On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, host Amrit Ahluwalia was joined by Ryan Torma to discuss how to make your microcredential programming stand out to learners and understanding what’s required to make a positive and engaging student experience.
On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, host Amrit Ahluwalia was joined by Ryan Torma to discuss how to make your microcredential programming stand out to learners and understanding what’s required to make a positive and engaging student experience.
Voiceover: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. On today’s episode, we speak with Ryan Torma, who is Executive Director of Professional Development and Lifelong Learning at the University of Minnesota. Ryan and podcast host Amrit Ahluwalia, discuss how to make your microcredential programming stand out to learners and understanding what’s required to make a positive and engaging student experience.
Amrit Ahluwalia: Ryan Torma, welcome to the Illumination podcast. It's great that we're finally doing this.
Ryan Torma (00:29):Oh, it is so wonderful to be here with you. I'm just such a fan of the podcast and I think what you and the team are doing through this is just such a gift to our field. So I'm just delighted
Amrit Ahluwalia (00:38):To be here. You're just the loveliest person. So we're together, we're in Washington dc, we're at SIA and Agros Convergence Conference. Just a really, really interesting experience. Obviously it's bringing together continuing ed leaders and registrars talking about Microcredentialing strategy. You and friend of the podcast, Chrissy Collins, are doing a session later today talking about the development to the design of micro-credential strategy within the institution. How excited are you for the session?
Ryan Torma (01:09):Oh, I'm so excited for the session. Chrissy's such a great colleague and such a great leader in this field, and it's such a treat to collaborate with her on this, and I'm really excited to talk about how we're thinking about this from a continuing education perspective. Certainly there's a lot of other folks at the conference thinking about this from their own perspectives, whether that's registrars or people working on degree programs, but we're going to bring our perspective to it and really looking forward to it being a conversation with the incredible community that's gathered here and just try and share what we know and what we're seeing, but also really draw on the incredible wisdom of the amazing folks that are participating today.
Amrit Ahluwalia (01:48):Absolutely. Well, one thing I want to dive into with you is the question of differentiation. Now, we've known, there's numerous reports speaking to this that adults across the US don't really care where they pursue skill development, what they're looking for outcomes. So in this segment where reputation of institutional reputation may not matter so much where the awarding of credit may not matter so much, what can universities do to ensure micro-credentialing programming that they offer actually stands out?
Ryan Torma (02:20):There's a number of things I think that can really help, and one of the things that we're thinking a lot about at our institution is really trying to understand who our learner is at a pretty specific level and design programs for them. So thinking about different types of micro-credentialing programs that might exist. There's a really big difference between an industry certification that you embed in a full-time bachelor's program that is different from a program that you might design for first time supervisors who are working adults and need to just learn a little bit about supervision, moving from an individual contributor to a supervisor role, which is different still from a continuing education program that you offer for engineers who are licensed engineers and need to get CEUs to keep up their licenses. And so I think it's really important that we as leaders are really honed in on who our audiences are, who are our learners, and what is it that our credential, our programs help those learners accomplish.
(03:30):And so we design for that, and I think that'll take us a long way. The universities also have a lot of good things to bring to this space. We have a lot of relationships in our community. We're often really trusted partners. Organizations want to work with us, companies want to work with us, and we often have the recognition and trust from our state and local governments. And so those are all really big things that we can bring into the community, into our offerings, into the space. And I'm actually really positive and opportunistic about, I'm positive about the opportunity that we have to bring meaningful credentials to people.
Amrit Ahluwalia (04:14):Absolutely. And I mean, there's something to be said for being able to draw on so much expertise. I mean, so much of this comes down to a question of the excellence that exists within the institution tends to be bottled up for the purpose of that the institution's already defined. So part of the challenge for continuing education division then is, okay, well how do we take this material and make it relevant to audiences that we may not be effectively serving? So let's talk a little bit about that. I mean, what's the role of a continuing ed division and of someone in your role of a continuing education leader in helping universities really identify and capitalize on these sort of key differentiators, especially programmatically when it comes to standing out in this skill development marketplace?
Ryan Torma (05:01):Certainly, well, serving different audiences requires that we do different things to meet their needs, and that might be different programs, that might be different support services, and oftentimes it requires different technical infrastructure,
(05:15):Whether that's a different registration system or how you do the invoicing and payment or all those types of things. And as continuing education divisions, well, we're really good at that and we focus on building programs, pathways and support structures for learners who might be different from the learners participating in main campus programs or some of the other traditional programs that we do. And so that's our focus. That's what we do, and so we're really good at it and we can help our institutions to grow along with us and to help serve learner needs, not only that we serve within our divisions, but also we can help the whole university or the whole college system think and serve these learners in better ways.
Amrit Ahluwalia (05:58):Absolutely. One phrase I hear a lot is, I mean, I like the phrase center of excellence. I recognize that it has connotations. I recognize that when people talk about a service department, it has a very negative connotation, a capability center as a term that really starts to get to the crux of what a future-oriented continuing ed division can do, which is basically how do we bring the excellence of customer experience and customer engagement, I'm going to use the word customer here to a non-traditional learner population that the university may not have always served while at the same time positioning faculty to really deliver programming to individuals that may not have access. How do you manage some of that, the perceived negativity that comes with applying business excellence to a space where terms like marketing and sales may not really resonate?
Ryan Torma (07:00):I think again, it really all comes back to the learner and their need and helping the institution develop an imagination around who these learners are, what they're trying to accomplish, and how we can best walk alongside them and help them accomplish their goals. And a lot of times folks understand that in traditional degree program processes, so we understand about marketing, we understand about admissions, we understand how that works in a traditional space, and now it's just translating this for a new audience
(07:34):And taking those same principles, but then designing them in a way that meets the learner's needs for the specific learner audience that we're going for. Now, some of that, I think how you do that is going to vary a little bit depending on how your continuing education support units are set up. So some folks have a really centralized model at the University of Minnesota, we have a really decentralized model, so there's continuing education happening in all kinds of different schools, colleges, campuses. And so I lead one of those groups. And so for the work that I do, it's much more about collaboration, shared wisdom, asking questions together, and then trying to collaborate to develop centralized support. And so one of the things we're working on right now is building a community of practice around non-credit credentials so that all of the folks at the university who are involved in this can get together, share their wisdom, share their challenges, and we can come together to solve some of these bigger challenges around it. And it's not just one individual unit trying to solve what might actually be a pretty big thorny system-wide problem.
Amrit Ahluwalia (08:51):Well, that actually, it brings me to what I think is a really interesting and really important facet of this conversation, especially at a decentralized institution because at the end of the day, a student might not, and likely doesn't recognize the difference between enrolling in Compass U Point University's school of English versus their continuing ed division versus their engineering school. At the end of the day, they're looking for an engagement with the institution. It's same with an employer. An employer is looking for a corporate training partnership with the institution, but won't necessarily recognize or understand that there are multiple divisions or silos within the institution that can serve them independently, and it creates opportunities for internal competition. How in a decentralized environment do you create that level of seamlessness or that level of singularity for an external partner, whether that's a learner or whether that's a corporation to understand that when they engage with the institution, they engage with the institution?
Ryan Torma (09:49):Yeah, I think that is a really big challenge for decentralized universities and certainly one that we face and are trying to work through. And I'll share a couple of things that I think we're doing well and maybe some places where we have some opportunity to grow. So some things that I think we are doing well, we've got centralized support for our learner management system, for our non-credit students, the team that does really great work and allows a lot of capability to happen across the institution. We've also, as a university, done a lot of work to develop a centralized approach to engaging with employers. And that happens both at a central but then also at a local level. So we have folks that work with employers in our college, but then they also are going to collaborate with the central units to do that. And so it's a lot of collaboration in that space, and we certainly hear that from employers like, oh, you're kind of hard to figure out who do I talk to?
(10:47):What do I do? And that's a challenge. I think the central and local collaboration is a thing that we're trying to do work to build there from a learner perspective. I think that's a place where we've got some opportunity to grow and maybe a place where through some better coordination on marketing and some of our general resources maybe as an opportunity for us to think about if you don't happen to know what kind of college can solve the problem that you have, that maybe there's some things we can do on our website to help route that so that you can find out like, oh, do you actually need to get to executive education or do you need to get to medical continuing ed? Or do you need to come to the College of Continuing professional studies to solve your issue and help get the learning that you need to succeed in what you're trying to accomplish
Amrit Ahluwalia (11:34):Internally? Yeah. Is there an internal understanding of where each division has clear strengths or is it still a feeling out process to figure out where the boundaries are, where the intersection opportunities are between different shops across the institution? I'd say we
Ryan Torma (11:53):Have loosely defined swim lanes that are really built through collaboration. So for example, historically we've had a fair amount of connection over a long many years with the executive education program at the university, which is housed in our business school.
(12:12):And in that case, the executive education folks tend to focus a lot on senior leaders, directors, VPs, folks who are working at senior level, strategic level of their organizations. Whereas the professional development programs that we offer in the college of continuing professional studies tend to be more oriented towards the early career person or the mid-career person that wants to pick up some discreet skills to make a step in their career. And then we kind of manage that largely through conversation and collaboration between the department. So when we launch a new program, we'll often connect with various colleges that might have an interest or an expertise in a particular area and say like, Hey, we're working on doing this thing. Take a look. What do you think? How does that go? And so that's a thing that we're really trying to do is to keep that collaboration and conversation going so that we're not stepping on each other's toes as we go bring programs to learners.
Amrit Ahluwalia (13:18):Absolutely. I'm curious then, and kind of the culmination of the level setting to a certain extent is what role do continuing ed leaders or should continuing ed leaders play in starting to create a level of institution-wide alignment on frankly what we're all talking about here at this conference? Micro-credential programming, micro-credential strategy, and the delivery of a cohesive student experience?
Ryan Torma (13:42):Again, I think it varies a little bit depending on if you're centralized and have formal authority over this or you're in a decentralized mode. I'll speak a little bit about the decentralized place and some of the work that I'm doing. So I work a lot as an advocate and trying to communicate and collaborate with my colleagues in various continuing education units across the university, and then also with key leaders around several areas. So some work that we've been doing at the University of Minnesota around this is, well, one the community of practice that we're doing that's going to work around this. There's been really great work historically around management of technology systems. So we've got a team that does really great work around supporting our registration system from a centralized system-based approach, and has done great work collaborating around that. That team has also been involved in coordinating a conversation historically around credential quality guidelines.
Ryan Torma (14:49):And they've been kind of a hub for conversation and have gathered a really great community and hosted a great community on solving these issues. And so that work around credential quality guidelines is now progressing to the next step where we're looking at seeing, okay, there's a lot of growing interest from state and federal government agencies, from accrediting agencies and other stakeholders in looking at and wanting to measure the quality of non-credit credentials. So we're trying to get ahead of that and are now working on moving forward some ideas around formal credential governance. That's really a collaborative project amongst the folks in the continuing education project. We've got some folks in the IT space who've been thinking about this, folks in the provost office who've been thinking about this, and our registrar and people in the team who we've brought a proposal to the provost to say like, Hey, would you call a task force to start working on this? And so I'm hoping to get approval to move forward on that really soon.
Amrit Ahluwalia (15:59):That's a fascinating concept. Can you talk a little bit more about what you guys have in mind as far as building a task force for the purpose of creating, I guess a singular credential taxonomy?
Ryan Torma (16:10):Well, I think there's a lot of work to be done. We know we've got a lot of stuff happening in the non-credit space and so much that we actually can't get a full handle on it.
(16:21):We've got a lot of stuff in our core learner management system for non-credit, but we also know that there's a bunch of other systems around the university. And so we don't even have a full sense of all that's happening, but we know it's a lot. So one task is to try and can we actually just get a census of all the things that are happening in all the colleges, all the campuses, and just know what's going on? And then from there, we know and expect that there's going to be interest from external accreditors agencies around being able to vouch for the quality of the credential and the programs that we're offering. And so we want to put together a process that is going to be able to, we can say proudly and confidently. If we offer a credential from the University of Minnesota, we know it's going to be great because of this, that and the other.
(17:25):And so we need to design a process to do that that is going to hopefully meet those expectations, but then also be nimble and flexible enough to meet the incredible wide variety of programming that we offer, and also is going to allow us to be able to move quickly and be market responsibly what that looks like yet we don't really know that's the work of the task force ahead of should it be called, which I hope it will be. And so that's certainly things that we're thinking about as this whole micro-credentials and alternative credential space continues to develop.
Amrit Ahluwalia (18:01):Absolutely, and this is where I think it becomes really important at the institutional level to create a sense of singularity or at least create a single understanding of what some of these terms mean and what some of these things are. Because lacking a state level or a federal level guidepost on what's a certificate, what's a badge? What's a micro-credential? How do these things intersect with one another at minimum within the institution itself? Those terms should be clear and understood if they're going to be offered at scale. I think one of the things we've found in a fair amount of the research we've done is lacking that common understanding can create some really challenging outcomes for learners and for employers when they're trying to figure out how do we create a lasting relationship with the institution? Because if the institution itself doesn't know what a certificate means, how can an employer understand what a certificate is?
Ryan Torma (18:58):I think that really is a challenge, not only for us, but also this entire field that we're working in. And I think it's just about where we are as a space. We're in that exciting period where we're all trying to figure it out and the standards haven't quite yet shaken out and quite developed yet.
I think over time as we continue to work in this space, we're going to see things to start to coalesce a little bit for the moment. I think a big way that we can address these things is to be transparent about what a particular certificate or a particular course does, so that we're clearly communicating to learners, to employers, to stakeholders around this like, Hey, this is what's going on in this course and this certificate in this badge, and communicating that as best we can. And then also within the institution doing work with our departments, our faculty, our staff, to really be focusing on developing quality, drawing on the great work around credential guidelines that's already happened and continue to develop and support that through support community of practice, that type of thing.
Amrit Ahluwalia (20:18):To that end, and this is, I mean, vaguely off topic, but I'm just curious about your thoughts here. As we shift more and more into the micro-credentialing space into the alternative credentialing landscape, how is that shift going to align with a broader shift towards competency-based education as opposed to time-based learning? Are those two things operating hand in hand or are they relatively separate approaches where we're drawing on the of each?
Ryan Torma (20:48):It might be more the latter, at least for now, and I think this is certainly a thing that we're talking about on our team, is can we actually do full competency-based education in the timeframe that we have? So often our courses are really short, maybe six to 12 hours, sometimes up to 15 hours. Can we really do authentic assessment in that place? Or are we doing education? Are we doing assessment? But the actual, if you're doing a project management course, going to have the opportunity to manage a full project in the course of 16 hours or six weeks. Now, can we use the best practice of learner-centered assessment and focus in actual practice? Yes, I think we can do that. Another thing I think is depending on the zone that you're in with your program, it varies a little bit. So let's talk about continuing education for licensure fields. So think engineers or those types of folks, a lot of the requirements for that are determined by external licensing agencies or state agencies. And at the moment, a lot of that is based on clock hour. So the way in which we record the way in which we report largely has to do about attendance at about clock hour rather than competency achievement. And so we would really look to the accrediting agencies or the licensing bodies to make that shift, and then I think we'd be in a place where we could respond, but it's really on them to lead in that space, whereas I think in some of our non licensure professional development, we can do more leadership in competency-based direction.
Amrit Ahluwalia (22:37):Absolutely. Well, Ryan, I mean that pretty much does it on my end. And as you know at this stage of the podcast, we transition from being a higher ed podcast to being a food podcast. So if someone's out to dinner in Minneapolis, where do they need to go?
Ryan Torma (22:50):Oh, I struggled over this, and if you'll forgive me, I'm going to offer two.
Amrit Ahluwalia (22:55):That's fine. Actually, I will say that for folks that are listening to this series of interviews that are being recorded at the Convergence Conference, you're on trend as far as offering two suggestions.
Ryan Torma (23:08):So since we care about access and affordability in this community, I'm going to start there and I will say that Punch Pizza, there are a chain in the Twin Cities. There's locations everywhere they do Neapolitan Wood-Fired Pizza. It's incredible. It's amazing. It should be on your must stop list anytime you come to the Twin City. So they're spectacular if you're looking to go out a little fancier and to celebrate. One of the places that has just been a real favorite for me in a place where I've celebrated a number of milestones with family, with Friends is Barla Rassa in the North Loop, downtown Minneapolis, and they're an Italian place. They do amazing pastas, amazing bruschetta. The food and beverage menu is spectacular, and the service is out of this world. And so Barla Rasa, north Loop, Minneapolis. Wonderful.
Speaker 3 (24:06):Awesome. Ryan, it's been a pleasure, man. I'm so glad we finally connected for this.
Ryan Torma (24:10):Oh, Amrit. So glad to be here. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
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