The Rant Podcast
A bi-weekly podcast focused on pulling back the curtain on the American higher education system and breaking down the people, the policies and the politics. The podcast host, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, is a known innovator and leader in higher education. The podcast will not pull any punches as it delves into tough questions about the culture, politics and policies of our higher education system.
The Rant Podcast
Serving Working Learners at UMGC
What does it look like when a “global campus” is truly global—and built for working learners from the ground up? We sit with UMGC president Dr. Greg Fowler to trace a line from faculty boarding planes after WWII to teaching through evacuations, tsunamis, and base alerts, all while keeping one promise: meet students where they are and prove value with real outcomes. Along the way, we dig into credit for prior learning mapped directly to military rank, why time is the enemy of the poor, and how skills-first, competency-based assessment can shorten time to degree without lowering the bar.<br><br>Greg shares how UMGC partners with employers to define the skills that matter, then designs assessments that mirror real work—lead teams, teach a class, solve a problem—rather than lean on brittle tests and essays. We explore AI as augmented intelligence: a personal learning assistant that adapts content, flags gaps early, and enables scalable oral checks and simulations. From submarines in port to rural education deserts, we examine what it means to deliver flexible, high-quality learning across 170+ locations and online, with a steady hand through policy shifts and market uncertainty.<br><br>If you care about economic mobility, ROI, and restoring public trust in higher ed, this conversation offers a practical playbook: validate experience, personalize support, measure what learners can do, and keep the North Star fixed on better jobs and better lives. Subscribe, share this episode with a colleague wrestling with adult learner design, and leave a review telling us what should count for credit in a skills-first future.
UMGC.edu
eloy@4leggedmedia.com
Hi, this is Eloy Ortiz Oakley. Welcome back to the Rant Podcast, the podcast where we pull back the curtain and break down the people, the policies, and the politics of our higher education system. In this episode, I sit down with Greg Fowler, president of the University of Maryland Global Campus, UMGC. Greg and his team at UMGC have been serving working learners for decades. Since World War II, as a matter of fact. We'll hear more from Greg about the history of UMGC and how they're serving working learners, but they are an excellent example of what more and more colleges and universities need to do today. And that is intentionally designed with the learner in mind. I'll talk to Greg about his experiences at UMGC, how his team is thinking about teaching and learning going into the future, their work with the military, which is extensive, and the fact that they are truly a global campus with sites all across the world. We'll also talk about his experiences with other adult learning institutions like Southern New Hampshire University and WGU. So Greg's experiences plus his time at UMGC will give us great insights as to what higher education leaders need to think about in terms of better serving working learners. And this topic couldn't be more important than it is today because as we're thinking about creating more value for more learners in more places and for post-secondary institutions to truly regain the confidence that the public has in them, they must do a better job of serving the millions of working learners throughout this great country. These are individuals who are struggling in today's economy, trying to get the skills that they need in order to have a good paying job. And either they never went to college or they went to college but didn't complete. Or in many cases they went to college and got their degree and now have to come back to reskill or upskill because the program and study that they chose did not give them the economic outcome that they were looking for. So this conversation with Greg is very timely. There's a lot of conversation in Congress, a lot of conversation in states throughout the country about how to better align post-secondary institutions with the needs of working learners. In my day job at College Futures, I and my team are focused on this issue. Trying to get at the root of what does it mean to truly design, intentionally design for the needs of working learners. Now is the time to do that. Whether you are a fully online institution like a UMGC and been doing this for many, many years, or you're a four-year regional who is struggling. I certainly think about the example here in California, the California State University system, which is going through significant turmoil, not just because of what's going on in Washington, DC, but because of what's going on with learners themselves. The challenges that they face with enrollment decline in the far north of the state, the challenges that they have in ensuring that beyond completing a program of study, that there is the economic outcome for the learners that they serve, the challenges that they face in extending the reach of their teaching and learning, and meet learners where they're at. These are struggles that every regional public university is facing and most private liberal arts institutions are facing. So the example that I'm going to speak with Greg Fowler about is a great example to look at for many higher education leaders today. Not that UMGC has cornered the market on all the solutions, but what they have done is for decades focused on the needs of their learners and trying to meet their needs where they're at. And in the case of UMGC, it's meeting military individuals and their families, where they're at, whether they're on the battlefield, whether they're in the barracks, or whether they're training in some country that we don't even know about. So I look forward to continuing this conversation with some of our other guests. How do you intentionally design for the working learner? But in the meantime, please enjoy my conversation with the president of the University of Maryland Global Campus, Greg Fowler. Greg, welcome to the Rant Podcast. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, it's great to see you. Great to have you on the Rant Podcast. We've been talking about having you and UMGC on the podcast for some time. So I'm glad this day has finally come. This is a great time to be talking to you about the work you and your team are doing. But first, let me begin with how are you doing? How are you and your team doing with all the stuff that's been going on over the last several months?
SPEAKER_00:We're doing okay. We are constantly, of course, like everyone else, trying to make sure we stay abreast of things that we need to be focusing on. One of the things that I think is unique about UMGC, of course, is that we are operating at 175 plus locations around the globe. So there's so many different impacts of different things that we are trying to deal with. Certainly you're talking about the political world, but you're also talking about, you may recall a couple of weeks ago there was an earthquake in Russia. That earthquake triggered a whole bunch of tsunami warnings for locations in Hawaii and Okinawa. We had one here. So it's the same type of thing that we are constantly thinking about. So what are our locations around the globe having to respond to? It's one of those things we are always on top of, but we are staying abreast of these things.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's good to hear that you have some additional worries in just your normal brick and mortar president.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yes, yes. It is definitely one of those things where I'm a little bit, you know, president, a little bit meteorologist, a little bit geologist. I'm learning all kinds of new skills in this role.
SPEAKER_01:Right. I I bet. I bet. Well, so you know, it's always interesting to me how different universities title their online presence. There's a lot of global campuses out there, but you are truly a global campus. 171 locations all around the globe. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00:That is absolutely right. Many years ago, right at the end of World War II, the U.S. government decided that it was going to try to educate those service members who were, at the time, they thought were coming home. And then, of course, it became quite evident with the Marshall Plan and other things that we're going to have quite a number of troops stationed overseas. And so they sent out a call to all the institutions in the country to talk about who might be able to go over there. And of course, institutions asked the logical questions where where will our offices be? We aren't quite sure. Where will our classes be? We aren't quite sure. And so by the time it was over with, only the University of Maryland was willing to send someone over there to try it out. And I often like to tell the story of we sent over one of our senior leaders here. He came back on a Tuesday, said we think we can do this. On Wednesday, they sent out a call, and seven faculty members on that Friday got on a plane and went to Germany and decided that they were going to carry suitcases full of papers and briefs and everything that they needed to teach classes rather than clothes. So I tell people since that day, we have been jumping around the globe. We've at some point served on all seven continents, including Antarctica, and have been in some interesting places moving as the military has moved around the globe. So we have spent a lot of time trying to understand how do you teach learners in non-traditional environments, how do you teach adults, but also how do you teach when all kinds of other factors are going to come into play that may not have anything to do directly with the classroom, but will also impact the learning. So is there a commencement ceremony on Antarctica? No, it'll be a very small one, a very small one, yes. But it is a lot of fun to actually hear the stories of people and being in the dark for a long period of time and saying one of the ways to keep from going crazy is to take a class.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you see, I'm just looking for a good excuse to do a podcast in Antarctica. So why the University of American? Because you are part of the University of Maryland system. Yes. You told us a little bit about the history, but how did it actually how did Global Campus come to be? Sure. Sure. And and how did how is it that the University of Maryland got into this type of education?
SPEAKER_00:So when we did decide to send those over at the time, it was the University of Maryland large. There was not a system of Maryland, by the way, up until about 50 years ago. There were schools within the state, but the system came into being, give or take about 50 years ago. And one of the things that now is true is that, of course, we are one of 12 schools. We're the largest here in the state of Maryland, but we are the most unique also in the state of Maryland. We've certainly got the flagship institution that is College Park, which is exactly what you think about in a lot of places. But you've also got the University of Maryland, Baltimore, University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. You've got the regional institutions like Salisbury and Thomson. You've certainly got the HBCUs, we've got three within the system as well. So it is a mixture of different types of educational institutions, all of which serve their populations well. For us, once we started dealing with the military in 1947 to 49, we went to Europe, 1955-56, we did a similar thing in Asia. And in the 1980s, we went into the Middle East. And therefore, you see education centers everywhere around the globe. But of course, what that now means is not just active duty military, you're talking veterans, you're talking spouses. And in different places around the world, you're talking about all different types of modalities of learning that we are trying to do. So certainly face-to-face, which is what we started. A lot of the people think of us, of course, in our online capacity, but we didn't get into that until well into the 1980s. As Europe began to, we began to pull out of Europe. Obviously, we can come with a different business model to the military began to pull out of Europe. So we've learned a lot about face-to-face, a lot about hybrid, a lot about learning how to teach in various types of even non-real classrooms. So what I mean by that is not a place where you're going to see desks and textbooks in the traditional sense. I've got a picture over here in my office of service members sitting on a tank actually take class. And another one was service members sitting on a beach. So it's a lot of fun to be hearing the stories of people and the various ways they're trying to learn around the globe since then. So that is how we um began to get into that space. Once again, as I said in the 1980s, we got into the online space and have been in since then and continue to do that, but we also continue to do those face-to-face experiences as well.
SPEAKER_01:As a former member of the military, you know, I and I was in the military those early 80s. I wish I would have known about UMGC because, you know, there there didn't appear to be a lot of options for me. I didn't go to college until two years after I got out of the military. So having that opportunity, being able to study and take a test on the plane as I'm getting ready to jump out of the plane would have been great.
SPEAKER_00:But those are different competencies that we might be able to give you credit for at some point.
SPEAKER_01:I may I may need to go back to UMGC at some point. So how how would you describe your mission today? I know you've sort of grew up around the military, but what when when you talk to people in the elevator, how do you describe the UMGC mission today?
SPEAKER_00:So the first thing I talk about is we are certainly going to talk to serve the non-traditional and adult learner in ways that serve them that traditional education may not be able to do. But I always try to frame that as this is an expansion of what education is. It is not a replacement. And I try to make sure people hear that because sometimes when you're dealing with a lot of the work that we do, people see it as you're trying to displace residential learning. It's like, no, we still need clearly residential learning. We still need our one institutions. What we are trying to do is make sure that we meet those students in the circumstances where they are. So you hear people say that sometimes when they mean talk about geography, that's certainly been true for us, but also trying to think about the various modalities. How do we make sure that when we're thinking about learning, we're thinking about the acquisition of new skills, new abilities? And sometimes that is, we can help you acquire them. And also one of the things we're thinking a lot about is how can we credential the types of learning that you are doing outside of traditional classrooms? We we use that phrase lifelong learning a lot. And the reality is that you're going to learn far more in your life outside of a traditional classroom than you're ever going to learn in it. So we're looking at various ways to try to make sure that we're looking at learning and making sure that we credential some of those things, even if it didn't happen in our classrooms, because that needs to have value as well. So wherever learning happens, we want to make sure we tag it and give students credit for it in ways that allow them to transition and transform their lives.
SPEAKER_01:So there's been a lot of talk about credit for prior learning. I know here in California, we've been beating that drum for some time. There seems to finally be some momentum. I think the more that we talk about skills, skill acquisition, someday skills-based hiring may actually become a reality. How how do you approach credit for prior learning, particularly those members of the military? Because I know when I got out of the military, I hardly got one credit. I think I had one credit for physical education or something like that.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I can tell you that I was actually over in Fuji, Japan, our location at Camp Fuji, you know, that beautiful mountain that's right there in the middle of the country. And I was talking to a sergeant major who was getting ready to graduate. This is maybe three or four years ago. And we were talking about his experiences, and he was telling me that when he joined UMGC, some of his first classes were around things like organizational leadership. And I and I was talking to him, I said, organizational leadership, huh? And he said, Yep. And I said, I bet you could have taught that class. And he's like, I probably could have. And we came back to that and I started thinking about are there ways that we can give direct credit for rank in the military? Because to get that right, they'll just give it to you as you know. You've got to actually go to academies, you've got to actually be observed. A lot of the things that we think about, when we think about traditional assessment and evaluation, happen in the military. We just don't always document those things. So when I started looking into it, we talked to some of our team members and began a process by which we are now able to give students credit directly for military rank in some of our classes. We had the faculty come in and take a look at here, the academies that you would have had if you are an E4, E5, E6. Here are the ways that you're going to have been documenting the things that you're trying to do. So that allows them to, you know, move faster, save money, and get credit for those types of things. We have, we launched that last October, and I think we've had some 10,000 service members take advantage of it, saving some$11 million in that period of time since then. So we are looking at how do we expand that? Because that was specifically for things like leadership and management, which were easy to sort of do. But are there ways that we can do that even more so across the board? Certainly with our military, but also think about we can do the same thing with first responders, for example, or other populations when we're talking to businesses, thinking about are there ways that we can certify that? So again, that we can save students time and money as they're trying to move forward. So we're thinking about prior learning or current learning in ways that we can again tag, certify, and allow students to move on in ways that will give them something that will allow them to continue to transform their lives.
SPEAKER_01:So you mentioned two phrases that are in discussion a lot these days. You know, my day job at College Futures, we just launched a return on investment study on all of our two-year community colleges and certificate running institutions. And we also did a California Mobility Index, which measured the return on investment and the economic mobility that our four-year institutions provide. So this whole notion about time and money, it's a critical issue for learners today, not just working learners, but every learner. You know, they want to know what they're going to get in return for the investment of time, investment of money, investment of themselves taking away time from their work and their family, toward their, you know, they're in. And 99% of the learners that I talk to, that return is an economic return, a better life, a better job, a better foothold in the economy. And that creates better value for the learner. And I think that's that's something that us broadly in higher education have not put a clear focus on. But you've been doing that for some time. So in in this day and age, how do you continue that march toward greater efficiency and effectiveness for the learner?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes. You know, a mutual colleague of ours, Paul LeBlanc, once said, and I've never forgotten that that time is the enemy of the poor. Right. And when particularly we think about access to education, time to actually go to classes or to study, while you're also trying to work and also take care of your families, we often re- point out the fact that we will never be as an educational institution ever better than the third best priority of a person based after their job and their families. And we have to be okay with that. So one of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about is are there varying ways that we can think of assessing students that matches the lifestyles in which they are living? I was mentioning a little bit ago this work we're going to the military, but also when we're talking to the retail industry and talking about what's happening on the job that we might actually be able to evaluate. And rather than putting them in a to a classroom, can we think about what's happening on the job? Certainly you see here in the state of Maryland, I'm sure across the country, this whole conversation about teachers. And we have a lot of places where we are putting substitute teachers or introductions to teaching out there for students to introductions for people who want to go into teaching to get into the classroom. So if we're going to have them in the classroom, they're going to be immersed into these experiences. Are there ways that we can assess what they are doing rather than having them to spend an additional amount of time trying to go back to a different setting to get those types of things done? So more and more we are asking the question of are there various ways that we don't currently measure because we're so comfortable with the traditional evaluation tools that are out there that we could actually do in some different ways. I believe very firmly that AI in particular is really negating a lot of traditional ways that we have assessed, whether it's writing papers or answering multiple choice tests. And the only way to actually really measure whether someone has something is to put them in the scenarios in which they're going to have to perform those types of things. So whether we're talking virtual tools where we immerse them in first day as the manager on the job or first day as a teacher in a classroom, can we do more of those types of things? Can we do more things that have interactions directly that allow us to do something similar to oral examinations at scale by using AI to help us do these types of things as well? So more and more we are trying to find ways to save people time and money and also understand and meet them where they are when it comes to the ways that they can be assessed. You you probably know better than I do the whole issues many years ago around standardized testing and are we really measuring skill sets as opposed to getting people to answer questions in a certain way. I think that that's a very important issue right now. It's really, do they or do they not have the skill? As you know, I spent a number of years at WTU. And the question ultimately was, are they competent or are they not? Not have they failed, but are they competent or are they not? And if they aren't, how do we get them to a level of competency as they move forward?
SPEAKER_01:I certainly believe that the currency of the future in learning will be show me what you can do, show me the skills that you have, rather than show me where you got your diploma from. So I think that march toward that future is happening more and more every day. I think the recent conversations in in Washington, D.C. around opening up workforce Pell, looking at accreditation a little differently, thinking more broadly about the connection between learning skills and employment. I think that positions you quite nicely as we move into the future.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, this is one of the things that I have said as you're looking at the disruption of various industries. In most of the cases that we are talking about, people do more of the activity now than they ever have in human history. People listen to more music now. They actually read more news now. And I would say that people are having access to more learning opportunities and learning experiences now than they ever have. They just aren't necessarily going to be the way that people have traditionally thought about it. Now, how do we adapt to it? We can do the whole thing like Kodak and you know tuck our head in the sand and hope that digital photography is not going to happen. Or we can try to embrace it and move forward and try to figure out how do we leverage these things to provide more opportunities to more learners as they are moving forward.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you mentioned Western Governors University. You obviously spent time at Southern New Hampshire University. You're familiar with some of the other online universities there on the East Coast. There's University of Massachusetts Global Campus, there's Empire State in the SUNY system. A lot more emphasis on designing for working learners, for adult learners. Given your experience in all those settings, and I think it's it's it's quite nice that that these examples are now exemplars of excellence rather than the outliers anymore, that a lot more public and private institutions are looking to you and the and the universe of institutions that you're associated with on how to better design. What sets UMGC apart in your mind from some of those other institutions?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I certainly think the intentionality, and I think that as you had said a minute ago, more and more institutions are having to move beyond that sort of black box of education as it has been known for a long time, where we simply say people just trust us, we know what we're doing. And now, and as we can see, and in many cases, people are saying we don't just trust you. We want to actually evidence and outcomes that demonstrate this type of thing. So one of the things we try to do very much so is make sure that on a number of different ways, we are operating with intentionality. What does that mean? That we are purposely bringing in businesses to talk to us about the skills that we are trying to put into our assessments, into our learning experiences. We're purposely designing with an understanding of here's how learning actually happens, as opposed to some of the ways that we have traditionally thought about it. We are purposely bringing students into that conversation to design and help us understand from a user experience perspective what's working and what's not. And all of these things, being able to say one of the examples that I use a lot is when I go to the gym, when I'm working with my personal trainer, if I'm trying to do X or Y, how do I set a path that's going to get me there? So yeah, you probably know that at the beginning of every year, there's the resolutionists, as I call them, who show up at the gym and have a presence that they want to actually move things forward. But they're gone at three months. When I but what I look at is the personal trainer working with them to say, how are you, what are you trying to accomplish? You're trying to run a marathon, you're trying to bench press 320. Let us create a plan and let me show you how that plan is going to get you there. That's the kind of thing that we're trying to do with learning as well. How do we lay out a plan that says, when you're going to be able to do this tomorrow that you can't do today? Because here are the things we're going to do as a result.
SPEAKER_01:What are some of the things that you can see happening now that you couldn't see, say, three years ago with the explosion of AI?
SPEAKER_00:Certainly, again, I mentioned a minute ago the idea of assessment, but I love this idea of a personal assistant. You know, this idea of you may remember the old Disney movie uh Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket. I have this idea in my head of a personal Jiminy Cricket for every single person who's coming along. So, how do we create that type of environment? Is one of the big things that we're talking about. You see AI as a remedial tool that can help you. You may remember that whole conversation years ago about the flipped classroom. In a lot of ways, having a personal experience or personal assistant who can work you, work with you through those types of things allows for us to leverage the classroom time or the assessment time more effectively and hopefully guarantee better that you are able to do the things that we are talking about as you are moving forward. So I see AI helping, at least right now, augment our abilities. Some of our colleagues often say the age should actually stand more for augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence because a lot of it is it will help the skill sets of our instructors, of our faculty members, and also of the advisors and others to figure out how to personalize this experience. For a long time, this was a conversation about customization. And customization just doesn't scale, but personalization is something that can scale if we have the right tools and information in there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I agree. I just think about the work I did leading into this podcast and this podcast in and of itself, leveraging AI in all sorts of different forms that I don't even notice anymore. But they're augmenting my skills, whether it be using grammarly to look through my script to see if there's any grammar errors, or at the end of this, the software that I'm using to edit this podcast will create text out of our entire conversation and make suggestions and think about different ways of editing the podcast itself. So it really is, as you said, it augments, it doesn't replace me, not yet, at least. Perhaps someday, but not quite yet.
SPEAKER_00:But but to your point, one of the things we are talking about to your uh to what you're saying there is imagine a world where in that personal assistance abilities, you you have various ways that you can engage with the learning resource. And the assignment may be read these 50 pages. And the personal assistant is able to say, I know you have a short attention span, or I know you go more comfortable with a different type of modality. So can I translate that into a podcast? Can I translate that into a video? Would you prefer for that to be in your native language? You prefer, I mean, all the various ways that you can take material and re-reimagine it is something that we should be looking at. And again, it doesn't mean that you don't have to gain the skills, but the way you go about doing that will be a very a bit different. You you probably heard my wonderful karate kid metaphor, where I said a number of times that, you know, Daniel LaRusso still has to learn karate, but he's not gonna do so on a traditional dojo. And he's not gonna, but but he has an instructor who knows how to teach him. He has the resources that he needs. And at the end of the day, he's still got to pass the assessment. He's got to participate in the tournament. And he can't get around that. But he may acquire those skills in a way that's much more comfortable to him. So imagine if everybody had their own Mr. Miyagi who could teach you wax on, XOF, and all the things that you can do. Exactly right. So this is how I think DI can help us if we spend our time thinking about the opportunities. Clearly, there are some challenges, but that's always going to be true for any technology. But at the same time, I think we've got to be able to leverage these things to help more learners succeed, particularly in places where they might not have other opportunities. And that's what UMGC really believes. It's like you've got to be in a jungle in the middle of Korea. We can still figure out a way to help you gain those learning experiences. If you've only got four weeks because the submarine is only going to be import for that long, then we're going to make sure we can craft something for you. If you are in Guam and we are doing a course in Okinawa, can we live stream it to you? I think the more we're thinking about the various ways we can create opportunity for learners, the better off we're going to be. And I think that is something we have done for the last 77 years or so in a way that no one else really does. I do love my colleagues in the places I've been before, but to this point, when I say global campus, you know, my previous title is president of global campus at SNA2. Right. But we weren't thinking of, okay, what's happening in Bahrain? A couple of weeks ago, we had to evacuate all of our people out of the Middle East right before the U.S. bombed a ramp. They gave us a, we have notice that says you probably should move your people out. So all of a sudden it becomes in Bahrain, in Jordan, in the UAE, Saudi Arabia. How do we rapidly move people out and also still take care of the students who are still there on those bases? So these are places and ways that we are constantly trying to think about. We still got to get this done. We've just got to be able to think outside of the box to get it done.
SPEAKER_01:Well, there you go. That's truly a global campus. Let me ask you something sort of contemporary. All of us in sort of the higher ed world these days have been dealing with a lot of different stressors, a lot of changes, a lot of, you know, whether it be executive orders coming that we people have to decipher and understand what this means to my institution or my learner, changes that the reconciliation bill has put into motion, the changes at the Department of Education, you know, who do you talk to? What does this mean to my institution? How are you and your leadership team dealing with all of the motion and uncertainty that has gripped the higher education marketplace over the last six months?
SPEAKER_00:So I will start with, I think it was Vincent Churchill. I may not be right about this, but that wonderful sticker that you see a lot often that says keep calm and carry on is one of the things that we we start with. First of all, let's make sure we have an understanding of what's being said as opposed to what is reality. One of the things we've had to learn very, very rapidly is to make sure that we have the facts before we try to respond to things. You know, and given the the Environment that we're operating in. Everybody wants you to try to comment on every single thing. And we've tried to create an environment that says, here's what we know, here's what we are working on, and we'll try to be as transparent about these things as possible. So I think creating a culture, we often talk about the only constant is change, but change is happening in so many different ways right now. So how do you create a culture that can actually function in a reasonable way has been one of the big things that we're talking about. Because today it could be one item, tomorrow it could be a different item. And some of these things are absolutely positive for us. You mentioned a little while ago, the idea of workforce pill is something that we are strong advocates for. We we absolutely believe that's something that then it becomes so how does it roll out? How do we leverage those opportunities? And how do we continue to move as we need to? I think that's probably the biggest single lesson of this, which is one, you can't respond to everything and you shouldn't. And two, how do you make sure you create a culture in which people can continue to see the North Star, let's the opportunities that are in front of them? We've worked very hard at that over the last period of time. And certainly within the system, as you can imagine, again, 12 schools, different missions, different populations, we're constantly trying to leverage each other to say, okay, so what does that mean for you? In this case, this is a positive for you. That's a challenge for someone else. This is an opportunity over here. So trying to make sure we keep our networks functioning in a way that allows us to stay on top of things. But again, the big goal of all of this is to be deliberate and, you know, responsive in a way that calms the waters rather than adds to the chaos.
SPEAKER_01:Well, the more you can be intentional about your North Star, the more that you become an anchor for your learners, for your faculty, for your staff. I think you're providing stability in a time where there is a lot of uncertainty. So I certainly commend you on that approach.
SPEAKER_00:As I said, I taught our team, and I was looking at some of the records here, and we were located. You know, we had a class that's being held just under Mount Penatuba when it exploded many years ago. Like my team is like, you think you think you got chaos? Right. Let's talk about let's talk about what's happening in an active battle zone. You know, our faculty members around the world right now literally are operating in some of these places where at 2 o'clock in the morning the sirens are going off for them to go to the bonkers. They are teaching classes. I get regular reports from our team on here's how many times we actually had to go to the bonkers here, so many times our classes were interrupted. Again, a couple of weeks ago when things had really blown up, I was getting pictures from the Middle East of missiles flying overhead and people saying, Well, what are we going to do about these types of things? So it's always been a situation of how do you operate in these spaces? And I tell my team the North Star continues to be our mission is to serve our learners. And we have done so under some very challenging circumstances. We will continue to function in this way as we continue to move forward. And the more you point back to the mission, and most of the people who I engage here with here are passionate about that work of figuring out how to help learners, the more it helps them to focus in on what's really important. And that is, are there ways that we can continue to do what we came here to do in the first place?
SPEAKER_01:Well, amen to that, Greg. Let me ask you one final question as we begin to wrap up. Where would you like to see uh UMGC over the next five years? What's what's on the frontier for you and your team?
SPEAKER_00:So I mentioned a little bit earlier this whole idea of what does the learning experience look like as we continue to move into the future. You know, five years from now, what I really like us to be even better at is finding all those various ways that people have acquired skills and ensuring that they're able to have the mobility that we're talking about by making sure as many of those ways as possible have succeeded in giving them the credit they need to move forward. So I everything I think we're talking about right now, the nature of instruction, the nature of learning resources, the nature of student support will change a lot as the technology continues to move forward. I hope we can see those things as an opportunity and not a threat, and to leverage those things to help even more people succeed in all the places around the country where right now we don't necessarily always see that. One of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about are the education deserts. We talk a lot about the rural areas of the country. We talk a lot about the various populations who haven't been served as well as they could because we couldn't reach them in ways that actually be identified with. So these are all things that I envision UMGC leveraging the next generation of its experiences to figure out new ways to do that. Sometimes right here in the United States as well as in the places overseas that we've worked on so much. So the better we can do that, the better off we're gonna be. But one other thing I'll add to that is I also see us partnering more with organizations and other universities to try to make sure that we all are helping more students. You know, I'm a member of the President's Forum, which you know well. And one of the things we've often said is that all of our schools together, doing all the great work that we're doing, still serve less than 1% of the entire student population that needs to be served. There's lots of work that we can all do to make sure that more learners succeed, even as we're trying to make sure we differentiate ourselves and put out their opportunities for different learners.
SPEAKER_01:I think that's a a great opportunity for a group of institutions to really show the way forward, particularly with this group of learners. And it's a way to recapture the confidence of learners. Yes. You know, making sure that they see the value in what they're investing in, that they're seeing the economic return, that they're seeing their learning actually show up in their career choices. So Greg, I really appreciate the work that you and your team are doing. If our listeners want to learn more about UMGC, where should we point them to to get more information?
SPEAKER_00:Certainly the umgc.edu site is out there doing a good job of trying to tell our story. We're putting more and more information out there on YouTube about the various types of things because as you can imagine, but in fact, just this last week we had our first TEDx that we hosted in Okinawa. And so trying to figure out more and more ways to provide those. So umgc.edu, and from there you can see all the various ways wherever you are in the country that we are trying to engage you wherever you are.
SPEAKER_01:All right. Well, Greg, listen, thank you for taking the time to be on the Rant Podcast. I appreciate your leadership and appreciate what you and your team are doing at UMGC.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. I continue doing this kind of work because as always, we we need more and more people trying to tell that story. Thank you, Eloy.
SPEAKER_01:All right. Well, thank you. And thanks everybody for joining us here on the Rant Podcast. You've been listening to my conversation with Dr. Greg Fowler, president of the University of Maryland Global Campus, UMGC. Please continue to follow us. Hit subscribe if you're following us here on this YouTube channel. And if you're listening to us on your favorite podcast platform, continue to follow us, download every episode, and we will be back to you soon with more great content. Thanks for joining us, everybody, and we'll see you soon.
