Forward With Big Ideas and a GPS for Learning and Work

We have explored the impact of disruption and how we got to where we are in 2019 in terms of models, practices, opportunity and performance in higher education. I hope my blog has helped you rethink where we are and more clearly understand the opportunities as well as the potential pitfalls that disruption is bringing us.

Turning to the future in the next dozen posts, I want to look forward in the following ways.

• First, I want to explore just who are the adult learners of the future.
• Second, I want to discuss a GPS for learning and work.
• Third, I will present three big ideas that suggest the kinds of thinking and possible practices that lie around the corner:
  • The Velocity Foundation: a global approach to harnessing learning and work.
  • Destiny solutions: A lifelong student life-cycle management platform
  • A digital-cyber land-grant university proposal
• Next, I will describe two more recently developing businesses as examples of “maturing practice.”
• And finally, I will describe several new developments at my home institution, the University of Maryland Global Campus, that illustrate one institution’s response to disruption.

With these submissions, I am trying to suggest the long arc of future innovation, invention and development in the higher education, lifelong learning and work space that lies ahead. The examples are not encyclopedic -- they are intended only to be suggestive and, at best, indicative of what is and will be happening.

I have tried, as the sequencing in the list above suggests, to open with the big, higher-order picture. Then I will migrate to concepts and organizations that are under development, but pre- or early implementation. Next, I will present a couple of what I call maturing practices, services that are in the field and, in my opinion, exemplary.

Finally, I will close with four examples of one institution’s developmental projects. That institution is the University of Maryland Global Campus, where I am serving as the interim chief academic officer and hold the Orkand Endowed Chair and am professor of innovative practices in higher education. These examples are not necessarily unique, but like other cases described in this series, they are illustrative of institutional responses to the problems and opportunities brought on by disruption.

I hope that you find this arc from the cosmically conceptual to actual practice at the institutional level a helpful approach.