Navigating the Future of Education: Embracing Innovation and Disruption

So there will be no sitting back and relaxing, in this presentation. Thank you all for being here. Last day of conference, if you are a conference speaker, which I do a lot of, and you see yourself show up this time on the last day of conference, you do have this panic attack about will anybody be here. So it's wonderful to see all of you, and thank you for coming along to the presentation. Just a little bit about me. My name is is Martin Bean, which is Australian for Martin Bean, for the Americans in the room, I lived here fifteen years and the first thing I had to do was to realize nobody understood my name when I said Martin and I became Martin.

So it's nice to be back in North America so I can be my American self. My my career's, a little different. I'm one of very few people on the planet who are bilingual. And by that I mean, the first half of my career was all in education technology. From the first PC on the desk, yes I am that old, I turned sixty this year.

Year of the dragon, it's actually the year of the wood dragon, which makes me very powerful this year. So hopefully you'll get something from the presentation. And the last job I had there was actually working for Microsoft in Seattle, where I ran their worldwide education products group. And it was a really magical time, because it was just as Bill Gates was going over to the Gates Foundation, and before he left the company, he said, look, there are two industries that technology has not disrupted for good. And before I leave the chief exec role at Microsoft, I want to do something about that.

And of course, those two industries were healthcare and education. And like Bill, I believe that it's a basic human right that we all should have a great education, and we should have a great health system. Why? Oh, thank you. Hey, thank you. Because if you think about what enriches communities, the basic building blocks of what enriches a community are if people are well educated, which is more important than ever before, because truth is being assailed, and we are healthy, which means that we have the ability on a level playing field to actually realize our potential.

So as Bill was heading across, they brought me in to really help them figure out not how to sell more technology, and this was back in sort of two thousand and five, we were already making one point eight billion dollars worth of revenue globally out of education, just out of education in Microsoft, and that was at about a sixty percent discount. Right? So we were very well penetrated into education, but we didn't, Bill didn't think, I didn't think, my colleagues didn't think that we'd really unlocked its potential at an education level. And And you know what's really interesting? After spending a lot of money, a lot of money with some really bright consulting firms all around the world, study after study after study. When we looked at education, do you know what we kept coming back to that the great promise of technology was in education? It was access. That what technology can do that nothing else can do, if you've got great learning and teaching, is open up access to people to that in ways that are unthinkable otherwise.

So that was the first half of my career, then something unthinkable happened. There I was living the beautiful life on Lake Washington, and I got a call from Britain's largest university, from the Open University of the UK. Two hundred and seventy thousand students, all working adults, most of whom were first in family, in a deep collaboration with the BBC, where back in nineteen seventy one, we used the breakthrough technology of the day, a color television, to broadcast all of the OU lectures into the homes of Brits all over the United Kingdom, and to open up a university to people without any entry requirements. And to this day, the OU has no entry requirements, but it consistently ranks in the top five of all universities in the UK for student satisfaction. Why? Because it's purpose built, purpose built from the ground up to help people survive and thrive at a university level without the normal prerequisites that we take for granted, and that's how they got me.

They got me because it was right after going out of web one, and they were stuck. They needed to transition to social and they were stuck about how to do it. So the unthinkable happened, ed tech guy suddenly was asked to be college president and vice chancellor of the UK's largest university, and of course it was during the period of the MOOCs. So along came the MOOCs, and for all the Americans in the room, we had a panic attack in the UK, because we suddenly saw you were about to steal all of our intellectual property. So the minister called me and said, Martin, the open university was created for this moment.

We have to fight back against the Americans and protect our intellectual property. And I thought, well this is pretty ironic because I'm Australian. This is sort of like the Empire Strikes Back, you know, this is, this is incredible. So I was, given the charter to start what some of you may know as FutureLearn, which became the UK's MOOC of the time, still around today, still flourishing, but our goal, and what what I loved about FutureLearn is we knew we were never going to be as big as Coursera, and we knew we were never going to be as big as edX, but you know what we could be? We could be better. And we knew the way to be better was by leveraging all of the open universities, know how, since nineteen seventy one, in what you needed to do with instructional design and content to be able to engage people in remote ways, that was meaningful, persistent, and helped them achieve their learning outcomes what they were.

So that's a bit of my backstory. Then after living away from my hometown of Melbourne, Australia for thirty years with three American daughters in tow from three different states, all legal, I got a call from my hometown, from RMIT University, saying, hey, Martin, don't you think it's about time you come home? And so after thirty years away, I went back to run RMIT University with campuses in Victoria, Singapore, Vietnam, and China, Roughly ninety thousand formal students, hundreds of thousands of informal students, so about the size of Ohio State, if that helps for some people, in the room. And again, the challenge was, Martin, we know we'll only survive if we open up to the lifelong learner. Right? You look at all of the demographics, you look at all of the numbers, and what was really clear is if you are a university in countries like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and you are not making yourself relevant for your core market of eighteen to twenty four year olds, you are also making yourself relevant for sixteen to seventy five year olds, and you stay in your own echo chamber, then every year that goes by you're going to become less relevant to your funders and your communities. So I might upset some people in the room today, because I unashamedly believe that over ninety five percent of our undergraduate students, no matter what type of institution we are, and I am speaking the k through twelve as well, they come to us to get a job and get ahead.

It's why my tagline for my strategy at RMIT was ready for life and work. That's what we do, and I know if there are some R1 people here, some elite research institutions, you will want to debate with me for hours about why a university exists. When we leave, don't talk to me. It is impossible if you're older than me and you've had more experience understanding how to drive access to quality education, bring it on. But otherwise, I just want to help the rest of you agree with me, that may be applauded with me because, I have this theory of change in education.

You find the enlightened willing, people like you, you enroll them, you support them, you fund them, you celebrate them. That'll take the middle of the bell curve, the fence sitters, they'll come along for the ride. The curmudgeons, the tail, you just don't talk to those people, because all they're going to do is weigh you down with a bunch of negative energy. So, if you are one of them, please leave now. Okay.

On we, on we go. On we go with the presentation. I am going to use Slido because the room's big. So pull out one of your weapons of mass distraction for me now, and just take a photo of the QR code. It's going to take you to a landing page.

And there's both Q and A there and polls there. We're just gonna use the polls today. We're not gonna use the Q and A, so just go there. Each time I arrive at a question, the browser will automatically advance. So don't leave that page, but if you do every question, because my undergrad is in adult education and I know what you're like, the QR code will be there again.

Because I know some of you won't be able to resist doing something stupid in the early part of my presentation. So it will be there, each time, but but that's your gift back to the rest of the audience, and I'm going to make sure Instructure gets a screenshot of the results, so that'll be part of what you get afterwards. In the session I ran on my book for leadership yesterday, the results were unbelievable. And I see a couple of people that were there from yesterday. Thank you for coming back.

It's good for my ego. Okay. Away we go. I'm gonna start off with part one of the presentation, talking about, the global spilling emergency. You might have noticed that everywhere in the world, there are these fundamental disruptions in local and global labor markets that are increasingly demanding that learning experiences have tangible market outcomes to address what WEF characterized as the skills or skilling emergency.

It wasn't caused by the pandemic. The pandemic was an accelerator. It was alive and well before the pandemic. It just sped it up. It sped it up in a lot of ways, and in fact, here's the tale of two stories, And it's all driven by skills becoming repeatedly mismatched or redundant over our lifetime.

And it's just kept speeding up along the way. Yes, it's good for my ego as well for you to take photos of my screens. I love that. So it's far away. To the left, you'll see what WEF was talking about back in twenty twenty.

Just as the pandemic was getting going, they said there were three forces driving the skilling emergency. There was a skills mismatch, qualifications not meeting those generally required for the job. That's on us. We cause that. We cause that because a lot of what we teach is no longer relevant.

Most universities I work with, from the idea to the program being launched, two years of program development. Then you've either got a three year undergrad, or a four year undergrad, or a two year associate degree. Which means often by their time from the idea to the program being developed to the first graduate, can be four to six years. What's the shelf life of skills now? Most skills have a shelf life of a maximum of five years. Do you see where the problem is? And worse still, we don't then want to update our programs on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis.

We wait till our regulator comes along and tells us that we have to update our programs. Start to see why industry are not big fans of us when it comes to the relevance of a lot of our graduates. Second one is skills deficit, a lack of candidates with the required skill sets to fill the vacancies. Boy, did the pandemic disrupt that. Particularly in countries like mine and New Zealand, where we just shut our borders.

We are still trying to find skills all around the world, and poor New Zealand, they've got the problem that we just keep poaching the kiwis to fill our scale deficits in Australia. Are there any New Zealanders here? Good. And then the final one is, skills redundancy, which is really what I'm talking a lot about today is that jobs disappear or skills are no longer in demand. And this little thing came along called, generative AI, well before I started this body of work for my research, and oh boy, it's going to make the pandemic just look like a speed bump in the road. It is going to change the world of work in ways that none of us right now can imagine, and I know that because I was there working in high-tech at the birth of the Internet, and we had no idea that it was going to disrupt the way that it has.

But then fast forward to twenty three, and I swear WEF stole my work, so I'm going to check that out for me. But they wrote, basically a framework to give to governments about if you want to make sure that there are jobs in your communities, you will do this. There will be two enablers. Enabler number one. You will embrace a skills first culture, policies, and mindset in your education system, in your industry, and in your government policies.

Second, you will adopt a common skills language. The only way any of this works is through structured data, and the basic building block moving forward is the skill, and the skill needs to be defined and given a unique digital signature. If we do that, and then if we build our courses on that, and if employers write their job descriptions on that way, then guess what, magic is going to happen for talent. People with skills in high demand will be discovered, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that. And then they sort of had the five things to the right that an economy needed to do, and I won't read all of those to you, but they're dead on as far as I'm concerned, and all my research lines up directly around those things.

A few stats for you, thirty seven percent of the top twenty skills requested for the average US job have changed more than two thousand more since two thousand and sixteen. One in five skills requested for the average US job is an entirely new requirement in that occupation, and seventy six percent of jobs changed more from two thousand and nineteen through twenty one than in the previous three year period. This is where he does dramatic pause, all before generative AI. All before generative AI. Just hold on to that for a moment.

So here's generative AI. Don't worry about the stats, except for one stat. One hundred million users in the first sixty days of chat g p t. And that was with them actually moderating how many could sign up. Ladies and gentlemen, we have never seen anything like it in our lives.

This is a slide from twenty three. All of the financial numbers there now, if you're an analyst, you'd laugh at. They're so low compared to what they're modeling now for the impact on our economies and the world of work. I'm an absolute eternal optimist. I always have been.

It's part of my DNA, but this is the first time I've seen a technology come along that I believe will wipe out more jobs than it will create. This is the big one. This is the big one. Most universities, colleges, schools, we overweight thinking about generative AI in learning and teaching. That's where all the media has been, that's where all the discussion has been, but actually this is a heat map of a university.

The really bright universities are thinking about its impact across all of these dimensions, student services, operations, marketing, research, learning, and teaching. They're the smart ones, and the ones that I'm engaging with have active programs right now to think about where the most important places are to start, but I want to let you in on a little secret if you're involved in this in your institution. If you go about this to cut costs, you will fail. If you go about this to cut costs, you will fail. I'm not saying that there won't be some money to be saved along the way, but if you go at it as, how do we get it to do the sixty, seventy, eighty percent of the mundane tasks that it does really well, to free up the humans, to do all the things we know we should have been doing, but we haven't had the time, you will win.

Pareto got it right, the eighty twenty rule. The way I'm looking at it, eighty percent of the task the human does today is likely to be able to be done with generative AI, which frees the human up to do eighty percent more than they were doing before. Imagine if you had eighty percent more headcount in your organization today, what you could achieve. That's the way to look at it, because if you allow it to be driven by the finance department simply being taking money to the bank, yeah, for a couple of years, you might have advantage because your cost base will be lower, But as Clay Christensen said, one of my heroes that I'll talk about later, the new entrant nearly always wins. Why does the new entrant nearly always wins? Because they don't come at it the way we do.

They invent the entire model completely from the ground up. Ladies and gentlemen, today is the slowest day of the rest of your working life. And you are already tired, some of you are on the burnout threshold, some of you are overwhelmed, all of you are craving better work life balance. I I want you to think about that. Today is the slowest day of the rest of your working life.

It's why it's the humans we need to be focused on with generative AI, not the technology. When Sol got up yesterday, for those that saw the keynote, note what he dialed into. What he dialed into is teachers are time poor, and teachers have been time poor for as long as I've worked in this game, and that is a long time. Why will teachers use Souls tools? It's got nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with, we have been burning them out for decades, and this is a way they get a little bit of their life back, ladies and gentlemen, and they are desperate to get a little bit of their life back. Some very hot off the press LinkedIn data, fifty five percent of LinkedIn members stand to see their jobs changed by the rise of generative AI.

Twenty three percent of the roles will be augmented. Thirty percent thirty two percent of the roles will be disrupted, which I think is polite LinkedIn speech for your toast. Head of AI position has grown by double digits in demand since December two thousand and twenty two. So this is this is an important slide, folks. Moving from experimentation to transformation, those who adapt will be the ones to seize the opportunity and channel this momentum into return on investment.

There are three types of people right now with generative AI. There are the ostriches. They have their heads buried in the sand, and they are hoping it's a passing fad, like non fungible tokens. They're hoping that it's going to be this hype and it's going to go away. Then there's the hysterics.

You see them in your offices now. They're running up and down the hall, arms waving in the air, hair on fire, doing Chicken Little, saying the sky is falling, Arnold Schwarzenegger is about to drop out of the sky, all of our jobs are gone, and I'm moving to Hobart, Australia. We recognize them as well. And then there's the pragmatic middle. These are the people that may not like generative AI.

They're worried about generative AI. They understand the ethics of generative AI are incredibly important, but they are the pragmatic middle. They know Pandora's box is open, it is not going away, and their job for themselves, their family, their their team, their enterprise, and the communities they serve is to embrace it and figure out what to do with it, and that's where I need to move all of you, because if you deep down inside think you are an ostrich or you are a hysteric, It's perfectly natural. It's perfectly normal. In my book, we call it being driven defensive, but now's the time to be adaptive.

Now's the time to actually say it's not going away, and I know that because Martin told us or have fun with it and say mister Bean told me that. And you actually go start thinking about what to do with it. Seventy five percent of knowledge workers already, and we saw this with the show of hands in the room yesterday with Sol, seventy five percent of knowledge workers use AI at work. Why do they do it when we ask them? Users save time. Ninety percent of them said to save time.

Eighty five percent said to be more creative, and the other, eighty four percent, who knows what they do because I left that there. Good. Seventy seventy eight percent of AI users are bring your own AI users. Seventy eight percent are bringing their own to work. Sixty eight percent of people say they do it because they struggle with the pace and volume of work.

It's natural, isn't it? That's why it's got nothing to do with the technology. Now if anybody works in the IT area of their organization and perhaps has to worry about cybersecurity, you're about to be very scared. You were already scared when I said that seventy eight percent were bringing it themselves. Fifty two percent of AI users at work are reluctant to admit they're using it for their most important tasks, and it's always been so. If you drive it underground, you will not stop this.

You will not stop this because this is deeply feeding the human condition. You try to drive it underground, they're going to use it anyway. What happens when you put stuff into an open large language model? You've lost it. So if all your people are using it, and if all of your people are bringing it to work if you're not giving it to them, and then they're not telling you about it, then everything that you think you're protecting, you're actually accelerating giving it away. So the moral of the story is, like all disruption, we have to figure out a way of embracing it right now.

This is a big point of my presentation. Generative AI, in its quest to standardize and automate creativity, risks pulling us back into a realm of mediocrity, where the unique spark of human ingenuity is dimmed by the uniform output of machines. She wrote that, my friend, ChachiPT. We had a conversation about this, and she wrote that quote for me. I was going to give it to my own attribution, but then my daughter said that it would not be cool, dad.

You have to give her attribution. That's what Gen AI is going to do. All the people that aren't very good is going to make them better. All of the people that are better today because of technical skills, they're not going to be as valuable. It's going to drive us all to mediocrity.

So what have we got left? What we've got left are our enduring human capabilities, or what a lot of people call soft skills. I hate that term because they're actually the hardest skills to develop. So for all of you in the business of, designing programs at universities, colleges, high schools, now is the time to double down on humanity. Because if we don't go to the place where the machines are from a skills and capabilities perspective, we are not giving our students what they need and our staff what they need to be ready for life and work. It's as simple as that.

But we've had thirty years of feeding technical skills. That's what we've done. Why? Because that's where the jobs were. Five years ago, full stack developer write their ticket to prosperity. Fast forward to today, they're all rewriting their resumes, because most of eighty percent of what a full stack developer can do, the Gen AI will do it better, and the masters will be able to review their work and fix it.

The question is, where are the apprentices coming from in the future? Ninety one percent of learning and development leaders state that human skills or soft skills are increasingly important. In the latest report from LinkedIn worldwide twenty twenty three, ten skills most needed by employers. You'll notice that human skills remain critically important. This was alive and well, well before the pandemic, well before generative AI. This has been a trend that I've been tracking now for over ten years, but of course what's going to happen is those enduring human capabilities.

And do you know in our universities and in our colleges, we do precious little to actually teach them, assess them, credential them, and allow them to be discovered, nor do we do a very good job of giving our students the language to use and the examples to use to talk about their enduring human capabilities, and shame on us. Shame on us. And when we think about the possibilities of micro and alternative credentials, go here first. Go to these enduring human capabilities. Do our jobs.

Give our people the evidence they need to go into the world of life and work to show what they're capable of. I was house captain, school captain, debating champion. I was involved in soccer, in rowing. Do you know what I got from my high school? I got a high school diploma and a number. That's all that that's how Martin was described.

What was my university admission based on? That number. It was non representative of all of those human capabilities that allow me to be standing on this stage today. And in too many education systems around the world, that is still the way, including my own in Australia, and we are doing incredible well-being and mental harm to young people because we have them fixated on a number. Instead of rejoicing in their ability to celebrate their enduring human capabilities and giving them the evidence that they need to defend themselves. I'm gonna skip past that one.

So, when we I want you to think about knowledge as a currency for for a moment. I want you to think about knowledge, as a currency, and I want you to think about a tale of two generations. So the first generation, I'm a baby boomer. Yes, I'm a boomer. The boomers stopped in nineteen sixty four.

I am the last year of a baby boomer, so I try to be in denial that I wrecked the planet and stole all of the wealth of the generations that followed me. Luckily, my three daughters remind me that I am a baby boomer on a constant basis, but life was pretty predictable for me. I got to play, and then from zero to five, I got to learn from five to twenty five. Yes, when I got my degree, when I walked across the stage, I remember to this day thinking, great, learning's over. Good.

Now I can go do real stuff in life. Then I get to have a job from twenty five to sixty five. Guess I've got five more years to go, but then I get to retire, which with my kids, I call an acronym skiing. I'm going skiing, which is an acronym for spending my kids' inheritance. I have a spreadsheet that takes me down to a dollar the day I die.

And if there's any residual, I have it in my will that my dog, Alfie, gets it if I go suddenly. Okay? Just as my my safety net. And of course, the average fifteen year old Oxford modeled, pre gen AI, would have five to fifteen years, sorry, five to fifteen careers in their lifetime. And that was before gen AI. It's probably double that now.

So they still get to learn, sorry, they still get to play, they still get to go to school, but now they're going to have job, job, job, job, job, which means what's the imperative? Why is everybody, including Salesforce who were in here before I got in here, why is everybody talking about lifelong learning? Because folks, that's what we have to embrace now. My world, the boomer world, just won't cut it anymore. With skills atrophying at the pace that they are, if we're going to be relevant, and anybody in the room that is funded by government or highly reliant on government money, you had better dial into what I'm saying. Because they are working around us left, right, and center with their workforce systems and other programs. And in this country, the ad council has an active campaign called tear the paper ceiling, which is being rolled out prime time television in the United States basically saying the degree is no longer the hiring currency.

Right? We've got to tear that paper ceiling, they have an acronym for people called STARS, Skilled True Alternative Routes, and there are state after state after state and organization after organization after organization that are now suspending the degree as the proxy for getting the interview because they realize where somebody studied and what they studied has virtually no correlation to their on on the job performance. I'm not saying for a second the degree isn't important, but what we need to understand is we were invented to do so much more than stay stuck in a single unit of consumption. The record to the CD to the iTunes store to streaming. Taxis and meters to Ubers. Hotels to Airbnb.

Anytime an incumbent doesn't pay attention to where the disruption is, which is usually at the point of consumption, they typically don't do very well. And what is the old currency? The old currency is the diploma. What's the new currency? It's this high resolution picture of who somebody is. That's where I've used LinkedIn here. I could have used any wallet you want to talk about, but it's moving from a very analog picture of somebody, the testomer, which says where somebody studied a bunch of course names that nobody understands and some numbers to actually something much more high resolution that if it's done well will be discoverable by big data machine learning generative AI, and employers are already using those algorithms to go find talent wherever that talent is.

Why? Because they need the skills, ladies and gentlemen. That's why they are doing it, and just to scare you a little bit more, if you're still feeling pretty cocky, you're an ostrich, and you think we've got time to figure this out, industry is already figuring it out for us. Google professional certificates, seventy five percent of Google career certificate program graduates report an improvement in their career within six months of completion, and they are paying to do these certificates. These are not MOOCs. Eight million Americans went have been trained, and this was from twenty one, so eight million Americans have completed training with Google and seventy thousand of them went on to pay for high stakes exams and be certified with Google.

Now we don't like the fact with employers that the Google brand is seen as good as our college or university brand or school brand, but in many instances industry brands are seen as better than ours because it's a proxy for relevance, a proxy for they're up to date, and I know that hurts, and it hurts me. I've spent half my life running magnificent institutions, but it's a wake up call. Salesforce, who were just in here, sorry, who are just in here with their Trailhead Academy, they're one of the other largest hybrid educators. Fifty percent of their graduates, and they call them graduates, report a promotion or a new role, and they have three million users of their education worldwide. So, as I work with university executives all around the world, and this is my own original work, I just thought it might be interesting for some of you.

These are the reasons why typically education providers focus on lifelong learning. Response to government policy, reach across borders and lifetimes, access to underserved populations, It creates an infinite number of on ramps and off ramps. It strengthens industry partnerships, it gives us incremental revenue, it allows us to have an innovation sandbox to do the unthinkable that we wouldn't be allowed to do inside our institution, It strengthens our employee value proposition, and it drives up our reputation. You walk into any college president or any school head and you show that you could get this, if we focus on lifelong learning, there will be at least two or three of those that are in their strategic plan right now. Right now.

And the only way we stay relevant for our communities and society is if we lean into this. So a Slido question for you. What opportunities does a skills based world create for your organization? And I've deliberately only given you the chance to say opportunity, because I refuse to speak to the negative people in the room today. So, what opportunities does a skills based world provide your organization? I don't care what organization you're from. Doesn't matter.

This new brave new world of skills based world, why don't you just type some of those in for me, because this is the gift you're going to give to others, and I'll try to editorialize them as they come up. Let's see. Okay. Cultivating relationships, personalization, stable enrollment, hallelujah. Expanded audience, wallet share, wonderful.

Cultivating relationships, deeper connections, expertise, easier hiring, more integrated alignment with the private sector. Yes. For the longest time, we thought they were evil and we didn't want to work with them. Hiring not by proxy, but by actual value, love that one. Discovery of innovators.

Love that one. Look at growth coming out in the middle. I've been willing that on myself since I was seven. Please grow more, Martin. Please, please.

Flexibility, confidence, higher order skill set, agility, empowerment. Isn't that just a fantastic list? Despite the fact that you can't spell personalization correctly because you use a z instead of an s, I'll forgive you that. But besides that, what an incredible list that is, and see, it just grows. Isn't it honoring the individual? Whoever that was, I love you, man. I mean that's, in many ways, it is putting the learner at the middle and recognizing what they need for life and work, and I promise you I'll get this, I'll get this back.

So part two is all about, now that I've sort of talked about that, what do we then need to do? What do we need to do to be in that pragmatic middle? To embrace the disruption? Well, I've got a few thoughts for you. One is a quote from the late, great Clay Christensen from Harvard and his work on disruptive innovation. By understanding and embracing disruption, organizations can harness it as a catalyst for growth and progress. But notice the word that he the word there that he's got, which is embrace. You're not going to be successful by flirting with it, by putting it off in a corner like a cat with a toy and just having a few people play with it.

My heat map before about the whole institution, We've got to have an open mind to embrace it, folks, and this is another bit of of, work that I literally finished off with my co collaborator, Rob Beja. We worked on it just before the conference, because we had a v one. We needed a v two. So this is, if you need to think about the disruption, here's a little gift from the bean to all of you. So it starts with having a library of rich skill descriptors, a trusted repository of comprehensive digital skill descriptors endorsed by the author's brand and reputation.

Where does quality come from? Where does quality always come from in education? It's brands. I don't care that there's millions of micro credentials, and I refuse to let it hold me back to think that that means they're not quality. Quality comes from us, our brand, our reputation, that's where quality comes from, and it will be the same with skill descriptors. Then it morphs to lifelong learning experience, all types of learning experiences, formal and informal, each with a unique structured architecture built on the back of those rich skill descriptors. So that will be formal education, but it will also be workforce learning, and what isn't really being talked about yet, self directed learning.

If there are Spotify users in the room, at the end of every year you get that roundup report of what you've done, what you've listened to, look into your podcasts. I listened to over two and a half thousand hours of podcasts about American politics last year. If I take that as my evidence and I self attest that I now know more about American politics than ninety nine percent of Americans because of the time I personally invested in staying up to date and learning about that, if I'm having a conversation with an employer that wants to then recruit me to be a lecturer in political science at the university, how impressed might they be that I've personally been investing that much time and effort, and so the story wrote. So there is this whole new chapter coming about self attested credentials. And then, of course, it leads on to credentials, and part of the reason why we needed to revise this work was two years ago when I first did it, we were very stuck in a conversation just about micro credentials, but now it's all about embracing micro credentials, meso credentials, industry certifications, professional licensure, other awards that are recognized in the labor market, and then of course, our macro credentials.

But where the magic is really happening now are these pathways. They're not linear stacks. They're not just laying one credential on top of another. They're three d pathways where people only ever have to learn something once and it automatically cross credits them throughout the rest of their life, provided it's current for not having to do it again. It's why I love working with Instructure and their badging technology, because they're the only badging technology out there that have sophisticated pathways.

Where is it all going? Sophisticated pathways. Then, of course, the new frontier, ladies and gentlemen, and the new frontier is digital wallets. It's why Instructure bought Parchment, because Parchment is the leader in this new space of digital wallets, which are a high resolution, centralized source of truth, offering a comprehensive detailed and verifiable record of a learner's achievements, skills, competencies, and experiences. It often gets described as a CLR, a comprehensive learning record, or a learning and employment record. It's so much more than that.

It's not a bunch of PDFs. It's a three hundred and sixty degree view of the whole person. It was who Martin was when I left high school that was more than a number and more than a piece of paper. That's what I'm talking about. And of course, then they go out into life and work, and they get work experience.

They get reputation from others, and they give of themselves. They volunteer. They give service. Next challenge for us is how do we give them recognition of prior learning, friction free, or what I'm trying to invent this acronym, so please use it, because I've got to bet with somebody whether I can get this to take hold, recognition of lifelong learning. How do we recognize all that lifelong learning and bring it back? So when they want to come back and learn some more informal ways or informal ways, we're right there to pick it up, right there to pick it up and help them.

So if you want to think about where the disruption is all taking place, this might not be perfect, but it's not a bad place to start, and if you line this up against that WEF circle that I showed you before, and what's really interesting is how many governments around the world are actually doing just this, stimulating this to happen. This is what you should look like. This is my disrupted tertiary institution. You'll notice it's an institution that understands micro, meso, and macro, understands how to build pathways for credit to formal programs, launches people into life and work to see their outcomes come to life, but as and when they're ready provides pathways for recognition, and so the story continues. And it is a virtuous circle for the Star Wars fans in the room.

Right? It works for everybody. Everybody wins in this world. And of course, there are the naysayers about micro credentials. They are the ostriches. Their harsh critique is there's no quality assurance, there's a lack of understanding, and it's the wild west.

Big deal. What innovation have we ever seen where it didn't start out messy? That's why we were invented. That's why the universe invented us. Is to take the messiness and turn it into something that people can trust. And the reason why I don't see them as a threat is because they can be embedded into existing programs and frameworks, they create new entry and exit points for the people that need us most, and industry love them.

So it makes us more relevant with industry. That's why I've always liked them, and the reason why providers build them, improve graduate outcomes for their students, increase their human skills, widen participation, address the needs of industry, help their staff professionally development, respond to government stimulus, and maintain a relationship with their alumni. Look at your strategies, folks. You'll see three, four, all of those things in your strategies. Our job is to make sure that it moves from experimentation right into the middle of the institution as the strategic thrust to get to lifelong learners.

So very quickly because I'm almost out of time, where do you see the greatest opportunity? Go for it. We haven't got a lot of time. This is your gift back to the audience. It's a little bit like an auction at this stage. Going once, going twice, come on, you can do it.

Who can be in first? Go Elizabeth. Go Elizabeth. Who can get in there first? Then, oh, time. Yeah, it could speed things up. Personalization, effective hiring, career education, business courses, somebody running a business school in the audience, life passports, what have we got, career education, accuracy, yes I agree.

Career education has jumped in the middle and is rounding the post, life passport we had, industry alignments, and so the list goes on. Wonderful, folks. And you could almost sum up a lot of that as relevance. Relevance to our students, relevance to our employers, by definition, they're now economy, but also for those that need us the most, relevant to the richness of the communities in which we live. We can't keep leaving people behind.

Is there anybody from Arizona State here? I love your charter. Thank you, sir. I love your charter, and I love the fact that every meeting I have with you, the charter slide goes up. Do you know what I take away from that slide? We measure ourselves by the people we include, not by the people we exclude. That's why I love your institution.

Alright. If we all measured ourselves that way and realized that we have a duty of care to open up our institutions that those that need us the most, wouldn't the world be a better a better place? So thank you, and please thank thank you colleagues for me, as well. So ladies and gentlemen to wrap up, I've talked to you about why the digital wallets are so important. Just two quick comments, interoperable and extensible, and put the learner at the middle. It's not your record.

It's not your record. It's their record. That's their life. Don't trap it. Don't make them pay for it.

They earned it. Let it be expressed, let it be discovered, and let them get their return on learning. And if you don't think it's alive and well, major EU initiative right now, it's called Europass, for all of their citizens, Create a profile, store documents, share information, access lifelong learning opportunities. In my own land of Australia and New Zealand, we've got our My Equals repository, which is really just getting started, but already it has all of our institutions, eighty seven providers. We've created two point five million learning accounts, and it's being expressed and accepted in a hundred and thirty five countries around the world.

Welcome to the future. Final word for you, ladies and gentlemen, it's all about structured data. You've got to go back to the basic building blocks of data architecture in your institutions. You've got to look at that in your program and course architecture. You've got to look at it in the skill building blocks of your programs. You've got to invent a currency to allow you to not have to produce one offs every time somebody wants your help, be they industry, individual, or government, And you've got to embrace the future, you've got to disrupt yourselves, and you've got to travel back safely. Thank you very much.