Like the Animal House Guys Loved

Beer. The Atlantic, September 20.

Sacks, D. 2012. Shaking Up Crowdfunding. Fast

Company, June.

Schumpeter. 2012. Fixing the Capitalist

Machine: Some Sensible Ideas for Reviving

America’s Entrepreneurial Spirit. The

Economist, September 29.

Wortham, J. 2012. Success of Crowdfunding

Puts Pressure on Entrepreneurs. The New York

Times, September 17.


Existing and New Providers Emerge as “Success Makers”

By 2013, improving retention and student success were a familiar part of strategic enrollment management (SEM) at most institutions. Moreover, leading practitioners were using embedded predictive analytics, personalized advising systems, and other technology-supported practices to help students improve their success in individual courses and achieve their certificate/degree objectives. Optimizing a student’s immediate success using these tools and practices was an achievable objective for institutions willing to invest in developing their organizational capacity in analytics. But shrewd providers in 2013 were raising the bar to link completion of academic objectives to long-term life success based on research and feedback from the marketplace. These providers were already positioning themselves to be branded as “success makers” by potential learners. They were moving beyond being merely learning providers by adding the following services: Certifying competences that were developed

in collaboration with employers; Assessing the critical elements of success

pathways based on ongoing market research and data mining;

Advising learners on their pathways to success and the knowledge gaps they needed to fill to continue to progress; and

Continuing as success makers throughout the learner’s career.

Consider the following examples of the green shoots of such practices occurring in 2013: For-profit providers such as Capella

University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Western Governor’s University were focused on achieving demonstrable competences—rather than a printed transcript showing 120 credits, they portrayed 120 competences, grounded in needs vetted by employers;

The U.S. Department of Education’s MyData Initiative was working to make electronic records available to students no matter where they live and had challenged vendors and schools to create tools that could improve education and career success through leveraging “open data;”

The Education and Career Positioning System (ECPS) developed by and for The Lone Star College System analyzed student learning records, personal traits, and abilities and then provided a list of career and education options for students to choose from. The system also connected employers looking for skills in particular areas with future graduates needing a job.

Talent management companies such as Monster.com were leveraging their 100 million-plus resume/job posting databases to research labor force needs and pathways;

Research efforts were underway at federal and state levels to make detailed K–20 data and workforce data available for sophisticated data mining.

Over the next few years, these developments are likely to continue to evolve.


“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and

magic in it.” Goethe

Success Strategies and Pathways in 2020. Students and their families, employers, public policy makers, and other stakeholders have strongly supported the “success makers” movement. Samantha Grant is a high school guidance counselor in White Plains, New York. Her role has changed dramatically in the past five years. Her high school has significantly increased pathway programs with local community colleges and universities, concurrent college enrollments, and personalized learning using adaptive learning services hosted by Pathways.com. As a result, her students have begun making their career decisions much earlier and with greater information. Most emerge from high school with significant college credit, well-developed electronic records demonstrating competences and interests, and access to substantial, research-based reports on career prospects and realities. Most have participated in internship, social entrepreneurship, experiential learning, and/or community problem-solving activities. Many students have entered well-defined STEM and high-tech manufacturing pathways; these programs have dramatically increased student completion rates and job placements. Many of the manufacturing students started co-op programs with local employers and community colleges while still enrolled in high school or

picked up necessary skills so they could be employed immediately after graduation. On the other hand, many of Samantha’s students still select immersive learning experiences at traditional universities, with many choosing less targeted career paths. Even these students, however, are keenly aware of the costs and likely career prospects, with many seeking accelerated completion pathways.


Focus on demonstrated competences

desired by employers

Shortened pathways to employment

Providing handy, user-friendly toolkits to assist learners and their families in charting success pathways

Capacity to use Big Data/analytics to

assess pathways to success and counsel learners on that basis

Success-making and match-up

services as important collaborations/shared services

Seamless linking of PK–20 and

workforce data Emergence of freelancer networks

and marketplaces Andrew Boynton is director of customer experience at Pathways.com. His primary responsibility is to create seamless, powerful experiences for students and employees participating in Pathways.com services—hosted, personalized learning offered through K–20 education in seven states; related personalized advising and success-making services; research-based insights on new job and career trends; and


match-up services for freelancers and free-agents seeking assignments.

“Companies spent the 20th century creating and managing efficiencies. They must spend the 21st century creating and

managing experiences.” C. K. Prahalad and V. Ramaswamy

There is tremendous competition for the attention of learners, their parents, and employees who want to fill emerging knowledge gaps in their industry or profession. Pathways.com works with a constellation of knowledge networks and emerging communities of practice in industries and professions, scanning and skimming information using sophisticated artificial intelligence-powered agents to discover and reveal new trends to its clientele. Its customers demand dependable, automatic access to information on which they can base their ongoing knowledge development decisions.

“Discovery and discernment are the cornerstone skills of the New Economy.”

Van B. Weigel Ghazala Parvez is a free agent working in the knowledge and information technology industry. Since she was a

sophomore in high school she has managed her

education and career planning using an app

provided by Pathways.com and substantially

improved over the past seven years. She

manages a dynamic record of her competences

and is continuously involved in filling new

knowledge gaps that emerge due to changes in

the field. She started on her ICT learning track in

high school, secured a co-op position with a local

firm, and completed the equivalent of a

bachelor’s degree while employed.

“Learning is not so much about content

anymore—it’s about services.” Dale Spender

She has since moved to free-agent status where

she works for her core firm 50 percent of the

time and accepts other assignments to complete

her employment needs. She spends about 10

percent of her time filling new knowledge gaps

and positioning herself for additional

opportunities.

“Experts [project] that within a few years, more than 1.3 billion people

globally will work virtually.” Tammy Johns and Lynda Gratton

Selected Readings Alabama Career Information Network. n.d. Alabama Career Planning System. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: www.alcareerinfo.org/kuder.html. ConnectEdu Education and Career Management. 2010. Welcome to Connect College and Career Planning. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: http://connectedu.net. Dewhurst, M., B. Hancock, and D. Ellsworth. 2013. Redesigning Knowledge Work. Harvard Business Review, January–February, 59–72. Johns, T., and L. Gratton. 2013. The Third Wave of Virtual Work. Harvard Business Review, January–February, 66–73.


Kochan, T., D. Finegold, and P. Osterman. 2012. Who Can Fix the “Middle-Skills” Gap? Harvard Business Review, December, 83–90. Lone Star College System. 2013. Education and Career Positioning System. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: www.eps4.me. TBEC Achieve Texas Education and Career Planning System. n.d. Achieve Texas. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: www.tbeachievetexas.com/. Tennessee College and Career Planning System. n.d. Planning Your Dreams. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: www.planningyourdreams.org.


Other Vignettes and Stories from the Future There is a real science to storytelling. Stephen Denning’s book, Squirrel, Inc.: A Fable of Leadership Through Storytelling, identifies seven distinct high-value forms of storytelling that are critical to engaging an organization in the future: To communicate a complex idea and spark

action, To get people working together in a group or

community, To share information and knowledge, To tame the grapevine and neutralize

negative gossip, To communicate who you are, To transmit values, and To lead people into the future.

A one-page matrix summarizing these seven forms can be found on page 152 of Transforming e-Knowledge: A Revolution in the Sharing of Knowledge by Norris, Mason, and Lefrere. “If you want understanding you have to

reenter the human world of stories. If you don’t have a story, you don’t have

understanding.” David Weinberger

Suggested Readings Denning, S. 2004. Squirrel, Inc.: A Fable of Leadership Through Storytelling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Norris, D., J. Mason, and P. Lefrere. 2003. Transforming e-Knowledge: A Revolution in the Sharing of Knowledge. Ann Arbor, MI: Society for College and University Planning. Epilogue: Addressing the Challenges Facing American Higher Education These vignettes from the future suggest how learners, parents, employers, institutional leaders, faculty, staff, new learning enterprises, policy makers, and other stakeholders will respond over the next few years to discover new approaches to learning and human development. These new approaches and offerings will be tested in the marketplace of ideas, attracting support and adjusting in the face of feedback. Taken together, these adaptations will address the six major challenges facing higher education. Choices, alternatives, blended approaches, and reinvented practices will characterize the emerging environment. The mix of the new and the old will be determined by how successfully each meets the evolving needs of stakeholders.


APPENDIX: ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGES FACING AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION

These matrices are an exercise in grounded theory. Many of the first green shoots of Track A (Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model) and Track B (Discover Future Business Model) reinventions are visible today to the trained and curious eye. The following six-part matrix portrays the array of Track A and B reinventions that are possible. These innovations are organized based on their capacity to address the six major challenges facing American higher education (Gilmour, Norris, and Speziale 2013 ).

Challenge #1: M any stu dents and their fam ilies can no longer afford a tr aditional college degr ee.

Challenge #2: Am erican h igh er education institutions are facing a sea o f red ink—declining state support, bur densom e institutional debt, unr ealistic instr uctional costs , plateauing tuition revenues, and intense com petition for adult lear ner s.

Challenge #3: Am erican h igh er education h as failed to assess student learning and per form ance.

Challenge #4: M ost institutions lack the or ganizational agility to m eet r apidly changing student lear ning needs and th e needs of the U.S. econom y.

Challenge #5: Higher edu cation has been unable to lever age technology to tr uly tr ansform lear ning and com petence building to be m ore accessible, r elevant, ch allenging, and aligned w ith w ork for ce needs.

Challenge #6: Higher edu cation has failed to learn fr om the disr uptive innovations pioneer ed by the for-pr ofit institutions and not-for-pr ofits acting like for -pr ofits (Univer sity of M ar yland University College [UMUC], Regis Univer sity, etc.).

This arsenal of possible reinventions contains the arrows that higher education could use to confront disruptive innovations. But what is the bow that institutions can use to fire these arrows into the future? Put simply, a conscious strategy of resilience building and performance excellence (Gilmour, Norris, and Speziale 2013 ) focused on fulfilling the value propositions that students, their families, employers, and public policy makers find compelling to meet the needs of the nation in the 21st century.


Challenge #1: Many students and their families can no longer afford a traditional college degree.

Track A: Reshape/Reinvent the Core Model Track B: Discover Future Business Model

Many institutions should reduce the total cost of completion of traditional degree programs.

Expand bridge programs with K–12, improve transfer and articulation at all levels, encourage/achieve accelerated completion.

Expand three-year baccalaureate degree options.

Streamline articulation/transfer, acceptance of credit for prior learning, open learning, and MOOCs of many kinds.

Expand post-baccalaureate certificates as a substitute for master’s degrees.

For traditional PhD track, reduce time to degree to four–five years.

Refine completion agenda to include sub-degree certificates, roads to rapid employment, and completion of baccalaureates while employed.

Create and refine low-cost, accelerated, competence-based models for baccalaureate degrees (selected institutions).

Western Governors University ($15,000 degree, 2.5 years).

$10,000 degree program institutions (Texas, Florida, Wisconsin).

Southern New Hampshire University (competence-based, $2,500/year, accelerated, 120 competences in a degree not 120 credit hours).

University of Wisconsin (competency-based programs for working adults, no time required on campus).

Reinvent student financial assistance and state support.

Reinvent financial aid to be primarily need based and simpler.

Emphasize the importance of class-based diversity in medallion institutions and provide financial assistance to enable it.

Redirect state support to pay for successful completion and performance, not enrollment.

Dramatically increase the focus on shortened and surer routes to gainful employment.

In K–12 education, introduce a clear linkage between learning, creativity and innovation, practical and work-based experiences, and life success.

Support vibrant apprenticeship programs starting in high school that lead to technical certificates and ultimately degrees.

Partner with industry and trade groups to certify competences recommended in various industries (e.g., high-tech manufacturing).

For initial technical placement, enable students to complete a few targeted courses leading to employment, then finish associate- or baccalaureate-level learning while employed.

Increase participation in cooperative education (co-op) programs at the undergraduate level.

Reorient learning and competence building to a Community of Practice model.

At the undergraduate level, use peer-to-peer (P2P) learning through Communities of Practice (CoP).

At the post-baccalaureate level, use CoP to provide alternatives to the master’s/PhD progression, e.g., reflective practitioner, master practitioner, mentor, and sage.

Dramatically reduce the cost of Continuing Professional Development and increase its connection to current practice.

Use the CoP model for all Continuing Professional Development.


Challenge #2: American higher education institutions are facing a sea of red ink—declining state support, burdensome institutional debt, unrealistic instructional costs, plateauing tuition revenues, and intense competition for adult learners.


Most institutions should reduce the cost of instruction.

Improve the efficiency of operations and pass savings on to learners.

For some institutions, reduce non-learning amenities and/or charge flexible tuition based on services chosen (a la carte model).

Consciously reduce the level of institutional indebtedness.

Reduce bonded indebtedness load as percentage of total budget.

Off-load financial risk of university-related ventures that are funded by partners who can help mitigate the risk.

Use public/private partnerships to develop shared facilities: libraries, learning resource centers, innovation centers, research labs, sports facilities, entertainment destinations.

Aggressively reduce the cost of operations and support services.

Deliver annual performance enhancements and cost reductions.

Aggressively deploy shared services, process reinvention, self-service, a la carte services, and other means of improving efficiency and productivity.

Examine and achieve physical space efficiencies.

Consistently deploy green, sustainable, “smart” buildings and operations.

Seek new revenue streams for existing facilities and programs.

Promote campus-based experiences; promote the campus as destination for cultural and developmental experiences.

Attract more entrepreneurs and practitioners to campus and increase research-, innovation-, and entrepreneurship-based revenue.

Attract alumni and other funders to invest/participate in ventures and continuing education; dramatically increase alumni engagement.

Right-size physical facilities for the 21st-century university.

Consciously reduce campus footprints; sell off surplus assets.

Reorient physical facilities to take into account increasing levels of online engagement of students.

Retrofit facilities and support services for more personalized, active, and open learning.

Reprogram campuses to achieve greater public use and interaction using public/private partnerships.

Increase amount of collaboration, innovation, and entrepreneurship space.

Share facilities with higher education and non-profit partners.

For high-demand institutions, consciously plan to use the current campus footprint to serve substantially more students.

Use online experiences to change the patterns of class attendance, enabling current physical classrooms to serve a larger total learner population.

Use MOOCs and other such arrangements to serve needs when possible.

Rotate students off campus to internships, co-op assignments, entrepreneurship projects, and at-home online learning to enable a larger total enrollment.

Explore continuing engagement of graduates through Communities of Practice.


Challenge #3: American higher education has failed to assess student learning and performance.


Make continuous performance measurement and improvement for learning and development a core part of the institutional culture.

Raise the expectations and training of senior leadership and the expectations of the board.

Elevate performance expectations for middle management, faculty, staff, and students.

Develop, deploy, and continuously improve frameworks for performance excellence.

Invest in personalized learning systems, learning analytics, and professional development in their use.

Use personalized learning to reinvent remedial learning, improving performance and accelerating completion.

Embed learning analytics and performance measurement in learning processes and use portfolios to demonstrate accomplishment.

Create teaching and learning degree tracks at research universities.

Focus on optimizing student performance and success.

Embed dynamic predictive analytics in academic processes.

Use Big Data techniques to understand “what works” in learning and leverage that knowledge.

Reinvent courses, enterprisewide, using National Center for Academic Transformation course development practices.

Extend student success to include career and workplace success.

Leverage personalized, adaptive learning and performance measurement to dramatically transform both institutional learning and free-range learning.

Open up learning resources and practices and the acceptance of learning/competence achieved elsewhere.

Unbundle learning, teaching, mentoring, evaluation, and certification/accreditation within and between institutions.

Shift the learning focus from meeting minimum standards to achieving personal best.

Enable greater degrees of flexibility so learners can create their own self-paced “personalized disciplines of one.”

Create lifelong personalized portfolios of achievement, possibly linked to national competence/employment banks.

Enable employers to easily confirm the demonstrated competences of potential hires in alignment with both general and specialized industry needs.

Aggressively pursue concurrent performance improvement and reduction in cost to improve value.

Use Big Data/analytics in personalized, adaptive learning environments to revolutionize the understanding of student success.

Encourage substantial investment by external solution providers in hosted, personalized, adaptive learning solutions.

Embed these solutions in digital text platforms, Next Gen learning management systems/analytics, Next Gen personalized learning networks.

Use external parties to provide capital, culture, and capacity.

Create expeditionary platforms/solutions capable of continuous adaptation.


Challenge #4: Most institutions lack the organizational agility to meet rapidly changing student learning needs and the needs of the U.S. economy.


Focus on organizational development to enhance institutional agility.

Develop board and executive leadership, commitment to reinvention, and preparation to take the heat and survive.

Reinvent shared governance model, accreditation, and curricular flexibility; address collective bargaining issues head-on.

Invest significantly more in faculty and staff development that is directed at keeping skills current and developing new skills needed to be effective in today’s disruptive environment.

Leverage adjunct and fixed-term faculty to achieve agility.

Enable specialization of faculty and learner development roles.

Develop skunk works and alternative competence pathways to foster innovation.

Accept credit for competence achieved through other reputable sources and weave this into the institutional value proposition.

Achieve resilience through reinvention of the institution’s core of existing services and business model in the face of disruption from new providers and the changing expectations of learners.

Establish a sense of urgency; mobilize champions.

Craft a conscious reinvention strategy including resourcing of new initiatives and reinvention of processes and practices.

Use multiple methods to raise reinvention capital: tax on existing programs, cost savings, reinvention campaign, reallocation.

Partner with external enterprises/solution providers to achieve the capital, culture, and talent necessary to create breakthrough innovations and deployments.

Achieve resilience through discovery and pursuit of future business models. Create a separate organization to develop next-generation practices that will meet the learning needs of the future.

Partner with external enterprises to achieve the capital, culture, and talent necessary to create and sustain breakthrough innovations.

Do not retreat from offerings that may cannibalize Track A reinventions over time.

Be receptive to open and free-range learning-based innovations to originate new solutions, services, and value propositions that institutions cannot create alone.

Address niche markets with distinctive value proposition requirements.

Create degree- and certificate-completion programs for working adults that include embedded mentorship.

Create CoP-based models to deal with economy-focused skills in entrepreneurship and innovation.

Turn competences in innovation, entrepreneurship, and problem solving into skills that can be achieved by every learner regardless of curriculum.

Expand experiential-, service-, and problem-focused learning experiences.

Use CoPs to serve post-baccalaureate/professional degree practice areas—engineering, law, medicine, and health science.

Form consortia to serve academic disciplines in an online, global, and distributed manner.

Form global networks/CoPs and serve global needs through next-generation MOOCs and community-based engagement. Use for low-demand disciplines (geography, rare languages) plus emerging ones.


Challenge #5: Higher education has been unable to leverage technology to truly transform learning and competence building to be more accessible, relevant, challenging, and aligned with workforce needs.


Decisively commit to Information Communications Technology (ICT) as a “game changer.”

Use ICT to align efforts to create greater value for higher education’s stakeholders—learners, their families, faculty and researchers, alumni, staff, policy makers, and the public at large.

Use technology-enhanced learning and competence building to reinvent existing practices and create accountability.

Leverage technology to optimize student success and enhance institutional productivity/effectiveness.

Use shared services (libraries, administrative functions, low-demand disciplines) to lower costs and improve services.

Replace the textbook model with eBook and open eResources models.

Over time, turn to cloud-based, next-generation ERP, LMS, and analytics platforms and solutions.

Overcome talent gaps (in ICT, performance measurement and enhancement, analytics, and Big Data).

Reduce costs; improve service continuously/aggressively.

Create multi-institution communities of learning practice.

Create new competence- and experience-based learning experiences that form new knowledge pathways and fill knowledge gaps.

Example: Rather than 120 semester credit hours, 120 competences.

Deconstruct courses into competence-building experiences.

Develop badges/certificates, especially in high-demand areas like entrepreneurship and innovation.

Deploy to support continuous learning, using MOOCs to feed Communities of Practice.

Target programs on a large scale to improve the educational attainment of post-traditional learners in the working age population (25–64)—mentoring and “success making” embedded in programs in a CoP environment.

Use technology and Big Data to empower students to take control of their learning and competence development and “open up” higher education.

Actively involve students in reinvention.

Develop students into free agents, job makers, and success makers.

Use technology to open up the intellectual property, research, and venture resources of colleges and universities.

Couple this with crowd-sourcing and -funding of ventures to create a tidal wave of 21st-century entrepreneurship and innovation.

Prepare learners/graduates to be freelancers, entrepreneurs, and job makers.


Challenge #6: Higher education has failed to learn from the disruptive innovations pioneered by for-profit institutions and not-for-profits acting like for-profits (University of Maryland University College [UMUC], Regis University, etc.)


For every institution, focus on providing distinctive, cost-effective value for stakeholders.

For all institutions, understand and leverage the services delivered that are most enduring and create the most appealing value propositions.

For traditional institutions, double down on immersive experiences that advance overall development and maturing, social and employment networks for life, research and innovation, entrepreneurship, and deep faculty/student relationships.

For traditional institutions, support the parts of the immersive campus experience—educational, social, leadership, co-curricular—that offer abiding value.

Overcome and de-emphasize commodification (courses, bundled offerings).

Deploy the techniques used by for-profits—re-engineered delivery and business models.

Design learning experiences to suit the needs of accelerated, adult learners.

Place a greater focus on meeting employer needs.

Deploy team-based design of learning resources, consistent application in all instances of courses.

Unbundle learning, teaching, assessment, and certification.

Modify faculty roles to increase productivity significantly.

Rely more on P2P learning.

Embed predictive analytics and interventions in courses and academic support services.

Reshape employer expectations and the means for meeting them and deal with the entire preK–20 through employment spectrum.

Meet employer needs through a combination of institutional and free-range open learning, plus certification of competence.

Remember that learning and competence building span organizational boundaries.

Keep in mind that adaptive, personalized learning solutions begin in preK–6 and continue through the rest of one’s life.

Expand the definition of “success.”

Change preK–20 focus to become “success makers,” providing counseling, advice, mentoring, and follow-up on all aspects of academic, career, and life success.

Engage more in competence certification, a growth industry.

Focus on success making for particular niches, tailoring the experience to their needs:

Working adults, degree completion

Professional training

Traditional Arts and Sciences disciplines, enriched with real-world experiences

Continuing development of practitioners in different fields (CoP)

Change the focus of career and life expectations.

Prepare learners for lives as freelancers, free agents, and success makers.

Provide habits of mind, body, and spirit for lifelong learning and personal reinvention.


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Smith, V. C. 2012. Scaling Up: Four Ideas to Increase College Completion. In Game Changers, ed. D. G. Oblinger, 105–113. Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: www.educause.edu/library/resources/chapter-8-scaling-four-ideas-increase-college-completion.

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Adler, P., C. Heckscher , and L. Prusak. 2011. Building a Collaborative Enterprise. Harvard Business Review, July–

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Collins, J. 2001. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t. New York: HarperCollins. ConnectEdu Education and Career Management. 2010. Welcome to Connect College and Career Planning. Retrieved July 23, 2013, from the World Wide Web: http://connectedu.net. Denning, S. 2004. Squirrel, Inc.: A Fable of Leadership Through Storytelling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Dewhurst, M., B. Hancock, and D. Ellsworth. 2013. Redesigning Knowledge Work. Harvard Business Review, January–February, 59–72. Downes, L., and P. F. Nunes. 2013. Big-Bang Disruption. Harvard Business Review, March, 46–56.


Duin, A. H., and L. L. Baer. 2010. Shared Leadership for a Green, Global, and Google World. Planning for Higher

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Evans, A., and E. Chun. 2012. Creating a Tipping Point: Strategic Human Resources in Higher Education. ASHE Higher Education Report, vol. 38, no. 1. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Fain, P. 2012. Majoring in Outcomes. Inside Higher Ed, October 17.

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AnnArbor.com, September 21.

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Winter, 35–41.

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Sloan Management Review, Spring, 45–52.

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AAuutthhoorr BBiiooggrraapphhiieess Donald Norris is president and founder of Strategic Initiatives, a management consulting firm that specializes in leading and navigating change, crafting and executing strategy, and enhancing enterprise performance. He is recognized as a thought leader and expert practitioner whose clients have included a blue-chip roster of corporations, colleges and universities, and associations and other non-profit organizations. Norris is currently directing consulting projects exploring breakthrough approaches to optimizing student success; improving performance through shared and managed services; and accelerating entrepreneurship, innovation, and the commercializing of ideas from universities. He is a provocative author and practitioner in transformative change, organizational development, and analytics. Before becoming a consultant he was a researcher and administrator at the University of Houston, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan, and Virginia Tech. These experiences culminated in his serving for six years in the position of director of planning and policy analysis at the University of Houston. Later, he became a senior fellow at the Institute for Educational Transformation at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the La Jolla Institute.

Dr. Norris has co-authored a series of books and monographs for the Society for College and University Planning that have dramatically influenced the field of strategic planning over the past 30 years: A Guide for New Planners (1984), Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century (1995), Unleashing the Power of Perpetual Learning (1997), Transforming e-Knowledge: A Revolution in the Sharing of Knowledge (2003), and A Guide to Planning for Change (2008.) Norris was awarded SCUP’s 1994 Distinguished Service Award.

Robert Brodnick is vice president for strategy and innovation at Strategic Initiatives. He has worked in the fields of planning, strategy, research, and organizational change and development for over 20 years. He holds specials skills in strategy; innovation; and organizational development, design, and intervention. He has worked in the areas of eLearning and technology-supported learning in several institutional settings. Brodnick is an expert facilitator of human process from dyads to small groups to large scale retreats and has notable experience with leadership groups, boards, and planning bodies as well as with strategic and creative solutions. He has managed technological implementation of business intelligence, data warehousing, security, learning systems, and analytics. He has served three universities over the past 20 years, and his work has focused on building institutional capacity and effectiveness through strategy, planning, and innovation. He has direct experience with institutional effectiveness; assessment and program review; institutional accreditation; enrollment management to include retention, admissions, financial aid, and registrar functions; and sustainability.

Drs. Brodnick and Norris are currently collaborating on a variety of strategic planning processes that involve preparing institutions for personalized, adaptive learning. Brodnick has been active in the Association for Managers of Innovation (where he currently serves as a member of the board of directors), the Society for College and University Planning (where he serves as a faculty member in the SCUP Planning Institute), the International Association of Applied Psychology, the Association for Institutional Research, and others. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Higher Education Data Sharing consortium and president of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education Directors group. Brodnick was honored by the Society for College and University Planning with its 2009 SCUP Award for Institutional Innovation and Integration.


Paul Lefrere is a principal with Strategic Initiatives. He is a recognized expert in innovation and sense making of the future. He has shaped many European Union-funded projects using the open technologies of the future. He is senior counselor with the firm Images (UK). He is a professor at Finland’s Centre for Vocational Education at the University of Tampere and has been an e-learning thought leader for over 30 years. He is also widely recognized for his insights and consulting skills on knowledge creation and management, knowledge services, reusable knowledge objects, and web-based learning services. Lefrere completed a distinguished career with the British Open University and Microsoft (where he had senior roles). He has participated in a range of strategic planning projects for Strategic Initiatives.

Drs. Norris and Lefrere jointly founded Strategic Initiative’s practice areas in competence building and strategy maps/balanced scorecards. He and Norris have co-authored several monographs and articles, including Transforming e-Knowledge: A Revolution in the Sharing of Knowledge, “Action Analytics: Measuring and Improving Performance that Matters in Higher Education,” and “Transforming Online Learning and Competence Building.”

Joseph E. (Tim) Gilmour is president emeritus of Wilkes University, in which role he served for 11 years. Under his leadership, Wilkes grew in enrollment (+nearly 50 percent), reputation, and financial health. Gilmour is known as an innovative leader who has championed transformation and a strong performance excellence culture throughout his career. His over 40 years of experience also include serving as provost at Northwest Missouri State University, vice president for strategic planning at Georgia Tech, and executive assistant to the president at the University of Maryland College Park. He has served on numerous boards including the National Total Quality Forum, the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Pennsylvania, and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. He is a nationally recognized leader in the performance and quality movement in higher education. He and Norris are currently co-authoring a monograph, Performance Excellence in a Time of Disruptive Change.

Linda Baer is a principal at i4SOLUTIONS and Strategic Initiatives. She has provided 30 years of leadership in higher education. She is currently the acting president of Minnesota State University, Mankato, where she is working on building analytics capacities to optimize student success. Together with Ann Hill Duin, she established i4SOLUTIONS focusing on inspiring leaders to new levels of innovation, integration, and implementation of solutions that improve student success and transform institutions for the future. Baer was a senior program officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Postsecondary Success, working on improving student engagement and success and establishing a national platform for analytics in higher education. She presents nationally on academic innovations, educational transformation, the development of alliances and partnerships, the campus of the future, shared leadership, and, most recently, on action analytics. Book chapters she has co-authored include “Building the Capacity for Change” in Innovations in Higher Education and “From Metrics to Analytics, Reporting to Action: Analytics’ Role in Changing the Learning Environment” in The Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies.

She and Norris are co-authoring A Toolkit on Building Organizational Capacity for Analytics with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Norris and Baer have co-authored a number of seminal publications in analytics: “Action Analytics: Measuring and Improving Performance that Matters in Higher Education” in EDUCAUSE Review, “What Every Campus Leader Needs to Know About Analytics,” and “A Toolkit for Building Organizational Capacity in Analytics.” She has also served on the Society for College and University Planning’s Board of Directors.


Ann Hill Duin is a professor in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota where her research focuses on shared leadership and the impact of digital technologies on communication and collaboration. Having pioneered the university’s first online course, she continues to teach hybrid and online courses on information design and international professional communication and currently is co-leading a constructivist MOOC. Dr. Hill Duin has taught and conducted research across K–12, undergraduate, graduate, and corporate levels in the United States and abroad. Over the past 15 years she served in central administration as vice provost, associate vice president for IT, and, most recently, as interim VP and CIO. She brought multiple offices together and established the IT Executive Oversight Group responsible for project prioritization, arbitration of escalated issues, and assurance of strategic alignment of investments to university goals, including the University of Minnesota’s focus on business intelligence and academic analytics. Her ongoing commitment to shared leadership results in collective vision and action; outcomes include strategic alignment and resulting initiatives, investment in academic analytics, an effective and efficient IT governance system, and cost avoidance of millions.

Stephen B. Norris is a research associate at Strategic Initiatives. He holds a master’s in public policy from George Mason University and a BA in history and economics from The College of William and Mary. His public policy experience spans 12 years spent on various issues in the fields of communications, healthcare, and education. As research associate with Strategic Initiatives, he has supported a three-year stream of projects dealing with action analytics and culminating in A Toolkit for Building Organizational Capacity for Analytics. As part of this initiative he administered on online community of practice in analytics. Norris also has served as a research associate on a variety of strategic planning and change management projects for Strategic Initiatives.

. . . every budget meeting is a trial because priorities aren’t established.

. . . an institution goes on probation because it did not “pass” planning on its accreditation review.

. . . a system opens multiple new buildings on campuses across the state but does not have the funding to operate them.

. . . a new president’s leadership falters because his or her staff resists working transparently or collaboratively.

Integrated planning is the linking of vision, priorities, people, and the physical institution in a flexible system of evaluation, decision-making and action. It shapes and guides the entire organization as it evolves over time and within its community.

A L I G N I N S T I T U T I O N A L P R I O R I T I E S W I T H R E S O U R C E S

Three years of using an integrated budget process, one

where funding decisions were transparent and clearly tied to strategic goals, brought about “the end of whining” for a Midwestern, regional university.

M A K E A C C R E D I T A T I O N W O R K F O R Y O U

The SCUP Planning Institute helped put integrated planning to work at a Southern university and it resulted in a “no concerns or problems” accreditation review.

C O N T A I N A N D R E D U C E C O S T S

As part of a comprehensive sustainability effort, integrated planning meets the requirements of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), and that adds up to savings in utilities for campuses across the country.

R e m o v e S i lo S W o R k C o l l a b o R at i v e ly U S e R e S o U R C e S W i S e ly

You’ve heard the stories . . . What is I n t e g r a t e d P l a n n I n g ?

Benefits of I n t e g r a t e d P l a n n I n g

Core Competencies for I n t e g r a t e d P l a n n I n g

Senior leaders excel when the people who report to them understand how essential it is to

» engage the right people » in the right conversations » at the right time and » in the right way.

Integrated planning might not solve every problem on campus, but it is sure to provide a solution to the most important issues. To be effective, and for you as a senior campus leader to be successful, everyone who plans on your campus needs these core competencies:

E N G A G E T H E R I G H T P E O P L E : Identify the people who need to be in the room and work with them effectively.

S P E A K T H E I R L A N G U A G E : Create and use a common planning vocabulary for communicating.

K N O W H O W T O M A N A G E A P L A N N I N G P R O C E S S : Facilitate an integrated planning process and manage change.

P R O D U C E A S H A R E D P L A N : Produce an integrated plan that can be implemented and evaluated.

R E A D T H E P L A N N I N G C O N T E X T : Collect and filter relevant information.

G A T H E R A N D D E P L O Y R E S O U R C E S : Identify alternative and realistic resource strategies.

This intensive, three-step program on integrated planning in higher education is designed to develop the six competencies of integrated planning in participants.

Taken in sequence, the SCUP Planning Institute Steps I, II, & III represent a unique merging of the knowledge of experts in planning with a dedication to using assessment to continuously enhance each workshop’s outcomes for participants.

Institute faculty members are drawn from across the country and the world, from all types of institutions. They facilitate learning through engaging exercises, small group work, and analysis of the SCUP Walnut College Case Study.

S C U P P l a n n I n g I n S t I t U t e The Steps in Brief

S T E P I : F O U N D A T I O N S O F P L A N N I N G I N H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N

S T e P I is the 30,000-foot view of integrated planning. The aim of this step is to provide participants with a clear understanding of what integrated planning models generally look like, what elements are important in integrated planning, and how the big picture ideas, such as mission, vision, and values, impact integrated planning. It is also an introduction into the vocabulary of planning.

Participants in the initial workshop in the series of three use SCUP’s Walnut College Case Study to apply the basic elements of integrated planning. The value of evidence-based planning is emphasized, as is the central place that the academic mission holds in focusing and driving campus decisions.

S T E P I I : F O C U S E D K N O W L E D G E F O R I N T E G R A T E D P L A N N I N G P R O C E S S E S

S T e P I I takes a look at the process of planning. What does it take to create a plan? What details are involved in fleshing out a plan? What does a planning document look like? And what moves a plan into action? This step expands the vocabulary of each individual discipline into the range of another—academics, facilities, and budget/finance.

The intersection of academic, resource/budget, and facilities planning defines a nexus for learning-specific lessons in integrated planning. The SCUP Walnut College Case Study is the basis for practicing an integrated planning process that results in a plan reflecting the collaboration of all functional areas at Walnut College. In the process of creating the plan, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the needs and issues confronting key functional areas on campus during a planning initiative.

S T E P I I I : I N T E G R A T E D P L A N N I N G — W O R K I N G W I T H R E L A T I O N S H I P R E A L I T I E S

S T e P I I I begins the process of managing the changes envisioned and set into motion by Steps I and II. It’s all about the people—individuals who can stop a process dead in its tracks, or pick it up and run with it. It brings the language of organizational change and psychology into the everyday office where it can inspire, convince, or mediate the cultural, social, and political dynamics that make change a real challenge.

Step III focuses on the cases that campuses bring to the workshop for its active learning component. Through the development of a change profile, each participant creates strategies for moving an integrated planning process forward on campus. Understanding the nature of relationships on campus—up, down, and sideways—and how they affect the planning and change processes can make the difference in achieving the institution’s goals.

T H E S C U P P L A N N I N G I N S T I T U T E O N Y O U R C A M P U S

Tough economic times require a time-tested approach to strategic planning. The most effective planning comes from an integrated approach that is structured, assessed, and successfully implemented. SCUP now offers members the opportunity to bring the planning institute to your campus with your team!

Bring the institute to your campus and you’ll . . .

» Be positioned for accreditation » Receive a program focused on your institution » Create an integrated planning process that

works for your campus » Save money on travel and registration

Multiple campuses can collaborate on offering a planning institute to help defray costs. everyone benefits through using integrated planning processes.

Whether you are new to the field or are an experienced professional, you will find the institute is a concrete way to create an effective network of planning colleagues, learn best practices, and grow in your career.

Attend as a SCUP member and save on registration: www.scup.org/join

www.scup.org/planninginstitute | [email protected]

B R I N G T H E B E N E F I T S O F I N T E G R A T E D P L A N N I N G T O Y O U R C A M P U S :

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