Reimagining Higher Education and the Learner Experience
In this bonus episode of Unstoppable Stories, UMGC President Dr. Gregory Fowler sits down with Dr. Angela Besendorfer Martin, UMGC's Chief Learner Experience & Success Officer, to talk about the new role Dr. Fowler created to unite the university's approach to the entire student journey. Dr. Besendorfer reflects on what drew her to the position, from Dr. Fowler's explicit vision for change to her own experience leading through crisis as an administrator in Joplin, Missouri, following the historic 2011 tornado.
The conversation explores what it really means to build a student-centered institution: rethinking degrees around demonstrated skills rather than seat time, using AI to enhance rather than replace the human elements of teaching, and creating a consistent UMGC experience for learners everywhere from military bases overseas to fully online classrooms. Dr. Fowler and Dr. Besendorfer also discuss UMGC's recent trip to visit learners and staff across Asia, the new Digital Student Experience team charting individual learner journeys, and why practitioner faculty with real-world experience are central to closing the gap between a degree and a job.
In closing, they offer a vision for the next five years, explain why UMGC maintains rigorous standards alongside its open-enrollment policy, and reflect on how a nearly 80-year legacy of serving students in remote military outposts and war zones continues to define the university's mission today.
Episode Information
Lauren
Hi and welcome to a bonus episode of the UMGC podcast Unstoppable Stories. Today, we feature UMGC leaders discussing the future of higher education. We will hear from UMGC President Gregory Fowler, plus Chief Learner Experience and Success Officer, Doctor Angie. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
So, Greg, about a year ago. Well, a little longer than that because I started a year ago. Yep. You made a decision to create a new kind of role, met you, and that is intended to change some things. And so can you tell us about that?
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Yes. And I thank you for applying for that role. Yes. So about a year and a half ago, we really started diving into this question of how do we really get the entirety of the student landscape. So in many institutions, you will see there will be a student affairs, a student activities, an academic affairs office. And many times they don't actually integrate. Well, when it comes to how do we all see the 360 of the student, whether it's in the classroom or not? In fact, and what we all know is that one of the reasons that students don't succeed, in fact, perhaps the biggest reason that students don't see has very little to do with the class. It's really life happens, or the things that are happening outside of the class that impact their motivation, the impact, the various things they're trying to get with support. And so we decided we're going to create this role. And this role was going to be basically one that rather than trying to say we're going to pull these departments together, it was we're going to create a new team, a team of people who are going to be thinking about what is the entirety of the learning experience for the student from the moment they actually think about coming to school all the way to the time they graduate, how do we get into the things that we want to see? A lot of people use that term student centricity, but a lot of people don't really think about what does it mean to truly be centered on the student. So when you think about student centricity, what I say this really means two things. One is everything in the institution is focused on how how we're impacting the learner. Are we making that our top priority? But it's also how do we also think about seeing the world through the learner's eyes as they're trying to move forward? So we created this new role that was basically going to create the next generation of what that looks like for the learner experience. Basically, uniting those teams is something new, us and what's going to be the next generation of that. And we do that a lot. We talk about intentionality, we talk about deliberateness, and one of the things we want to make sure we do, and even when it comes to the job descriptions, it's message to people that this is not meant to be the job. As you might have thought about it in other places, that we really are trying to be intentional about saying we intend to disrupt things, that we intend to continue the mission of UMGC and doing things in a different type of way. And one of the things that really impressed me about your background was your time in Missouri and your willingness to think about how to do things differently. So can you talk a little bit about that whole experience that gave you an opportunity to say, we could be doing this the same way, but we could also have the opportunity to do something very different.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Yeah. So I think you're referring to probably the time in Joplin. I have lots of different periods where I, I truly question what education was doing and how it needs to be next, you know, and so one of the things that I try to do is I think that there's best practice and we should be using best practice. If I have a heart surgery, I want my doctor to use best practices. In certain cases, I might want them to use a next practice, like if I know that I'm at the end and unless something major happens, then I want it to really change. I think in education we're not doing life or death most of the time, which is a good thing. But we need to be thinking about next practice what who's building the the next best practice. And so I think about that a lot for me in Joplin in particular, was I think probably when you were referring to we, we experienced the F5 tornado that was the worst in our country's history. And we were at a point in time that we had the opportunity to actually question things. I think when you're living with things you thought you could never live without, you can question things you never questioned before. And the opportunity that we had leading in that period of time when there was so much that was uncertain, so much that was just you didn't have it anymore. Now, what should you do? Should you buy back what you had? Do you want exactly what you had? Not really. You know, I don't think we would do that with our house, but we don't. We don't want to do that with our with our buildings and what we're doing. And so the opportunity to really think through what should we have in a fast way because we weren't able to go slow, you know, we had 3200 students without schools. The opportunity to live past that and to see that we made some right decisions. And, you know, we stumbled forward in some ways to but that we had the opportunity to rethink. And it worked out okay. And actually transformed education across Missouri in some ways and other places. And we can point to that. Pretty cool. And I think that's where UMGC is.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Yeah. It was it's interesting because my career has been very much along those same type of lines, where moments give you the opportunity to rethink or reflect upon why we do what we do. How is editor Western governors at the time? And I got my second Fulbright, and I was the opportunity to go over to Brussels and spend some time with the European Union talking about the work air trying to do, formulating what they were going to be next. And part of what they were thinking about was the Bologna courts and education. And because a lot of people don't realize that while the EU is the European Union, every country had its own degree system and everything every country does not have, like the US, where a bachelor's degree is a bachelor's degree. So they were trying to save a good degree in France. And you want to go to Spain, you don't want to go to Italy. How do we create a system where things equal out and required them to be intentional about that work, because they're trying to move forward? And I came back from that work thinking, you need to really be thinking about why a bigger is a degree, what it is. And that led to the opportunity to be thinking about competency skills, deliberate design, and a lot of the work that goes into how do we make sure that we're clearly defining what people should be getting, and also how do we make sure that we are providing that in a way that says we're going to hold ourselves accountable for moving it forward? You and I both share some time at UMGC in a couple of different ways. So what are your thoughts about that whole idea of skills and competencies as we're looking at the future?
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Yeah, I think it's really important for us to to begin to know people better than by just a degree. And part of that is because in most institutions, even if we both get the same degree from the same institution, we took different electives, we had different professors, the actual things that we actually walk away with as skills. Sometimes it's not the same, right? And employers can't count on that. That's too big of a group. We need to really understand the skills that we've mastered, and the employers need to know what they're getting with that. And I think that that's really important, both for us as an institution to understand the skills that we're that we're working to make sure that our learners master. But in addition to that, that then employers can count on the fact that those students have mastered those skills and that when they hire them, they actually experience that. And so the the opportunity for us to dig in and define at the skill level down below the course level, right, the skill level to let people be seen for what they can do. And I also think that the really important change with that is, you know, we talk about skills based hiring a lot these days. I think that there are certainly, definitely some employers that are trying to do skills based hiring, but I don't think as higher ed institutions and even sometimes like the the short term workforce programs that we do a good job of actually portraying by skill. And I think we can lead in that space. But partnering with some of our other, other institutions that we partner with, you know, through our gates work and all of that, I think in make a change that is big enough that people can actually watch the skills based hiring change and that that's going to change how people are seen and hired, and that will also level the playing field for people. I'm excited about what the future holds when we do skills right, and we do it in partnership with employers.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
And it's a weird to talk about this in a lot of ways in the university context, but I would say that there's a big issue even at the elementary and secondary level. And when we're talking about skills and intentionality and design, what have you seen in your background that leads us to believe that this shouldn't just be a conversation about higher education, but it really should be a conversation about what is in general and how do you build a stack those things and what's much more intentional way. So any thoughts on that?
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
A lot of thoughts on that, of course. I mean, with my K-12 background and then higher ed space as well have a lot of of thoughts about how we need to be better, making sure that skills are scaffold across the system. I mean, we we have years in, in K-12 that it's like, oh, we're teaching the same thing again. I mean, there was a period of time where it's like, how many times do you teach pilgrims, you know, so, so like that scaffolding of it is important. But in addition to K-12, I think employer trait and what's happening in other areas outside of traditional higher education and post-secondary education, that's important to people learn skills from working. They learn skills because they volunteered at an organization. And how do we actually capture those and and take the time to understand what those are and then be able to and I think with the help of AI, honestly, to consistently apply rules that help us see what people can do, which can translate into credit for prior learning, it can translate into actually helping people accelerate through to their degree more quickly, because we can prove what they know. And I think it will also then flip the switch on how we hire people, and that they can be seen for what they.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Can do. You know, it's fascinating. You see it that we often talk about lifelong learning or lifetime learning. And I often say that the vast majority of the things that we are going to learn in our lives don't happen in the classroom. And yet at the same time, we feel like this is the only packaged way we can go about giving people, you know, credentials for these types of things. So one of the things we're trying to do a lot of here is think about what are all the barriers, ways that we can assess and evaluate and credential those other types of experiences. Certainly, the work we're doing with the military when it comes to if you demonstrated this rank and being evaluated those levels, we can bring that into your transcript and into your records in a way that allows you to keep moving, save money, save time, and keep moving forward. Same thing is going to be true for all of the other ways in life that this happens, whether it's on a retail store or a bank or the military, you've got to come up with much more, many more ways to think about what does the skills based environment look like. And it may not be courses and programs in the way that we're thinking about in the future. The product may be something very different.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Yeah, it really may be very different in that maybe it becomes something that's very modular and that that people like in the strategic plan. One of the things I got excited about was like the opportunity for individuals to personalize their learning and decide what kind of a degree they want. And what I imagined when I was reading that as preparation for the interview and all that was, was the idea that if I know that I want to work in healthcare, but communications, then maybe I could pull modules from different places because there's health care information and I can learn some basic stuff, not the degree. I don't want to be the nurse, but I want to know enough about it that I can write about it to tell the stories better if I'm the communications person. And so how do we build customizable kind of degree opportunities for people to create the life they want? And that how then do we help employers see those skills as like, oh, this is a better match than just a degree.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Yes. And it's one of those things where we do it right in the currencies, truly skills. Then we can really find those barriers, ways to say it's happening here. I love that idea of a plug and play model. Often say it's almost like a reverse version of Jenga, where you're trying to pull in the pieces based upon. This is what this structure needs to be, as opposed to something else. But that requires us to think very differently and much more intentional about it. And at the same time, thinking about this, using people who are used to a very different system. This has been one of the big challenges that we talk about when it comes to we are trying to create something new, but people go with what they know. And so one of the things that I asked you to do when you came on board was to begin to take a look at the teams. Do we have the right teams and players? Do we have the right skills in place, and how do we rethink this conversation as we are moving forward when it comes to working with people who want to do the right thing, who are committed to the mission but don't necessarily see the pathway yet. So how's that going for you? And should be giving to engage with people and trying to think about how to bring to belong and develop them as part of the strategic plan as well.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Yeah. So it's been a growth process, of course, because there are there are people who are all in. They love the strategic plan. They want to make this happen. There are also people that are our team that might not be as excited about that as the same. And change is hard and change in a large organization is hard. So how's it going? We've made some transformations. We've created a completely new division within UMGC. We had two departments that reported to me when I started, the Chief Academic Officer and Student Affairs. And today I have six direct reports, all leading departments and and touching things. But I think more importantly, was the design that you created, Greg, whenever, whenever you built this role, it was you're going to have these direct reports that that was important to this. But then there's dotted lines that there's there's this whole piece of we're a matrix organization and that it's not about we we own this. And that's all it's about. We all work together to make sure that we achieve the goals. And I think that that is becoming much more alive.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Yes, yes. And it's been interesting to have that conversation with your colleagues in the, in the senior executive team to say yes. From the moment someone thinks about UMGC, we want to be thinking about what is their experiencing. And that means you've got to be able to work with the marketing team to say, how are we messaging what this is and being able to work with communications team and say, how are we communicating more effectively and being able to work with all the other partners and other pieces? And that can be challenging for an organization when you're trying, when you have had a history of being much more traditionally departmental, one of the words I, one of the things I see a lot is we don't want to think about being an advocate for our department at the senior level. We want to be stewards of the institution, and that requires a lot of hard work to get us there as we're trying to do it. One of the things that we're trying to do now, of course, is also broaden our global sets. And one of the things you and I've been doing over the last period of time is spending a little bit of time trying to go visit some fast sites around the globe. And I also, not too long ago, ask you all to go spend some time as leaders, just spending some time in Asia with all of the various other global news. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like and how that broadens what UMGC does, and helps the leaders get a real picture of where the students are?
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Yeah, I think I think it was an amazing week that we spent together in Asia. We had several leaders from my organization, my division, as well as marketing communication. We had then different folks from the overseas, both academics as well as kind of the advising side of things. And then we went out to bases and we saw like, what's life like? They're like, what's what's it what's happening there? How do you do this? And how is it different so that we're understanding all the learners that we have, because a lot of our learners are online and we do that in a certain way, and it kind of seems to be like, oh, this is how it works. But we also have a significant number of learners that are active duty military spouses, all of that that are learning in face to face classes on bases across the world. And we need to understand the experience of, of UMGC as, as a learner. And so it was really helpful for us to be able to see that, to talk to learners that are doing variety of different things, like we had one group of of learners that we set with, I don't know, there was probably ten different students there that shared. Now I only go online, I only go in person, you know, like there's different ways that they experience UMGC. But it primed us for work when we came back to the hotel. It'll be set. And we we dug into things and we talked about how do we create one experience and how do we define what we're going to be the same about, and why are we going to be different in certain ways for the learners so that they can experience that? Like you said, the iPhone works. When I get off the plane in another country, it's still my iPhone. And how does it feel? The same. And that's what we want is for students to not like, hey, it was this great thing when I was in, you know, soul. And there's this, this piece here and now here I am back here. And this feels different. Yes. And we wanted to feel like UMGC and to have that experience, I mean, your creation of this role and to think about through the eyes of the learners is really, really what we embodied in that trip.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Yeah, it's one of those things where trying to get people out of Adelphi, because it's so easy when you're here to think that we're just going to be focused on where things are. And it's the idea is to get people out in the field, to get in front of learners, to get in front of our team members. We have 175 plus locations in 24 plus countries around the globe. And people sometimes think that, you know, we're like a lot of other schools where the students who are taking it online, and I know we are physically in these places in the logistics of being able to move these places around. We just had to, of course, not too long ago, deal with evacuations and one place in the Middle East, and certainly have to deal with things like typhoons in Guam. And because our team members on the ground teaching classes, supporting students, and we therefore have to be global in the way that a lot of people don't think about. But it also requires us to be thinking about what is the next generation of this going to look like for UMGC? And one of the important things that we have to be talking about is that this does not mean that we're criticizing traditional education. We're saying this is not an either or. It is a both and situation where how do we expand the opportunities for more adult learners? How do we think differently about the learners who may say, I want to go to education, but I don't want to go full time? Those who said I do not begin these credentials years ago, but I want to go back to it. There are so many different learner stories that we are trying to dive into, and it doesn't mean that one size fits all, either for an institution or for the people that we're talking about as we're trying to move forward. So as you're diving into these learner stories and you're hearing from active duty military, and you're also hearing from community colleges, and you're here from corporate corporate people, are you thinking a little bit about how do we chart the experience in an intentional way? And part of your team is very much focused on can we chart that experience and then figure out where the opportunities from a workload perspective are? So any thoughts on how to move that forward?
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Yeah. So one of the things that you created before I arrived was the Digital Student Experience team. And they do chart that. But I think it's not charting a student story because it's not one. It's about what's the difference between a learner that starts with us and doesn't have any college credit, which is becoming a growing area for us, but then how many credits and what's happening within? Did they come with an associate's? Did they come with just some college? How much college? And what's the difference for the for the learners in that kind of a journey versus other journeys? And really looking at the journey from the moment they find out about us through the whole piece, including why did they leave us? Because not everybody sticks it out, and maybe because they transferred to somebody else and that was their that was their plan all along, was that they were using us as a beginning steps. It may be that life happened and how do we help them again later, but understanding their journeys is really important. And then what are the patterns within that and how can we personalize within? That is one piece of it. In addition to that, there's there's factors that we want to look at that the learners are like alike based on their credits that they brought in or the jobs that they have, whether they're active duty or they're not. But then there's also personas that are, you know, single parents. They have a different kind of challenge than than other learners might have learners who are working, you know, various kinds of demands on adult learners is is really different. So how do we know the student? So the future to me is making it to where our learners feel like UMGC knows me and they're and they're serving me. And so that means how we advise you as a learner at UMGC is different than how you would advise another person, because we actually know your particular things and that we can support you for your success. We understand your goals, we understand your life, and we understand how you want to be communicated with, etc., etc., etc. and that that helps us to be sure that we're not packaging something and saying here, this is what you get, that you actually get to decide and you're still in charge of your learning, but that you are able to do that in a partnership with us to where we're guiding and serving as a mentor to help you to be able to have a better life, because you figure that's why you're you're choosing to spend some money on an education.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Yeah. It's interesting because we often talk about education as if it's different from all the other industries. And while there are some things that may be unique about education, we learn a lot from the other industries that we observe over time. And certainly a lot of that's got to deal with the idea of disruption and what we've seen happen in other industries. When it came to those types of things. I often say more people listen to music now than they ever have in human history. More people, you know, get news now than they ever having human history. They just don't do it in the way that the big titans of those industries were imagining 20 or 30 years ago. And the result is that you see a much more personalized thing that says, I want to listen to my music, I want to create my own playlist, and I don't want to buy your big package to do this type of thing, or I don't want to buy your newspaper and have it delivered to my doorstep. I want to be able to figure those things out for myself. And I would say more people are engaged in learning than ever have been in human history. This is no longer about access. This is no longer you got to go to the these stacks that we may recall from our time trying to go down into, you know, I still hear the word of microfilm and microfiche in my head. Sometimes you can still smell the smell of cardboard boxes and archives, but this is no longer a situation where information is isolated, and only the rich people or others can get access to it. We have more information than we know what to do. What's now the challenge is, how do we then use that to empower people to make sure that they have the credentials that give them the power to transform their lives? And that's a very challenging thing for our industry right now, because so much of it has been tied up into what happens with the expertise, and how does that expertise get disseminated in these various ways. And one of the things from a global perspective is being able to say, we can educate thousands of people at a time now, not just the people who are sitting in front of us. And in many cases, they don't even necessarily come to us for the resources. They come to us that certify that what they've been doing is a good thing. So one of the things we're going to be working on is exactly this question of how does how do things like technology pack this? And certainly we're talking about things like AI. You can't have a conversation today of some corn without talking about AI, because either you are being influenced by it, or you are influencing it by the ways you're designing the types of things. So how are you thinking about this as we design the experiences for the future and talk about personalized systems and data that will be fed up to people, how are these things being affected, areas that you're trying to control.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
So AI is important for us to embrace and us to understand, but also to understand how to carefully do that in a way that is ethical and moral and keeps the humans in the center of this, that there's things that computers should do and there's things that humans should do. And we need to define what that is for us. We're definitely leaning into AI. We believe that there are lots of ways that we can utilize AI. But I will tell you that one of the things that's strange to me is that when I talk to vendors, because a lot of vendors reach out right there wanting to sell me things like how to how to deal with AI cheating and that kind of stuff, and that is important. I'm not saying it's not important, but it is not the interest that we are having when we're thinking future forward. We're really thinking, how are we using AI to enhance the learning experience, to enhance the way that we use data to help us to be better serving and really to personalize, as I mentioned before, that experience. So we know the learner so well that they feel like that, what they feel like we're definitely their partner, where we're that for them and the learning space. We're really working hard on what is next gen learning. And so we're spending a lot of time with both our faculty and our instructional designers looking at AI, looking at how do we use AI in a way that is the right way, which includes can we use some cool avatars that might actually, instead of doing a discussion board, have a conversation with the learner where they're on video that Ben as transcribed, and then that's turned into something that we can actually use as, as our academic leaders and our professors and all can, can utilize that to understand skills that the learners are gaining so much better than if they would do a discussion board, and somebody then responds 2 or 3 times to it, like that's I think, a better use. So like, can we use AI for that? Can we use AI for formative grading, not to do the grade, but to actually give the first round of feedback so that what's actually turned in then for the grade is a better product. And with AI that's trained not to tell the answers, but to encourage deeper exploration in areas, can we utilize AI to help instructors take less time grading and more time actually telling the stories? We have amazing faculty who are, you know, CEOs of companies and all kinds of things. Can we spend their time telling stories about this principle of business? I used in this scenario in my in my work, as opposed to, hey, you didn't do your discussion board post, you don't know what's going on. Let's let's use AI to really enhance the experience.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Yeah. And this is one of those areas where I'm trying to make sure we're very transparent with all of our teammates about AI as a phenomena will impact every single role in our university, mine included, and being able to be comfortable with that and say, okay, so what does that mean? How does that it doesn't mean that it's going to replace all of our people. It means that hopefully. And one of the things that you've heard people say is that AI should really stand for augmented intelligence as opposed to artificial, because it should augment our skill sets as we were trying to move forward in the various ways. Now, that means that we have to be comfortable with how do we engage with that, and what are the things that we can allow it to do that allow us to then broaden our skills? One of the things that we hear a lot of our team members say is that I'm not necessarily interested in moving up the vertical chain of leadership and marriage, but I am interested in continues to expand my skills in various ways, and hopefully that will allow us to do this. But it also allows us to do the very important work of being intentional. Again, going back to that idea of do we are we really looking in the mirror and having an understanding of our workflows? Do we understand how these things happen? When I go to various conferences, I always start off with, do we all agree on what it means to learn? I'll do understand how learning happens. And if we understand how learning happens, are we charting pathways that really measure that or are we not? One of the things you're hearing a lot of these conversations about AI around how we really been doing assessment. Right. And if if it's that easily done, have we really been evaluating things that we think we have been or have we been doing something else? So when we look at the learning experience, when we look at the evaluation experience, when we look at the student support, charting those things, having that information is a different thing that we're just going to come in, as you were saying, I'm going to go in and sprinkle AI like a seasoning on top of everything and hope something magical happens as a result of it. It really does need to be. We're going to really design these things and see where there could be an impact and hopefully move that forward, but that boosts people's cheese.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
It does. And I think a key word that you said there was assessment. Yes, I think that we have in in education cage Wolf and higher ed. We've worried about grades a lot. And so we've done a lot of things to measure activity. We've counted activities to be able to count hours. We've done all these kinds of things that are about the school game, whether it was K-12 school or higher ed. It's about how do I get the right amount of stuff and a grade book, that it feels legit. And we're measuring activity versus a learning a lot of times. And so one of the, one of the muscles that we're going to grow here in UMGC is our ability to really, truly understand assessment. What we're talking about with that right now is we're talking about skill signal. So how do we not measure hey, you did your discussion posts, you know, each week. And so you got X number of points and that and pretend that measures learning versus how do we actually build assessments. That can help us to know that, you know, this and that you understand and that you're going to be able to keep that with you, that that is a skill that you now have. And so we'll be changing the school game in a different way, which will, I think, make it more enjoyable. One of the things that we're striving for is a delightful learning experience. Yes, yes. But beyond that, it is that we actually know people didn't just get an A or A, B or C in the class. I've said many times that you can get an A on this test and flunk this test, and no one ever makes you learn this. How do we ensure people actually do learn what we need them to know?
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Yeah, this is one of the big challenges that higher education is going to have to deal with regardless. And it is we have made the assumption that because someone sits in a classroom for three hours a week, for 15 weeks a year, 15 weeks a semester, and gets a graded something, that it actually measures something, and we don't have any real standard ways to say no. Can you or can you not do that? And this is one of the things that we are constantly trying to make sure we're getting better and better, which is this is less about how much time you sat there. And it's not about, you know, whether or not you sat and got it the specific way it really is about, do you or do you not have the ability to demonstrate that skill set? Can you or can you not do it? And have we created an experience that allows you to do that, which creates a level of accountability on the part of the institution that a lot of institutions really don't want to actually have? We want to make sure that we are saying, if you come here and you do these things, we're going to show that at the end of this, you can do this type of the skill set or ability that you have. That again, goes back to the intentionality keys that a lot of institutions are going to have to deal with in the future. This is part of the reason why you've seen such a big challenge. Is education worth it? And we see a lot of this when it comes to things like transfer credits, for example, and the resistance to transfer credits, frankly, where someone will say, you didn't take my class. And it's like, well, what specifically you get in that class that I can demonstrate that says it's either you need or that it mirrors the things that we were looking for. So we often talk about there may be 47 different intro site courses in the state, and I guarantee you that no two of them are the same way. But what what we want to be able to do is we're moving forward, is be able to say to people, here are the five skills that you're going to have after this experience, whether it's a class or an internship or something else. So as we're diving into that work, one of the things we want to make sure we do is hold ourselves accountable for it.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Right. And I think I've said to our team many times at this point that the brand of UMGC to employers is really important, that as they hire one UMGC grad, that they find them and they find, oh my gosh, they know their stuff. This is great. I didn't need to retrain them. And so then they find another UMGC person that a supply for job. And they're like choosing them because this other one was really good you know. So for between these two. So then now they've got two that are great. If they can consistently understand the quality that's coming from our our brand, then they will consistently come back to our, our learners to do that. And that is a promise. I think that higher ed and the the criticism of higher ed that's out there, that's the promise that we can change. And when we can, when we can help employers have the experience. So if we talk about experience of learners, we want to talk about the experience of what happens to our alumni, right. If they're successful and employers see them as successful, there will become this deal that says, I want UMGC Eagles because they know their stuff. Yes, we're building the education infrastructure, the kind of assessments, all of that to ensure that our graduates have that kind of experience.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Yeah, and this is one of the big challenges as well, which is it's all about inputs in the traditional models for a lot of places, even when it came to accreditation, you know, in the old days, I know a lot of places have changed a little bit now. But with the accreditation, one of the big challenges has been there measuring all of these inputs. How many books do you have in your library actually tells you something about whether or not the school is a good quality school? How many things have happened to these other areas, and what we want to be able to say is, in the end, either the learner can do what we say or they can't. What are the outputs? I don't care how they got here. I don't care about, you know, the variance of the pieces. I've used a lot of booty references in my life to talk about this type of thing, but I keep saying this is less about all of those various inputs and sort of taking the box on those things, because none of those things guarantee that you're going to have success. And so when we're talking about experiences, we're going to be creating in the future the future of things like learning and resources, the future of assessment, the future of the instructors who are going to be in front of the classroom. This is really about being able to demonstrate those outputs. So we talk about our practitioner faculty. One of the things we're saying is we want people who actually demonstrate that they are working in the field, know the field and have had success in the field as opposed to simply looking at the degree. And therefore you should actually trust me with it, right?
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
I think it's really important for us to understand that difference, like the the practitioner faculty is critical because we're we're really leaning into the real life stuff. And I think that that translates into our learners actually being more prepared for that. I can remember there used to be conversations about the gap between now I have my credential of whatever, whether it's high school or whether it's college. There's a gap then between ready for work as that the employers were having to train people for that. The more that we can bring real world examples, which can be internships and different kinds of things as well, like experiential learning, but it also can be practitioner faculty helping them understand the stories. You know, there's a concept called borrowed perceptions. You don't have to live everything yourself, but if you can hear it from somebody, you can understand it in kind of a depth that you can actually adapt that. And I think that our professors bring that to our learners, and if we can then unleash them from some of the things that are taking their time by using AI, by by making things easier for them in different ways, we can actually embed more of that expertise into the learning.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
And I think that also goes back to the idea of what is it truly mean to be a skills based culture. That means certainly the work for its students, but also from our side. One of the things that our HR department says we need to be clear on what the skills are that we're expecting and the people who are working in our teams and how we're evaluating those skills as well, because over and over again, it becomes a sort of full circle of, we want to make sure that our people demonstrate the skills that they need to have, that those things are clearly defined, and we want to make sure that the skills that we're giving to our students are clearly defined, and that the methods that we're putting in front of them provide them with that opportunity. We do those types of things, then it doesn't become a question anymore of his education, work, that or what am I getting for this? Then it becomes, here's what it is. And you can demonstrate that continuing to move it forward, that's hopefully where we're going to be able to go more and more, but it will be different than it has been in the past. That doesn't mean that the past is a bad thing. UMGC has a long history. We're getting ready to celebrate our 80th anniversary in a couple of months. Being able to say we've had 80 years of thinking about how to do this differently from the first day of those seven faculty going over and say, we don't have all the answers, but we're going to figure it out and we're going to partner. And the result has been at some point, the work of being on all seven continents, digging out, how do you somebody who's at the South Pole, who wants to get their degree, how do you do this in the middle of an active battle zone? How do you do this in a jungle in the middle of Korea? How do you do this in places like Russia, raq, Iran, places that we don't even necessarily now have the relationships within the same type of way. But at some point, UMGC has been in those places, working with various students to try to make sure that those things that that they want to do are being actually part of the work. They're trying to move forward.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
You know what that makes me think about is that from the get go, 80 years ago, we were focused on people, but then how we serve our students will all all be about that. And I think about it's so interesting, the the grounding piece in the strategic plan, the last piece is people, right? That people are the center of what we've always done. And I think now more than ever, the personalization that we're going to be able to do both for the practitioner faculty, you know, like they're they're not the same. That's part of the value of what we bring within that, that that model, the way that our students come in and they're not the same. How we personalize across all of that is, I think, going to be a differentiator for UMGC, because when we put people first, you talked about learner centered earlier. When we put people first across all of that, I think that there's no doubt that we're going to really win with this and that we're going to serve people.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
But yeah, I often say we want to model for our people what we want our people to model for our lawyers that we live up to what we're trying to do that it doesn't become. We're asking them to do something that we are not doing well. A big fan of the idea, my parents used to say, if you got to be able to walk the walk and go to talk, to talk, we're going to make sure that we're able to do those types of things and demonstrate that. It goes back to the whole idea of, if we're talking about skills for our learners, we need to be talking about skills for our people. And and this is where I think we're trying to create a different type of organization, one that is reflective in all of the ways integrated throughout that what we're saying and doing. We are living as part of the work that we're trying to move forward. We've got to be honest with ourselves about where we're succeeding and where we're not. We got we've got to be able to walk the walk and talk the talk and this type of thing. So we've got to be able to demonstrate for them that if we're going to do this, we're going to be successfully demonstrating that we're going to do this as we continue to move forward. If we do that, well, then the public will stop asking the question because the evidence will be there that they have to ask. The question is because they don't see the evidence. But that requires us to, you know, get beyond sort of the traditional ivory tower thing was simply saying that you just got to trust us because the public, we don't just trust you. And so that's also true when it comes to how we work as an industry. You've got to demonstrate to our people that this is all about people all along the way. So if we do those things, I think we're going to really do that thing that we say in our mission, which is, you know, transform the lives and hopefully transform the world as a result.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Yeah. And I think that that goes back to my interview. One of the things that I had to do in a presentation for the interview was to talk about what success looks like. And, and I remember that success looks like we do this very well for our learners, but we model it for the rest of higher ed because we've all got to catch up. There's there's a lot of struggle right now with higher education and knowing what to do. And then there's financial constraints. There's all kinds of things that are happening. How can we lead that in a way that shows that this is what's possible for learners and for for people, really that that can change that and can lead the way for others.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
So one of the things we get wrapped up as being able to think about five years from now, if you were trying to say, what's the wind? What? What do you want? The students who are walking across the stage to say, what do you want? The team members who you're that you're passing in the hall to say, if we did create this different role and we did so intentionally, but we also know that sometimes we create something. The reality of what happens is different from the expectations or the design of it. If you're saying five years from now stepping into this role, what do you want to say best? The wind that I want to see.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Well, I would want to see that we're more efficient in the way that we serve learners so that we've been able to maintain low tuition. So that would be one of the pieces. But with that, I think that my biggest hope and my biggest dream for what we're trying to accomplish is really about the learner experience. It's about what's happening in the classroom. It's about delight. As I mentioned before, what I want is for oftentimes our learners are people that didn't believe they were college material. They were not encouraged to go to college, they didn't go to college right out of school, or they did. And that wasn't successful. And so they thought they weren't that wasn't for them. And now they've decided to try again, whatever it happens to be, whatever their journey is to us, that when they get in that classroom with us, that they experience delight. And the delight is it can do this, that when they experience it, that there's enough choice in that learning experience, that they can choose whether they want to read it or they want to watch a video about it, or listen to a podcast while they're driving to work or whatever it happens to be. That how they ingest the information has choice because it fits their learning, and that they really believe that this worked for them, and that maybe no other would have for them. That they believe that this experience was so delightful and that they they may have had struggles because, you know, learning is cognitive dissonance and it can be struggles. Right. But that so not that it was easy, but they always believed that we were going to be there for them and that they could, and that they knew they could count on us to help them through, to reach their goal. And they knew from the get go that achieving their goals possible.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
You know, that's absolutely awesome, because I think that in the end, what we want to be able to say is, did we transform those lives when actually watch this students walk across the state, it's you see the long lines of students to the point you were making earlier. Every student has their story. Everyone is a unique, interesting thing that says, some people may say, you know, I just came here and it was very typical, but we have students who walk across the stage who say it till eight, 50 years to get this to degree. And what we want to be able to do is say it doesn't matter to us. We want to make sure that we live up to our mission to be an open enrollment institution, but we also want to live up to our mission and say, if you walk through those doors, there's a promise that we're going to make here. That is, we're going to do all we can. We can't lure the bar. We can never lower the bar because we're not serving students wealthy Lord the bar. But we can say it. Find a way to say we want to make sure that we give you every opportunity, that we remove all the obstacles that we can, and make sure that when you walk out this door, you feel good about what you've done, you can actually demonstrate that. And hopefully you can transform your life, the life of your family, the community, and ultimately the world. I love the work that we do part, because it's one of those jobs where you can look around and say, we are changing the world through the work that we do, precisely because we're changing it one student at a time.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
And it's an honor for me to lead with you. And, you know, as I celebrating my one year anniversary and all of that, that the opportunity to be able to work in an institution that dreams big for our learners, that pushes our people to be the best that they can be, and that is truly focused on how each individual can be successful and is willing to question things that have it been questioned before. Is is truly an honor, and I appreciate your leadership.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
And we're just getting started.
Dr. Angie Besendorfer
Yeah. Good. Be good.
Dr. Gregory Fowler
Good stuff.
Lauren
Thanks for tuning into this bonus episode from UMGC. Be sure to like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to hear more. Until next time.