Some College, No Degree with Josh Steele

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, there are approximately 36.8 million adults in the United States under the age of 65 who have completed some college but left before obtaining a degree. How can universities meet the needs of these potential students, especially when the traditional approach to college didn’t work for them?

Josh Steele is working to answer that question. Josh is the associate vice dean of digital learning at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Josh is helping to lead efforts at UT to reach the “some college, no degree” cohort and help them complete degrees that are meaningful to them. Josh talks about the challenges that adult students face in coming back to college, the experiments that are happening at the University of Tennessee to meet those challenges, and how his team works with faculty to design and implement quality online education. 

Episode Resources

·       Josh Steele on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuabsteele/

·       Vols Online, https://volsonline.utk.edu/ 

Chapters

• 2:01 Meet the Educator
• 8:02 Some College, No Degree
• 14:56 Faculty in Online Education
• 21:07 Course Exchanges
• 26:35 Residential Students
• 30:35 Online Ed Misconceptions
• 36:36 Outro

Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to 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. Have you heard the phrase some college, no degree? This refers to adults who left post-secondary education without receiving a degree or other credential. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, there are approximately 37 million adults in the United States under the age of 65 in this category. Not all of these individuals want to go back to college and get a degree, but many do. How can universities meet the needs of these potential students, especially when the traditional approach to college didn't work for them? That's a tough question, and I'm glad there are folks like Josh Steele.

(00:56):
Trying to answer it. Josh is the Associate Vice Dean of Digital Learning at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Just a few hours away from my home outside of Nashville, Josh is leading the efforts at UT to reach the some college no degree cohort and help them complete degrees that are meaningful to them. I connected to Josh thanks to UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association, in part because Josh was on a really fantastic panel at an UPCEA conference this summer. I'm excited to bring you this interview with Josh Steele. He talks about the challenges that adult students face and coming back to college, the experiments that are happening at the University of Tennessee to meet those challenges and how his team works with faculty to design and implement quality online education for these and for traditionally aged college students. Before I get to the interview, however, I want to take a moment to ask you to share an episode of Intentional Teaching with a colleague. Maybe it's this one, maybe it's a previous episode. You found enlightening. Word of mouth is the best way to take what we're doing at Intentional Teaching and grow it. So thank you now for my interview with Josh Steele.

(02:03):
Josh, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and talking with me today. I'm looking forward to getting to know you and your work a little bit. Thanks for being here.

Josh Steele (02:11):
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Derek Bruff (02:13):
And I'll start with my usual opening question, which is this. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Josh Steele (02:23):
So I was pretty late into the education game, and it really wasn't on my radar when I graduated from college. I didn't really have a plan on where I was going. And so after I graduated, I continued in the work that I was doing previously that put me through college, which was retail, and I had aspirations of growing in retail as a career. Finally got tired of nights and weekends and was just looking for something new. And I stumbled upon academic advising, and that was really my first job in education, and I thought I'd do that for a bit while I figured out what my next steps were. And I was fortunate enough to be an academic advisor for adult students studying online, and I absolutely fell in love with the work and fell in love with the students and decided to make a career out of supporting adult learners in education. That was over 15 years ago now, and that's really how I got my start into this field.

Derek Bruff (03:30):
 That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, I think I've met people who started in academic advising. It's nice to see here's one place that career path can go. Wow. Okay. And I know you did some of that work at Arizona State, is that right?

Josh Steele (03:47):
I got my start at the University of Phoenix and then transitioned to the University of Arizona as they were really starting their new online education foray in 2015. And then from there have worked at a couple of other large public land grant universities. I've been drawn to this large cultural project of what does it mean to be a future land grant, and recognizing that these institutions were created to make education accessible back in the mid to late 19th century. And so what does that look like now in the 21st century? And so that requires a lot of shifts that happen at a university. And so being able to help support those shifts to make our places of learning more accessible to this population has been really exciting for me.

Derek Bruff (04:41):
Yeah, I was really fascinated to find out that UPCEA has been around for a hundred years and it was accessible learning through correspondence courses a long time ago.

Josh Steele (04:53):
We've come a long way.

Derek Bruff (04:54):
Right, right. But also, I do hear that the land grant institutions have a kind of different sense of that it's serving the state, serving the people in the state, and that in 2024, that means online and digital.

Josh Steele (05:12):
And I think we're all on different stages of that recognition and how intensely we're looking at that. And so I do think that it is a broader calling that the land grants need to have moving forward if we're really going to achieve those ideals of the Moral Act and that work that happened beyond the Moral Act.

Derek Bruff (05:33):
Yeah. So how do you describe your work at UT Knoxville?

Josh Steele (05:38):
Yeah, so how I boil it down is my role really is to solve problems that stand in the way of two fundamental goals. And so one, how do we build engaging activities and courses in an online environment and support our faculty in doing that work in a really incredible way. And then secondly, how do we make the University of Tennessee that 21st century land grant and open up new opportunities specifically to degrees? And I think most, I impactfully undergraduate degrees that support that number that we keep hearing the 39, 40, 41, 40 2 million adults with some college and no degree. How do we solve those problems that allow people to come back to the university and come to our places of learning and get those degrees and how do we make sure that those are quality experiences? I think those of us who work in higher ed know that that brings a host and a variety of different challenges.

(06:42):
And what I really appreciate about the work is that in my role, I get the opportunity to scope back and forth between working with an individual faculty member around one pedagogical question or problem on how to translate a learning objectives to an online audience, to really big picture questions on our institutional policies aligned with supporting this population. What does it take to launch a full degree that requires 10, 12, 14, 16 courses? What's the financial model of that? How do we do all this in an evolving regulatory environment? So I really appreciate the ability to move back and forth between the micro and the macro in this role.

Derek Bruff (07:31):
Yeah. Well, and I appreciate the way you frame those two goals. As a teaching center person, I am often drawn to that smaller one. How do we design these online learning experiences that are really meaningful for students and practical for faculty? And how do we equip faculty to do that kind of work? But of course, that doesn't happen in a vacuum. We have to tackle these. This was something that as I moved into a director position at a teaching center, I started to get a much better sense of the structures and the resources and the challenges. Well, I want to talk about, because you mentioned some college and no degree challenge, and so I don't know if my listeners have heard that phrase before, but I've heard that phrase quite often. And you said there's 40 million Americans or so that kind of fall in that category where they started college, they got to some point, but they didn't finish a degree. And so this may include folks who are very young but also very old. This could have happened a long time ago in some cases. What do you see as the rationale for building structures for that population?

Josh Steele (08:41):
Yeah, I mean for me, I think it requires some reflection on all of our parts who have been engaged in higher ed for a while to just think about the why and why do students not complete. And going back to my time as an academic advisor, as I was talking with students who were coming back, a lot of them left for very good reasons. Maybe they started college, but they needed to support their family or a relative got sick or they started their own family. And historically, we have not necessarily been particularly accommodating or even welcoming to students who haven't been willing to sit down in many cases, move to a new location, be there for four years, be subject to our scheduling whims. So if the course that you need to graduate is offered at 11 o'clock, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you need to be available.

(09:45):
Or if it's offered at four o'clock Tuesdays and Thursdays, you need to be available. If you don't fit yourself into that mold, then maybe you're not college material or that college isn't meant for you. And I don't know that there's always been a good amount of reflection on the relative privilege that we ask students to enter with for them to be successful in or not even to be successful for them to complete a degree. It really is a marker of surviving a relative marathon versus really any sort of recognition of someone's ability or aptitude. And so I think that it becomes, when we think about it from that lens, it becomes an imperative for us if we really believe this access calling that many of us talk about, we have to be able to, one, change that dynamic and provide more flexible learning opportunities to students, but two, recognize that learning can happen outside of the ages of 18 to 22, and that if you need to leave, that's fine. And when you're ready to come back and have the time to dedicate, we'll have different pathways for you. So I think it's really a critically important project that a lot of us need to be undertaking to really solve this broader societal issue.

Derek Bruff (11:20):
So what are some of the experiments that you're involved with at UT that are trying to meet this challenge?

Josh Steele (11:27):
So the big thing is that undergraduate degree opportunity, while there's a lot of conversations about what is the value of a degree, we still know that the data show that earning a bachelor's degree is provide significant economic opportunities for many people. And it unlocks new opportunities for people who have a degree at the University of Tennessee for there have been online master's degrees and graduate programs. If we think about graduate degrees, usually these are things that can be created within a single academic unit or maybe a college. They're usually responsible for their own admissions decisions and they can create a custom experience within an institution. And it's been, I'm not going to say easy to do that. There's been a lot of blood, sweat and tears and creating those experiences, but it's something that is, maybe it's one step in this process of creating audit degrees.

(12:33):
The creation of our unit at the University of Tennessee was in recognition that if we want to do this at the undergraduate level, it requires a lot of cross-institutional collaboration. We need to fundamentally rethink our admissions processes. We need to fundamentally rethink our transfer credit processes and how when these students bring in these transfer credits, how are we going to articulate those in an efficient and effective way? No one gets an undergraduate degree and only takes courses in one academic unit. We have this thing called general education that requires students to have a breadth of knowledge. So it really needs to be a large conversation at the university, at the institutional level to figure out how we deploy these undergraduate experiences. So that's the big project that our unit is undertaking. But additionally, very recently, we have had some really exciting conversations that recognize that learning can happen outside of a three credit course that occurs between the months of August and December or January and May.

(13:45):
And so when we talk about alternative credentials, we've got some academic units who are really doing some exciting things there, particularly as it relates to some of some what we call grand challenges that the state of Tennessee is recognized. So to address a teacher shortage, are there ways in which we can provide teaching licensure endorsements to students who are interested in pursuing that profession but didn't go the traditional four year degree and student teaching route. So there's apprenticeship programs that are being created, a new competency-based online opportunities that help provide the foundations of that and opportunities to work in a school environment while earning a teacher licensure. There's some similar things happening with substance abuse counseling or substance abuse peer mentorship. And so our faculty are really rallying around these ideas, and it's exciting for our unit to be able to help support them when they're looking to utilize online delivery, online learning delivery, a way to support people in filling these key needs across the state.

Derek Bruff (14:57):
So I want to hear more about some of those programs, but you mentioned the faculty rallying around, and I know that each institution has a kind of different relationship with online. I've been in institutions where that online master's degree program was a heavy lift actually, that was stretching a lot of new muscles.

Josh Steele (15:18):
Absolutely.

Derek Bruff (15:19):
And was challenging. But it sounds like at least some areas of UT are eager to figure this out. And I'm wondering if you could say more about how faculty come to some of these challenges. I assume there's a variety of responses, but what does that look like and how do you try to navigate that?

Josh Steele (15:39):
I think the most important thing that we can do is listen to faculty, because what we know is that many of them are engaged in research and community work that is related to some of these issues. And so oftentimes we've had faculty come with these types of ideas, and perhaps at certain points in my career, based off of whatever institutional priorities exist, we could or could not necessarily entertain those types of conversations. But I will say that one of the things that's really helped us move the needle on this is having a leadership team at the university that's really been supportive of this work. And it starts with the creation of a unit to do online. It starts with a mission and a vision that addresses the needs for more accessible pathways to the university and a mission and a vision that calls out specifically our work outside of the classroom.

(16:47):
And so I think that having those things aligned, the faculty who are working around these issues and a senior leadership team at our campus level, and as well as our system level who believes strongly in the role of what a university needs to be to its state, its popula, its communities, those are conditions that really help for these ideas to flourish. We've been talking about online education for a long time, and sometimes the idea of what is a quality online experience, there's some perhaps perceptions that to make a quality online course, it's going to take you hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of hours of time. The only way that you can assess quality experience is through rubrics and checklists. And I don't think any of us got into this work for rubrics and checklists. And so we spend a lot of time also,

Derek Bruff (17:53):
I love a good rubric, but I am very visual.

Josh Steele (17:54):
I mean, don't get me wrong. I love a good rubric too. But when we're trying to talk with our faculty who have been in the classroom for a long period of time, and if we frame the transition to online teaching as a series of rules and things to check off, we're not really hitting on that joy of teaching that a lot of people talk about who come into this field. And so we're very focused on making sure that when we talk about a quality online experience, we're talking about bringing an instructor's presence and their identity into the online course, and those are things that students also want to see. And so I think there's this balancing act. Maybe it's a delicate balancing act, but it is a balancing act to make sure that yes, online quality design is there, but also that we are leaving an opening for faculty to imbue their personalities and their joy into the online classroom. Wow,

Derek Bruff (19:03):
That's so fascinating. Yeah. It's the preconceptions that faculty bring to this, right? I was working in 2020 with a lot of faculty who had no online experience, and so for some of them, emergency remote teaching was their model for online. And six to 12 months later, we were like, no, that's not what it looks like. But what I'm hearing from you, there's also this idea that online is this very complicated regulation driven, cookie cutter, massive time investment. And it doesn't have to be that either, that you can do good online course building in a way that is not trivial, but also not overwhelming.

Josh Steele (19:54):
Absolutely. And that it can be a work in progress. So if we require you to jump through a certain amount of hoops on the front end, or you're not allowed to teach online, for example, that just limits our pool and the willingness of people sometimes at an institution like mine, I will say,

(20:16):
To be able to take that leap. But if we recognize that this is all teaching is a process in which we're all growing in and that people will grow from semester to semester and learn new things and be able to incorporate that in the classroom, if we take that approach, I think it allows more people to feel as though they can be a part of what the university is trying to do, rather than it's something that just the few selects people who are really engaged in this work, who are experts in this work are to handle,

Derek Bruff (20:49):
Right. Or that this is something I'm going to build an online course, I'm going to take a year to do this, and then I'm going to walk away and not have to think about it anymore. Right. Absolutely. I've done the work all upfront, whereas, yeah, my approach with faculty is to think about how are they building their own teaching skills over time? Right. So let's talk a little bit more about specifics. What are some other projects that you're involved in that are approaching the online world perhaps a little differently than maybe how it was in the past?

Josh Steele (21:20):
Yeah. So one of the things that we're really excited about is pretty recently we've announced a collaboration with Arizona State University really in recognition that there's a lot that we can learn from other institutions who have gotten to where we aspire to be at some scale.

(21:46):
And so that collaboration with Arizona State provides opportunities for us to learn from their experience in creating ASU online. It allows us to collaborate on partnerships related to technology in the online classroom. They've done some really incredible work around virtual reality and augmented reality, and we know that that's a really heavy lift. And so are there opportunities to really collaborate around that space? And then most immediately, there is a course exchange component that's a part of that. And as you can imagine, ASU online, they have hundreds of degree programs fully online. They've got Thousands.

Derek Bruff (22:31):
And for the listener who may not know, this is a big, big online operation, one of the biggest in the us.

Josh Steele (22:38):
It is one of the biggest in the US and by far the largest public research university in online as well. And so it's a university with a similar mission and vision of what we have now and still addressing these same types of challenges and how do you simultaneously support innovative research while also continue to innovate on the pedagogy side and provide access to learners across your state and beyond. And so the course exchange with their hundreds of degree programs and thousands of online courses that they've developed over the course of the last nearly 20 years, there's a recognition that there's opportunities for our students to perhaps be able to take some of those courses so that we can stand up online pathways more quickly. If we were to try and create an online lab science course in biology or chemistry today, a fully online asynchronous lab course that's going to take us a couple of years.

(23:50):
But if our students have the opportunity to take that course at a renowned public university and be able to transfer that in, what doors does that unlock to us really being able to achieve our access mission? And so we're really excited about that. And it's something that, again, at the most senior levels of our university, at the president's level and the chancellor's level, this recognition that perhaps we don't always need to keep competing with each other for students, and maybe that there's opportunities for us to learn from each other and grow with each other. And we're optimistic that that's perhaps a new model in growing online, especially if all of us land grant public universities start recognizing that this is work that we need to do. We may not need to always recreate every wheel in that process.

Derek Bruff (24:46):
Yeah. Well, let me play devil's advocate just for a minute, because ASU has a lot of courses and a lot of programs. So who is a student who would want to enroll at ut but benefit from some of these ASU? Why not just go to ASU?

Josh Steele (25:03):
Yeah. No, it's a really good question. And the way in which this course exchange is framed right now is that we're really focused on supporting students who have general education needs. And so it's not students who are taking ASU courses and really doing a degree at ASU through UT. This is really a means to support students who, while they have some transfer credits coming in, maybe they didn't complete their natural science requirement, like many of us held math until the end of their degree and don't have, right? Yeah. So Derek can't relate. However many of us, were in a completely different boat. And when we talk about these learners who are coming back, we see a lot of those types of gaps. And while we absolutely will create those experiences at the University of Tennessee and those online courses, by having those courses available at ASU, it allows us to focus our resources more on the creation of those major courses, upper division courses that will allow students to earn their degree at the University of Tennessee rather than the needing to spend a couple of years just to be able to open up access to our undergraduate programs.

Derek Bruff (26:24):
So it sounds like most of your work is looking at what are sometimes called adult students, the kind of some college and no degree. Are you also looking at traditional age, first time enrollment students and what role online might play for them?

Josh Steele (26:42):
Yeah, no, it's also a really good question. And so I would say that one of the misconceptions that we sometimes run into on our campus is the thought that when we say that we want to provide online degree programs that we're going to recruits 18 year olds, they're going to move to campus and they're going to sit in their dorm rooms and then they're going to be enrolled in an online program and never leave those dorm rooms. And I think that just speaks to the fact that when we think about a student, we're sometimes biased by only those students in which we've historically served. And in many cases, for a lot of us that has been 18 and 19 year olds who moved to campuses. And so when we are creating these online programs and when we have these ambitious goals to grow online, we really think that that market is working adult learners who would never move to Knoxville, Tennessee or will never, they're not actively choosing between, am I going to take this course on Monday, Wednesdays and Friday at two 15 in the afternoon?

(28:00):
That's not an option for them. And so if they're going to get a degree from us, it needs to be online. That's who we're building this for. That said, I am a firm believer, and I think this is something that we learned in the pandemic, that students learn best when they can choose their modality. And so I'm not discounting the fact that there may be 18 and 19 year olds who would choose online that works best for them, maybe for a variety of reasons, including maybe they need to stay home, including maybe they at 18 need to work full time or have other obligations that certainly exists. So we're not looking to restrict anybody from those experiences if that's really what fits best for them. But we are not actively thinking about that traditional, that traditional student who's going to move to Knoxville and wants the University of Tennessee experience. We don't think that they're a prime candidate for a fully online Program

Derek Bruff (29:03):
At Mississippi. We found that a lot of students pick the University of Mississippi for the experience s they say, absolutely, there's a culture, there's traditions, there's lots of football. Right?

Josh Steele (29:17):
Exactly.

Derek Bruff (29:18):
But students appreciated some flexibility. So I knew there were a lot of students who would take one or two courses online in a semester to solve some of these scheduling problems and just to make their life the puzzle pieces of their life fit together a little bit better.

Josh Steele (29:32):
Yeah, absolutely. We all know the immense value that co-curricular and extracurricular activities bring to the experience, and I've heard from several residential students who say that the one or two online courses that they can get in a given semester really allows them to have an internship or to be the president of a student organization because they have more flexibility on where they deploy their time in a given semester. So I agree. I definitely think that one of the benefits of an institutional culture that supports online is the ability for students to craft that flexibility when it's needed, and to recognize that when someone comes to us for a four year residential experience, maybe their time availability is going to change over the course of those four years. I think it also honors and recognizes that level of shift that happens within an individual student in their journey.

Derek Bruff (30:34):
Yeah. Now, you've mentioned so far a couple of misconceptions that people have about online education. Are there other misconceptions that you run into that we haven't talked about?

Josh Steele (30:48):
Yeah, Derek, you already talked about the emergency remote instruction. Right. And for good or bad, a lot of people got access to online education during that time period. And some people through that experience saw the potentials and the possibilities, even if it was not ideal. I think for others it may be further entrenched their belief that online is an inferior learning modality. So that is still, unfortunately a misconception that we are actively working to address. I'll also say too that there's a, we online can mean a few different things, and sometimes we talk about the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous. And as we work through our undergraduate strategy, we're talking about we want things to be as asynchronous as possible to allow as many potential students as possible to have access to the University of Tennessee. And there is sometimes a misconception that asynchronous means no engagement. And so

(31:59):
We have to demonstrate and talk about the ways in which asynchronous courses not only can be engaging, but in some cases can be more engaging than perhaps some of the experiences that I had in large lecture halls during my undergraduate experience. And so what's really enriching is when we have faculty members who've switched and they've taught an online course and some of the recognition that they have, for example, something that we've heard a few times is, you know what? In my online asynchronous course, I actually knew the individual students better than I did in my in-person course because in my in-person course, maybe I usually hear from the same four or five or six voices who participate in my class. But in my online asynchronous course, I can democratize that participation and experience and people are engaging and those people who maybe are never going to raise their hand in in-person course with the time to kind of think and take part in discussions in a different way that's not confined to this 50 minute time block, I'm actually getting more of those voices present in my classes. And so those are the types of stories that I think we need to continue to tell, to bust this myth that online asynchronous equals necessarily that there's not going to be any levels of engagement between learners themselves or between learners and the instructor.

Derek Bruff (33:30):
One other question. We talked a little bit about the faculty who've been maybe teaching a long time and how they're coming to online, but I saw that you recently finished your PhD. Congratulations.

Josh Steele (33:42):
Oh, thank you.

Derek Bruff (33:43):
And I've worked a lot with doctoral students who are hoping to have faculty careers in higher education. And I'm wondering if you have any advice you might give to someone who is maybe close to finishing a PhD and is thinking about, what is my faculty career going to look like? What advice would you give them, especially as it concerns online education?

Josh Steele (34:05):
Yeah. No, that's such a good question. And I recognize that when we say faculty, there's a lot of different types of faculty. Even though I just earned my PhD, I think I am probably, my identity is probably packed up in administration still for quite some time.

(34:24):
I am partnered to a tenure track faculty member, which is an entirely different existence than an administrator existence, as well as a teaching professional existence or a primarily teaching responsibility instructor. And so I think the most important thing that I would say to anybody entering into a faculty type career based off of what I've seen, is we have to find our community somewhere. And I think what's amazing about the work that we do in online is that that community can be found in different ways. We know the importance of when we talk about faculty retention, we know the importance of building community and a sense of place and belonging, just like we know how important that is for students. But sometimes when we're doing online work, we may be the strange people in our home departments or at our universities even, and it's harder to find us.

(35:30):
And so ways in which we can build community I think are really helpful, and we have to share our stories, experiences. I know we're always actively seeking what are some really interesting things that people are doing in the online classroom, and so we've got to share our experiences so that we can continue to learn from each other and draw from each other. There's no shortage of pedagogical challenges and questions that we face regardless of modality, but then you layer online on top of it. It's absolutely true. And so ways in which we can support each other and find each other and talk to each other synchronously or asynchronously, I think are really helpful.

Derek Bruff (36:15):
Well, that's great, and that's a great note to end a podcast interview on as you've shared some of your story here today. I really appreciate you coming on Josh and giving us kind of a bird's eye view, but also some view from the ground in the world of online education. Thanks for being here.

Josh Steele (36:33):
Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Derek Bruff (36:36):
That was Josh Steele, associate Vice Dean of Digital Learning at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Thanks to Josh for taking the time to talk with me, and thanks to Apsia for connecting us. What is your institution doing to reach the some college no degree cohort or to offer traditional residential students more options for online learning? I'd love to hear from you. In the show notes, you'll find a link to send me a text message. Be sure to include your name in that message. Thanks to my podcast host Buzzsprout for making that possible. You're also welcome to email me at derek@derekbruff.org. 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. 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 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.