hi everybody thanks for coming today on the last day of South by it's great to see you here um I'm super excited to have a discussion today about a really important topic that's essentially about higher education and value and go to more laser focus on that value for Learners who are both looking for a degree but also looking for the skills and the competencies and the credentials to get that first job I'm Marnie bakerstein I am the chief content officer at Coursera and I'm here today with a super exciting panel who is going to help us to look at this topic from a variety of different perspectives both from a higher education lens as well as from an industry lens so with that I'm going to let each of them introduce themselves starting with Robert Mcdonald hi everybody thanks for showing up today I know how this is a Die Hard crowd right so I I'm Robert Mcdonald dean of libraries and Senior Vice Provost for online education at the University of Colorado Boulder and I'm here today because you know we've been working with stackable credentials and our master's programs for a bit now and we're starting to bring on some more micro credentials with our badging solutions that we helped uh kind of put in place during parts of the pandemic and I'm really excited about what those can offer our students at the University of Colorado bowler and really excited about what those can offer other people as they go to get our credentials or other credentials and they're able to stack those together to help with uh you know their skills in the workforce and I'm Amy card service senior vice president of strategic Workforce relationships and CompTIA is the world's largest trade Association and certifying body in cyber security I.T and Tech so we really think about how does industry need great workers how do we help provide that pipeline how do we work with folks in academics too to make that happen glad to be here thanks everybody for being here my name is Deborah kiak France and I'm the AVP and Dean of University connected learning at the University of Utah our unit is in charge of the online portfolio at the University of Utah but also contains the traditional continuing and professional education group and I'm here because I we are in the middle of exploring how do we provide micro credentials to two different audiences our on-campus students or or our online students as part of or in addition to their degrees but also to the community so that we can help build the workforce that the state and region need wonderful so really thank you thank you all for being here I'm super excited to get started so we're going to just a quick overview of what we're going to do today we're going to start with some student student and employer perspectives from research that Coursera has been doing with a couple of research Partners This research actually is coming out today so at the end of the presentation there's a little QR code that you can sort of look at to connect with that research once we sort of quickly go through the primary sort of findings around trends that we're noting across the globe on this front we're then going to talk about um how that links to application inside of a degree pathway the impact it has on Learners the implications it might have for Workforce Development and then sort of best practices hits misses opportunities challenges for implementing the integration of of Industry credentials into degree Pathways and then we're going to finish up with a q a session for you so please mark down your questions as we're going along the more operational the better we have a really operational crew here today and we'll we'll have a conversation about how this might apply at your institution so uh let's start with the the research so we have recently undergone some research across Coursera Learners globally to understand a couple of things one is how how are learners valuing micro credentials as a part of their educational journey and how our employers valuing those same credentials in their hiring practices we hear a lot about this there's all kinds of chatter about micro credentials and Industry recognized credentials and do students really value them do employers really value them and we just really wanted to find out we looked across the countries that are highlighted here we're looking in the U.S but across the UK Middle East India Australia and got a pretty good end on our learner population in those countries to sort of sort of assess these trends so before we start I just want to this is like a little maybe a little bit nerdy I don't think Amy will think this is nerdy but I do want to make a distinction between sort of perhaps industry endorsed or university endorsed um professional certificate so for example Coursera has many over 30 professional certificates endorsed by Google and meta and IBM but those are different from sort of certifications that are are that are assessed by uh wonderful professional associations and industries like CompTIA that are truly industry recognized so we do have an emerging taxonomy around micro credentials that I think is a little confusing to us and to employers but right now we're sort of splitting those into two two buckets so let's look at some Global perspectives and let's start with the student so um oh sorry let's start with students and employers we're going to have some Global slides so you know it's really really interesting that what we're seeing is especially post covid rapidly increasing valuation of micro credentials by both Learners and employers and here you see ninety percent of students believe across across the board the professional certificate will help them stand out with employers and 88 percent of employers believe a professional certificate helps a candidate stand out in a hiring process so if we look at that if we dive into the student perspective we see that 76 percent of students across those regions believe that professional certificates make them on average more likely to enroll in a program that incorporates them and 86 percent of the students surveyed agree that a professional certificate will likely get them a job or make them more competitive in the job market now this is is a sentiment that we've been seeing see last 10 . you see this kind of sort of unified sense of the value of a certificate for Learners and that they're actually looking for these certifications as part of their Pathway to to degree so the other thing that I found interesting and this is coming from a background where I was at Columbia and I was at Penn and I was here in Texas and we were always trying to create these certificates these professional certificates are short form credentials for Learners based on our research expertise and I think there's still room in the marketplace for that but you can see that the vast majority of students are really interested globally are interested in those certificates that come from industry and that are branded or that are are endorsed by Major employers they're looking for that trust signal as they're choosing these certificates and I think that was that was kind of interesting to me the second thing that I think is really interesting and makes sense is they're also at the same time wanting to understand that those experiences are credit eligible so that they can stack them in into their degree Pathways so they they don't want to do extra education if they're in a degree program in addition to their degree pathway they want something that's going to be perhaps blended into that pathway as a career elective or Etc and they're going to get some credit in their academic path from that as well I I find that really interesting about this data um and they're also really interesting 90 of students believe that the professional certificates will help them stand out and get a job and as you can see that this is really pretty consistent across regions that are very very different from each other in terms of their economic profile the different Industries and sectors that are in those countries and this is this is fascinating as well I think that these numbers had we done them pre-prand pandemic would have been a little bit lower or maybe even more variable from country to country but here in our post-pandemic world we're seeing a sort of global reaction on the part of Learners or a global evaluation on the part of learners for these micro credentials as part of as part of their path so let's take a quick look at employer perspectives so 97 of the employers that we talk to are already using or considering moving towards a skills-based hiring approach we hear a lot about skills-based hiring there are a lot of studies coming out around it I think generally speaking specifically in it and it related fields this does not mean that they are not valuing a degree but they are looking for certifications and certificates and sort of Competency and skills validation as part of that profile of a learner that they're going to hire and then employers are 72 percent more likely to hire a student with a professional certificate this is also true across the regions again in a very uniform way I was kind of shocked at the uniformity of this I sort of thought that there was Enlightenment in certain countries or employer sectors maybe not as much as others that were trending more traditional but this is a really interesting set of findings 88 of employers believe that a professional certificate will strengthen a candidate's job application and in many sectors we're seeing that short form credential becoming enough in many cases for that entry level position into a good job or a good job pathway so employers want professional certificates that show proof of skills and skill proficiency skill uh scores so what we're finding with employers is they are also really trusting in many cases certificates that are endorsed by other employers because that's meaningful to them well what's truly meaningful to them and that's what we're finding in our work across course Sarah is that we have the right kind of Assessments to determine competency and Mastery level of Competency so that they can use that as a signal for the types of jobs and roles that they can really depend on that micro credential and for producing in their hiring decisions so so that's what we found and again this research is coming out today I encourage you to check the QR code at the end of the presentation and sort of check that out it's a very detailed report and I think you'll find it interesting uh so I'm going to turn to my panel now and say you know what do you think like what's your response to this research and what's resonating with you or what maybe was surprising and we can start Robert start us off yeah I'll kick it off if you want I you know I think for us uh we were not surprised in seeing the research because even with some of our own programs that don't they don't have professional certificates built in but they were built as stackable certificates so that you could build upon those certificates to get a master's degree right and we had started uh about six or eight years ago a post back in computer science now that was not designed that way it was designed to take the two extra years and then you get another undergrad degree in computer science and it was a data science related version of computer science undergrad degree well what we saw is people would get enough training from the courses that were in that track and then they would leave us because they would already be promoted get a better job so we had not thought about doing the stackable certificates that way and that's what we learned and built into some of our master's degrees with the stackable certificates that being said if you could also tie in some of these other certificates I know it would be useful to the that demographic of students who take our online program which are in that 25 to 40 range they're working professionals with families and all kinds of things going on so they want to get the most bang for their Buck out of the education that they're getting I'll jump in and say I think Mariah's it to me students aren't stupid [Laughter] um there definitely is this desire in most people to get to productivity and my career was driven by opportunism we talked about that in the green room and I think a lot of people especially with the diverse backgrounds or economic challenges are also very opportunistic coming out of the pandemic we've all had to be a little creative and more opportunistic um and obviously leisurely Learning for Life is a beautiful thing but it's also a luxury and um I think this day doesn't surprise me because uh globally coming from the I.T and cyber security sector we see that folks want skills to pay the bills and um that certification there's a lot of taxonomy in that terminology means an ISO certified process to capture industry knowledge and validate that job role based certification um they realize that's a skill and I think there's a little confusion around which ones are worth something but we're working on that thanks yeah um I wish I had a tagline like your skills to pay the bills um and I think um what what you can steal it it's totally cool thank you okay thank you I'll trade market effort um so um what I really what struck me about the report was that 90 88 were 90 of the students said we think this will help us on the job market and thankfully 88 of employers said yeah it does it does help you stand out and I think the trick is how do we make these skills-based credentials available across different audiences whether it's our own students who are who are seeking degrees um whether it's the community members because that's also in my portfolio and how do we work it so that students gain the skills they need to work in the field that they've chosen so we're not asking them necessarily to move into a tech field but rather recognizing that every field that some someone chooses has a tech component in it and people who work in there will do better if they have those Tech skills and I just I have to point this out we're all Humanities people who have augmented our skills with tech skills and Tech understanding should we reveal French literature music composition German language German literature I mean this is crazy this is crazy yeah yeah so I'm all for those Humanities degrees but you know I had to get that job through work study student experience in Tech to really pay the bills right yeah indeed perspective that stood out immediately to me is that both Learners and employers are looking for a trust signal that is not a traditional education traditional higher education trustee can I jump in and say something yes the most embarrassing moment of my professional career happened right before the pandemic at a convening of land-grant universities because um I was asked to speak about what's a certification and how do they fit into degrees and would you not be interested in this is that after the pandemic I think things have really changed I love seeing this research but um I was speaking to a lovely audience a very committed Deans and folks who'd come in to do this and I said you know the cool thing about and I have a way of kind of cutting to the chase the cool thing about our certifications is skills pay the bills and they can help your students get a job I had about five people jump up and jump down my throat saying we're here to educate students for life and then proceed to say that doesn't matter to our audience and these are land grant universities with cardinal directions and their names um where I'm sure everybody writing a check to go to school was thinking yeah I want to be educated for life but I actually would like to get a job when I'm done here yeah and it was such a like whoa moment where the Ivory Tower in these you know Great Schools but they really very few of them got it before the pandemic and it really was sort of shortly before that I thought gosh have I really hit a nerve here said something totally absurd that you might want to you know Bridge a German major with some tech skills to end up with a really cool career um and it was just it was obvious to me at the break that I was persona non grata with a lot of folks and it was shocking to me and I think you know when you hit that kind of nerve you're on to something yeah yeah first for sure and I I would just to stack on that just a little bit um that has always been my experience in traditional hair Ed I've been trying to promote short form credentials or incremental value on the way to degree for a long time in my career it's been one of my one of my big goals um that is generally speaking the mindset and if if they allow for these certificates to be part of the journey it's generally as an extracurricular not integrated to the curriculum yeah a lot of it was in the people who got it were the non-credits out of the house continuing at the global dot alumni alumni education and that was a really one of the best things for me I recently was the chief academic officer and Provost at Western Governors University one of the best things for me about that role is they did not have that mindset at WGU at all they totally integrated third-party certifications into that learning pathway and boy did that have an impact on student decision to enroll but also retention and completion and I think that's changing a little bit so I've only been at Utah for two and a half years but what I hear is when this idea about skills credentials was brought up let's call it six or seven years ago it hit academic Senate and the the response was what do you mean our degrees aren't good enough how dare you now in the meantime we've also seen parent and student surveys and when they say what are your what's the top reason you're coming to school why are you doing a degree it's to get a job like so from from our customers it's to get a job and now we've got and thanks to the pandemic I think we do have there's there's a change mindset I think it's an easier path yeah so that's a great segue into the next question which is you've all either on one side of the fence or the other side of the fence been involved in trying to integrate um certificates professional certificates certifications into the learner Pathway to degree either as an on-ramp or part of the degree or part of the alumni service you know what what has been easy what are the sort of the wins that you've experienced on this front and you know what's what's still hard about it I'll jump in on that one um for for our programs that are have been working on that and we've got a couple one's our outdoor recreation economy Masters and the other is our masters in data science they work a lot more with industry so I think that's part of the driver there is they see what where industry you know wants them to go with some of the skill sets and credentials and how they're tying that to their Master's programs and that's going to be something that they're going to keep working on and iterating and their stackable approach to what they're doing with the graduate certificate stacking up to the degree I think are really helpful but we see a lot of people taking those same certificates for non-credit because they're just after the skill set you know to really take back to move up to the next level uh you know where they're currently working and that's that's what's interesting to me is it's kind of a naturally evolving thing especially with the programs that are really tied to uh to the corporate side of things I would just add briefly one of the challenges we see is what I call the we call in our industry the train to certification ratio so some folks will take a class on Cyber Security Plus or Security Plus our certification um and then never take the professional proctored exam that would be a half day exercise because they you know didn't it wasn't built into the course or they moved on to the next course and where life happened um and that is a challenge because even people will think they've done it they'll they'll say oh I'm Security Plus certified well if you didn't sit for the proctored exam you're actually not so I think that that train or that learn to certify Gap needs to kind of be built into the car are you seeing any Innovative approaches across institutions for solving for that because it could be that they don't know they need to take it it could be they don't have the money to take it I think they need to build it in from the start that's the best way to do it um not say oh they'll take it after the class I mean gosh who's going to do that there's going to be an outlier yeah we've actually in some classes have built the exam in so that the cost of the exam is built into the the tuition for the program and that's that I think is the way to do it um with us what we're trying to do is align strongly with the academic side of the house so we're aligning micro credentials with Student Success initiatives we're aligning micro credentials we're bringing the academic side of the house into the professional Ed continuing education side because that's the only way we can start to at least right now build non-credit to credit Pathways if there is right from the design the curricular design there's academic input so that there can be for us the trust doesn't necessarily come from the corporate side of the house but it has to come from the academic side of the house and then the the area that's still challenging is who owns this so the University of Utah is part of a system of 16 institutions eight of them are degree granting and eight of them are are technical colleges and so now there's kind of some rumbling about who actually owns the micro credential space and so so we are also trying at the state level to to walk that line in a respectful way but also serve the communities we know we need to serve and to serve our own students so that's that's a challenge yeah so just to dig into a little bit to what you said what we're seeing from the survey um is that students and employers are gravitating toward industry endorsed or recognized certificates and certifications that are branded IBM branded meta branded like what is your faculty especially and I would ask at the undergraduate level because we're really kind of biasing toward graduate level but what is the faculty's openness to recognizing those achievements for credit in their degree paths I should I should I should use words um so it's varied um so we have won one Professor who's integrating AWS into his curriculum um maybe at the undergraduate level more at The Graduate level but what he does is he uses those skills and augments them with the the conceptual or the theoretical as well yeah we do have some faculty at the undergraduate level integrating and it's not industry recognized but integrating Adobe certificates into their curriculum because they want they want students to use Adobe tools to be better communicators but that that could be about it we see it broadly in the community college level I think we'd love to understand what the challenges are in the four years well you know going back to that same question it really varies Department to department and what the department is interested in doing and you know from our our perspective as a campus right our micro credentials and badging are all based out of the registrar's office which uh you know it's not always the case you know when they set it up that way but the big thing there is to let the Departments decide what they want to do and they would do it in a similar way you know not quite as complicated as setting up a graduate certificate or something but figuring out the micro credential then having their curriculum committee review it and move that forward and so that's you know a similar path that we would do for any kind of academic curriculum but I think it's a good model to follow because it really lets the programs that want to move quicker or work with the industry more move in that way and we've got a lot of push right now from our state to take a look at prior learning assessment especially at the undergraduate level and I think that's going to open up some new things that you know historically you know we've never done much prior learning assessment at CU Boulder but because of that we'll start taking a look at things that we can do the community colleges in Colorado do quite a bit of that right now in fact I know they've mapped out say Google certificates across their computer science curriculum and that's a big thing that's going to be coming pretty soon you said a word that excited me it was quickly industry recognized credentials are iterating I mean change in I.T and cyber is so fast right so boom there's a new one can we really be quick in the University I was kind of surprised you're that word I know that the things I've been doing have been quick for higher ed so I hope they'll keep maybe we should Define quick on that speed right yeah yeah yeah it all depends on what it is like right right now we've been working on some capstones with Folks at a couple different Industries with some of our online programs and those have worked really well they've moved pretty quickly because what we're doing is taking their you know scenarios and letting the students uh basically work on them with that Capstone and that makes I think that's a good entry point for a lot of departments to figure out can I work with this industry is that going to work for me can I jump in with one question back to industry recognized credentials into academic institutions is that your faculty didn't come up that way probably right they did a PhD they probably never sat for a AWS that didn't exist then maybe a CompTIA did um and it seems like people pass on what they know right they want to so how do you combat is that an issue no it is an issue and I think it goes back to it now I'm going to get all I'm going to nerd out Humanities nerd out right here um it comes down to that you mentioned it in The Green Room it's the applied versus theoretical it's the theory versus Praxis and in the academy the theory rules and so there's there's this I mean a conceptual tension because these are skills based and that's not what we do um and and I've seen it my whole career I've seen it since I was an undergraduate I could see this tension so I think it's it's more than just they didn't experience it I think the savvier ones are the ones who say this is what my students need let me give it to them and I think that's where the light bulb goes and they're and they're understanding that it's not either or it's and it's and yes I would agree and and I think that's that's import important I I am really proud of the work that we're doing at Coursera right now around credit eligibility for these industry certifications so whether or not an industry or a higher education institution chooses to award credit we're working on global credit eligibility across sort of uh credit accreditation organizations to make sure that it should a higher education institution decide to do it that that eligibility is established through ACE or through ntsc or any of the global groups that do that work and I'll jump in with the pla so and I wrote down curriculum committee the we should be doing that um but we have to use the tools we have to make that to bridge what's a pla a prior learning assessment and we actually do it we do it with IB we do it with AP courses we we have a lot of these already we just need to expand that a little bit and so we should be looking to use the tools and the culture we have already to be able to leverage to leverage for correct Pathways I think that's a great that's really great advice um so one of the big concerns and I will admit that I've had this concern in the past as a leader of higher education programs is that if you include these industry certifications that employers as we've seen really do uh there's demand for it unnet demand for them that the students will leave and retention rates will go down so what what are your thoughts on that and experiences on that ah jump in students always leave I mean maybe I'm cynical um and maybe also having moved to Utah I see this cycling in and out over time that students do leave they leave to go to work anyway I think again you talked about the the luxury of of being able to go to school for four years and finishing in four years I think that's a very narrow section of the population and always has been I think that micro credentials is almost the Humane thing to do so that as students do leave that they have increased their earning potential for that time that they're gone it's not the binary of do you have the degree or not but do you have you increased your earning potential in the short time you've been with us and we also have to look at it as a lifetime of learning not four years of learning yeah I I just wanted to you know chime in on that a little bit more because you know when I think about that whole issue for our students we found with that postback CS program that I mentioned before they were getting the training they needed and moving on anyway so there's always going to be some kind of reason for that whether it's work whether it's family whether it's some other thing in their life but the portable credentials and being able to take those along and reuse them when you know to come back and add on to them as you need them through a lifetime of learning that's one of the best things I think that everyone can do for their learners but we're not there yet well I'll come back to students aren't stupid and if they can get a job and the employer will pay for them to complete their degree amen right and that's a an interesting opportunity a lot of our kids and peers are facing so I think that's a great example of why not absolutely and I would just speak on behalf of Western Governors University who's done a lot of this and looked at a lot of the data I did have the kind of preconceived concern that perhaps certificate attainment inside of a degree pathway was having a big impact on retention we did not we did several investigations of that and did not find that to be true perhaps Amy because of the reason you're talking about I'm moving up in my job I have more money I potentially have access to a benefit perhaps it's a confidence thing so many of our Learners at WGU come from low-income backgrounds there's students of color they are people who who have perhaps because their degree they're continuing their degree perhaps had a bad experience with higher education their confidence levels are low and getting into a degree program and actually finishing a certificate that actually is an actual value for them on the way to the degree I think it's a confidence Builder it's it's it's a signal that they can do it like right on let's get the next one let's finish this degree so I think I think there's a lot of that as well um and that sort of brings me to my last question for all for you all which is is we know that the new traditional student even first-time full-time Learners Learners coming out of high school are now looking more like adult working professionals than ever before many many of them a very large percentage of them are working full-time they're balancing work in school they are financially independent they are skeptical about taking out big loans to get that first degree they're much more tactical than prior generations of first-time full-time students and they really are not looking for that come of age experience in the sort of Ivy clad campus that's four to six years until you might you have a basically a 50 50 chance of getting that degree uh so how do you think what how do you think this works or synergizes or maybe transforms higher education as we know it to better serve the reality of the students who are right in front of us and I am talking about under undergrad students now well I'll jump in and say we saw a signal this month at CompTIA there's something called the national Pathways initiative and there's a convening in DC next Thursday a week from today 220 plus University undergraduate student government leaders have signed this declaration basically of we want Pathways we want seamless Bridge we want we want basically what was so crazy before the pandemic and there's a kind of this six point thing online you can get it um and we're sponsoring this event Governors are coming together to listen to these student leaders they want change now that's a signal that is a really the revolution is upon us yeah because I think academic Senate might be one wait where a place where change happens but I don't know the mechanism how that's going to all work out but to have student governments from from uh SUNY New York to UCLA showing up to say this it's kind of a big deal I mean I think that's fantastic and I think one of the pieces that we need to focus on is the alignment with advising I mean we talked and they all determined that my lack of advising was actually all about me not not being willing to be advised um throughout my my academic career um it wasn't but uh but the the advising piece and the coaching piece are so critical because those pathways are hard even through something that's been like literally chiseled in stone for the last hundred years and so how do we advise students how do we train the advisors to know how do we balance the need for all of the requirements for getting not just a course salad as your bachelor's degree but rather something that has context connectivity Community like that really and then it also prepares you for for a job and that's a piece I'm not sure I know we are at the University of Utah because we have a new Dean of undergraduate studies and a senior vice president for academic Affairs who's really focused on that but that's going to be key because students aren't going to be able to figure that out themselves even if they want it yeah and I was just wondering about that you know it's not just a student s aren't going to be able to figure that out but it's fairly complex a fairly complex understanding of sort of Workforce the workforce ecosystem for career advisor to figure that out right like how do I take a person with a French literature review add a set of certifications and sort of allow that student to have confidence in me and my recommendations that that's going to uh that's going to get them a job I mean that's that's fairly complex compassing there it is in its complex messaging yeah so as an undergraduate I wasn't ready to go out and say actually you do want a Humanities person because I can read critically I can problem solve I can analyze I can synthesize I can evaluate I can do all these things that you want me to do cross-culturally I didn't know how to say that yeah and I think that's another so thank you the career advising is another piece how are you able to pull out the best skills that are brought to you by a major with the best skills that are brought to you through micro credentials and really Market yourself yeah understand that that employability profile that doesn't have to be linked to a computer science degree in fact yeah Robert and I was just going to say I you know some of the tools I've seen lately that are trying to map of course syllabuses to more skill development that I think could be very valuable for all of our faculty as well as our students because it's just another way of looking at the skills that we're teaching the students no matter what these degrees are and then when you have that then you're able to go for that interview and be able to say confidently you know I took this and this and this and that translates to these skills that you want right yeah and I would say it's not just the technical skills and the um academic skills we talked about but it's also what we're calling durable skills communication executive skills how are we creating a taxonomy of that that an employer connects to SS and how are our students learning that I mean some things are best learned by doing and so that applied learning that apprenticeship that internship that co-op in the summer you know how does it all that and the part-time job you had to scrap through like how's all that ending up on your right in your bucket right we actually just acquired a tool that allows us to do that um for learning outcomes at the at the the course level um that are skills based and now we have to go and put it into policy back to academic Senate which is lovely it's a lovely group most of the time um but put that into policy so that we really communicate that and persuade faculty and curricular curriculum committees to participate in that because it's key yeah I mean it's it's so this is this isn't there just just after effective having uh worked at Western Governors University I think that this notion that somebody comes out of college with an academic transcript which is important if they want to continue on to graduate school or et cetera but they also come out of that experience with the skills profile that that has some sort of rubric around it related to Mastery levels and any third-party certifications or industry certificates that they've gotten I mean that kind of a profile as an output of their degree experience would be so powerful not only for the students who could use that to help them get a job but for the institutions to sort of communicate hey you know you can study history here political science you know computer science management and regardless of what pathway you take regardless of what your heart wants to follow you're going to get a really robust set of skills and competencies out of that that are valuable in the workplace and that you can communicate to employers yeah there's been a lot of work on that sort of wallet or different tools but I think the key concept is any kind of school is working on a totally different uh taxonomy and registration and rubric of skills hard and soft that an employer is the middleware between those two is non-existent right right I think there aren't there there are a few National organizations that are trying to put together people together yeah um I do want to do a shout out our nephews in your program the bachelor's uh computer science he already has bachelor's so thank you on behalf of my brother thank you there we go Robert did you have any last thoughts on on sort of the role that career advising would need to play inside of a degree Pathway to to sort of make it worthwhile for an institution to incorporate these well we know that's important because when we look at some of the companies with the certificates you know they have these services that try to tie to all the industries that are looking to hire in those skill sets and they're trying to do coaching for the job interview and that's the thing that all of our Career Services groups do on our campuses but how do we take that to the next level and and kind of bridge that Gap to show industry more of what those skill sets are from our credentials that's where I think we need to head for our students benefit yeah for sure all right well um with that I'd like to turn uh the conversation over to you um and just get your questions comments concerns around this topic we're here like I said all of us are operators at the places where we work happy to give suggestions or entertain debates there's somebody way in the back yeah there's somebody right there I can't I'm Tim Smith also a survivor of a liberal arts program with a degree in linguistics [Laughter] and one of the things I think that y'all have a view on is is my vision of looking at us as kind of a new inflection point in education as a human skill and not as an Institutional artifact in other words all of these new technologies are bringing us into a place where we can learn and do things in ways which weren't possible or actually more reflect your ability to use technology to replicate human functions and this is really exciting and how this is happening within the structure of Institutions that have been built with have lots of reasons for people to defend them and also what I want to do is look at the revolution in the United States specifically here in Austin represented by South by Southwest [Music] and see what's happening in Bogota Colombia where they have a very similar need but very different institutional set up most of the training is done by these kinds of areas and almost all the same needs for technology for universities for taking large marginalized populations and integrating them into a modern society with tremendous Equity issues different but similar and I think what I'd like to see is how you have wonderfully French German and music all different countries how if you see if it's possible for us between societies to share information better to see if some of the ideas are things that are working and specifically for Spanish we have six to ten million people in this country who depend on Spanish for services how we can start looking at certificates for bilingual functional bilingualism to be promoted through these things yeah going forward yeah and think thank you for that for that points there where they're worrying many of these certificates in these critical high demand skill areas where they're acute Workforce shortages are Global they are global resources for audiences all over the world working in those sectors in those Industries and I think that is a very fascinating piece of this the other thing I think is fascinating about that is they're they're almost the first intergenerational asset as well students can take them in high school they can take them as undergraduates they can take them as as folks who are switching in their careers because they have lost their jobs and they work they work across those those contexts and and I think because of that we need to focus on sort of interoperable recognition of their value that's why I love the work we're doing at Coursera across these different agencies to look at credit eligibility because these these a lot of these Learners are mobile as well you know in the digital Nomad age of digital Nomads we want them to be able to take these these achievements that they're getting these certificates and these certifications and allow them to be sort of high value wherever they go whatever age they are and whatever point they are in their career um that's that's I think really important there was somebody back could I just jump in about the bilingual about the Spanish morning yes um so I've been approached by we have a lot of Deans at the University of Utah for some odd reason but I've been approached by three of them to see if they can start translating some of their online courses into Spanish to the end of how do we have bilingual degrees and how do we chunk those into certificates so I think that's on the radar and I would be remiss if I did not say about that because we're so focused on generative AI right now at Coursera like hopefully generative AI Technologies are going to help us to do that better than we ever have before right now it's very expensive it's very complicated it takes a it takes a team a pretty big team to do that well especially across like degrees or or sort of extensive certification programs I do see that the cost on that coming down and I'm super excited about what that implies okay um thank you my name is Dr Andre gillesny green and I work for data.org which is building the field of data for social impact and I'm currently embarking on our journey to to build micro credentials for people working in the data professions and so one of the things that I didn't hear in the conversation but I wasn't fully paying attention the whole time because my daughter's here with me what what talk and links did you all make with community colleges because this is also part of the higher education system a system which is built for you know I love the the skills for bills I've taken that um and then also thinking about our t-vet so I went to a Technical High School in the United States where I learned Health Professions and so there are these other ways where people can get micro credentials that don't involve a university and as a philosophy and Spanish major who now works in data science I know that these are the types of things that can make a difference in terms of your career path so just wanted the speaker's perspective on this and I also liked I don't know your name the person in red you pointing out the racialized nature of this conversation because most people who are saying they want to learn to earn are people who look like me and so it's not an out of place conversation because the other modality is people who are already coming from a place where they have a lot and can get started immediately thank you um I'll jump in about the the community colleges and the the micro credentials I think that I am so I was just I was just made to see that that the the transfer rates for community colleges are going down um into four years um and I think that's a result of the pandemic the community colleges which are really the Workhorse and the the point of access for a broad swath of our country they the community colleges suffered disproportionately with funding and funding through tuition and that's it it it's enough to make you You Weep because I think that's the that's the spot and again it goes back to I'm going to jump back to advising too Community College advising how do you advise community college students to get the credentials they need to improve their earning potential but also prepare them for not just career Pathways but possibly for Pathways into degree programs that allowed them to advance further um and I love the fact that you're that you're working on credentials that meet the need of a particular community and we're actually trying to do that in the the West Valley which is closer by the the Great Salt Lake it's the the everything drops like you you go across the street and life expectancy drops income drops everything drops and the university is building a hospital out there and what we're doing is we're providing Healthcare micro credentials to the community so that we can hire community members to work in that hospital it's a drop in the bucket but I I love what you're doing where you're really saying what does the community need and how can we provide that in the easiest pathway possible I don't know if that answered your question or just commented on it yeah I think it did and I I do think I believe here in Texas some 60 percent of Learners Traverse two or more institutions in order to get their first credential of value um it's really important that we understand uh that almost that supply chain of the of the degree ultimately and think intentionally about how these types of Industry certificates and certifications help someone to make that journey and and to encourage institutions to recognize that Journey not only within individual schools but across schools that's really really critical part of this it's somebody else said yes did you oh sorry sorry I can't see anything so yeah it's okay you're going to love this question okay I want to reward you tackling a difficult topic with a hard questions adaptive assessment so I am Tiffany Tesla Michael head of content strategy right now at Udacity contrary to popular belief I love Coursera we love Coursera but I personally love the work you're doing and hearing you all talk about um even the mention of durable skills I went to I think a session on that and I have strong opinions because it's a Hot Topic I'd love to hear you speak to the tension uh between practical or rather to days in demand skills and tomorrow skills and I'll give you some color to that right data driven approach might say if product manager is growing at 63 year over year maybe maybe you want to look into that and maybe not double down on things that have four jobs like stable diffusion or Dolly which is cool yeah it's on the internet so it's what how do you strike that balance and I know we all have the same problem whether it's professional learning online learning there's YouTube they can teach you how to sew they can teach you how to code but people want jobs and money and if you give them that they will be loyal to you they will come back so how do you strike the balance between future skills interplanetary travel right or whatever and something practical that has a job today and will have one next year yeah I I love that question because probably like you that is a question that wakes me up at 3am every every morning because you do have YouTube or other or other providers of of content at scale who are reading the tea leaves they're out there talking to an employers and their catalogs of skills based education are vast right and always growing super Dynamic um it's the what's the skill new skill of the day and it literally changes daily or weekly it seems especially on the tech front so one of the ways that we're thinking about this at Coursera is really building out what we call our Clips or our enhanced Clips so that very short form Atomic content that is really focused on an entry point for students to build interest into certificate programs but also a place where we can test out some of these other skills at that very Atomic level in terms of learner interest Etc so that we can gauge whether potentially ultimately a certificate in that area will be necessary so that's how we're approaching it and it is kind of exhausting because like I said really every day every week it's like do you have do you have a certificate program or course on click or on this or on that and it's like oh gosh what is that let me Google that let me ask chat GPT right and um and so that is that is definitely a stress that we're working on I don't know if you I was I was just going to say real quick you know that goes back to the speed for higher ed because content creation as we all know takes time no matter what and uh you know you can only move so fast with certain size organizations but you know as part of our strategy is trying to get the the credentials we're known the best for online right so that's not gonna you know give that changing daily to everybody but it will let you know to come look for us when you're looking for these certain things that we have you know true expertise in so that just means you need more places creating the content like that right yeah so the one thing that is constant is change right like you brought in your question I had the most interesting conversation two weeks ago in Berlin with Yanina kugel she's uh the former chro of Siemens the global tech company and she was speaking at this cool institution they have called the futureium across the street from the bundestag and she kept coming back to that change is the one constant and I think part of this lifelong learner long life learner thing is we talked about it here learning how to learn and that question came up here too but part of it's that ongoing upskilling by HR once you're in a company too so um it can't be the responsibility can't be abdicated because you have to to watch where the ball is going but certainly the one thing that is constants change and how to see the future is just one step at a time and the future is not the same at the same place at the same time so there's kind of places to look for it coming and I think this conference is kind of one of those things yeah yeah and I'm glad you said it I sort of mentioned accountability there we hear so often from industry and employers that education isn't moving fast enough to provide them with with talent that has the skills they need to be competitive um fine I think higher education has an accountability obviously from what we're learning in the research to address that concern on the other hand um employers can't be there's a certain fickleness in the in the air right now on the part of employers in terms of defining the skills that they need they need to do a better job at defining the skills they need and also really addressing which of those skills are enduring whether they're technical or not um and and which of those skills are something that are probably better managed on the job in the quarter over quarter work of determining what kind of applications they're using for X Y or Z we I know you've had your hand up and that's too quick two minutes it looks like we have one question left with that one finger maybe that's what that meant one question left hi um my name is harm um purely technical background I am a big fan of like coursera's Udacity all the online learning platforms and through my social media accounts I constantly get a lot of ads for different professional certificates so my question is how can I as a learner kind of understand the quality of all of these different ones whether it's audacity master class or Coursera 15 seconds 15 seconds I think this speaks to the need for a unified definition of skills and competencies and a way to express those both to you the consumer as well as once you achieve them to to employers I think that's the next phase it's really important we need an alternative for the credit hour and I think a unified definition of skills is it and I will leave you with that controversial statement thank you for joining us today at The Bitter End of South by Southwest [Applause] [Music]