Tackling Systemic Challenges in Education, Supporting the New Majority Learners and Lifelong Skilling

In this interview, Dan McFadyen, Managing Director of Edalex, and Bill Hughes, President and CEO of Education Design Lab explore the Lab’s work to create a more inclusive and adaptable learning ecosystem. The Lab focuses on “New Majority Learners” (or STARs) who are underserved by traditional education pathways. Their XCredit project validates skills acquired through alternative routes, making them recognisable and transferable. The discussion also covers the complexities of standardising skill recognition and the transformative potential of educational technology. Education Design Lab envisions a future where community colleges become “talent partners” for industry, fostering lifelong skilling opportunities, and ensuring that edutech supports all learners, particularly the New Majority.

02:30 - Education Design Lab Breaking Traditional Barriers for New Majority Learner
10:13 - Recognising Skills Beyond Degrees: How XCredit Project Empowers New Majority Learners
20:42 - How Standards and Skill Validation Elevate the Learner-Earner Journey
34:11 - Funding and AI Technology – the Lab’s Transformative Forces For Shaping the Future of Education
46:15 - The Lab’s 5-Year Vision to Transform Community Colleges into Talent Partners for Industry

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Transcript

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Hi, I'm Dan McFadyen, Co-founder and Managing Director at Edalex. and it's my great pleasure to be joined today by Bill Hughes. Bill is the president and CEO of Education Design Lab, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.. The Lab engages learning institutions, employers and regions using design thinking to unlock economic opportunity via skills-based pathways into and through quality jobs and careers. Before joining the Lab, he was the Founder and CEO of JobReady, which was acquired by LearningMate. Previously, he was Chief Strategy Officer at Learning Objects, which was acquired by Cengage and led business development at Pearson. He co-founded Intellus Learning, acquired by Macmillan Learning and oversaw the transformation of Pearson's learning products into its flagship MyLab platform. Over the past 25 years, He has held leadership positions at Sapient, Mercer and the Cambridge Innovation Center. In addition, he was a member of the Board of Trustees of Kaplan University that became Purdue University Global. He is currently serves as a board member for Berkshire Bank and Education Development Center. Bill - thank you so much for joining me today. It's a great pleasure. That's great. Thank you so much, too. I really appreciate it.- Yeah - And we first connected back in a previous life for both of us at Pearson. But I don't want to talk about ancient history today. I'd love to really dive into the amazing work you're doing and EDL is doing. And my personal contact, our first connection with the lab was a meeting with Don Fraser, who is now EDL’s Senior Vice President of Design and Innovation, at a conference. And you're in the process of growing out your 21st century micro-credentials. And that was five or six years ago and maybe longer. And I think suffice to say, the Lab today is a very different organisation. And we've really gone from strength to strength since then. So can you tell us more about about the Lab and what its mission? Yeah, great. Thanks, Don is one of the longest tenured staff right now and he has been responsible for so many innovations that we've done. And sort of evolved, you know, starting back in 2014, there was a design session and kind of applying design thinking at the White House and an interesting session.

So, you know, asking this design question: 2:56

‘how might Government best accelerate scalable pathways and high quality and low cost workforce ready credentials?’ And that led to a whole host of these design sessions. Don was involved and as well as our founder, Kathleen deLaski, who's now our Board Chair. And it's been applying this kind of design thinking approach through the years. In 2015, they started bringing together higher ed leaders and looking at how do you apply design thinking approaches to really wicked problems in higher ed in 2016. There was a ten person college Design Sprint, I think was funded by Lumina looking at the traditional models for higher ed, and that was a harbinger of something that was to come. That's really our flagship now, which is the community college growth engine. Now, we kept going, you know, through the years, engaged leaders at UMCF around their schools And then it’s taken a slight shift really in towards the learner with this parent. Parent learners were called single moms at the time. Design challenge is if you look at the number of single parents who don't successfully graduate a community college model, it's pretty dramatic. And you know, they're talented, they're smart, but the system is not designed for them to be successful through the school, the college program. So we help these colleges rethink their programs and the supports around them, but putting that learner, in this case, the single moms at the center. And that work is still going on right now. We've got it really re-granted to take it to the next level. The other thing that happened right around that time, I think that was 2019 was we published this thought leadership piece called The Learner Revolution, really trying to look at how colleges can thrive in this new world of skills. So part of it was just a recognition of this shift to skills to competency beyond just degrees as kind of brands that should speak for what people can do. It was also this rise of what we call the weave of weaving in life - learning, earning and living as people. Once you're an adult and before you're out of high school in the US system anyway, you've got the system in the state and society that is all organised around you going through this one path. And the assumption is in a modern U.S, you get out of high school, go to college, and that's the normal path only 20% of people, fewer than that in some indications, actually go from high school right through and graduate from college. And the other ...- just end up there - So you said fewer than 20% follow that path Yeah.- Wow - The numbers slosh around at times, but the one study I had seen was 18% a few years ago. It is crazy, right? It's not even... Sorry - there's such an expectation that that is the traditional route. That's the model, right? Exactly. If you talk to anybody on the street, you know, I go to conferences all the time. Everyone's thinking about what they want aspirationally for their kids, which is you go to high school, you go to college, get a good job. Your aspiration is, ‘Well, you know, discover what you do and what you want for ten years.’ Because by then the mindset, you know, and again, this might be an American mindset. I am growing up in another country, but, you know, somehow you're going to be behind. So maybe that 80% of our talent forces fall behind according to those metrics. So it sort of begs the question of, first of all, why is this happening? So what are the barriers? And we look into those types of things and, you know, what can be done about it? And one of the the pieces is that, you know, when you look at the traditional college degree, it's not broken. It's just incomplete. Like it was not designed for 100% of the population to be trained in postsecondary. It was designed for maybe 5 or 10% And we got to 20% maybe people think are success. And then even, you know, if you have adult learners who somehow fall out of the system but make their way back, there's another, you know, 15%. So ultimately, 35% of people do get a college degree and a bachelor's degree, at least in the U.S. But 65% still there. And they're there, which means that they often don't have the credential of value that they need to be successful. So there are two problems there. One is ‘What types of credentials are available?’ And we do some work on that. And then, ‘What are the credentials that are valued in the talent sector?’ So we try to help move both of those things along by the work that we do. And we think of the the community college in the US as the best connected organisation, the institution, because they're connected with the workforce sector, they're connected with talent, they're connected with employers. They understand short term programs, they understand adult education, and they understand open enrollment and open access and affordability. So all of these things come together and they're funded. Most of them are funded by public funding, at least in part, if not substantially. So they've got great positionality, but they're not equipped to transform themselves and, you know, what organisations really are designed to do that. But especially not that. They're barely able to often deliver on the promises that they have to the public. And so the idea of transforming themselves is kind of crazy. So that's where we've kind of come in and continue to do these design challenges funded by philanthropy and increasingly funded by other sources as well, to help this kind of transformations. And it’s important that you are tackling the challenges and the opportunities from a number of different fronts. And we had the pleasure of working with the Lab’s team on the XCredit project, which targets individuals known as STARS, those who are Skilled Through Alternate Routes. So I think that builds on some of what you've been talking about so far. But can you tell us more about these STARS and why is that project so important. Yeah. So STARS was a term popularised by another nonprofit in the U.S. called Opportunity at Work. We're a partner of theirs. The name we came up with, which I think is complementary to that and really talking about the same type of folks is New Majority Learner and the ‘Majority’, you know, represents the majority of people who don't have these kind of degrees and the fact that they're learners The fact that the learning experience has been kind of broken for them. Those are the folks who need to be skilled through alternative routes. So as opposed to a 4-year college degree, Even beyond shorter version of a four-year degree, which is a two-year associate's degree. There's this notion that there needs to be some sort of alternative credential that accelerates you... It's directly aligned to jobs and career, accelerates you into those jobs, and that they can also be stacked so that you get that one credential and you're not left off. But those can be stacked one to another. So now in that context, what we discovered is, you know, people will show up... and I'll give you an example of a person who will show up that have skills, but they don't have the credential. And so then what do you do with those folks? There's one guy who came out of the military. He had run over 100 projects, you know, clearly skilled. But he didn't know he was a Project Manager. Right? You know, he thought he had military experience. It was called one thing. He didn't know how to translate that into civilian experience. Now somebody is really savvy and really understands both worlds, can really tell that story and bridge it from one to another. But, it's relying a lot on your own kind of cunning in your communication savvy. So what XCredit is and what problem it solves is how do you actually give credit for experience - X Credit and what kind of things qualify as credit, as experience. Well clearly if you've been, if you've gone through some academic work, maybe like you have a transcript, maybe that should articulate into credit. You know, that's obvious. Or maybe you're taking a noncredit course, but it's demonstrated your ability to do something that's valuable and in the workforce, you know, I knew that you see like Google certifications, and cybersecurity certification, you know, project management certifications, all these different types of things much less the other things that are in the skilled trades. All of those things are skills. There's someone I know who's started a really interesting program for spouses of military folks, many of whom are very skilled themselves. And it has created essentially a part time worker program for these folks who are off on bases around the world, and they don't get opportunities to work or nor do they get credit for the work that they do. So that this program actually creates both the opportunity to work and a credential that sort of attests to what you what you can do. So the other thing that Xcredit does is it actually allows for those things to be all integrated. You know, if you're in the military and the military service, how does that automatically translate into some sort of credit and recognition of skills obtained? So all of those things that need to feed into like a Skills Wallet, which is kind of a new concept that you guys are familiar with that. and that skills wallet can actually start to tell a different story and help someone tell a different story about what they can do, how they can do it and provide evidence to that effect. So that's kind of what what we're doing with XCredit. And the reason why it's important to people skilled through alternative routes is that you don't have anything... Otherwise, what do you have? Maybe you have your own resumé and who's validated that? Right? Who's attested to that? So there's an opportunity for a much more powerful instrument for validation of skills through something like an XCredit model. Now that's brilliant and again, building on the stat that you shared of under 20% are following that traditional route, and I love the expression New Majority Learner That is something I think resonates at all levels. I love sharing an example that one of the high schools that we work with here in Australia. Shares that one of four high school students says that she didn't have any skills, she just worked at McDonald's. And when you think about it, like,‘Why, that's incredible, right?’ So you have Team Work, you have Conflict Resolution you have Collaboration, you know, you have Task Focused. There's so many of these skills. And I think the 21st century skills that the Lab develops quite a few years back are really focusing on those durable skills that are so important for all of us and ultimately being able to recognise both the potentially domain specific or technical skills as well as these durable skills that will support someone. And I love that example that you shared of someone coming out of the military and not being able to not having the language or evidence to back up those skills that they do have. So yeah, and I think to that, just to finish that one off, you know you mentioned durable skills and we've built a number... We built actually a whole competency framework that gives names to these durable skills. So Teamwork, Critical Thinking, Collaboration and so forth they were designed by, with, and for employers as to the things that they understand that are the complementary skills to those technical skills that folks are learning. And the other thing is ‘How do you then measure those things?’ Hmm. So you can name them and those are really important. You can get out of station. I see evidence of something, but then is there a way also to evidence them, you know, through some sort of like mastery challenges and simulations and so forth. And I think we actually got some funding to do that, through the gracious support of Walmart Foundation and actually build out several dozen of these mastery challenges that are all scenario-based. And therefore, they really do a better authentic job of assessing what someone's skills and abilities are and what they can show. And I think this is only going to increase with the advancement of Generative AI. You’ll be able to create, at scale, very tailored types of assessments and challenges and, you know, situations for people to respond to and even respond to and have their feedback, in an automated way, like in another world - Europe, I mean, not that you would ever be able to be replaced by a person, much less a bot. But I can imagine, you know, you feeding your script of things that this is what I care about for Bill, you know, And your bot interviews Bill right now, right? If we had something like auto turned on, it would be capturing everything I said, summarising it, being able to look for trends that you care about, and then feeding back to you. The same type of feedback that you get if you talk to someone in your company who's an interviewer. And you don't have the problem of, okay, this person just got off the phone with their partner and they're upset when they're talking to you or they forgot to go to the bathroom and they can't focus on what you're saying or they're bleary eyed and they have a meeting coming up. And, you know, so I think there's even an opportunity for the more greater and richer types of kind of non-academic feedback about what people can do. And that's where really what we care about. We don't care that they sat there. Of course, we care about what they could do. Sitting through a course helps you build strength and muscle and skill and patience and experience in doing that. That's great, but that's certainly not the only way. And sometimes it's not the best way. Yeah - well said. Building on a number of things that you've shared already I was just reminded we've been pleased to be a member of your Skills Validation Network that is bringing together a number of players in this space and really looking and trying to tackle that. We can challenge the wicked challenges around how do you recognise skills in a meaningful way and share that. One of the mechanisms, you know, as a design lab and it is great to be at a number of design thinking examples that you gave in terms of the Lab’s history. so I know the lab promotes and gets involved in a number of different initiatives around standards for the exchange of information and, and in terms of promoting skills visibility, and then one of the many admirable things about the Lab is that you are often leading the way and pushing, and challenging, you know, assumptions and models. So are there particular standards that you try to weave in? or any standards that are helping? So in terms of talking about specifics as I'm someone who loves standards, and appreciates them and I've used them in other contexts And I want to be respectful of the work that's being done in standards. But they're emergent in this space. And to the degree, I think they're more than that, I wouldn't do justice if I say which one or ones, or follow this or that one. Because I know when I was doing that in other spaces, you know, it mattered a lot, what the name of it was. But I will say that the work around digital wallets, is a big deal for a few different reasons. You know one is if we're gathering all these skills or needs to be a place for them and there needs to be some sort of portability for the user and ability to essentially express those in ways that are meaningful to them. In some way, you might tailor a resume, or you tailor a cover letter to tell a story about yourself. Well, how do you actually, with a different kind of artifact, not only have all that stuff validated in a one place, but also tell a story about yourself. Another thing is, in the US, there's a lot of aversion to kind of a national identity record. And it's kind of weird. I think I will go into why I think these things exist but they do and, and it's made it hard to have kind of a national record of of who you are, and what you can do. But it's starting to happen, not at the federal level, at the state level Where states are putting out wallets for things like, you know, when COVID was here, your COVID record and you know, for any other immunisations and your driver's license. So My Colorado - where my daughter went to school at one point in Colorado. And the My Colorado wallet was a digital wallet that you can download to her phone. And it had a whole bunch of stuff about her. And you know, the skills work is a little bit behind. You know, it's not the easiest thing to put in the wallets and to use. But that’s coming. It not just one standard. There's a bunch of different standards I guess there's the open badging is probably the one that's closest that I know a little bit about that When I was at Pearson, we had the Acclaimed system which then got acquired by Credly and then got reacquired back by Pearson. And I know they're on a journey around those standards. And I think they're seeking credit, as a private company, you have to wrestle with issues of your strategy and interoperability and all that stuff. But I think they're moving in that domain. Other folks like Badger have, you know, are already living in this space of the open badges so that one badge system and another badge system can interoperate and share your information. And I think all of that is really in support of empowering the learner so that it's not about an entity, a corporation or institution owning your information, but it's about you owning your information in the sense of where it makes the most sense for you. So we think those things are important. But I want to take a step back and just talk about the concept of standards in general and why they're important in this ecosystem. You know, it's a pretty messy ecosystem. The U.S. in particular, again, you've got 50 states plus federal, plus other jurisdictions So each one of those is sort of its own market. And in each one of those own markets, there are different policies that drive how funding works drives what kind of programs are supported. And in some of those states, you have a lot of metropolitan areas. So there's a certain type of work that shows up in those kinds of areas. In other states, it's like Australia, you know, there's a wide open, massive, like there's no people there, probably more prairie dogs or kangaroos, whatever, joeys You know, the U.S. version of that. So how do you scale something in a rural community? And what are those programs look like? So there's a lot of kind of variability. And without some common standards, It's very hard to coalesce momentum in the sector to really move innovation at the speed and scale that it needs to. So we are focused on a few different things around standards. One of them is, I would say, our contributions to having standard vocabulary, standard concepts. I don't want to push it as like, this is the EDL standard. We're trying to be more inclusive and, and including ourselves and what other work is going on as well. But we are doing work, you know, in our micro pathways. We have over 100 community colleges only. There are fewer than a thousand in the U.S. and 100 that we're actively working with right now. There's another 100 pipeline who want to work with us. That creates a standards like dynamic The number of different institutions all doing the same or similar things. And in that work, we not only do work with the schools to build these micro pathways, which are essentially a blueprint for stackable credential programs that can be for credit or noncredit that people can leave in and out of, which is to say start and stop. They get something in a year or less. It articulates to a job that's in demand in that area, all those types of things. So there's that blueprint and they're called lots of different things around the country, but they all have this common piece and we have communities of practice that we build in support of that so that they’re are birds of a feather who are all kind of coming together and supporting one another as they innovate in this space. The other main thing place where we're doing this, you know, is in two other places. One is in skills visibility, which is what we call kind of a wallet space. And we're talking about wallet. And then the third one is you mentioned this, sort of a center for skills validation that Edalex is part of, that we've got a notion that if we're going to have skills-based credentials, you know, one of the challenges right now is they're actually like a million micro credentials. I think they're in the in this system called Credential Engine, which is another system that has some sort of standardisation around a credential registry. We support that. So that's another one, maybe two to put on the list. But with those million credentials, that's way too many for any employer to really understand which one and which ones are good. And how do I make sense of all that. So there needs to be some sort of quality criteria that comes, you know, on top of that, there's some quality initiatives like the Equals initiative that JFF has been pushing forward. But there's also this need for a sort of ex post quality like what programs have shown that they have successful outcomes. But I think there's another way of defining quality, which is also matters, which is design quality. Like is it something designed right? If it's designed right and has the right design characteristics Then it intrinsically has quality And I think that's an important thing to do for people who are designing new things because the feedback loop is too late. If you wait to see outcomes to know whether you did it right. So we believe one of the key pieces of quality or skills-based credentials is a coherent, consistent, understood way of measuring skills. We call those skill validators and they can show up in lots of different ways. They can be an assessment or a mastery challenge, and then someone goes through. It can be an attestation at the end of an internship or an apprenticeship that someone says, I have tested these things that happened. But in all these different cases, there needs to be some common sensibility about what these things are, what they're testing to, what they're referencing. You know, if they're drawing from skills, taxonomies, to have clear kind of reference or ability to those. If that's generating new kinds of skills, It's probably something around there. And also the functionality of it, to be able to help a learner - earner tell their story. So all of those things that, you know, plug in the wallets. We don't know what the end game is with with what skill validators are. But we've flown that flag. And as we started flying it, before we've even finished defining it, people are coming to us. We have dozens of organisations coming to us and saying, We think we're building skill validators and we'd like to talk with you about it and try to figure out what you guys have learned. So we've got a whole research program that's advancing the state of the art around that. And we also have this center for skills validation - Skills Validation Network that you are a part of that is moving this kind of work forward. So we think, you know, probably in the next year or so, I would suspect it's going to have enough traction where it could start saying some things definitively about about what skill validation is. And we already have some papers around that. So in some ways we've already said it. Yeah, I mean, we really want to start, you know, shouting that from the rooftops. That's brilliant Bill. And one of the things that we we love talking about is, is that the concept of giving, giving learner-earner a voice for their skills. And we commissioned market research a few years back that identified that more than a thousand American college graduates, only a third felt comfortable voicing their own skills during its first job search. So that's the point. But it's not just at that learner-earner perspective, but also from an institutional perspective. The work you've just described is so important to ensure that the educational institutions and I know there are organisations are thinking about it with the end in mind and what skills, what capabilities or competencies are they helping develop in those learners And shifting gears a little bit, I'd love to talk about the the grant that you received from Mackenzie Scott and her Yale Giving Foundation, which is just amazing. And I understand typically it's not something you apply for, but, they just look at it, they do background research on not-for-profits that are doing amazing work. And then suddenly you received this grant. So congratulations on it. That's amazing. So what does that mean for the Lab and what do you do with the grant? You know, that's a really good question. So first of all, we're so grateful to Mackenzie Scott, the Yield Giving Foundation that as we received, we announced it publicly. The Yield Giving Foundation that has, as we received, we announced it publicly. So I’ll say - we received$6 million of unrestricted funding which was the largest unrestricted single grant that we've ever received. And it very quickly accelerated. You know, so for me as CEO, you know, we've got some financial goals, and one of our goals is over time, you know, you build up your reserves of unrestricted funds, which gives you some more cushion to do a few different things, which I’ll mention. And so first of all, it accelerated that a lot. So it gives us some breathing room and opportunity to to kind of explore and take risks and, you know, in a way that we otherwise we might have waited longer to find external funding. And now when I say wait, I mean work and beat the pavement and try to find external funding, something that we know is the right thing to do. And I'll give you one example of that, which is with our growth engine work, that's part of our college transformation capability at the Lab. So we've built over 300 micro pathways with now working with close to 100 colleges and the first cohort of colleges, everybody who's done this work has continued on with it, which has been great. And some of them have said this was so successful within our organisation that we want to go deeper. We've been talking about our strategic plan and what we want our strategic planning process to include and they've come back and said, we want you guys in that process. because they started to realise now if you're creating a new category of credential, it's really a new category of market that you're going after. And in some of these places, 50% of folks that they're enrolling with them are coming from some sort of alternative direction, other than the traditional. So, you know, and when you think about traditional enrollments declining, there's one group we talked about the other day, traditional enrollments are declining. But this credential, kind of micro pathway style stuff, is growing anywhere from 20 to 40% a year.- Wow - Yeah. So all of a sudden, people are like,‘oh, maybe this is strategic’ They start to plan around on it and what is it that we have to... Like, why do we have to work with the Lab before in order to even do this? And the answer is that just not organised to shuffle everything around. And the way that we get folks to shuffle things around is we say, let's find a transcendent purpose, which is the learner, right? What is the learners journey? How do we empathise with the learner and the learners need? And then, you know, and that's on one side of the equation and then the other side of the equation is employers, because if employers are not engaged, then it doesn't really matter. So what are employers need in our region? How do we work more effectively with them? You know, and then it starts to suggest, well, how do you actually staff your organisation differently so that you have better connectivity with learners, better connectivity with employers, and where you know, faculty and program designers are working together with new sets of goals beyond the academic goals that really are helping and helping learners. So they came to us with all that. We're out there now, starting to look for funding to get that going. But there's a half dozen of them who said, we love that. We're ready now.- Yes - So we're able to begin that process a little sooner than we would have otherwise and do it in earnest so we're not leaving people out hanging. But, you know, we do need to continue to raise money and support programs like this. but having the starter, the seed. To be able to have the working capital that we can borrow from our goal is really to treat it like a bit of an investment fund to invest in projects that we think others are going to fund. But we want to basically seed it and then replenish and grow. That allows us to continue to stay a bit ahead of the curve, continue to take a little bit more risk so that we don't get sort of slowed down by the vagaries of the funding cycle, things like that which is so important these days. With AI you flagged - no conversation can go by without mentioning AI and obviously having a massive impact on the economy, on businesses, on individuals. So that’s the question of opportunities Yeah, exactly And you know, you mentioned our mutual friend Don Frazier before. And Don, about a year ago, a little over maybe a year and a half ago now came to me and started talking about AI and his interest. And he said,‘well, why don't we try this or that?’ We got together as a leadership team and agreed that, you know, we can't go into this year without making a commitment to building our own capabilities in AI. So we were able to... and we did this even before the Mackenzie Scott money, but we made an investment in training the entire staff on AI. The Mackenzie Scott Money made that less of a perilous sort of... heart palpitating thing. But we’re investing so that now we have budgets that we do where you know traditional research approaches held in comparison to ones that can be done with AI we're able to do a lot more interviews like this, automatically transcribe, automatic processed and analysed, find trends, things like that. We can look at new concepts like we do a lot of persona work, where the purpose of the persona is to have the intentions and the experience and the situation of the end users, of new majority learners- STARS be represented in the design process. And, you know, we see opportunities even for AI to support that. And then, like I mentioned before, there's places where whether it's improving the learning experience or assessment experience or even translation experience of skills, you know, there's a project with a group called AstrumU that we pioneered a year ago which is about automating the reading of military records, for example, and having those translate into wallets. So that's a big deal and there's going to be a lot more I mean a ton more And the other thing about AI So here's all the possible side. You know then it's sort of like,‘Oh yeah, we invented gunpowder’, When people come back with their hands blown up. Or maybe we need to have some rules and some guidelines and some safety around this. And it's a serious, serious, serious issue Because it's not, you know, AI unlike gunpowder, you know, people are not explosive themselves. They have explosive personalities, but not themselves but human beings are being imitated and replicated, you know, and aspects of human experience are being imitated, replicated by AI. And AI doesn't even... the fuel for AI is us. Right?- Right - It gets no smarter than what we allow it to get, right? So if we decide that we want to allow AI to read all of our books, to read all my content, to read my movements around the planet, then it's going to get smarter about all of those things. And I don't own the system that all that stuff goes into. So someone does. Or some entity does. So we've got to sort of figure out, you know, how all that stuff works and what does it mean to be a human in this age of AI? We actually to that end... The other thing that Don did was he started this Humans of AI, which is Humans of New York published by the New York Times. But we have a set of interviews and we're continuing to do them and push them out on a periodic basis of just ordinary people in all sort of walks of life from like students to people working to, you know, we had Paul LeBlanc, we did an interview with last week. I think we published that you know, he’s the former kind of legendary president of Southern New Hampshire University, And other innovators and you'll see more. I've met some folks this past weekend at a reunion event at my school, and they've said they're interested. But it's this aspect of‘How are you human in the world of AI?’ What does it mean to find your place there? And in some ways, how can we leverage AI? But how do we protect folks? And we were particularly careful and focused on protecting the interests of the new majority learners. So how do we make sure that that AI and its adoption is safe for everyone, especially them, because they often don't have someone at the table advocating for their interests? Right - Wow. That's such important work Bill. So thank you for that. I really appreciate your time. And we're getting close to our time, but I have one final question for you. And if gazing into your crystal ball and again, coming back to building all the fantastic work of the Lab and science thinking and how you're pushing the boundaries, Where do you see the Lab in five years? Will AI totally take over or...? Well I’m sure it won’t But yeah - Where would you like to see the Lab And what sort of role do you want to be playing in 5 years? I start with somebody today about this where, you know, we've talked a lot about Community Colleges. And one place I want to be is I want to help transform any community college that wants to at least as part of what they do, if not the majority of what they do to be talent partners for industry, which means that they're highly able to align to basically work at the speed of business as opposed to work at the speed of accreditation, and that they're able to align their programs to really understand those needs. Why is that? Well, ultimately, our focal point is in the new majority learner. But we can't... and specifically with respect to them supporting their best economic outcomes and their best career outcomes. Well, we can't do that if industry is not a part of the equation you know, they are the demand side of the talent equation. But in addition, we think that having them be good talent partners is going to transform them. I think it'll make them a lot more compelling and relevant in our society. It's a big investment the society makes, in the US especially. So we also can only really do that if we are good partners with talent. And that means understanding winning the new majority learners who are bringing that understanding more deeply. And we want to elevate that and make it more explicit in lots of different ways. ranging from something that small like, I would say, next generation persona work that's powered by AI to a clearer kind of learner... you know, the key design requirements to making learning effective and things like AI effective and safe for those folks and whether it's something that they can lean into as this kind of transformative innovation as opposed to resisting and fighting because it's not working to support them, we want to make sure that AI, as it evolves in this space, really does support their interest. And then the third thing is if we can help colleges... if we can be better partners with them, we can help colleges be better partners with industry, that also ought to enable frankly to help industry be better partners with talent, you know, and we've talked about lifelong learning. That's the other thing I'll just leave with the new phrase that I'm using is ‘Lifelong skilling’. Just because lifelong learning sounds like... so yesterday and maybe it's a little bit harder edge to it where really it’s about building skills throughout your life. And you know, I did some work when I was at Pearson on the economics kind of transactional approaches to this market versus relational approaches to this market. And without getting into any of the details and not proving that they're the same, my hypothesis is that there's a ten fold increase in value creation for those that take a relational view. which is the learner. And I see us as enabling that as well. So things like if a Community College or a network of Community Colleges that you might be a part of, for example, decides to really support the type of learner that you are and the type of person you are and the type of region, or the type of industry you care about, then, you know, being part of that network for extended period of time, coming back and getting reskilled, not just getting your first credential when you feel like you should get recognised for things you know that there's a place you can go on the weekend and go through a gauntlet and prove, ‘Hey, I don't need to spend, you know, nine months doing stuff. I've been spending all this time doing it. I've done some stuff even on my own. So let me just show you what I can do. Can anybody give me credit for that? Can anyone recognise it?’ I think community colleges, for example, would... there's an opportunity for them to be that service provider of all these various things, you know, as kind of the last mile to the employer, the last smile to the community and people in the community. And because there are a thousand of them sprinkled around the United States and they're funded, there's an opportunity to dramatically improve the efficiency the velocity of innovation in this space. And I think the last point is that's going to be, you know, supported by standards and collective understanding of how we're solving this problem. And part of that is going to end up triggering funding and, you know, funding equation at the end of the day in the U.S. is probably the biggest challenge for education innovation in general and innovation in this space in particular. So a lot of good ideas, but everyone has to stop and start thinking about like, what's the good idea and figure out what to pay for.- Right, how do we make it work? Can we make that work so that it can be sustainable? So I think those things are going to... you know, in five years from now. I'm hoping that we are in a very different place along each of those dimensions Fantastic - I love how you think of that and then ‘Lifelong skilling’. So yeah, that's wonderful concept. And really in terms of skills visibility and giving learners the voice that helps bring it all together. Well thank you so much Bill, not only for for your time during this hour, but for the work that you're doing and all the other lobbies. Yeah, we've been a huge fan of Education Design Lab for quite a few years now. So that's fantastic. So thank you. And yeah, I'm looking forward to reconnecting. We'll have to do another interview in five years and say‘Bill, you promised us in five years, and now you got even more’. So exciting times ahead. But thank you again for your time. Really appreciate all the insights, Bill. Thank you Dan for creating the platform and for this outstanding work that you and Edakex are doing. But thank you so much. Thanks.