Scott Pulsipher, you are the president of WGU,
can you tell us a little bit about how you're using technology to advance student learning?
Yeah, in fact, the... probably better question is how are we not using technology?
One of the hallmarks of Western Governors University is that we are 100% online. We leverage the Internet,
we leverage all aspects of technology to power the innovation that we're driving,
in pretty much all aspects of what we do. And if I were to break that down somewhat,
everything... we utilize technology heavily into how we design curriculum, how we
identify learning objectives and outcomes, and map those to workforce competencies.
We leverage technology, enabling our faculty and their engagement with students, we obviously leverage
technology to design specific student experiences and applications,
and environments and access to learning resources. Everything about their
journey with us is fully powered by that.
One of the big and very important areas for us in leveraging technology, is in, also, all the data, and so...
...clearly as you have enabled the entire end-to-end journey of a student experience with WGU,
that affords us the opportunity to really understand, at a much deeper level, as to how our faculty engaging with them,
how students engage with learning resources, how different learners learn...
...all aspects of that, and then data really allows us then to power
the adaptation and the ongoing invention and reinvention of how we do
the things that we do to better serve our students and ultimately increase the likelihood of a better outcome for them
WGU is one of, if not the, most innovative universities in pushing forward on competency-based education,
can you tell us a little bit about that work?
Sure. I appreciate that question,
and also the recognition that I do believe that WGU is one of those innovators around competency-based education.
It was core to our founding and it's one of our hallmarks today, clearly.
The fundamental premise actually began with the students that we are serving,
so, it was a way to think about the design of
education and the learning model to ultimately serve the student that we were founded to serve,
which is the underserved student, the adult learner...
...and the needs that they had were for flexibility, not only in access and affordability,
but also in the learning design and approach. By that what I mean
is that, competency-based education focuses on
assessing the demonstration of proficiency in a particular learning outcome, or
a competency. And we recognize that they come in with experiences and learning
references that may allow them to accelerate past...
...faster than what would have been a seat-time model. So, we don't we don't measure time. We measure learning.
Competency-based education obviously
really, really requires a strength in evaluation and assessment,
because that is the measure of learning. That is where you really have to focus on having to define the learning objectives,
mapping those into the curriculum,
and ensuring its modularized in a way that those modules can ultimately scaffold to courses, which scaffold to a degree.
And then ensuring that you have really strong
assessment throughout that so that you know that when a student completes the degree or the course with us, they have demonstrated proficiency.
We have obviously a high volume of...
...transactional-engaged activity being supported by technology, that also creates masses amount of data...
...very specifically in the last few years,
we've been shifting from mostly an in-house kind of
contained environment around all those servers and the data processing, etc.
To where...
...we are scaling at a pace much faster than our own ability to invest into that, and that's where the partnership with AWS has really
allowed us to anchor on a cloud-based
architecture, from both the processing power that affords us an ability to kind of linearly scale,
but also provides us a very rich data
architecture that allows us to keep
amassing this volume of
information that allows us to better
personalize the learning for the students, allows us to enable a growing volume of faculty - a growing number of faculty members - with a growing
number of students. So, it really just allows us to focus on what we do really well,
and leveraging AWS to support us.
That's really terrific to hear. Thank you so much.
Thank you.