CanvasConEU 25 - Martin Bean
That was wonderful. Alright. The furniture's going to be moved here while we we move into the presentation. So what I'm gonna try to do now with that wonderful conversation as a backdrop, is to try to bring to life for you a few of my thoughts about, so what do we need to do? I think it was summed up really well by Johanna that it's not about the students conforming to the way that we want to teach and the way that we want our institutions to run. If we are going to be successful, my two r's, whether it's about revenue or whether it's about relevance, we are going to have to be the ones to adapt. And I think this slide is great.
You heard it come up so many times by the panel, but Toffler's quote here, I think is wonderful. The illiterate of the twenty first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. If I was to start an institution from scratch, that would be my goal. My goal would be that every graduate, no matter what age or where they come from, the number one capability they've got is the ability to learn for life. And when it comes to us, it's an understanding and a realization at the most strategic level of our institutions that learning does not stop at the diploma degree or even credential.
You heard that. It's not about all of the lovely ways that we've structured our systems before. To remain relevant, we've got to embrace all types of learning and all types of credentials. Education must enable the learner to respond to community workforce and societal changes in real time. It's a very different type of student.
We need to structure differently. We need to market differently. We need to support them differently and we need to use technology differently to support them. And finally, people will move in and out of education and support services as they navigate life. It's as simple as that.
And that brings me to my disrupted tertiary institution. This is the way I view, this is my backdrop, the slide that I put up to sort of get the conversation going. The disrupted institution of the future is an institution that is very comfortable embracing micro, meso, and macro credentials and knit them together in elegant coherent pathways. We will still confer those degrees and certificates that we know and love, what I've called on this slide tertiary programs and courses, but then we'll do something quite different. We'll follow people out into life and work.
We'll look at their life and work outcomes and we'll break the next frontier of what is pretty ugly in our systems around the world right now and that is we'll come up with elegant, scalable, flexible and fair recognition of prior learning systems that will allow us to take all that they've done when they weren't with us, knit them back into pathways for recognition and that cycle will continue as they move through life. I talked a little bit and the panel talked about, well why is it a lifeline for institutions? This is my list. It's a dynamic list. It grows and changes as the years go on. But these are the reasons that I've found that institutions focus on the lifelong learner.
In response to government policy, to reach across borders and lifetimes, to access underserved populations. And you, that's a big one if you've got to live up to your commitment in society to bring people from the edges into your institution. That's a significant advantage of lifelong learning. To strengthen industry partnerships, incremental revenue from a new segment of learners, what we call lifelong learners. It's a wonderful way of creating an innovation sandbox to improve campus and hybrid delivery.
You can do things in lifelong learning spaces faster and in more creative ways than we often can in traditional programs. They can be used, as Amina said, for our own employees. What a wonderful thing to think about. You know, we can enrich our own staff through the programs that we run to make our institutions stronger and then take them to the world. And finally the reputation of our institutions.
There is a crisis of relevance ladies and gentlemen. We might live in a little bit of denial in a bit of a bubble, but if you look at what's going on with governments, funding mechanisms, and student preferences all around the world, Unless we keep up from a reputation perspective, people will find another way. And they are finding another way to work around us. My one of my favorite quotes from Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, If you don't know where you're going, every road will get you there. Alright.
If you don't have your strategy as to why you're doing it, you will be a dabbler. That's what I call them. Dabblers. I work with universities and colleges all around the world that are spending one I worked with recently in England. They're already spending twenty million pounds a year.
But because they don't have a strategy and they don't know where they want to go, they're doing a lot of dabbling but they're not really having any strategic progress in what they're doing. So one of my big tips is if you're going to go after the lifelong learner, I don't care which of these is your objective, but have a set of objectives, have a strategy, know why you're doing it, and then put the resources, talent and commitment behind it. So I thought I'd just wrap up with you by sharing that when I walk into a university, a college, and we start talking about disruption, and I look to the future and think about how to bring my iceberg institution to life, I wanna just quickly walk you through those elements of my disruption continuum as a bit of a provocation. And the first the first place that the disruption starts are in these libraries of rich digital skill descriptors. A trusted repository of comprehensive digital skill descriptors endorsed by the author's brand and reputation.
Your brand, your reputation. There are libraries of rich digital skill descriptors being built by institutions, by governments, by not for profits, and by private sector providers all around the world. I don't care which libraries you use, but you're going to need a library. Because if the world is moving to skills based hiring, and it's not just moving, it's there right now, then the basic building blocks of everything that we do has to be the digital skill descriptors that we write in and it uses the foundation of what we teach. Because if we don't do that, machine learning, big data, AI and generative AI can't do its job.
Can't do its job. And so when I go into institutions, it's one of my first questions. Where is the evidence of what skills you're actually teaching in your programs? And are you being able to bring those to the foreground in the ways that you teach, assess, evidence and credential? The second step is us absolutely opening our minds up to different types of learning experiences. Whether those are formal education, workplace learning, self directed learning, we gotta be open to them all. We have to be open to them all if we wanna look after and serve the lifelong learner.
It can't always be just the formal credit bearing programs that we know and we love. And that's important because it's the only way we're going to be able to truly embrace credentials of all types. Learning experience based awards that offer a skills aligned portable and independently verifiable record of skill and competence mastery. That's why they matter. It's not about the image file in a digital badge.
It's about the data inside the image file that allows somebody's skills to be expressible, discoverable and verifiable. And for those of you sitting there saying, but Martin, there's millions of them. There's no quality in the system. My response to you would be, that's your job. It's your job to bring the quality to the micro credential.
It's your brands that have always been synonymous with quality and rigor, will always be synonymous with quality and rigor which is why you need to make sure that if you are going to step into alternative credentials, you do it the right way. Because the minute you start putting your brand and reputation on credentials that don't have rigor, that's when you draw yourself into that space of harm's way when it comes to reputation. But it doesn't just stop at embracing the different types of credentials. It's then about learning pathways. Sequences of credentials that stack towards tangible and transparent academic and labor market outcomes.
That's where it really comes together. And for those of you that are already working with Digital Badges, I'd ask you the question, are you actually thinking about pathways? Program pathways, self directed pathways, lifelong learning pathways. And does the technology that you use today actually allow you to knit pathways together in seamless, elegant ways? Do does your technology allow you to ingest credentials from others in open standards to be able to knit them into your pathways as well? Or are you building a set of discrete credentials and badges that don't aggregate and follow people for life. And then the next step after that is a really important one and you heard it talked about earlier today and I'm just so proud of the moves that Instructure is making to power it because this is actually where the value really comes for the student and it's the digital wallets. It's the digital wallets.
My nation of Australia, we're currently building a digital wallet for every citizen to be appended to our myGov account because we want our citizens to have a high resolution, centralized source of truth offering a comprehensive, detailed and verifiable record of a learner's achievements, skills, competencies and experiences. That's what we all need. I'm proud as punch of the analog degrees that I've got hanging on my wall. My mom loves them too. But you know, they're pretty unhelpful.
They're on paper so they're completely digitally undiscoverable. They do a few very unhelpful things. Where I studied and the name of my degree, both of which have no correlation to my workplace performance. And if I dig a little deeper and get my transcript, it just gives a bunch of other fairly non sexical course names and a bunch of numbers. In the world that we live in today, a world of skills based hiring, a world where technology is morphing and changing and redefining the world of work every twelve weeks, We owe it.
We owe it to every student and every graduate to give them a digital representation of all that they've achieved, formal and informal, assessed and self attested, and we need that to be persistent and enduring through their life and we need it to be interoperable because nobody's gonna control it except the individual. If we do it the right way, it will be the individual that has the agency over their wallet and how they choose to express it and to allow it to be verified in the world. And then my final frontier for the Star Trek fans in the room, my final frontier is recognition of prior learning, which is pretty ugly right now in the way that we do it. We need to have much fairer systems to be able to track people's work experience, their recommendations, the service that they've done. We need to be able to that be put forward so that as and when they come back to us for more lifelong learning experiences, we can give them the credit that they deserve to actually bring that back with them.
This is my disruption continuum. This is my provocation to institutions to help them get started with their strategy. Take it, take it back to your institutions. The next time you're having a conversation about lifelong learning, start walking through the continuum and having a conversation about where you're at and where you want to get to. You can't do all of this at once, but one thing's for sure, back to Alice in Wonderland, if you don't know where you're going, every road is going to get you there.
And I do not want you to be a dabbler because we're all relying upon you to help. Because I'll let you in on a little secret. I actually think that truth is under attack right now in the world because it's messy, it's muddy. We're trapped in bubbles of of people and information and we owe it. We owe it to our communities and society to have a vibrant education system.
Because a vibrant education system, as you heard loud and clear from the panel, a system that can help humans critically think, reflect, collaborate, challenge. That's what we need in our societies to be able to remain vibrant, healthy, active, and economically sustainable. So we need all of you. And the only way that all of you are gonna be around when we're here in two thousand and thirty as the panel discussed and we come back into the room is if we start thinking about embracing the lifelong learner and we start thinking about these building blocks that will help us get there. So thank you very much.
This is why you give me a round of applause. So round of applause please. Thank you. There's a little QR code there for you that'll take you to me. You're all my alumni now.
So if you want to come on the journey with me, feel free to connect. I'd love to have you with me. I'd love your feedback. I'd love your your ideas because we've all got to be in this together. And speaking of being in this together, it gives me great pleasure to invite a dear friend to the stage and a pretty wonderful human actually.
Her name is Melissa Lobel. Many of you in the room have already got to know Melissa and worked with Melissa. And her role, is a really courageous thing for a technology company to do, but her role in Instructure is she is the chief academic officer. In other words, she is our heart and soul and conscience on the executive team of Instructure to make sure that as they're busily looking at what can be done with technology, they're thinking about how and why it should be done with technology. I'm a huge Spider Man fan, Uncle Ben.
With great power comes great responsibility. Technology gives us great power. Melissa makes sure that we have great responsibility. Will you invite her to the stage for me please? And thank you very much.
You heard it come up so many times by the panel, but Toffler's quote here, I think is wonderful. The illiterate of the twenty first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. If I was to start an institution from scratch, that would be my goal. My goal would be that every graduate, no matter what age or where they come from, the number one capability they've got is the ability to learn for life. And when it comes to us, it's an understanding and a realization at the most strategic level of our institutions that learning does not stop at the diploma degree or even credential.
You heard that. It's not about all of the lovely ways that we've structured our systems before. To remain relevant, we've got to embrace all types of learning and all types of credentials. Education must enable the learner to respond to community workforce and societal changes in real time. It's a very different type of student.
We need to structure differently. We need to market differently. We need to support them differently and we need to use technology differently to support them. And finally, people will move in and out of education and support services as they navigate life. It's as simple as that.
And that brings me to my disrupted tertiary institution. This is the way I view, this is my backdrop, the slide that I put up to sort of get the conversation going. The disrupted institution of the future is an institution that is very comfortable embracing micro, meso, and macro credentials and knit them together in elegant coherent pathways. We will still confer those degrees and certificates that we know and love, what I've called on this slide tertiary programs and courses, but then we'll do something quite different. We'll follow people out into life and work.
We'll look at their life and work outcomes and we'll break the next frontier of what is pretty ugly in our systems around the world right now and that is we'll come up with elegant, scalable, flexible and fair recognition of prior learning systems that will allow us to take all that they've done when they weren't with us, knit them back into pathways for recognition and that cycle will continue as they move through life. I talked a little bit and the panel talked about, well why is it a lifeline for institutions? This is my list. It's a dynamic list. It grows and changes as the years go on. But these are the reasons that I've found that institutions focus on the lifelong learner.
In response to government policy, to reach across borders and lifetimes, to access underserved populations. And you, that's a big one if you've got to live up to your commitment in society to bring people from the edges into your institution. That's a significant advantage of lifelong learning. To strengthen industry partnerships, incremental revenue from a new segment of learners, what we call lifelong learners. It's a wonderful way of creating an innovation sandbox to improve campus and hybrid delivery.
You can do things in lifelong learning spaces faster and in more creative ways than we often can in traditional programs. They can be used, as Amina said, for our own employees. What a wonderful thing to think about. You know, we can enrich our own staff through the programs that we run to make our institutions stronger and then take them to the world. And finally the reputation of our institutions.
There is a crisis of relevance ladies and gentlemen. We might live in a little bit of denial in a bit of a bubble, but if you look at what's going on with governments, funding mechanisms, and student preferences all around the world, Unless we keep up from a reputation perspective, people will find another way. And they are finding another way to work around us. My one of my favorite quotes from Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, If you don't know where you're going, every road will get you there. Alright.
If you don't have your strategy as to why you're doing it, you will be a dabbler. That's what I call them. Dabblers. I work with universities and colleges all around the world that are spending one I worked with recently in England. They're already spending twenty million pounds a year.
But because they don't have a strategy and they don't know where they want to go, they're doing a lot of dabbling but they're not really having any strategic progress in what they're doing. So one of my big tips is if you're going to go after the lifelong learner, I don't care which of these is your objective, but have a set of objectives, have a strategy, know why you're doing it, and then put the resources, talent and commitment behind it. So I thought I'd just wrap up with you by sharing that when I walk into a university, a college, and we start talking about disruption, and I look to the future and think about how to bring my iceberg institution to life, I wanna just quickly walk you through those elements of my disruption continuum as a bit of a provocation. And the first the first place that the disruption starts are in these libraries of rich digital skill descriptors. A trusted repository of comprehensive digital skill descriptors endorsed by the author's brand and reputation.
Your brand, your reputation. There are libraries of rich digital skill descriptors being built by institutions, by governments, by not for profits, and by private sector providers all around the world. I don't care which libraries you use, but you're going to need a library. Because if the world is moving to skills based hiring, and it's not just moving, it's there right now, then the basic building blocks of everything that we do has to be the digital skill descriptors that we write in and it uses the foundation of what we teach. Because if we don't do that, machine learning, big data, AI and generative AI can't do its job.
Can't do its job. And so when I go into institutions, it's one of my first questions. Where is the evidence of what skills you're actually teaching in your programs? And are you being able to bring those to the foreground in the ways that you teach, assess, evidence and credential? The second step is us absolutely opening our minds up to different types of learning experiences. Whether those are formal education, workplace learning, self directed learning, we gotta be open to them all. We have to be open to them all if we wanna look after and serve the lifelong learner.
It can't always be just the formal credit bearing programs that we know and we love. And that's important because it's the only way we're going to be able to truly embrace credentials of all types. Learning experience based awards that offer a skills aligned portable and independently verifiable record of skill and competence mastery. That's why they matter. It's not about the image file in a digital badge.
It's about the data inside the image file that allows somebody's skills to be expressible, discoverable and verifiable. And for those of you sitting there saying, but Martin, there's millions of them. There's no quality in the system. My response to you would be, that's your job. It's your job to bring the quality to the micro credential.
It's your brands that have always been synonymous with quality and rigor, will always be synonymous with quality and rigor which is why you need to make sure that if you are going to step into alternative credentials, you do it the right way. Because the minute you start putting your brand and reputation on credentials that don't have rigor, that's when you draw yourself into that space of harm's way when it comes to reputation. But it doesn't just stop at embracing the different types of credentials. It's then about learning pathways. Sequences of credentials that stack towards tangible and transparent academic and labor market outcomes.
That's where it really comes together. And for those of you that are already working with Digital Badges, I'd ask you the question, are you actually thinking about pathways? Program pathways, self directed pathways, lifelong learning pathways. And does the technology that you use today actually allow you to knit pathways together in seamless, elegant ways? Do does your technology allow you to ingest credentials from others in open standards to be able to knit them into your pathways as well? Or are you building a set of discrete credentials and badges that don't aggregate and follow people for life. And then the next step after that is a really important one and you heard it talked about earlier today and I'm just so proud of the moves that Instructure is making to power it because this is actually where the value really comes for the student and it's the digital wallets. It's the digital wallets.
My nation of Australia, we're currently building a digital wallet for every citizen to be appended to our myGov account because we want our citizens to have a high resolution, centralized source of truth offering a comprehensive, detailed and verifiable record of a learner's achievements, skills, competencies and experiences. That's what we all need. I'm proud as punch of the analog degrees that I've got hanging on my wall. My mom loves them too. But you know, they're pretty unhelpful.
They're on paper so they're completely digitally undiscoverable. They do a few very unhelpful things. Where I studied and the name of my degree, both of which have no correlation to my workplace performance. And if I dig a little deeper and get my transcript, it just gives a bunch of other fairly non sexical course names and a bunch of numbers. In the world that we live in today, a world of skills based hiring, a world where technology is morphing and changing and redefining the world of work every twelve weeks, We owe it.
We owe it to every student and every graduate to give them a digital representation of all that they've achieved, formal and informal, assessed and self attested, and we need that to be persistent and enduring through their life and we need it to be interoperable because nobody's gonna control it except the individual. If we do it the right way, it will be the individual that has the agency over their wallet and how they choose to express it and to allow it to be verified in the world. And then my final frontier for the Star Trek fans in the room, my final frontier is recognition of prior learning, which is pretty ugly right now in the way that we do it. We need to have much fairer systems to be able to track people's work experience, their recommendations, the service that they've done. We need to be able to that be put forward so that as and when they come back to us for more lifelong learning experiences, we can give them the credit that they deserve to actually bring that back with them.
This is my disruption continuum. This is my provocation to institutions to help them get started with their strategy. Take it, take it back to your institutions. The next time you're having a conversation about lifelong learning, start walking through the continuum and having a conversation about where you're at and where you want to get to. You can't do all of this at once, but one thing's for sure, back to Alice in Wonderland, if you don't know where you're going, every road is going to get you there.
And I do not want you to be a dabbler because we're all relying upon you to help. Because I'll let you in on a little secret. I actually think that truth is under attack right now in the world because it's messy, it's muddy. We're trapped in bubbles of of people and information and we owe it. We owe it to our communities and society to have a vibrant education system.
Because a vibrant education system, as you heard loud and clear from the panel, a system that can help humans critically think, reflect, collaborate, challenge. That's what we need in our societies to be able to remain vibrant, healthy, active, and economically sustainable. So we need all of you. And the only way that all of you are gonna be around when we're here in two thousand and thirty as the panel discussed and we come back into the room is if we start thinking about embracing the lifelong learner and we start thinking about these building blocks that will help us get there. So thank you very much.
This is why you give me a round of applause. So round of applause please. Thank you. There's a little QR code there for you that'll take you to me. You're all my alumni now.
So if you want to come on the journey with me, feel free to connect. I'd love to have you with me. I'd love your feedback. I'd love your your ideas because we've all got to be in this together. And speaking of being in this together, it gives me great pleasure to invite a dear friend to the stage and a pretty wonderful human actually.
Her name is Melissa Lobel. Many of you in the room have already got to know Melissa and worked with Melissa. And her role, is a really courageous thing for a technology company to do, but her role in Instructure is she is the chief academic officer. In other words, she is our heart and soul and conscience on the executive team of Instructure to make sure that as they're busily looking at what can be done with technology, they're thinking about how and why it should be done with technology. I'm a huge Spider Man fan, Uncle Ben.
With great power comes great responsibility. Technology gives us great power. Melissa makes sure that we have great responsibility. Will you invite her to the stage for me please? And thank you very much.