Career-Oriented Course Design with Greg Edwards

On this episode, I talk with Greg Edwards, head of learning at Rize Education. Rize is a for-profit company that works with a consortium of over 135 colleges and universities to help them quickly launch new, career-oriented majors and other programs. The institutions partner with Rize, which can provide half a dozen core online courses for these majors, sourced from the consortium, that layer on existing courses at the home institution to get these new programs up and running in a semester or two.

As head of learning at Rize, Greg is involved in all aspects of course design and development. In our conversation, he shares how Rize goes about identifying new programs to create, how course design works at a consortium scale, and the roles that faculty play in this new model. 

Episode Resources

·       Greg Edwards on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorytedwards/ 

·       Rize Education, https://www.rize.education/ 

·       Lower Cost Models for Independent Colleges Consortium, https://www.thelcmc.org/ 

·       LCMC programs, https://www.thelcmc.org/programs 

·       “The New Learning Economy” white paper by Jeff Selingo, https://info.cengage.com/learning-economy_wp_2738580

Transcript

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Derek Bruff 0:06
Welcome to the Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I’m your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

In the last episode, I quoted Jeff Selingo from his recent white paper on the “new learning economy.” In that paper, he writes, “What’s clear is that students in the future will require a mix of the liberal arts and the practical arts.” This episode of Intentional Teaching is the second of two episodes exploring ways that colleges and universities are innovating to prepare graduates for a changing workforce. Last time, I talked with Anne Reed from the University of Buffalo about her institution’s array of micro-credentials, which are units of study typically bigger than a course but smaller than a minor that students use to develop and identify their workforce-relevant knowledge and skills. 

On this episode, I talk with Greg Edwards, head of learning at Rize Education. That’s R-I-Z-E. Rize is a for-profit company that works with a consortium of over 135 colleges and universities to help them quickly launch new, career-oriented majors and other programs. This group is called the Lower Cost Models for Independent Colleges Consortium, or LCMC for short, and it consists largely of small liberal arts colleges. These are schools that might have trouble starting up new majors in data analytics or digital marketing or public health. They partner with Rize, which can provide half a dozen core online courses for these majors, sourced from the consortium, that layer on existing courses at the home institution to get these new programs up and running in a semester or two.

As head of learning at Rize, Greg is involved in all aspects of course design and development. In our conversation, he shares how Rize goes about identifying new programs to create, how course design works at a consortium scale, and the roles that faculty play in this new model. 

Greg, thank you for being on the podcast. I'm excited to talk with you today and learn more about Rize education and what you guys are doing. 

Greg Edwards 2:20
Yeah, thanks for having me, Derek. 

Derek Bruff 2:22
Yeah. So before we jump into all that, I'd like to learn a little bit more about you. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to work in education? 

Greg Edwards 2:32
I was studying my masters. I did my master's in computer science and machine learning AI, a long time ago, before it was really cool and hot and everyone was talking about it. And I... basically to pay my way through my masters, I was teaching. I was initially looking to tutor, but I saw a job posting that turned out to be a full time teaching position because an economics teacher had walked out of this secondary school a few weeks before the job posting. I responded to the posting and I ended up becoming a secondary school teacher. This is in London. I found the work hugely rewarding, more rewarding than I thought, and I initially went into it thinking this would be a good way of making some money because the hourly pay rate was pretty good for the hours that I was in the school and then quickly learned what I think all secondary teachers... or all teachers generally learn, which is those are not the only hours you spend. And I probably ended up not making a good choice from the hourly rate perspective, but it was really rewarding. And I... rather than going sort of the data engineering route that I had expected, I started looking for jobs in an overlap between technology and education. I ended up working for a technology education company as a result, started as a subject matter experts, and then over time moved more towards learning design, instructional design and sort of ended up as the head of product that that that company. 

Derek Bruff 4:05
Wow. And then later ended up at Rize. 

Greg Edwards 4:09
Yep. Absolutely. 

Derek Bruff 4:10
Yeah. So great. Tell me about Rize. What what is this company about and what is it? What is it trying to accomplish? 

Greg Edwards 4:17
Yeah. So at Rize, we help colleges launch new college programs, often in a very career oriented degree pathways quickly, often as quickly as a semester. And cost effectively. So usually at a fraction of the cost of what a traditional new program costs to launch. We generally work with small colleges, liberal arts colleges. And the way we do this is we offer a small number of shared online courses which a college will take, add on top of their current course catalog in order to create these in-demand majors. And so these create programs where some of the courses are taught online. Most of the courses are still taught on campus in-person, and these are in subject areas like cybersecurity, data analytics, supply chain management, really quite career focused areas, professional areas where colleges are seeing a lot of demand from prospective students. 

Derek Bruff 5:18
Okay, so what are some examples of new programs you guys have have worked on recently? Or maybe like a partnership that seems to be working really well? 

Greg Edwards 5:28
Yeah, an example of a of a recent partnership that I think is working quite well would be Hartwick College in in New York. 

Their main goal was to grow enrollments. They're in New York. They're in sort of competitive New York market. They were particularly focused on adding new career oriented technology programs. And they they were also aware that they wanted to actually offer more online flexibility for students. They heard that their students had an appetite for more online options. So their goal was to provide sort of an awesome campus experience alongside a wider set of curriculum by leveraging online options, which is really a nice... the type of need that we we best address. So they they launched five new programs with us, five new majors, digital marketing, cybersecurity, game development, data analytics and web design. 

Derek Bruff 6:31
All very, all very practical programs. 

Greg Edwards 6:33
All very practical, all with really nice, like really clear career outcomes, I think, and all with a lot of technology overhead. Traditionally, I think if you went to try and do this in-house, you start to see and we talk about this with a lot of colleges, you start to see costs spiraling in terms of, you know, do you start a computer lab? How do you bring in expertise? How do you pay for, I don't know, cloud licensing costs, things, things like that. So we started first offering those courses in those programs, spring of 2023, and I believe they've already got 15 declared students across those subjects. And where are we now? Where this is October 2023. So that's that's pretty much immediate return on investment on those programs. And they have over 100 students registered for those courses. So they're expecting declared major account to grow significantly over time. So that's that that kind of time scale and that kind of impact is is, I think, a good illustration. And I believe that they're already looking at exploring new new programs with us as well. 

Derek Bruff 7:44
Right. Because I you know, I haven't I haven't worked at a small college. I've worked at bigger research universities, but even at big research universities that have a lot of resources, launching a new major is usually a multiyear endeavor. It's... there's the curriculum development, there's the approval process, there's recruiting students. All that kind of work takes a little while. And so how are you guys able to kind of move faster through that process in partnership with a small place? 

Greg Edwards 8:17
I would say repeat attempts and a lot of practice. 

So I think the key thing to highlight here is we are not providing the entire program. We are providing a layer of specialized courses that sit on top of the majority of courses, the majority of credits, which are of existing courses in the college's course catalog. 

And so the fact that we already have those courses and they are being iterated and improved every semester based on college feedback, based on student feedback, based on feedback from our curriculum committees, which include industry experts who are who are looking at career outcomes. And those mean that those programs, those courses and often it ranges between sort of four and six or seven, depending on the program that we offer. Are we know they're driving good outcomes, we know that they're vetted, they work, and then we will work with colleges to help them package that together as a program, given their course catalog and help them pass it through governance processes. 

Derek Bruff 9:29
Gotcha. So I'm imagining a small college that might have a a major in computer science, and they want to add a major in data science. And so they have a lot of courses on the books already that are relevant to that new major. Everything from their general ed requirements to particular computer science courses that might be relevant to the data science major. But there would be a need for, like you say, 4 to 8 new courses to kind of complete that major and that's where you guys can come in and kind of pony up those courses very quickly. 

Greg Edwards 10:03
That's exactly right. We're basically the pre-professional specialization layer that sits on top of a lot of that stuff. 

Derek Bruff 10:09
Right. Okay. So let's talk about those courses. So I guess I'm curious, like if we kind of walk through the lifecycle, right? So like, how do you identify what the needs are, what courses you should be developing? 

Greg Edwards 10:23
Yeah, it's it's a good question and it's it's a always an involved conversation unless it's an obvious... I think when we started offering courses, we started offering with programs that we knew the consortium of colleges that we work with wanted computer science, data science actually data analytics. But we're still evaluating new programs. So what that process looks like is we generally go to our to the consortium of colleges that we work with. It's called the Lower Cost Model Consortium. I actually think there's a couple of other words in that, but it's the LCMC. And that consortium has grown quite a lot in the last few years. I think we've got now what, over 100 colleges in the consortium. 

And what we do is we basically survey colleges. We say, what demand are you seeing? What programs do you want to be able to start? And we get a basically a weighted list of of interest in new programs. Then what we do is we review those programs against an internal rubric, which really focuses a lot on student outcomes. So we need to validate that this is going to drive, that there are clear career outcomes, program outcomes for the students. And then we also need to validate teachability, which is kind of a bit of a vague term, but really are we able to create a program that's actually going to achieve those career outcomes? So recent examples that would be... we actually surveyed the consortium this year. We heard back that there were three top contenders. That was nutrition, sustainability and artificial intelligence. 

Derek Bruff 12:10
That that's a range there. 

Greg Edwards 12:13
It's a real range. It's a real range. But that's kind of... that's the kind of question we're asking, which is what's going to move the needle forward? The result of that was we ended up with now launching a nutrition program, but we're not launching a sustainability program or an A.I. program. And the reason we're not launching sustainability or A.I. at the moment is because we weren't able to identify robust career outcomes, because as much as we're here to help colleges with the need of starting new programs, if we can't, if we aren't sure that we can demonstrate good career outcomes for these students, we're not going to achieve the ultimate goal, which is helping create a sustainable driver of enrollments to the college. Because if this is a flash in the pan sort of thing, which I'm not saying it is, I'm not saying sustainability is, but if it's something that it doesn't have solid ground to stand on, we open we open ourselves to and partner colleges to risk down the line.

Pretty much most of the colleges we work with self-identify as liberal arts institutions and so it's not about trying to move away from that at all. These are all the majority are liberal arts programs. These are supplements to that liberal arts approach and that liberal arts philosophy of creating holistic graduates that are ready for not just one specific task in one specific career space, but all of the challenges that life is going to throw at them. And and we are producing we are supporting with a slightly more specialized layer. 

Derek Bruff 13:57
So you've picked out maybe a new program that you're going to start to develop courses for. I assume there's some kind of curriculum mapping that happens as well. And then you're you're moving into the course design. So what's your... now these courses? Just to clarify the context, these are online courses, right?

Greg Edwards 14:15
Yes.

Derek Bruff 14:16
Who is teaching them and who is taking them? Are there are students from multiple institutions and in one section of one of these courses. 

Greg Edwards 14:23
Yeah, there are. We actually funnily enough, we get really positive feedback on that aspect from students who get exposure to to other to other students that they wouldn't otherwise get. I guess the best way of answering that is to pick up from the okay, we've identified the program we're looking at starting this program. The first step is we need to identify teaching institution. So the question, the question of who's teaching these is a member college that is a member of the consortium who has relevant faculty expertise in that area. So what we what we do now is we work with the teaching institution to sort of build these programs from first principles of being fully online courses and for the consortium context. So so we identify the teaching institution, we identify subject matter expert team. We basically start building the curriculum committee for this program, what we call a curriculum committee, which will be representatives from the teaching institution. We'll often find representatives from other colleges in the in the consortium to sort of just be a voice of the students with relevant subject matter expertise. We'll often add in a sort of leading academic in that subject space that is perhaps outside of the consortium. Maybe they've built programs in this many times before and then we'll add in industry representatives together. And so that that consortium is then responsible for defining the program level learning outcomes, the course level learning outcomes. And then and then we'll we'll start to get building courses. 

Derek Bruff 16:04
So you have industry reps as part of that team? 

Greg Edwards 16:06
We do. We do. We we want to make sure that voice is in there. 

Derek Bruff 16:12
Gotcha. So their role is to help kind of calibrate those learning objectives so that they they have real relevance to to the workforce that they're in. 

Greg Edwards 16:20
Exactly. And that's that they're all working back from this this concept of these programs need to deliver return on investment to the college. So they need to clearly meet the expectations and needs of the students. And those are for most of our programs, to deliver fairly immediate career outcomes. 

Derek Bruff 16:41
Gotcha. Okay, so now let's talk about courses. 

Greg Edwards 16:46
Yeah. 

Derek Bruff 16:47
Yeah. What do they look like and how do you go about that design process? 

Greg Edwards 16:50
So the one of the one of the many magic tricks, I guess we have to perform to make this work is we need to make online courses that don't just work for all the students that go in from all of the range of different colleges that we work with. But we need to pass and exceed the design standards of every college that adopts our programs. So if we start a conversation with a college and they bring in their learning design team and they ask us a bunch of questions that we don't have answers for them, we're in trouble. It's a non-starter. College don't want to compromise, and they shouldn't compromise on their learning design standards. So we basically collect all of the learning design standards and that includes aspects of accessibility, online design principles, things like that. And we have a list of what we call our baseline standards. So all courses need to meet this as a minimum standard, and we run before any course gets taught any semester that has to pass our baseline checklist. 

Derek Bruff 18:01
So that's really just to clarify. So like if one if one university is like using Quality Matters or some type of rubric like that and another university is using a different rubric. Exactly. You've got to be able to satisfy both rubrics. 

Greg Edwards 18:13
So yeah, yeah, exactly. 

Derek Bruff 18:14
Not the intersection, but it's the union of those those standards. 

Greg Edwards 18:18
That's exactly right. It's the it's the union, not the intersection, which is part of the challenge and yeah well, we kind of have to hit all of them which is, which is good. I mean, it's it's a high bar. But that's that's one of the sort of guiding principles and one of the core jobs of our in-house instructional design team who is who works with the faculty from the teaching institution to build any of these courses and just make sure they work for for our online context. 

Derek Bruff 18:48
Gotcha. Yeah. And so the courses themselves, are they synchronous? asynchronous? Do they run on your platform, Some other platform? 

Greg Edwards 18:59
They they all run on our instance of Canvas. So students go to canvas dot rize dot education to access these courses. That is a friction point That is a student going to a separate learning management system to their normal one. And so we have to be really mindful of that and we have to make sure that this the way we set up our courses in Canvas are as straightforward, as clear to use as possible so that we're minimizing that that friction point. 

And then in terms of the... does that sort of the running of the courses, they are what we call optional synchronous, which is which basically means there is a weekly live class available to all students. Students have the option of attending it or not. It's it generally ends up looking like a little bit of lecture, but mostly office hours support. Those life classes are recorded or students have access to those recordings and and so it's really a yeah it's it's a hybrid of synchronous and asynchronous I guess I'd say. 

Derek Bruff 20:07
How many students would you have in a section?

Greg Edwards 20:11
Sections cap out somewhere... It it depends on the range of group work. But we generally set caps between sort of the 28 and 38 range. They rarely go, They really got ready, go above 30. 

Derek Bruff 20:25
Gotcha. And so I'm asking a lot of questions, but are so many models of online course design out there, I'm just I'm trying to kind of narrow down. So you have someone from the teaching institution who's involved in the design of the course. Is that person also the kind of the the facilitator, the section instructor, or do you have other folks who play that role? 

Greg Edwards 20:48
Usually the person responsible for the initial design of the course will also teach the course. It's really important to us to ensure this continuity and that the person who is being the subject matter expert who's been behind the design of the courses, sees how they land and iterates them. Because I think we've all experienced teaching someone else's content in the past or creating content that someone else has taught. And there's always there's always a bit of a disconnect there. So it's important just for for continuity to make sure that happens. However, often these because we have offering these courses to many colleges, often they scale beyond the capacity of a single faculty member or a single subject matter expert. And so quickly you have other faculty members from the teaching institution teaching these courses.

And in terms of the design of the courses themselves, something I think that's reasonably unique about the way we go about designing these courses is the involvement of our instructional design team. As I as I said, we have to meet the shared standards. The union, as you said, of all of the standards of different colleges in our consortium. And we need to make sure that these are driving the program level outcomes and career outcomes that the the the curriculum committees expect. And so that's the responsibility of the instructional design team. And I think in a lot of institutions, the instructional designer takes the role of support of the subject matter expert, which is which is right for our context. Instructional designers basically have sign off on the course and need to make sure that really every assignment is meeting the standards as well so that they're very heavily involved in the in the design of the courses. 

Derek Bruff 22:35
Are there other kind of signature pieces of your course design pedagogy that that that you try to build into most or all of the courses? 

Greg Edwards 22:43
Yeah, it's interesting. I think because of the way we go about... because we're very anchored on the outcomes of these programs, we end up emphasizing slightly different things in our courses. So an example would be our courses generally emphasize projects a lot more than final exams. The reason for that is we want to give students portfolio work that they can show employers. And when we listen to the industry experts on the curriculum committees, they're very interested in seeing portfolio work, ensuring that there is some, you know, it's just an indicator that the student has accomplished something fairly significant and been able to incorporate things like feedback, work with their peers. We generally get a lot of emphasis on communication skills from the industry experts, and so we often integrate in a final project fair, where students will record a video presenting the outcomes of their projects.

And we also end up emphasizing discussion forums a lot, which can be a flag for rigor, because I think there are there's a huge range in terms of the quality of discussion forums that you see in online courses, particularly in higher ed. They can feel really transactional and they can be very un rigorous, not rigorous. And so we try to make sure we we give clear guidance on what qualifies as a sort of a good response to discussion forums. We try to make sure that they generally ask subjective, not objective questions to make sure you don't get copycat responses and you get meaningful, thoughtful responses. And we include those because it's it's just important from a evaluative level, learning outcome level to ensure that students are reflecting, taking on feedback, responding to other people's opinions, things like that. 

Derek Bruff 24:48
Well, let me ask a little bit about kind of the faculty intersection points with this because, well, let's start on the kind of teaching institution side. What what motivates a faculty member or a group of faculty members to get involved on the teaching institution side in designing and offering these courses? 

Greg Edwards 25:05
A lot of the commonality with a lot of our faculty members is that they're interested in and often have experience teaching in online and they understand what works and what doesn't work. Often those faculty members are, and that means that they are interested in really making the online classroom work. And I think there's a common understanding that online isn't inherently inferior to in-person courses. I think it's approaching... it's an interesting opportunity for a lot of faculty that we work with to practice a lot of maybe their experience and what they've seen work in an online setting, apply that and be supported by an instructional design team that does this day in, day out and is sort of very passionate about online learning as well. 

Derek Bruff 25:59
Now you mentioned advisors at the partner institution. So so what does that look like, the faculty involvement at one of your partners that is now launching one of these new programs with your courses? How does faculty get involved and what does that look like? 

Greg Edwards 26:15
So for each program that we help colleges launch, we provide an advisor guide which is circulated to advisors and faculty at the at the home institution. We call we call any college that starts a program with us, a home institution. And then we have teaching institutions who are the teaching institution. And that advisor guide has a lot of detail on what the courses are in the program, the purpose of those courses, the outcomes of those courses, our approach to online learning, what students should be expecting, what courses are the details on prerequisites, and then what type of student or what aspirations a student should have to be successful or to be a good fit for that program or for those courses. We get good feedback on those advisor guides. I think it's definitely an area where I know on our team we'd love to help advisors more and more. I definitely think there's always more we can do that and I think that's potentially an area that we love to work with faculty members more. I just think about how we can better support those conversations. But the advisor guides is sort of the main conduit at the moment as to how we do that. 

Derek Bruff 27:35
Okay. Are there... I'm, you know, trying to put myself in the position of a faculty member to host institution. Do they have concerns about this model that that come to where you are in the in the process? 

Greg Edwards 27:50
Yeah, absolutely. I think the main there's two two main concerns. They generally fall into the academic rigor bucket and then the shared consortium content model bucket, the educational content is coming from outside of the home institution, it's coming from a consortium.

We really appreciate those concerns. Those are those are the right concerns to be having because this is a new model and that is inherently anything new comes with risk. I mean, that's just kind of by definition. But actually the shared consortium model, I think is often really one of the key selling points of Rize. We talked about earlier how this is centralized curriculum, which is iterated pretty much every semester against a really long list of standards with a team of experienced instructional designers. So these courses are getting a lot of attention, a lot of reps, a lot of students going through them, and we're trying to make sure that that volume and that expertise is being channeled into better courses. And the way we measure better courses is through surveys, learning outcomes, things like that.

So the way we typically talk about rigor, which is a hard it's a hard concepts to nail down, often I think it starts more as a feeling than a specific metric. I think you and I could look at an assignment or do an assignment and say whether we felt it was rigorous or not. But in terms of how we break that down into something empirical, we generally just again anchor on learning outcomes and we try to make sure that we are identifying valuable learning outcomes at the course level. So, you know, are we teaching the things, things that are going to be useful to students and then are we assessing those outcomes valuably? And their value is to students and future employers or graduate programs, whoever is evaluating the students outcomes on these courses. In order to make sure that that's happening, we have the instructional design team in the middle to make sure that the assignments, the rubrics that are being written, are being are evaluating those learning outcomes rigorously. And then it's really the responsibility of the instructors from the teaching institution to make sure that grading, feedback, are meeting levels of rigor and in order to monitor that, we have survey questions like workload difficulty. But while those are proxy metrics for rigor, they're not the same thing. You could do a lot of work and not really learn anything. And you can also you can also do very little work and learn a lot. And so it's it's important to measure those proxies, but we try to make sure we're anchored on the achievement of the learning outcomes and the value of the learning outcomes, because that's really the ground truth. So that's it's it's never an easy, simple question, a simple answer to the rigor question, because I don't think it's a simple question.

And then when it comes to the shared consortium content, I think when we talk through the process, when we talk through how these courses operate, when we talk through how we use feedback, that helps. And I think what really helps and is the most important thing is ensuring that the faculty at the home institution continue to have a voice in how these programs are taught and how they are, you know, presented to students. And so we really try to we have a dedicated academic partnerships team who is and partner success team who's responsible for basically ensuring faculty, whether they're directly involved in the program or just observing students going through the program, have a voice and have a say in how these how these programs are being designed. 

Derek Bruff 31:45
Yeah, well, our time's running short. I want to ask you one more kind of big picture question. And and this is an open question. Like, I'm not expecting any kind of particular answer here, but given your experience in this area, should higher ed be reconsidering the four year bachelor's degree? And if so, how might this this degree need to change in the near future? 

Greg Edwards 32:13
Yeah, I can give you the pros and cons that occur to me immediately. I don't know if that's the same as an answer. I would say one of the clear pros of the four year degree is the fact that it's four years long and that is pretty... when you look at when you look at what a lot of the ed tech companies or alternative options look like, they're often trying to condense learning into the most time efficient package because they're selling. I'm talking about boot camps here. They're selling, you know, learning outcomes to students for the best return on investment, investment being money and investment being time. And so that pushes the program into, you know, often six weeks, six months. 

And I that's that's where my brain goes because I, I, you know, I did a master's in data science. I ended up hiring and interviewing a lot of the graduates of these boot camps, which are not a direct competitor necessarily with the four year degree, but I think they're an alternative. And one of the challenges I found as a hirer of graduates of these these programs was when you've studied something intensely for six months, you become a hammer looking for a nail to some degree, and it's really hard to contextualize those learnings and take time with those learnings and think about them in a broader context. I just think some things take time. I think that's definitely true and I think in terms of offering employer to people, employers or graduate programs or whatever that might be, after the end of that learning experience, whatever it might be, it's really useful to show that the student did a thing over a longer time frame. And it wasn't just a few weeks, a couple of months of really dedicated hard work, which is which is not representative of what life looks like when we when we go and do things, when we go and apply the things we learn in college or or in a really keystone educational program, we are not solely dedicated on those skills. We are living life. We have got a lot of pulls in our time. And I think giving learning, giving things that time is really important. So that's that's probably my main pro for the four year degree.

I guess on cons, I don't know it is... one of the hard... I think one of the main pressures is the four year degree is currently under is the ROI question. We're moving into a space where you have competing offerings giving hard numbers on this thing. And I think it's hard to quantify the value that I was just talking about. It's really hard to quantify the value of taking your time at something or coming at something from a ton of different angles or just learning something that is completely irrelevant to your career interests and learning it for the sake of learning it. It really hard to put a number on that. So that's not necessarily a con to the four year degree, but I think it's a... I think it's a note that the context of the conversation seems to be changing a little bit. And we should, I say "we," I don't know who "we" is... but I don't know if turning education into a simple ROI calculation is is the answer. But at the same time students should be asking that question. So it's a delicate balance. It's we can't discard that question. We can't solely focus on that question. There has to be a middle ground. And I don't know if we're overcorrecting towards ROI right now, and it'll kind of find its center, I'm not really sure, but it certainly seems to have more emphasis these days. 

Derek Bruff 36:32
That's certainly true. I think that's been more true since the pandemic as students and their families are thinking hard about how they spend their time and their money. And with college costs rising in many cases, they are asking those questions. And I think it is important for universities and colleges to have better answers. I'm not sure what those better answers are, but I think they need to be better than they were five years ago. 

Greg Edwards 36:56
Agreed. 

Derek Bruff 36:59
Yeah. Well, thank you, Greg. This has been really delightful. Thank you for walking us through behind the scenes at Rize and the course design and construction that you guys are doing. It's been pretty fascinating and I appreciate your time here on the podcast. 

Greg Edwards 37:11
Thank you so much, Derek. I mean, it was a pleasure and have a good one. 

Derek Bruff 37:19
That was Greg Edwards, head of learning at Rize Education. Thanks to Greg for taking the time to talk with me about his experiences at Rize. 

Years ago I was involved in a project at Vanderbilt University to offer less commonly taught languages to our students. Vanderbilt partnered with Duke University and the University of Virginia to offer online courses in languages like Kʼicheʼ Mayan and Tibetan. These are language course that wouldn’t make at any single campus, but across the three institutions there was sufficient interest to run the courses. Rize is doing something similar, but on a much larger scale.

The institutions Rize is working with are often small and heavily dependent on tuition. They have an existential need to continue enrolling sufficient students, and that means offering majors that students want. I remember visiting one particular university when I was in high school. I loved the campus and the students and the faculty, but their computer science program was barely there. That was a dealbreaker for me, as much as I wanted to attend otherwise. 

Rize offers a kind of scale that smaller institutions can’t offer, but also a kind of speed. The in-demand majors of today aren’t likely to be as in-demand five years from now. It’s hard for institutions to pivot quickly enough to follow those job market demands. I’ll be curious to see if Rize can help them with those pivots coming in the next few years.

Thanks again to Greg Edwards for coming on the podcast. Over on my Patreon, you can listen to an extended bonus clip from our interview where Greg talks about the methods Rize uses to evaluate and revise their courses. Their course assessment regime might be the most robust I’ve encountered!

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to the UPCEA website, where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings.

This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you’ve found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot.
As always, thanks for listening.