Nelson Baker (Georgia Tech) on Redefining Education for a Lifetime of Learning

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Nelson Baker to discuss a new approach to lifelong learning that redefines education and puts an emphasis on leveraging technology. 

Transcript

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 Nelson Baker, who is Inaugural Interim Dean of the College of Lifetime Learning at Georgia Institute of Technology. Nelson and podcast host Shauna Cox discuss a new approach to lifelong learning that redefines education and puts an emphasis on leveraging technology. 

Shauna Cox (00:02):Nelson, welcome back to the Illumination podcast. I'm so glad you could join me today.

Nelson Baker (00:07):Thanks, Shauna. I'm excited to be here.

Shauna Cox (00:09):Yeah. So we're here to talk about the work Georgia Tech is doing around lifelong, or maybe I'll call it lifetime learning, as you recently launched the College of Lifetime Learning, I would say back in September. Is that correct?

Nelson Baker (00:21):That is correct. We officially launched September five.

Shauna Cox (00:24):

Amazing. Well, congratulations. So what was the inspiration behind the launch of this college and how do you envision its role in reshaping education for a lifetime?

Nelson Baker (00:34):Well, thank you for that question. Certainly not one that I haven't heard before, but this is an exciting time, and I'd say the inspiration came in two forms. First, we do an awful lot of listening to the people in our programs, to those in our employer network to our community. We purposefully try to authentically listen, where's the market headed? What do people need? What are the trends of our enrollments? And so we've been doing that work for more than a hundred years, starting with the Georgia Tech Evening School back in the early 19 hundreds, bringing Georgia Tech into a way in which those who can't come to our traditional programs could get Georgia Tech education. We've touched tens of thousands of K 12 students, they're teachers as well as adult learners. Every year we've been to university's global campus, the connector for those who can't get to our campus, as I said before, but we started to hear several years ago that people wanted something more. Employers were wanting something more. They were telling us, particularly around our degrees at scale, that we had found a way to reduce tuition significantly, that we kept or enhanced the quality of the education and we were making learning

Shauna Cox (01:56):Accessible.

Nelson Baker (01:58):Was there a way in which we could think about higher education around those qualities? Secondly, about five years ago, president Cabrera joined us and started a strategic planning effort, used a process called Appreciative Inquiry that had more than 5,000 different inputs from a whole host of different constituents, and several themes emerged from that process. Two of them being we as Georgia Tech should expand access and we should amplify our impact. They dovetailed very nicely with what we were hearing around the learners in our program. And so through that process came out this university initiative through the strategic planning process. What if we created a new college, the first and over three decades at Georgia Tech that would focus on how are people learning differently? What is it that we Georgia Tech could do, and how would we build programs around those kinds of capacities? So I want to emphasize this is about learning.

(03:12):We're not planning to create teachers, although they could be students in our programs, but we want to understand how people learn. What's the new ecosystem that's going to drive our economies and our workforce forward? We're learning, working, and living are all intertwined, and that starts very early in one's career or even lifespan I should say, and all the way, well past the days traditionally when they would go to a university because degrees don't last a lifetime anymore. They're a great foundation. So this is a both and situation for us, but people and employers are wanting something more. We think our stakeholders deserve it.

Shauna Cox (03:58):Absolutely. I love that you guys are adapting to the here and now and what students are not only wanting but needing, and as you mentioned in this era of wanting more, what are some of those significant challenges that institutions are facing when they're trying to meet that need of lifelong learning opportunities?

Nelson Baker (04:20):So I think one is just the definition of what that means

(04:25):And trying to understand a different market space or a complimentary market space of a student or a learner. So we see this as a both and opportunity. We have no intention of replacing what Georgia Tech has been known for. We will remain a place that high school students can come to. Traditionally, we see others there, but come to us further start of a career. But what we've learned through the tens of thousands of people we're currently serving is that they want a both end. They want to access this before they get to Georgia Tech traditionally and after they get to Georgia Tech. But some of those challenges are policy landscapes, be it local policy within the university, state policy, federal policy, et cetera. We are a public research university and we're not deviating from that, but some of those policies are hard. They've been in place for decades. How can we be a voice to raise some of those up and say, is this the way it really should be? Or is there a different way in which we as a public can be educating our people in new ways and setting in place potential new policies around these activities? Let's say the other significant challenge is all of us have so much on our plate today capacity. How do we find ways to do both and with the capacities that we have within our own ecosystems?

Shauna Cox (06:04):Absolutely, and I think you alluded to maybe some solutions there. So what are some of those best practices to overcome some of these obstacles that you mentioned?

Nelson Baker (06:18):So I think we're going to walk before we run.

(06:21):You just can't jump into the deep end. Well, I guess you could, but we're not going to jump into the deep end necessarily. We're going to keep doing what we've been doing. We have the capacity to do that, and we're going to continue to listen and engage our stakeholders in the process, sharing with them where some of our both and opportunities are and see how it resonates with them more deeply than what we already have in launching the college. And we already have capacity for faculty and research activities. So we're going to find those opportunities also as a research university. And that's oftentimes where the synergies happen. So I think one of the ways to overcome some of those challenges is finding synergies, aligning mission and purpose. So if faculty have research that's already taking place, they have instruction that's already taking place, how will we align some of those kinds of things to a newer both and stakeholder population so that they can participate, they can learn, they can contribute to those same things as we go forward.

(07:25):So I'd say those are our two biggest ways that we want to try to use best practices, but ultimately it's the mission and just expanding that to more people we want and we need to encourage people to pursue their dreams, to see a future that they can see can exist for them along life's journey. And that means be it encouraging somebody in third grade to see a future that they may not think is in reach to them or somebody in their sixties or seventies that's trying to pivot and see a new space for themselves as well. These are exciting times and we need to broaden our thinking of how we can

Shauna Cox (08:09):Serve. And I want to expand on that a little bit and because oftentimes lifelong lifetime learning is connected to the labor market and the industry and things like that. So how do you see lifelong learning initiatives contributing to the economic and social development of our local and global communities?

Nelson Baker (08:33):For Georgia Tech, this is going to be our North star.

(08:36):It's our learners, it's our employer base, it's our economies. What are they trying to do and how can we help them realize those dreams? As I just said, we're going to have to find a balance of the short-term viewpoints of today's needs with the longer term viewpoint of building and resilience in our people. They can't afford to come back to a university for two years, four years, every decade. That's not possible either monetarily or from a time perspective. How do we find new ways to help them get new knowledge, new skills in a way that is amenable to them? How can we showcase to a young person who wants to be an astronaut or a doctor or a lawyer, or pick your favorite career, but instill in them a mindset that's great place to start, but likely throughout their career, they're probably going to pivot and they won't be that forever. They might be, and that's fine, but they're likely to pivot. And right now, that's not typically part of the vocabulary that we tell people. It's what do you want to be when you grow up? And there's one answer, and that's the answer for life. That's not the future.

Shauna Cox (09:52):Absolutely. And even if they're staying in that career for their lifetime, which again is totally fine, their skills are going to need to be refreshed and updated and things like that. So it's not four years and you're done. I think that a lifetime of learning is so pivotal to everyone's, to just a society, quite frankly. So

Nelson Baker (10:13):Absolutely. And if I can just echo on that, as we're thinking about the college, we're also thinking about the whole person perspective. This needs to be more than just curriculum and courses and credentials. We need to think about how do we advise people about the future careers? How do we know that we're not sending them into a space that's a dead end or could be a dead end 10 years from now? How do we help them with the emotional side of making those kinds of pivots? So this is also building on a new kind of service platform to help people and guide them through these kinds of challenges that they will see in their life. I mean to say, I'm quitting my job and I'm pivoting to something else. That's not just an educational journey, that's an emotional journey. That could be a financial journey that I have lost a paycheck, will the new one arrive? So we need to help the whole person make these kinds of career long decision making.

Shauna Cox (11:17):And that dovetails so beautifully into the next question because the student experience is so important to make sure we're meeting the needs of these students. So I want to shift to the technical side of it and ask, what role do you believe technology will play in facilitating access to lifelong learning?

Nelson Baker (11:36):So being Georgia Tech, we believe technology is going to have an instrumental component.

(11:42):But I also want to just stop and pause for a second though. We understand that not all parts of our society and certainly world don't have access to even things like broadband and internet. So we have to be careful if we're really trying to expand access, that it's not solely built on just technology that not everybody has access to. However technology will be and has enabled us, at least in our past, to find ways to scale, to make programs that are more affordable and of higher quality because we're bringing a more diverse set of students together in the same learning environment. And that too, just by the nature of who's in the learning environment, can be an educational endeavor. So technology is going to be a significant component as it's constantly changing. If we were here 10 years ago, we'd have been talking about cloud and mobile kinds of computing technologies.

(12:39):Now AI is all over the landscape and how that's going to change things, but 10 years from now, it's going to be something beyond ai. So technology's here with us. We need to find ways in which it helps us. So that's unprecedented. That's going to continue to change, but it's only one of three pillars that this college is being built on technology. The other two pillars that we want to make sure are part of this process is the applied learning sciences. So how cognitively are our minds adapting, changing this technology to do new things? I know when I think about my own learning, very different from my children, very different from my grandchildren. People are using technology in new ways. So we need to think about the applied learning sciences here too, not just the technology. And the third pillar that we want to build on is policy and business models.

(13:41):Policy as written may not necessarily be what we need it to be. As I stated earlier, what are those newer policies to make learning accessible for everybody? How might we find ways for different kinds of financial assistance or tax breaks, for example, or time breaks? Because time is just as important perhaps as finances, as one's trying to pick up new knowledge. So those three pillars, technology, applied learning sciences policy and business models are what's going to be our core for this new college as we go forward. So certainly technology is going to be a driver, but it's not unto itself the only

Shauna Cox (14:28):Driver. And speaking of going forward, how can institutions ensure that their lifelong learning initiatives are remaining relevant, they're staying adaptive, and they're aligning with those future needs of learners? That quite honestly is going to constantly change.

Nelson Baker (14:47):We believe they're constantly going to change. So much like what we did to get to this point,

(14:53):Authentic listening I think is the key. We need to be constantly asking ourselves questions, and we probably need to be doing that more frequently than historically. We as higher education as an industry have done, what are the needs of those around us, our stakeholders, upstream, downstream, around us, our communities? What do they need and why do they need it? How can we play a role in helping to serve them as a constituency, particularly as a public good, expanding those kinds of opportunities so that everybody is with us. We certainly don't want a digital divide or a learning divide between the haves and have nots, and yet that seems to be happening. So how can this endeavor, how can institutions of higher education through lifetime learning find ways to make sure that access is available to everybody at any time, wherever they happen to be? Great challenge because we're not always funded that way either. And that becomes part of this business model proposition. How do we find new ways through society that our value proposition is one that resonates and is needed?

Shauna Cox (16:11):Amazing. Well, Nelson, those are all the questions I have for you. I want to thank you for coming onto the podcast, sharing the great work that you guys are doing. It was great chatting with you.

Nelson Baker (16:20):Well, thanks so much, Shauna. Great to be here with you. And one last comment that I would make is I would encourage higher education to all be asking these questions. We as an institution, can't be the only one doing this. Just like with our degrees at scale, we now know of dozens of other universities who have done something similar. I would challenge all of us to think about how do we serve a broader constituency to make our economies, our societies a better place to be?

Shauna Cox (16:52):Amazing. Thanks again, Nelson.

Nelson Baker (16:53):Thank you.