There is no doubt that the past few years have brought about a sea-change in how higher education operates. Almost overnight, traditional face-to-face teaching was swapped out for distance and online learning, with many institutions caught off-guard from an experience and technical perspective.
In this video interview, Darcy Hardy, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Director of the Anthology Education and Research Center, offers her take on the shift towards a more blended learning approach and the opportunities and challenges this brings.
An interesting dynamic is the return of older students and adults to learning, either to finish degrees or start new ventures. Here, Hardy discusses that, while online learning has made it more accessible for these people to re-engage in higher education, there is a gap between expectations and what is actually being offered. If course providers get it right, there is a huge market in the United States, where around 37 million adults have some credit but without a credential.
Other key topics touched on during the discussion include how to effectively personalize online learning and communicate with students virtually, as well as how to make the most of the abundance of valuable data available to higher education institutions.
Anthology’s Darcy Hardy discusses the shift towards blended learning models, the opportunities and challenges that are emerging for higher education institutions, and the critical role technology has to play in responding to them.
Elliot Markowitz:
Darcy Hardy:
Thank you, Elliot. Great to be here.
Elliot Markowitz:
Fantastic. It's good to see you. Got a couple of questions for you. Let's start with this one. Can you shed a little light on the trends and milestones, some of the challenges you've seen in the higher education market over the last two years, particularly as it moves towards a more blended learning approach?
Darcy Hardy:
That's a great question, Elliot, and I've actually been in higher education for about 30 years before I came to Blackboard in 2014, and my career has been in distance and online learning. So the trends that I saw, particularly during the pandemic, have to do with the fact that so many schools had to jump into online or digital teaching and learning without any expectation of having to do so. And in many cases, faculty were not prepared. So what I'm seeing now trending is not only a increase in digital education, either blended or fully online, but also schools that had not really dabbled very much into online in years past, before the pandemic, BP, are now considering scaling their programs. The biggest problem is they may or may not be prepared to do that without having had the experience before the pandemic.
Elliot Markowitz:
And we are seeing an increase in a certain type of learner and a certain type of student, a lot more adult learners returning to the school because of the accessibility, right.
Darcy Hardy:
And then to be honest, that actually started several years ago. The adult learner is now probably more the traditional learner than the non-traditional learner, and the adults have been coming back in swarms to finish that degree in a convenient way. The issue that we're having, I think, with the adults is there's not enough for them to find that fits their needs. So we have to look at the relevance of the programs we're offering and the completion programs for these adults.
Last year, Anthology conducted a global survey where we heard from about 2,700 students worldwide and about 2,500 institutional leaders. And these were all types of learners. The gap now between what those students want as far as online and digital education is a little different. That gap is there between what the institutional leaders are planning. So it's almost like the learners and the types of learners are pulling the leaders along with them to get what they want.
Elliot Markowitz:
It's interesting, we wrote a story recently where I think the research said about 20% of current higher education students are adult learners at this point. So they certainly do [inaudible 00:03:23].
Darcy Hardy:
I'm sure. And in the United States alone, we have about 37 million adults in the country who have some credit but without a credential. So there's a huge market there.
Elliot Markowitz:
Absolutely. It's also been said that online learning enhances the interaction engagement with content because it can use adaptive learning methods to personalize the learning experience. Can you explain what adaptive learning is, how it personalized the learning expertise? Because the engagement part is really where a lot of institutions are trying to figure out.
Darcy Hardy:
Adaptive learning and teaching and personalized learning, well before we had technology to help, K-12 in particular was trying to think through how to do that most appropriately. And what it means is that you are truly learner centered in the highest regard for the learner. So rather than making changes to a course based on a final assessment where the students are spread out all over the place, you don't really know why they only scored 70%. You just know they all scored 70%. You can make your changes, but that's not adaptive. Adaptive learning is going in and looking at each student individually and adapting content to fit their skill level and their performance.
So with technology, it makes it easier in some ways because you can use technology to do the branching, the adapting to that particular learner's skills. The problem is we don't have enough people trained on how to do it effectively. But one of the big pluses I think with adaptive learning today is to really think about equity and using adaptive learning to be adaptable to some of our high-risk and low-performing students.
Elliot Markowitz:
That makes perfect sense. Technology certainly has made it possible to do that. So as an educator, what advice may you offer seasoned instructors venturing into online education? Because they're not technologists and all of a sudden they have to be not just a subject matter expert, they have to know social media, they have to know technology. So how may they be able to offer a force through the same sense of community and collaboration that an in-class environment could offer?
Darcy Hardy:
Yeah, that really is an excellent question. I started in online learning at the beginning from an administrative side, and one of the biggest challenges has always been how to personalize and communicate with these students that are online. For folks who are going into online now as faculty, the one thing that they can do more than anything is go through training. And when I say training, I very much consider online learning to be an academic endeavor. It is not a technology endeavor. It does depend on technology to bring the information to the students, but it's an academic planning and designing sequence.
So if a faculty member goes through training to understand the LMS or whatever technologies they need to use, they should be going through just as much on the pedagogy of teaching online to adult learners in particular, and using the internet. So many of our faculty get trapped inside of the LMS like it's a box, instead of realizing they're using the internet, so they can bring all kinds of resources into that box to make it much more interactive and engaging. But training, professional development, leveraging the fact that so many people didn't know what to do during the pandemic, this is the time for them to get more help and assistance to understand how to do it as best they can.
Elliot Markowitz:
And we are seeing more of that. We have seen universities invest more in training, bring in instructional designers to help faculty obviously through this. So you brought up the LMS, and obviously that's at the core of any higher education institution. As colleges and universities adapt to more technology tools to better student engagement and assessment, how important is it that these tools be integrated into their LMS? Because you can get faculty that's all over the place trying to engage their students, but at the end of the day, it still has to work with their core technology.
Darcy Hardy:
I would make a friendly amendment on that. I would call the LMS a core technology of the institution, as opposed to the core of the institution. It's a core piece of technology that allows faculty to reach their students in different ways and provide resources and so forth. As far as third-party pieces or capabilities, the LMS, you want it to have as many capabilities as possible so that the faculty can choose those.
There's also though the issue of academic freedom. So if one faculty member feels like a certain approach doesn't work for them, they want to do something else, they've got to be able to integrate with that piece of technology as well. In our company, our LMS, is designed to integrate a lot of different technology and has so much already built in.
We did find something interesting over the years. I was a faculty member once, so I say this. Faculty think that they need a whole lot of options. They need just all kinds of options to do this and that and the other. The reality is they don't use nearly as many. So the real trick is to figure out what are most faculty using and making sure that that's available for them, and then giving them guidelines within their institutions on how they can add other kinds of technologies. But working together is key for faculty and students.
Elliot Markowitz:
And the benefit... It's a challenge, but it's also a benefit of integrating that you can make more data driven decisions, correct?
Darcy Hardy:
Absolutely. We talk about data everywhere and the inclusive institution. I direct the center, which is the Education and Research Center for Anthology, and we just recently published a research paper by our research fellows on what would it look like for an institution to be fully data integrated, rather than these silos of data that are various places, because it's very difficult to pull all of those pieces together. And so we asked our researchers to basically do a meta study, a meta analysis of what's out there and what it could look like going forward in the future.
Elliot Markowitz:
No, that makes a lot of sense. Can you talk a little bit about Anthology's holistic EdTech ecosystem compared to your competitors? And how does your company enable universities and colleges to be prepared for blended and hybrid learning?
Darcy Hardy:
I think the key word there is holistic. The combination of Blackboard with Anthology basically means we can help an institution way out in front with lead generation, marketing, et cetera, all the way through admissions, all the way through student information systems, CRM, the LMS. We've got accessibility software. We have consultants that can help take an institution from the beginning and the vision of their online learning program, all the way to delivery. Course design, full-on marketing, student supports, alumni services.
So in many ways, the holistic part of who Anthology is today means virtually anything that that institution needs in order to be successful in delivering these kinds of programs, we have it. I'm a firm believer in not only a holistic approach around technology, but also a holistic approach in understanding what it means to offer programs. There's accreditation, there's policies, there's all kinds of things that go on with these programs. We also help institutions with those.
Elliot Markowitz:
And every institution, university is different. So it's not one size fits all, all the time.
Darcy Hardy:
No cookie cutter. Not a cookie cutter approach at all.
Elliot Markowitz:
So that being said, last question for you is looking forward, blended learning is here to stay. Hybrid learning is here to stay, however you want to categorize it. You know as well as I do, technology never moves backwards. We always move forward. What can we expect to see from Anthology going forward?
Darcy Hardy:
I think what you'll see from Anthology is this continued approach to the holistic solution of an institution, refining what we already have, adding more services, and really paying attention to the fact that as institutions move forward, they need a credible partner. They don't just need a group of vendors where they buy goods and services and software. They need a partner that can guide them through the process. One of the reasons why the Education and Research Center exists is because we can do the research behind that, that can help our company understand what are the schools talking about, what are institutions in need of, and then providing that kind of support to them as a valued partner as opposed to a contract only.
Elliot Markowitz:
Makes sense. Well, Darcy, thank you for your time. Some great insights. We're looking forward to what's come with Anthology and higher education and moving this ball forward. So thank you for your time today.
Darcy Hardy:
Great. Thanks so much, Elliot. Appreciate it.