Celebrating 5 Years of Learning Innovation, Looking Toward the Future

Yakut Gazi

As I am completing my first 90 days as Duke’s Vice Provost for Learning Innovation and Digital Education, I am in awe of the talent of my team and the energy around learning innovation that I feel from the students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of Duke. While we celebrate the past five years of our organization with pride, we know the next five years will be all about growth to engage more Duke learners from pre-K through gray, through programs and services powered by digital education.  We are here to put Duke on the map as a powerhouse for lifetime education and learning innovation. 

This is a great time for Duke to become the educational partner of choice for the global lifetime learners of today and the future. We believe that we, at Duke, have a unique opportunity to shape not only the future of our institution, but also the future of higher education. 

Next year, Duke University will be 100 years old. Duke has spent that time becoming a model of excellence in traditional higher education, but our changing world demands that Duke expand its vision beyond tradition in the next 100 years. 

There are major drivers in place that are forcing us to think of higher education in novel ways:

  • Churn of knowledge as a result of technological advances: These advances, such as AI and machine learning, make some jobs obsolete and dramatically change the skill sets required for other jobs. 
  • The skills gap in the workforce resulting from the accelerated churn of knowledge: The graduates we send out to the world will be in need of updating their knowledge as rapidly as within a year.
  • Demographic shifts, an aging population, and the enrollment cliff: Duke’s traditional student population is shrinking and will continue to do so. There are opportunities to make the pie bigger by expanding our mission to include lifetime learners, rather than only focusing on competing for a slice of the same pie.  
  • Longer life: 50% of the children born in the Western world will live to be 100 years old (Gratton and Scott, 2016). There are sociological, societal and personal implications of a longer life for health, education, finance, security, transportation, etc. systems. In order to survive the longer life and longer careers during which we will have to learn and re-learn, we need to be planning for a 60-year curriculum and respond to the market demand of the fastest increasing segment of population, the 65+ learners (Golden, 2022). 
  • Social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion: Time and again we see the evidence of the superiority of diverse learning and work environments. Our society also demands higher education to serve broader populations and re-establish education’s power for upward mobility, social justice, and equity. 

In addition, in higher education we created elite environments and defined our success by who we excluded. For those whom we included, many times we didn’t enable their success. Almost 40 million adults have some higher ed courses, but no credential or degree. 43 million people owe over 1.6 trillion dollars in student debt. We desperately need innovation in higher education and the good news is, it is already happening. We now live in a world where content is democratized through open education and elite brands are within people’s reach through digital learning. Creative business models make big brand education accessible. Georgia Tech has three master’s degrees that are less than $10,000 for the entire degree, with over 18,000 students pursuing them. Boston University has a $24,000 MBA. These programs are a fraction of the cost of their on-campus counterparts. There are over 50 of these degrees that create access to robust digital education in an affordable way. These degrees offer graduates the same diploma and access to the same alumni network. The value proposition is clear and the return on investment is a no-brainer for learners seeking these opportunities. 

To respond to these driving forces, we will:

  • Focus on learner engagement pre-K through gray. Programs and services powered by digital education are vehicles for this lifelong engagement.
  • Allow empirical and data-informed decisions to drive the practice of teaching and learning in all modes – residential, hybrid, and online.
  • Remediate, amplify, and accelerate learning for all, anywhere and at any age through the power of digital education, envisioned as a continuum from one to one hundred percent.

These pillars will guide our initiatives in the following ways:

  • We will shift away from supply-driven portfolios to demand-driven portfolios. Employee-demanded new and stackable credentials will increase Duke’s impact and generate revenue streams. Going beyond traditional degrees is paramount to growth. 
  • We will help learners develop soft skills/human skills as well as technical/STEM skills for shaping the future of work  through experiential learning, opening up possibilities to work across the various institutional units as well as with employers.
  • We will roll out new learner services and new learner experiences that go beyond the course, program, or process advising that we do currently, but expand into lifetime career coaching to help individuals swirl between learning and work. The last decade was about content, which has now become a commodity. This next decade will be about learner engagement and learner experience. 
  • We will continue to explore digital technologies and partnerships for affordability, scale, and impact to reach all corners of the globe. Innovative business and learning models have already changed the equation for many learners and institutions.
  • We will generate applied learning research on effective learning approaches through existing and new centers that focus on data-informed learning design, the future of higher education/worker-learner strategies, and broader educational insights that guide our practice of teaching/learning and design/delivery practices.
  • We will champion diversity, equity and inclusion to bridge the digital divide, to address the last mile problem in education and technology, and to expand access to global populations.

Through building lifetime engagements with global learners and through intelligent programming and services powered by digital education, we will put Duke on the map as a powerhouse for lifetime innovative education. We will expand Duke’s impact in Durham to Duke’s global network of alumni, friends, and their communities all over the world. The challenges with the future of work and education are indeed issues of scale and inclusion, especially in a technology-driven post-COVID world. Progressive and bold brands like Duke can expand access and opportunity in an equitable and inclusive manner, and do so by delivering affordable programs to global audiences. Our commitment to affordability and access will lead to impact at scale. 

Here is to the next five years and beyond!


References

Golden, S. W. (2022). Stage (Not Age): How to Understand and Serve People Over 60–the Fastest Growing, Most Dynamic Market in the World. Harvard Business Review Press.

Gratton, L., & Scott, A. (2017). The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.