Janette Muir (George Mason University) on Shaping the Future of Learning Through Institutional Agility

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Janette Muir to discuss the integration of continuing and professional education with traditional academic programming alongside the evolving role of faculty and governance in advancing short-cycle, skills-based learning pathways.

Transcript

Shauna Cox (00:02):Janette, welcome to the Illumination Podcast.

Janette Muir (00:06):Thank you, Shauna. It's great to hear you today. I appreciate

Shauna Cox (00:11):Absolutely. So we are here to talk about how lifelong learning is shaping the academic enterprise, which is no small feat. So I'm going to start off by asking you how do you see that boundary between traditional academic programming and continuing education evolving in today's higher ed landscape?

Janette Muir (00:33):Well, Shauna, let me begin by saying a little bit about George Mason because that will help to situate

Janette Muir (00:39):Where we're located and why we do the things we do. I've been at George Mason University for 35 years. We've grown from when I started at about 8,000 students to now we're well over 40,000 with another plan for another 5,000 or so within the next few years. So we're one of the fastest growing institutions in the country and an R one, a very top level R one institution. So a lot of things are happening at George Mason. I've seen major transitions over the years, but let me tell you one thing that has been very interesting, and that is when I first started at George Mason, I did spend a lot of time thinking about adult learners and how can we better help them navigate a complex educational system that wasn't always very, very thoughtful about adults. And so even early on in my career, spent some time working with adult learning program and trying to get attention for this kind of work on campus, and it was not a priority.

Janette Muir (01:43):It was really focused on the traditional student who comes in at 17 or 18 and then graduates at 22 in very clear, organized way. Well, fast forward now to here I am, have 35 years at George Mason, and I'm excited about the way things have transformed with regard to adult learners. We find now that students come to George Mason through a whole full life cycle of education and that we have to recognize that they come and go and we need to build on and off ramps to help them keep moving forward in terms of their successes. I think the boundary is becoming increasingly porous as far as the traditional programs and continuing education because there's so many new ways that we can actually offer education. We're seeing a blending of credit and non-credit pathways and stackable credentials. I'm sure we'll get into more of this in a little bit, but mainly we have seen now continuing to professional education, not being that peripheral unit somewhere that has to make revenue on its own and build its clientele. It's far more in our institution and we have created a learning initiatives network to help build that across all of our colleges.

Shauna Cox (03:07):Absolutely, and I love to hear that CE is becoming much more integrated. I know at some institutions they're well integrated, sometimes they're still siloed, which is unfortunate to hear, and then there's kind of this middle ground where we're getting there and it's, you know what? At least the wheels are start rolling and that's all that matters. So dovetailing off of that, what challenges and opportunities have sort of emerged as institutions begin to embrace that more learner-centric lifelong learning model overall?

Janette Muir (03:40):Well, I think that there are some amazing challenges to this work, but also great opportunities as part of it. So one of the first things that's a critical challenge is the faculty governance and curricular design processes. They are often not built for agility. And the thing that you find with continuing education is that it has to be nimble. It needs to create a lot of different ways to help people get their education. And a lot of the more traditional structures aren't built in a way to allow that. So we have to build in aligned incentives, policies, resources with the traditional departments with continuing education. And where we've found some real synergy is when the colleges are aligned under the provost office academic affairs

Janette Muir (04:34):And so is continuing education, which allows for a different level of trust. In the past we've had continuing education programs peripheral to what the units are doing, and it becomes a far more competitive landscape, not very helpful to everybody. The opportunities based on what we've seen is that we have a stronger community engagement employer partnerships because we're starting to really streamline how we engage in this work. And we are starting to reach, really reach underserved populations like the adult learners, the veterans Upskills big issue now with all of the government shifts in employment, we've got some real challenges that we need to be able to offer solutions for folks that are trying to figure out new directions in their lives. And so upskilling becomes an important way to do that and really continue education, especially as we're looking at these creative ways to provide credit and non-credit work that provides a way to drive innovation across the entire institution because there becomes this real ecosystem of trying to find ways to support lifelong learners.

Shauna Cox (05:50):Absolutely, and I love hearing that ecosystem and it sounds like a much more collaborative environment. And you did mention the academic affairs and continuing edge, which again dovetails beautifully into my next question, so I love that. But how can academic affairs and CE collaborate more effectively to support modern learners?

Janette Muir (06:13):Well, one of the things we spend a lot of time on at Mason is trying to make sure that we have strong governance in place. Any big initiatives we get into, we need to make sure we've got the right people at the table. If any one group tries to really own a system, it's too complicated to try to say, yes, this is your work and not ours. So we try to really build a joint governance or cross unit working groups to align policy and curriculum. And that becomes important because sometimes you can be working on one thing with curriculum, maybe over in continued education and never talk to a unit about that. And so this sort of begins to align everyone and trying to then leverage continuing ed's market agility within the academic affairs rigor. So making sure that when we are deciding we're going to provide credit for the amount of time spent in a particular training, that we have a clear way that we respect has integrity and really means a student has earned that particular certificate or degree. So trying to build a strong, solid sense of integrity in this space is important. Our collaboration model shares an infrastructure between CPE and academic colleges, and I think it's a really strong case study because not every place tries to work in that way. It's hard work, but it does create, I think, a sense of engagement and ownership across the institution.

Shauna Cox (07:55):Absolutely. And typically with, sorry, there we go. Typically this type of question in the discussion around credentials and pathways is normally spoken. I typically speak to a CE leader about that type of stuff, but you are of course in the academic affairs office, so I'd love to get your perspective on this. I think it's really important to get your perspective on this of how are the faculty roles and expectations shifting as these short cycles skills-based learning gains momentum along those degree pathways? And I know you mentioned on and off-ramps before,

Janette Muir (08:36):Right? I think the definition of teaching is expanding faculty might lead executive workshops or design asynchronous certificate programs. It's not necessarily the traditional, as we know, sage on stage or just everything through the online delivery. There's a number of ways that people are doing things. And so first thinking about the fact that we can engage our faculty more directly into continuing education. They get great experience and we get some of our smartest people out there working with various partnerships, and it's been very successful in that way. Faculty are being asked to microcredentials, this is definitely a hot area in higher education and thinking about, because we recognize especially adult learners are going to come and go in different ways. How can we have chunks of their education that they can bite off, take a break, come back and finally build? And our dean of the Costello College of Business has been very successful in creating a whole stackable credential master's degree that's based on various certificates that a student can earn. And it gives them that chance, okay, I can only do this much right now. I'm going to go back later, and so forth. It gives 'em a little more flexibility.

Janette Muir (10:02):And faculty are, I think, responding well to those sorts of things. Just this week we were having conversation about international students and the fact that visas are impacting whether or not international students can get here. So we're looking at are there bootcamps? Are there ways we can provide training and teaching in other parts of the world where they can then bring these things in? So it is not only just those domestic students, but this impacts students everywhere.

Shauna Cox (10:35):Absolutely. And I feel like in creating those stackable masters and the international students, it's not just one team running the show here. It is multiple. So this is a throwing in question, but how does all of that get managed?

Janette Muir (10:53):Well, I have to say that I'm lucky in this space and unusual because my portfolio is very large, which Provost continually reminds me about. And because I have been here for a long time and as my portfolio has been built, I have all of these areas that report up to me. So undergrad education, graduate ed, CPE, global. So there's this confluence of really great minds around the table at various points when we're trying to think about these, how do you do the micro-credentials? And in our governance structures that we respect, we try to make sure we create task forces and work groups that will also include people from various offices at the table. And the goal is that let's get everyone around the table, do whiteboarding, figure out what this can look like and see what we can produce it by the end. And we have both the registrar and the executive director for CPE leading that initiative.

Janette Muir (12:06):So you right away then get the right people at the table who can not only be the visionaries, think through things, but actually make it happen. And that's the real hard part. A lot of people have great ideas. It's like how then do you actually make it happen? And so I think our structure helps to build that, but it doesn't have to be that kind of structure and positional authority. It can be thinking about in any institution how you make change by bringing people to the table, engaged in the conversation and recognizing the common goal. And our goal, our main goal at George Mason is that students come first and we want our students to be successful. We want this university to be accessible, and we have great results in terms of where students can get jobs and their employment success is very striking. And so our goal is to really get people through and try to do it in creative and expansive ways.

Shauna Cox (13:12):Amazing. I love that. And I really love the emphasis of this collaborative environment, getting everyone to the table, trying to share everyone's ideas as best you can, seeing if they fit, and then just really just putting all these ingredients together to make that nice big ecosystem there. So what role do you believe lifelong learning will play in shaping the future of higher ed? Now, I say over the next decade, but let's be honest, we don't know what's going to happen in a year, so maybe the next couple of years.

Janette Muir (13:45):Yeah, I think that it's no longer optional to think about lifelong learning. It is the core operating model for modern universities. We can't just think we're going to get a certain type of student, a certain age range, a person in lockstep for their career, knowing exactly what they want to do. That's not the way students think these days, nor was it that way even 20 years ago. We need to recognize that this is a core model for our institution

Janette Muir (14:18):And spec continued integration of AI automation, rapid tech change, which means there's going to be a lot of need for reskilling and upskilling. It's constant. So people may think they have learned everything. Sometimes my son has said he's learned everything he knows on YouTube. Well now he's learned a few years later that, no, that doesn't work that way. And he's in the adult learning program here at George Mason. So you find that you have to constantly be thinking about what your is going to be, and then institutions have to embrace the flexibility. We have to think about how we're going to credential people better and build strong employer partnerships that will really provide great internships or mentoring in different ways. What I like to think about here is that we have the whole of university approach at Mason in that we have from the Bachelor to accelerated master's programs, these pathways to executive education, to just learning basic workforce skills, retooling. It's the whole way that we try to use what's the best, I think of George Mason to help our adult learners.

Shauna Cox (15:40):Absolutely. Well, Jeanette, those are all the questions that I have for you. Is there any advice that you'd like to share to other higher ed leaders trying to incorporate lifelong learning, any collaboration, anything else that I may have missed?

Janette Muir (15:57):Well, no, Sean, I think you've had some great questions here. You and your team have been very thoughtful about this. I just think that we have had, through history, there's been this competition amongst universities and community colleges. So much of is built on that and chasing students and so forth. And what I have learned over my time at this institution and in working with partnerships is that we really build the best when we're thinking about how we work together, how we build these relationships. And this is not easy work that we do, and we can just thrive when we are finding these ways to really work together in a sense of trust. And that's hard. That's hard work. We can do much more in our own little silos sometimes, at least by ourselves. But really to make this for long-term success, finding ways to build these relationships is key. And that means not only partnerships externally, but also recognizing those various offices that are deeply involved in adult learning and getting them to work together. And that makes a huge difference.

Shauna Cox (17:18):Amazing. I love it so much. Jeanette, thank you so much for sharing your insights and congratulations on 35 years. That is a big accomplishment.

Janette Muir (17:27):Thank you very much, Sean, and good to see you and good luck and have a great weekend.

Shauna Cox (17:32):Thanks.