Raiders of the Lost Apprenticeship: How Student Leadership and Experiential Learning are Driving Workforce Success

Welcome to Educast three thousand. It's the most transformative time in the history of education. So join us as we break down the fourth wall and reflect on what's happening. The good, the bad, and even the chaotic. Here's your hosts, Melissa Lobel and Ryan Lufkin.

Hey there. Welcome to Educast three thousand. I'm your co host, Melissa Lobel.

And I'm your co host, Ryan Lufkin. Today, we are diving into something that feels both deeply historical and incredibly urgent, the power of experiential and Apprenticeship Learning in Higher Education, something that's been on Hot Topics since AI came about. We are thrilled to welcome Emily Foote, Chief Growth and Strategy Officer at Saxby's. Emily's spent her career at the intersection of education, workforce, and innovation, thinking deeply about how we move from theory to practice, from credentials to capabilities. And Emily happens to be a longtime colleague and friend of both Melissa and I. So, Emily, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here and to see both of you again.

Always good. It's like reunion time.

Absolutely. And Brian and I know a lot about you, Emily. We've been friends for a long time and worked together for a long time, but our audience does not. So if you don't mind, would you just share a little bit about yourself? Kind of what got you to where you are now, your passion for education, all of the above so our audience can get to know you a little bit more?

Sure. Absolutely. So a little bit about myself. I come from Philadelphia, from a big family.

And I was fascinated as a child of why my where I grew up, which was three blocks from West Philadelphia, was so different from where my friends three blocks away grew up from a perspective of education.

And as a child, I was fascinated by this problem and made a promise to myself that what I do in my career will try to help solve that problem. And so my career to date has really been in all in education, but in four different chapters. So I was classroom teacher through Teach For America and at the Kipp schools. I then went to law school, and I practiced education law.

So that was the second chapter. My third chapter was an ed tech, which I was lucky enough to meet you all, Matt. I had founded a company called Practice, which was all around how do you scale apprenticeship like learning in both the higher ed context and the corporate learning. And then we were lucky enough to be acquired by you all at Instructure.

And so I spent time there in that ed tech chapter. And then the fourth chapter, I spent five years as a partner of a early stage investment firm where I focused on b to b software investing, but education and workforce place. Those were the four chapters of my career from an education perspective. And then now I really missed operating, and so I went back into the operating world, and I joined a company that is an experiential learning company called Saxe Fees, which we'll talk a lot more about in the podcast.

Yeah. I have to say, and actually I told this story before we jumped on, but first time I met you was at my first instructor con at Keystone, Colorado, and you were presenting about practice. And you had educators in tears because of how much time that was going to save them, you know, driving across rural America. So I always you're an amazing storyteller.

You have just such great experience. But one of the things that we always like to ask our guests is for a favorite learning moment. And that can be favorite learning moment, whether it's you learning or you doing the teaching. But I'm sure you have probably more than more than we have time to share, but share one with us.

Sure. So I think my most favorite was really instrumental in in everything I've done in my career. So as a kid, school didn't come super easy for me. I had an IEP. I had a reading learning difference that was never specified exactly what it was. I was pulled out a lot, but I figured out how to work the system to get great grades, which was basically by mimicking.

I didn't learn that much.

I found, like, joy of learning and getting better was in sports, in particular in basketball. Because I had that circular motion of experience something, so it'd be in the game. Then I would reflect on it at times watching video. I would think about it with feedback from a coach, and I'd practice, and then I'd do it again in the game and I'd get better. And it was a form of experience for me in terms of how people learn, how I learned, and then it influenced really the entirety of my career as both a teacher and both in ed tech, both as a in investing and now back in the operating space.

What I love about that story, yeah, it's apprenticeship at its best, right, or experiential learning at its best when we think about sports or we think about those extracurricular activities kids do and adults do throughout their lives, there's so much learning embedded in that. So it it actually not only is it inspiring, and I I love it, but it leads to our first question for you, which is really about experiential and apprenticeship models and sort of grounding us in they've been around for a long time. In fact, very early days of society, people learned through apprenticeship models.

That's how you developed your skills and your workforce skills. We're seeing a really significant resurgence of both experiential learning and apprenticeship models in the last couple of years. What do you think's driving that? Where is that coming from?

Has it always been there, but now suddenly we're paying attention to it? Where do you think this is coming from?

Yeah. It's a great question.

Where I'm understanding where it's coming from most today is through my experience at Saxby's, and so just a high level. So Saxby's is an experiential learning company that partners with universities to transform operations on campus into learning laboratories. So and universities are coming to us, and we do this by transforming cafes and also book stores with our partnership with Follett. So universities are coming to us because they want a proof point.

They wanna tell students, parents, employers, we are preparing you for the real world here. And you can see it by how we transform operations on campus into class classrooms, but experiential learning classrooms. So that's what we do. But so I'm hearing it a lot from universities coming to us.

But I'm also hearing it just from others in my life. So my brother-in-law recently toured a dozen campuses with my nephew, and he told me every school is talking about experiential learning, but very few of them could tell him exactly how it would help my nephew. And so that gap between, I think, the promise and the proof of the proof is what's driving the urgency in this moment. I have a couple other things to say on this.

Yeah, keep going. Please, dig in. Yeah.

Alright. So one of the biggest reasons I joined Saxby's was I had been in the ed tech world for a while, and there were some education solutions and structure in Canvas being one of them that really did have an impact. But there were a lot that didn't have super strong ROI. And the stat that got me most excited about Saxby's was that the students who were in leadership position running these operations on campus were getting leadership positions when they graduated seven times faster than the national average. So taught said to me, okay. This isn't just an amenity or a nice to have on campus. It's an outcomes like, experiential learning is an outcomes based part of the university.

And if it's part of their architecture and DNA like it is at schools like Drexel and Northeastern that have co op in their curriculum, their two two partners of ours, you're gonna have these great career outcomes.

But I think the two things that are really causing the urgency now is first the experience gap, and then second is AI. So and we all know these stats. They're dated, but they just seem to hold true. Gallup in two thousand seventeen said eleven percent of business leaders believe higher ed is effectively preparing graduates for work.

Then the Chronicle of Higher Ed in two thousand twenty two essentially said the same thing. The number hadn't moved. But then more recent data from NACE, National Association of Colleges and Employers, tell us that eighty one percent of graduates believe they're strong critical thinkers, but only fifty six percent of employers agree. And so when that four out of five graduates think they're ready, but only half employers agree, the degree stops becoming a reliable signal of capability.

And that's when experiential learning stops being at campus kind of amenity and more becomes an economic necessity. So that's one reason I think it's there's urgency.

The second is just AI supercharging all of this. So that traditional I think the best way of saying it's just a junior career phase was a bargain where early stage employees, they would do all the grunt work like we did in our jobs, the track, the research, the data cleansing. And we did that in for lower salaries, but in exchange for that experience. And AI now is removing those bottom rungs.

So I think we all know this, but the World Economic Forum Research says that fifty to sixty percent of those junior tasks are now being executed by AI. Stanford analysis down that employment for workers aged twenty two to twenty five. So those recent graduates have already declined by thirteen percent in AI exposed fields. And the CEOs, you know, are saying the quiet part out loud that AI isn't for junior employees, it's just going to replace those folks.

Yeah. And even recently, Anthropic released some data around where, you know, where they anticipate the impact of AI on jobs where they're actually already seeing it based on cloud usage data. And it's so, it's here. The future is here and it's starting to impact those jobs.

Yeah. And I think that experience gap and then that we know from the data that has been decades old and then AI supercharging is those are the two things really forcing the urgency around, you know, let's look at experiential learning.

And by the way, this this hits home for me because my daughter is a junior in college and is very, you know, she's basically starting to look for internships. Internships and these, you know, like, they're just not there like they were when, you know, because the entry level jobs like you said that we had aren't there. And so how do we how do we bridge that gap? The next question really is kind of like, and for decades, higher education has prioritized knowledge acquisition, right? That, you know, to be a subject matter expert, you have that knowledge. Now we've actually kind of all got that knowledge in our pockets. So what's fundamentally changing about how we define being educated from your perspective?

Yeah, I think this is one of the most important philosophical shifts in higher education in in a generation is being educated used to mean you complete the course, earn the credential. I was quite good at that as mimicking it. But what I'm by the inputs, where what's changing is a move towards defining education by output. So what can you actually do? And I do think there's a distinction around experiential learning that's important to talk about between student run and student led. So where I'm at now at Saxby's, it's not student run, it's student led. Student run implies labor, where student led implies leadership development.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know, there's a lot of programs out there that put students to work, but there's fewer that build conditions for students to lead, where they're not just operating and doing that kind of first rung roles, but they're actually they have p and l responsibility. They build culture. They develop their peers. They're making decisions that in a consequence rich environment. And that really develops leaders, which is what I think employers want when they're saying people Yeah.

Those are those actual transferable skills, right?

The Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

The durable skills. Right? The the ability to critically think, the ability to problem solve, the ability to change make, the ability to set culture, those things are the skills that we're seeing. A lot of the research that you're talking about is also leaning into what very tangibly do we need to see in order to align to what workforce needs are.

And so I think that student run versus student led distinction's really Yeah.

Really important.

Yeah. It's so interesting. We've tried to operationalize this by we call the durable skills, we call them power skills, and we have five of them. So there's critical thinking, just like you were saying, Melissa, Emotional intelligence, resilience, influential communication, and then something we coined Thrive Drive, which is that intrinsic motivation to push through, you know, difficult high stakes situations.

Instinctuitiveness. It's one of my, you know, like, it's an intangible. I really like that Thrive drive.

Exactly. These are the ones that you're saying, Melissa, like the employers wanna find, but they're really only the ones that you can develop in these consequence rich environments, these experiential learning environments, and you can't get them as easily in a lecture hall. So I think, you know, when we talk about what is the definition of educated, I think it's evolving to have a different set of questions like, can you lead when things go wrong? Can you motivate people who don't report to you? Can you make a decision with incomplete information? And that's gonna be the new currency of the workforce.

I love that.

Yeah. I do too. I wanna lean in a little more here too. Like, how do you scale the development of those skills? There's probably examples that Saxby's, you have a Saxby's or you just even more broadly or your past. Like, I think that's been the challenge in the past around both apprenticeship and experiential learning programs is a really challenging to scale, especially in a world where technology has enabled access to learning and access to experiences both in person and remotely that can create its own challenge around scale. How do you scale experiential learning?

I can answer that by how we've thought about it, and hopefully that'll be helpful for others and schools. So we operationalize experiential learning by embedding it directly into the core business model. And that is the critical difference between other experiential learning programs that are more of a layer on top of the business or a layer on of what the school is doing. So experiential learning really is how our business operates because it and it generates revenue and it generates value.

And this ensures that it scales and it does not become kind of a high touch limited access program. So if it's helpful, I can kind of tell you how that works. Yeah. That'd be great.

And where the scale comes from. So so universities provide us space and students.

Construction. So we're opening at Wellesley next month in their new construction for their library, or we converted an Einstein Brothers at John Carroll University or Starbucks at Drexel. So that's the space, and then they give us the students to work there. And the student leaders deliver this operational excellence in part, and they come out with career skills in part because of the curriculum we have around them. That generates revenue for the cafe and then that funds the student wages.

Then they also come out career ready and the universities now have something to showcase as an ROI. And when we have that stronger ROI of a strong financially viable operation on campus, plus the career outcomes, then more schools want it. So last fall, we opened four new cafes. This year, we have eight new partners. We haven't announced them all yet, but there's a handful.

SUNY Plattsburgh and Fairmount State, which is our first one in West Virginia, University at Albany, Mount Saint Vincent University in Wellesley, I just mentioned. But when those are I should, then the cycle gets stronger.

You can scale it, but it's funding itself. And I believe strongly that there's latent opportunity across college campuses to replicate this, specifically in retail operations.

So we can transform them into experiential learning, but they stand alone based on the revenue that they're generating.

We partnered last year with Fall at Higher Education, helped them transform bookstores into student led operations. So Northeastern was the first one they piloted last fall, and it had great academic and operational results. Think from an operational perspective, they had a nine percent year over year increase in revenue, basically showing that this is not only an experiential learning opportunity that can have great career outcomes for students, but it can also yield strong financial results for the schools. And then it's not an add on, but it's really part of the architecture of the school. And I think that's how it can scale more broadly.

That's amazing. Like even before the rise of AI, right, we were talking about that skills gap, and it feels like that's why. But, but one of the secrets of success of most successful apprenticeship models is that they require a deep employer partnership, right? What does it take to truly align educators and industry in a way that benefits learners rather than just serving that short term hiring needs?

I think this is a question that keeps a lot of well intentioned partnerships from actually working. Yeah. I think it comes down to one distinction that this vendor error in higher ed is ending and the partner is beginning where you'll sometimes have vendors extract value, but I think partners can really create it together. The risks that I've seen, and it's not all of them, but in a lot of employer education partnerships, is that it often comes with a recruitment pipeline, where the employer comes to campus, they select the top students, then they have their talent pipeline. It's not exactly experiential learning.

It's more of a well dressed job fair.

Yeah. That's a way to describe it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's it's not necessarily bad, but I think it's a gray zone for saying that's experiential learning. And so I think if employers work with the campuses to really be true academic partners and sit at the table.

Close that loop to actually, you know, make sure they're mapping the skills to the academic aspect of it. That's incredibly important.

Exactly. Yeah. And then I think it's like, how do we create value collectively as opposed to a one way value street.

I think too like, I think that's such an important piece to understand because you'll also see you have to align as educators and employers on what are the outcomes that are joint outcomes for you. Because to your point about that talent pipeline, you you almost see like, okay. So we're sending standing up this experience and these experiential programs, and it could even be apprenticeship style things. But then that means that those students will come work for us.

And that's not what it's about. Right? It's about enriching, and it's about developing those skills. It's not about the bridge between education and workforce from a career perspective necessarily.

Like, that I think this is what's falsely assumed. And so you see programs where you know, I've led some programs like this where when the employer doesn't get the volume of students or not every student turns in decides to what to go to that employer, Like, well, that partnership didn't work anymore. That's not necessarily what it's about. You never know if that human is gonna wanna come back to work for you or how or that person could go work for a partner company.

Like, there's so much more impact than that, but it's like that lack of joint outcome, which leads me to my next question where you and I have nerded out on this in the past. Sort of you have I would say the majority of your career has been about education, but always with that workforce alignment in play. Practice, your early company that you founded had a lot of that as its underpinnings. Your work, in investing, all of that is bringing those two worlds together.

I'm curious over that journey, how has your thinking evolved around how the classroom and workforce are either entwined or you know, what does that continuum look like in your mind, and how has that evolved over your career?

Yeah. It's a great question. I think early in my career, even a bit with practice, I thought about this question as binary, so classroom learning versus real world experience. Because practice was practicing not in the real world. It was practicing to get into the real world.

And I come to really believe that this framing is is wrong. I think the most transformative learning happens at the intersection. So theory without practice produces graduates who know things that they can't do. But practice without theory produces competent technicians who can't transfer skills into new context. And so I think where we're getting is that the learning needs to have this strong feedback loop between the two, similar to how I learned how to play basketball. So how do we take that and bring that into experiential learning?

One of the challenges of experiential learning is it doesn't fit neatly into that traditional grading system. Right? So how do you measure mastery? How do you say, yep, Emily's got that skill, she's mastered it, right?

You're in this and build that loop.

You've got to, and that's I think the challenge is we're so used to that like learn the thing, get the grade kind of model. How do we adapt or make this fit, like, into that bigger system?

Yeah. That's also a wonderful question. And I think it's one of the most important design challenges in experiential learning.

And I work with this exceptionally bright woman. Her name is Katie Sandoval. And she built an assessment model for our experiential learning platform that she's continually improving upon, but it works quite well. So I think the first principle is you have to measure both the lagging and leading indicators.

And that well, it's to your point, I think when you sit down with the provost and the deans and the directors of experiential learning as a partner to them, what outcomes are you looking for? And that's really the more of the lagging outcomes indicators. And then also, okay. To do that, what are the leading indicators that ensure that we will get there?

Those students will land the jobs that they want, and they'll graduate on time, and they'll reach leadership faster in their, you know, than their peers. So from a perspective of what we do that hopefully could be helpful to others is we first administer kind of a power skill self assessment. So those five transferable skills that we talked about at the start of every semester, and it's modeled on NACE's career readiness competencies, measuring the five skills, you know, that we talked about already most in demand by employers. And then mid semester, every student's, you know, completes a structured reflection, reflection and they have a one on one with their operations lead, not really a check-in, but more coach conversation about growth and career direction and where are the gaps.

And what we have found, we did this for the first time last semester, was that sixty seven percent of the students said they would answer the PowerScale assessment differently than they did at the start of the term.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Is like very interesting. And I think that's they you know, showing that they're self reflective and they're learning. And then the overwhelming majority said they had, like, meaningful leadership growth and described seeing themselves differently than they did on day one. So it was just a good evidence of transformation.

So that's around the critical things. But then we've also are developing and we'll release this an operational proficiency tool. And that, you know, is really establishing objective behavioral standards for leadership for leader performance across core responsibilities of the operations like inventory management and scheduling, team accountability. And that rubric will be you know, is what will allow us to say this student had mastery of certain skills, which is really those leading indicators that will then allow us to get to the lagging indicators.

But I think the broader lesson is just assessment has to match, you know, what you're trying to measure. And to your point, Rai, like traditional grades tell you what a student knows in a controlled environment, but they don't tell you whether the student can lead in a difficult conversation or hover from a business failure. So for that, you really need that structured reflection that we've worked in.

Yeah. So taking this one step further. So students seeing this growth, how do they then outwardly express their skills? Is this a like, are we seeing alongside experiential learning from your view, a new role for portfolios, and we've talked about portfolios in education forever.

Is there a new role for portfolios? Is there, like, opportunities to demonstrate your skills? Like, does this translate into to credentials? How is this now expressed outwardly by the students that are building these skills so successfully in these apprenticeship programs or these experiential learning programs?

Yeah. I think that's a really great question. I think it's all of the above of what you said. I think we're beginning to figure out which combination is most meaningful.

But portfolios, performance based demonstration, employer validation is all important. From portfolios, they're powerful when they document, you know, that genuine growth over time, not just curated highlights. The best portfolios I've seen from our student leaders tell a story. So here's who I was when I started.

Here's what I faced. Here's how I failed. What I've learned. Here's who I am now.

And that narrative arc is what makes portfolio meaningful to employers, not the artifact itself, but really the the evidence of development. We do that in something called a capstone. But then you mentioned performance based demonstrations.

Those really force students to synthesize what they've learned. And you you know, in our world, in this capstone, you present a semester's worth of p and l decisions to a roomful of, you know, stakeholders.

And that's really like, oh, I actually really understand understand that. So compressing that into a compressing that into a live demonstration is a form of assessment. And then I think employer validation is is really the most underutilized lever. So when employers can verify that a student demonstrated specific competencies in a in a real business context, or some experiential learning moment and not just claim that them on a resume. It changes the, you know, quality entirely, and that's something I think we're just moving more towards as a group. So I think it's a a combination of verified record, etcetera.

I just have to highlight, and I I'm sorry to interrupt at this moment. Like, what you just said about portfolios in and of itself is key, and it is not, in my experience, what the education space is doing. We are having too many conversations about what is the output, how do I demonstrate the output, as opposed to how do I demonstrate the arc and the journey, and how do I prove my own self as a learner and all of those, like, your five skills that you all focus on, how do I how do I demonstrate those? And that's through that journey within a portfolio.

I think we do the same thing around credentials. It's about check the box. I've got this skill, but there's no history behind it in some situations that really demonstrate what that individual is gonna be like when they come into your workforce. And when you know, how can you start to really understand someone's ability to be resilient, one of your five, or somebody's ability to grow or somebody's ability to learn.

You can't by just looking at artifacts. So, anyway, I had to call that out because when you said that, I thought, oh my gosh. Our listeners, please. This that is a really important perspective to lean into because it is not necessarily the direction collectively we're seeing in education.

One of those other big challenges too is equity. Right? We talk a lot about equity right now. And when I think back to when I was looking to get my first internship, one of the things that I was most horrified by was how many of them were unpaid internships. And for a student like me that I worked full time, I had to pay for my college, had to pay for my car, I had to, you know, all of that was non negotiable. There was no way I could have done an unpaid internship, and I was lucky enough to find one that was paid. But how do we create these experiential pathways that, you know, are designed in a way that they truly widen the participation for students that aren't necessarily being supported by the parents or that's the biggest challenge I think for me is how do make sure these are available for everyone?

I couldn't agree more. That's the goal. And I think historically, I also experienced that, that it's experiential learning was a privilege.

I think it's still a privilege for a lot of people, but I see movement that it's becoming less and more more equitable. But just like you said, on paid internships in cities, you can only afford if somebody's subsidizing your Exactly.

Yes. Yes.

Net worth with access to if your parents know those folks or Here, those opportunities compound advantages for the students who really are already had advantages. So this is another reason I was really drawn to join Saxby's. They've had equity at the core of what they've done, and I think it's a great model for others to learn from. So every experience that we provide in the cafes and or the bookstores through through the follow-up relationship is paid.

But students also earn academic credit. And those leadership roles, the wages are really commensurate with responsibility. So across the first ten years that of Saxby's been doing experiential learning for ten years, students have earned over seventeen million in wages. Wow.

Know, not incidental.

It's really foundational to No way.

That's amazing.

And the other thing that I'm proud of, and it's because of how it's built in to how we do things, which is really about paid and credit, is during last school year, fifty six percent of our student CEOs were from were first gen college students or came from underserved backgrounds.

That's awesome.

And that has been pretty much the same stat across the ten years being in experiential learning. And that's it's not because we're lowering the bar, it's because the model removes those barriers, Ryan, that you and Ulp talked about, that typically filter students out because they have financial need or there's geographic access. Well, these experiential learning opportunities are on campus, and you don't need a network to get those opportunities. So the other thing I think that's really interesting about making equity part of the the core, equity meaning pay and credit, is that you see that in retention data. So a hundred percent of our student leaders have graduated on time compared to fifty percent of students nationally. Experiential learning, I think when it's designed well, doesn't just build that career readiness, but it builds like a deep belonging if you're doing it with other students.

Yeah. Especially embedded in the campus experience like that, right? That really is incredible.

Yeah, which I think really is why there's there's strong retention. So I think generally for experiential learning, when people are designing it, the design principle isn't a feature that you should add after models built for the equity, but it has to be foundation. And that's paid, accessible to all majors. So our student leaders come from seventy fields of study. It's not just business. Structured to first gen students and students from underserved backgrounds, you know, aren't disadvantaged from what they're not coming to the table with like some of their peers.

Does it, Kurmulf?

So before we get into predicting the future, I have one last sort of tactical question maybe or even just philosophical. You and I have taught for a long time, and the role of the teacher, the faculty member has evolved over the years. And I've noticed this in my own classes. You know, five years ago, students I would get one student that would ask me about how does this align to these careers that I want to get into?

Or, you know, what skills am I really getting from this work? And now I would say at least seventy five percent of my students are asking or expecting career coaching, career guidance, understanding of skills alignment skills mapping. And this isn't all ages. Like, Brian and I had the privilege of visiting a a public school district a couple weeks ago, and we met with kids in some apprenticeship programs.

And they could talk very articulately at very young ages about skills that they knew they needed in order to have, you know, employment that was consistent and well paying. And those were parts of their decisions around what they studied. So so this has shift. But faculty and teachers, it's a different skill set.

How are you seeing this evolve? How are you what's happening to the faculty member or the teacher in all of this?

Such a great question. I have three kids, and they're young. They're seven, eight, and forget the software that they use, but it's all about connecting their work in the classroom to careers and having them make those connections similar to what you're saying. Yeah.

And it's listening to them is very similar to what you're hearing. They're so articulate about what skills they wanna gain, so they can have a job that they enjoy and make money from. And it's fascinating, because I never thought like that. Nobody No.

No.

Like that wasn't a part of the curriculum of like, oh, you guys are a lot smarter than I I wanted to be a garbage man because I got to ride on the outside of the truck when we were kids, right?

Because that looked rad.

Well, it's great.

I'm like thrilled by it. But it also makes us all have to up our game. And to your point, Melissa, how do we have to evolve as educators? I think the the individuals that are most effective in an experiential learning kinda ecosystem is less lecturer and more of a learning architect, which is why you're such an incredible teacher, Melissa, because you have a learning design and development background of of from a training and execution perspective.

But your design experience and those that really think about it as a learning architect as opposed to a lecturer, I think that creates like great conditions for students like the ones you were talking to or my kids or your daughter who's a junior now, Ryan, to have, like, deep insight into what skills they have to develop for a successful future. And that really comes from educators who are coaches and who help them reflect on their practice so that they can then take that feedback and go back and act again and then do that cycle just like I learned in basketball and our student CEOs learned working with their operational coaches.

And so I think those connections are made through experiential learning, but with an educator who's the coach or the guide on the side. We're, like, unbelievably lucky because at many of our universities and I actually looked at a bunch today, and they're they're actually all also Canvas users.

Nice.

Had bit had a bit, like, worked with us as an experiential learning partner, and then have been able to extract, okay, what are the students doing at the cafe?

Or even students that aren't at the cafe, but how can we use this as an example to bring into the classroom and really be that guide on the side?

So there's folks at Penn State, Janet Miller and Mackenzie Anderson. Anderson. They did a case study where they looked at our plant powered menu, and then they invited students to think through product market fit to align more with gen z consumers. Then Monique Kelly at Boston University, she used it to develop, the SATPs and the experiential learning to develop, media strategies and marketing briefs. Brendan Bowler and Dave Lipinski at UVA used it. So let's go look at this experiential learning and how can we do a market map from a go to market of what other schools in the radius of UVA can use this. Steven Fleming at Rowan University used it also to see, he uses interdisciplinary case study for liberal arts students, and how can they think about market expansion, but through a liberal arts education?

Interesting. Yeah. That's Interesting.

Very interesting. It's many, many more, but all of those professors are just great examples of how they're using real world application experiences their students are having, and then integrating the learning through those experiences and being the guides for them to be reflective on it, to think and act, and then be able to go back in the cafe and use those marketing strategies they learned about class room. So comfort and ambiguity requires deep knowledge of the experiential industries or learning that's happening in the industries that the experiential learning is happening in. And it requires you I think this is probably most important, to debrief on the failure as rigorously as we do on success.

And there's, you know, there's a lot of schools doing this well, but I think the most important thing is that the schools are investing in their professors and their faculty to have professional development about how are you that role? How are you that learning architect, not just the lecturer, to support it?

Well, and that so that kinda actually gets to my next question. If you gaze into your crystal ball in the next, you know, it's hard to say five to ten because everything is changing so fast, but three to five years, does experiential learning become more intrinsic to the four year degree and what needs to change systemically for that to happen?

So I do think it will be the norm. I think it's gonna take five, seven, maybe even ten years, because I think three things need to change for this to become the norm. First, I think crediting frameworks have to evolve. So too few institutions offer academically integrated pathways for students to access experiential learning. So credit is the difference between it being an add on and to be equity driving, which we talked about earlier. And without it, it really just becomes an experience for students who are already privileged, that have the time, the money, or the flexibility to do it.

Second, I think employer behavior has to change. When employers reward demonstrated competency over pedigree, I think the universities will invest more in bringing those opportunities.

And then third, funding models have to catch up. So our model works in large part because it's it's economically self sustaining. You know, the cafe generates revenue that supports the program, but not every experiential learning model has that built in economics. So I do think policy and philanthropy have a pretty large role to play.

But as we talked about earlier, AI is really driving Accelerates a lot of this.

For this. Yep.

Well, I think if we think about those three things, you know, credit pathways that schools support you doing experiential learning and getting credit for it, and the experiential learning pays you, the employer behavior changes to reward competency over pedigree, and then the funding models change, we'll get ahead of the Yeah. I see.

Beat the prediction.

Yeah. Exactly. I love it.

And I think on that note, this is a great place to wrap up.

Emily, thank you so much for your sharing your deep experience and insights, the work you're doing now. And I think it all is in service, and you've always been this way, of ensuring that people, wherever they are in the learning journey, are able to contribute to their communities, their personal, and their professional lives in the most meaningful ways. And I just love that. It's just so inspiring. So thank you so much for being here. Also, I'll note for our listeners, Emily mentioned a number of different sort of research reports and things like that. We'll make sure we add those to the the show notes so that you have some of the reference that's references that she mentioned as well.

Emily, thank you so much for being here.

So much. Amazing. Amazing.

Thank you all for having me. It was a pleasure. I was honored to be able to an hour to to speak to both of you. So thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Oleg.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Educast three thousand. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and drop us a review on your favorite podcast player so you don't miss an episode. If you have a topic you'd like us to explore more, please email us at InstructureCast at Instructure dot com, or you can drop us a line on any of the socials. You can find more contact info in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Educast three thousand.