UMGC Global Media Center
Preparing Learners for What Comes Next

That may be a simple question, but the answer seems complex. How was HUMANS developed, and what makes you confident that it will yield the intended outcomes? 

Sugarman: HUMANS did not emerge from a single discipline or individual perspective. The framework draws on workforce and labor-market data, scholarly research, civic and educational frameworks, and analysis of future workforce trends. It also served as a model of effective human-AI collaboration. 

We adopted a seven-step research and validation model that leveraged the strengths of both humans and AI, with humans conducting extensive marketplace research and assessing emerging workforce signals while AI helped reduce pattern bias. Then, human experts were called back in to evaluate, organize, and create the framework, aligning the skills that fit within each domain. We socialized the method both with academics and with experts who are approaching the skill validation work from a non-academic context. The research and alignment phases are complete, and we have begun validating the framework with employers, students, faculty, and staff, recognizing that this work must continue to evolve as workplace and societal needs change. This ongoing validation is what gives us confidence in the direction and will help us continue refining the framework as we move from design into implementation. 

The developmental process provides its own sort of validation of the HUMANS framework: humane connection created the environment for effective collaboration and our ability to bring diverse perspectives to a large, unstructured problem; understanding the context allowed us to determine whether the idea was worth pursuing; moral judgment allowed us to make sure that our approach was aligned with the UMGC mission; adaptive performance allowed us to pivot when required; novel creation allowed us to organize our thinking into a legible framework; and skeptical inquiry helped us to ensure that we could separate signals from noise.  

The building blocks of HUMANS seem similar to what employers term "soft skills." Is this different, and if so, how?

Segura: One reason we began exploring HUMANS is that the notion of "soft” skills doesn't adequately reflect the importance of these capabilities. Communication, ethical reasoning, creativity, adaptability, and critical inquiry are not secondary skills. They are foundational capabilities that influence how people navigate complex situations, make decisions, work with others, and create value. 

The HUMANS framework treats these capabilities not as optional additions to education, but as central to learner success. They're the capacities that help people connect knowledge across disciplines, respond to change, and exercise sound judgment in increasingly complex environments. One of the distinctive ideas behind HUMANS is that these same capabilities underpin effective collaboration, whether it is with other people or with increasingly capable AI systems. And we expect these capabilities to be relevant now and in whatever the future of work holds. 

HUMANS also pushes past tool fluency to what actually determines whether AI improves organizational or individual performance. And rather than leaving that to individual courses, it treats learning and development as ongoing and truly interdisciplinary. That’s what makes learning transfer. That’s what makes it stick. It also prepares people to keep learning as work itself keeps changing. Learners aren’t static. Their contexts aren’t static. At UMGC, we believe learning shouldn’t be either. 
 

What will HUMANS look like in practice? How will it change the learner experience?

Segura: HUMANS is helping inform a redesign of general education, which comprises the foundational courses that make up approximately 40 percent of an undergraduate degree. These courses are intended to provide a foundation for academic, personal, civic, and professional success. Despite that intention, students often experience these courses as standalones that don’t build toward an intellectually cohesive experience. In contrast, with HUMANS, we are working toward a model that will deliver on the promise of general education, helping learners build and apply these capabilities across disciplines. This model also promises immediate relevance and value by giving students who are seeking career advancement an opportunity to demonstrate their marketable skills early in their learning journey while also gaining a vocabulary to communicate with employers who are seeking individuals with those skills.

Sugarman: Rather than thinking about general education as a collection of disparate requirements, we're designing a cross-disciplinary experience that encourages learners to practice and demonstrate capabilities over time.

Learners will have a clearer developmental pathway. Rather than moving through separate requirements, students will encounter the HUMANS framework early in their academic journey, continue developing those capabilities across multiple disciplines, and ultimately demonstrate them in increasingly complex environments. 

Segura: We're designing ways to better recognize skills and knowledge that adult learners already possess while maintaining clear standards for demonstrating mastery. The emphasis is on helping learners understand what they know, develop what they need, and show what they can do. Ultimately, the goal is for a learner who completes the HUMANS journey to develop the deep domain knowledge needed to thrive in their profession while also learning to view problems through multiple lenses and to take a systems thinking approach to solving them, rather than exercising siloed thinking. In the modern workplace and in our modern civic context, where problems are complex and people need to consider diverse and ethical perspectives to develop better answers, HUMANS graduates will be better equipped. 

Why is this especially relevant for adult learners?

Segura: Our 2024 demographics survey revealed that some 80 percent of UMGC students work 40 or more hours per week, meaning many are already applying workplace knowledge and skills while they earn their degrees. HUMANS builds on that reality by helping learners develop and demonstrate the capabilities that support success across changing roles, industries, technologies, and evolving workplace expectations.

HUMANS focuses on capabilities that can travel with learners across industries, career stages, and technological shifts. That's consistent with UMGC's mission of meeting learners where they are and helping them achieve meaningful outcomes.

Many of the capabilities in HUMANS, such as communication, critical thinking, and ethical reasoning, have long been intended outcomes in higher education. What's new about this approach?

Segura: That's an important question. The innovation isn't the idea that communication, judgment, creativity, or critical thinking matter. Higher education has been developing those capabilities for generations.

Traditional general education models often expose students to important disciplines and perspectives, but they don't always provide a clear developmental journey that takes an intentional approach to helping learners understand how these capabilities build on one another over time or how they are designed to promote skill transferability outside of an academic context.

HUMANS is not simply a framework for describing important capabilities. It is helping us design a different educational architecture, one that makes those capabilities more visible, intentional, and demonstrable throughout a learner's journey.

Sugarman: HUMANS provides an intentional framework for preparing students to succeed in an ever-changing workplace. It is also prompting us to think differently about recognizing what learners already know, documenting what they can do, and creating stronger connections between learning, workforce relevance, and lifelong development.

What impact could HUMANS have beyond UMGC?

Sugarman: Higher education is entering a period of significant experimentation and innovation. Institutions across the country are asking how learning should evolve in response to changes in technology, workforce needs, and learner expectations. 

We see HUMANS as a contribution to that larger conversation. It is not simply about AI. It is about helping learners develop the capabilities that enable them to succeed academically, professionally, and personally while remaining thoughtful, responsible, and engaged participants in their communities. 

Segura: Ultimately, our goal is to explore approaches that improve learner opportunities and outcomes. If HUMANS can help advance conversations about how higher education prepares people for the future, then we believe it has value not only for UMGC but also for the broader field. 

It moves us beyond a focus on the final product and the related assumptions about what that product represents. A HUMANS-centered approach can ask learners how they framed a problem, used AI, verified evidence, rejected weak recommendations, and justified their final judgment. That gives us a richer picture of what a learner can actually do.

What's next for HUMANS?

Sugarman: Discovery work is complete, and we are now focused on program design. We're designing with both the near term and the long term in mind. The first horizon is reimagining the general education experience itself. The second is exploring how capabilities developed through that experience could connect to emerging opportunities in skills recognition, portable credentials, and lifelong learning. 

Segura: While there is still important work ahead, the direction is clear. Higher education has an opportunity to move beyond asking what learners studied and toward helping them demonstrate what they can do in a way that is meaningful to academics and employers alike. 

About HUMANS

HUMANS is a framework that UMGC is developing as a way to help define and nurture six enduring human capabilities for an AI-enabled world: Humane Connection, Understanding Context, Moral Judgment, Adaptive Performance, Novel Creation, and Skeptical Inquiry. UMGC is also exploring how the framework could inform an emerging approach to general education designed to prepare learners for success in a rapidly changing workforce and society.

Additional reading from Segura and Sugarman: Why Human Skills Still Matter in the Age of AI.