Scaling Microcredentials with Kelvin Bentley

Work Forces

Kelvin Bentley is the program manager of Texas Credentials for the Future, an innovative initiative within the University of Texas System that is funded by the UT System and the Strada Education Foundation. The initiative includes an extensive partnership with Coursera that offers microcredentials from tech leaders such as Meta, IBM and Google and is designed to provide students with employer-initiated and validated microcredentials to gain technical skills that they combine with their college degrees to be successful in the world of work. Kelvin discusses the Texas Credentials for the Future initiative, program successes to-date, the complexities of implementing microcredentials in a large system, and suggestions for faculty and administrators to build microcredential initiatives of their own.

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Resource:

Kelvin's curated list of microcredential-related resources

Transcript:

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Workforces, I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine. And we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Let's dive in.

Kaitlin: We're thrilled to welcome Kelvin Bentley to this episode of Work Forces. Kelvin is the program manager of Texas Credentials for the Future, an innovative initiative within the University of Texas System. Texas Credentials for the Future is funded by the UT System and the Strada Education Foundation and includes an extensive partnership with Coursera that offers micro credentials from tech leaders such as Meta, IBM, and Google. The program is designed to provide students access to employer-initiated and validated microcredential programs to gain technical skills that they combine with their college degrees to be successful in the world of work. For over 22 years, Kelvin has led online learning initiatives as an administrator and consultant for two and four-year colleges and universities, K-12 systems, and for-profit organizations. Kelvin has received various honors, including Blackboard's 2017 Catalyst Award for Inclusive Education. and he was also selected as a Fulbright Specialist in 2010. Thank you so much for being with us today, Kelvin.

Kelvin Bentley: No, thank you. It's great to be here with both of you.

Julian: Yes, Kelvin, thank you so much. We are thrilled to be speaking with you today. Tell us about your background and give us an overview of your work, your current work.

Kelvin: Originally, I got into higher education through teaching. And so originally when I went to graduate school, I thought I was going to be a clinical psychologist. And so I went to graduate school at the University of Delaware, got my master's and PhD in that. But along the way I actually enjoyed teaching more, first as a teaching assistant, graduate assistant. And after I finished my pre-doctoral internship, I actually decided to pivot a bit and actually go into teaching. And then teaching brought me to online education actually. I was actually, several years ago, back in 2001, I had a chance to help build from scratch the first bachelor of science program in psychology, which at the time was the first of its kind in the state of Louisiana. And of course the bonus was I got a chance to live a little bit closer to my girlfriend. who's now been my wife for over 20 years. And so it's always great to have a bonus like that, right? So, yeah, it worked out on so many different levels, but other than also getting married around that time, you know, I just, I realized, you know, in that job at Northwestern State University, I realized that I actually liked the interface between technology and pedagogy. And because I had a chance to be a program manager of this new Bachelor of Science program, I really was just attracted to similar work where I could actually help lead online learning initiatives. And so that one job in a lot of different ways shaped the course of several years to come in terms of my career. And so I took on different roles after I left Northwestern State. So, you know, became a Dean initially at Baker College in Flint, Michigan. overseeing general education faculty who taught online. And then really from there, I just did other work in online education, but was really attracted to this more recent role here within the University of Texas System, because I think similar to online education, I was attracted to the fact that this particular role was about really helping students in new ways. Like online education, of course, opens doors. But I think microcredentials also do that as well. I think within our system, we're really trying to empower our students to really earn the skills and abilities that will help them make that transition from university to the world of work. I think at times that transition, for a lot of different reasons and for a lot of different people can be very challenging. Just because you have a college education doesn't necessarily mean that you'll easily find a position. And I was just really attracted by the fact that Chancellor James Milliken and the Board of Regents, you know, within our system have been so supportive of our work. And this started back in March and it's just been really great just to be in a system that is supportive of you know, trying to help our learners be successful through the use of microcredentials.

Julian: Kelvin, tell us a little bit more about the program itself, and also clarify for our audience, how do you define microcredentials?

Kelvin: Well, I think there are different, there are definitely different definitions out there. I don't think there's like a universal one. Typically, microcredentials represent some type of learning experience when you take it at its whole is less than. what we know to be like a certificate or a degree. It's usually very specified in terms of a learning experience, very specific, focused. Could be for credit or for non-credit. And really within the Texas Credentials for the Future Initiative, this was an initiative that really began with Chancellor Milliken's vision of really trying to help the system, the University of Texas System, increase the number of students who would actually be able to meet the workforce development needs of the state. There's a growing chasm between supply and demand. Employers, especially in fields like cyber security, data analytics, and also to several roles within business. There's just a growing need for folks to meet the evolving 21st century workforce. And so I feel like the Texas Credentials for the Future initiative does that by trying to provide students with the skills that they will need to align with that evolving workforce. And also just provide our UT campuses an opportunity also to reach out to adult learners, to help them with their reskilling and upskilling needs as well. And so I think we're really trying to help again students, but also the employers that partner with our campuses to really help them have the workforce that they need, which as you can imagine is a daunting task because every day there are just more and more positions that are just remaining vacant because there's just not enough people to fill them.

Julian: And your goal for the initiative is pretty ambitious. What is it like 30,000 students by 2025 or something?

Kelvin: Yeah, we do things big in Texas, including big hairy goals. And actually the Texas Credentials for the Future is supported by a grant from Strada Education Foundation. And so I would be hugely remiss if I did not mention them in this. And that particular goal aligns with that particular grant. So in 2021, we initially got a phase one Beyond Completion Challenge Grant from Strada to kind of experiment with the use of microcredentials in undergraduate courses, kind of embedding them in courses so that students would have easy access to them. And also students would then of course receive credit along with the courses themselves, but they would also have the bonus of having access to professional certificates through Coursera, which is also a vendor partner of ours. And so our students initially received access to these microcredentials through the Coursera platform. And Strada liked the work so much that we were one of four institutions that received a phase two grant, which began at the start of this year, which encourages us to scale some of our initial work. And so we're trying to reach even more students, especially students in those majors where we know they are, you know, their median salaries tend to be a lot lower than their counterparts at the same institution, as well as across institutions within our system. And so it is big, you know, luckily we have a very large system. You know, we have over you know, close to a quarter of a million students when you also include our health campuses. But with the grant, we're really focused on trying to improve the skills, those technical skills for those students in our academic campuses, which are, you know, nine of the campuses in our system.

Kaitlin: So building on that, we'd love to hear about your preliminary successes from phase one. Given I know that you said that ended I think in January, or the new phase started in January. So what are you building upon? What worked really well? And maybe what were some of the lessons learned as well as you go about phase two?

Kelvin: Yeah, I mean, I think initially our work, we found that actually, when faculty actually find ways to embed access to a professional certificate, like a Google certification in data analytics or a Meta certificate. When you actually embed it in the course, students then tend to be very motivated to actually complete it. So we actually found that out of the hundreds of students who actually ended up enrolling and then also successfully completing their microcredential, it was definitely in those cases where students actually had access in a course. Another thing that we actually noticed too is that when schools also made it available co-curricularly, for example University of Texas Arlington has a really cool program called Power Up + Tech Up and it was originally designed to actually upscale transfer students to their institution. Now it's actually been made available to any UTA student. And so when you provide even a co-curricular pathway and provide supports for those students, that also can be successful too. But embedding, we're really finding some success there. And also when you, another thing that I would say that we're noticing is that simply when you actually empower not just access for students, but when you actually provide thorough faculty development. You know, so far we've had almost a couple hundred faculty complete a fully online course on microcredentials and how to embed them. So when you make that course available, we can also provide some incentives for faculty to do that work around their busy schedules. That's where I think you can really see some success. So helping to educate faculty about the importance of this work and then providing them the time to actually, you know. integrated into their teaching. That really goes a long way such that it's not about administrators saying, hey, we need to do this. But when you actually frame it as something that could be very helpful for students, that changes everything.

Kaitlin: What does the connection to employers look like? How do you go about choosing the microcredentials and who is involved in that process?

Kelvin: Yeah, no, that's a great question. You know, each campus has their own. employers that they actually, you know, employer partners that they reach out to. And so what I'm hearing from some of our project leads locally at each of the campuses that I work with is that they are basically asking them, you know, what do you think about the fact that we're leveraging, let's say, Google certificates or, you know, from IBM, from Meta, from Google, from AWS. And I would say based on what I'm hearing from the campuses, the folks that I'm working with, they so far are receiving really positive comments from the employers. And our hope is that we'll be able to dig even deeper over time because our grant initially is for three years. And so we'll be able to also longitudinally track our microcredential earners over time just to kind of check in with them and find out, okay, post-graduation. What types of positions have you applied for? Do you feel as if the microcredential actually helped you in terms of getting that interview as well as hopefully getting a particular job? And my hope too, and this is Kelvin Bentley speaking, but my hope is that we'll also be able to follow up with employers a bit more too, and ask them from their standpoint. these students who actually have a combo platter of a traditional undergraduate degree with the microcredential, what do you think of our graduates now? Do you really want more of them to come to you with that preparation? And so definitely will have much more, I think, to report as we move forward.

Julian: So, I think one of the challenges we face in sort of more workforce aligned programming is when to cut bait. Oftentimes we'll develop programs and the economy changes and jobs go away you know, like I think of the dot-com boom where every program and their sister had to have a web development program when there were not nearly enough jobs as web developers, and with the rapid pace of tech change now, do you have in place processes for adjusting which courses are offered?

Kelvin: Right, no, that's a great question. I mean, right now, I can tell you that we'll have, I think we'll have opportunities to adjust as we move forward. You know, our existing, we have a partnership right now with Coursera that was just announced in July of this year. Now any faculty member, any staff member, any student, any alumni member across our nine academic institutions has access to a curated set of professional certificates on the Coursera platform called Career Academy. And that's an evolving catalog and I think, you know, we'll be able across our nine academic institutions to kind of track, you know, how many learners are participating in completing courses that are required to earn the professional certificate of their choice. And over time we'll be able to talk with our campuses to find out which certificates our students are signing up for. We’ll be able to also talk with our campuses too about what their employers are requiring or at least strongly encouraging their new employees to have in terms of skills. And so I think that feedback from the employers will be very helpful, I think, in terms of campuses then, you know, suggesting to their students, you know, you may want to consider, like, out of all of these certificates, you may want to, again, based on your undergraduate preparation, you may want to focus on this subset within the subset, right? Just so that it's a little bit easier for students to hopefully find the right match for them. But I think that's really gonna come down to closer conversations, I think, with each campus's employer partners. I think also because Google is also a really good partner with us. We were one of their larger Grow with Google partners earlier on in this process with Texas Credentials for the Future. And, you know, text, Google also has their own consortium of employers too. And so it'll be interesting to speak with Google as well, in terms of, you know, giving your 150 employers that are really open to hiring, you know, students or learners with a microcredential from Google. You know, what are you looking for? You know, what are your needs as well? And so I think there will be different ways for us to collect information to then help us shape our strategy as a system, but hopefully shape, hopefully it'll be information that each campus can then take to shape how they will advise their students, you know, in terms of, you know, what types of preparation that they would want to provide to them.

Kaitlin: So one thing that is so impressive about this initiative is how broad it is and wide reaching. I mean, it's really looking to scale this effort, which is so exciting. What does it take to scale and integrate microcredentials across a system? What's the process been like? I understand, what do you try to leave more customized or specific to one school versus another? What do you try to do holistically across all the schools? I'd just be curious to hear more about that.

Kelvin: With something this big you have to be thinking about again, strategic, definitely having a strong strategic lens as well as a tactical lens. Because each of our campuses, even though we are a system, you know, each campus is very different, right? They have their own communities of students and employers that they work with. And so really as a system, we're trying to enable them to think through with their faculty, you know, what... what courses make the most sense. You know, as a system at a strategic level, as I mentioned before, we're trying to just provide professional development opportunities that again, previously took the form of summer, a summer course that was four weeks, fully online, where, you know, faculty were incentivized to complete the course and learn more about what microcredentials are, how to embed them in courses. That course now will evolve to be more of a self-paced course. And so starting this fall, it will be available to anyone, you know, any faculty member or staff member who wants to self-enroll. And then that will allow, hopefully, more faculty to learn about the process, about, you know, what works, you know, how do you actually do this work. And hopefully we'll see even more faculty, you know, working with, you know, hopefully. other faculty who've already done it. And, you know, we have this community of practice at a system level around microcredentials, and then campuses are developing their own, you know, their own communities of practice. And so, you know, locally, I think that will help faculty to see examples of what works. Also for them to hear directly from other faculty who've done this work about what didn't work so well and what they learned and how you can make improvements, what types of data that you wanna collect from your students. At the system level, we'll continue to kind of monitor our overall uptick of students who are signing up for these courses and we'll be able to kind of find out how many based on the larger funnel, how many are actually enrolled in courses, how many of them are actually completing. If we see a campus that's, where maybe some of the numbers are on the lower side, then that's just an opportunity for us to, you know, for me to work with our project leads to kind of find out, yeah, what are some of your challenges? And, you know, at the system level, are there some things that we can do? I think locally, I think a big opportunity as well as challenge at the same time is how do we market it to students? And I know campuses are finding like, you know, a web presence, you know, they're kind of defining maybe better the web presence that students need such that they can find all the information about their options on the Coursera platform, who to contact if they have questions. Some campuses, for example, are also making available like success coaches to kind of guide students along the way. So I think as we move forward, we'll be able to kind of monitor, you know, again, the overall, the number of learners who actually participate and then those who earn the microcredentials and then talking with our project leads, my hope is that they can give, they give us at a system level, what are they seeing boots on the ground, right? Like what are students saying? What are faculty needing to maybe do this work better? Are there additional incentives that campuses can make available to faculty? We've provided some via our grants, but of course that's finite funds, right? And so are there some additional opportunities for campuses to find other types of incentives to get even more faculty aware of this process, of this program. And my hope too is that some campuses, if it's a good fit for them, will find co-curricular options as well that maybe can even be marketed to students right when they actually start, right? Saying, hey, you know, we have access, you have access from day one of being a student with us to earn a microcredential, and here are some options that you may wanna consider now, or as you get a little bit closer to finishing up, maybe in your junior and senior year. But it's definitely going to take a village and other villages, you know, at a system level but also locally. But the great thing too, what I'm seeing is our community of practice. I think that will really help, I think, inform all of us about, again, what's working, what's not working and how we can do a better job of coming up with strategies to actually achieve our big hairy goal. And even if we don't get there in three years, I think there's a strong potential to get there in time outside of our initial grant period.

Julian: Yeah, it's a really, I mean, it is really an ambitious effort and your approach does seem to combine very well kind of the local boots on the ground faculty in the classroom with the systemic and the learning community. It's really cool how you're kind of tackling this on multiple efforts. And so I guess I'm interested to hear what words of advice. you might have for our listeners who are looking to be forces in microcredentialing efforts, you know, whether it's within their classroom or an institution or at a systemic level, because, Kelvin, you are the expert here.

Kelvin: Well, no, thanks for that, Julian. I think we're all students of this work. I really feel that it's still quite, and we say this all the time, the Wild West in terms of what's actually happening and the learnings are still for the taking in this. I think we're going to continue to learn a lot because there's still many things we, again, we all have working hypothesis about doing this work. I would say don't be afraid, doing something very small is actually a good thing. I'm really glad that we actually had some initial seed funds from... Phase one the phase one grant that we received from Strada to beyond completion challenge grant just to get started somewhere And so I would say it would be great just to set you know If schools could even find a way to set aside some initial monies to incentivize the faculty You know even over a summer to learn more about microcredentials how to embed them in courses, you know, for example, I would also A big suggestion I would have too is also talking with folks that are actively doing this work. Again, we're very happy about the work that we're trying to accomplish within our system, but we're willing to also share as much as we can with others, whether it's at a conference or also informally. So I would encourage folks to do that. Talk with myself. Talk with... You know people like Chris, you know, Cynthia Porter at SUNY system The SUNY system is doing some really interesting things University of Maine, University of Colorado Boulder, you know some really great work being done there and there's so many others. I would also take a look at you know, some of the more recent articles about micro credentials There's some interesting reports. For example, Harvard’s Project on the Workforce actually just released a report on some of the lacking research on microcredentials, I would definitely check that out. Workcred also did, you know, integrating microcredentials paper, which featured us, but also other institutions. It's a really great read, and I would strongly recommend people just read that as a primer around what other people are doing, other schools. But definitely don't be afraid to start small, even if it's one course or a couple courses. And you, and you know, some of our campuses are telling us, another thing I can recommend is that if faculty want to do this work, it would be really helpful for them to be in the role of the learner. So if you are going to embed microcredentials in your courses, definitely, you know, complete a microcredential yourself, you know, whether it's in... data analytics or project management or UI/UX or in whatever field that maybe is interesting to you just so that you can learn more about what the student experience will be for your own students. That would be very helpful as well. Again, I've been finding the microcredentials community to be very open and to be very, very supportive. Some great conferences that are coming up too for folks. would be the AACRAO UPCEA conference called Convergence. The University of Colorado Boulder has their Badge Summit every summer. And then also One EdTech has their digital credential summit scheduled in February. And so that would also be a good opportunity to have some touch points with people. And then if you are a member of EDUCAUSE, EDUCAUSE has their own you know, community of practice on microcredentials as well. But if anyone, you know, has questions and they want to just find out how to get started or if they want to talk with even some of our faculty, I can definitely make some introductions and some great work is being done on the campuses. And again, I'm just, as you can tell, I'm really excited to be a part of this work. The potential is huge. And even if, you know, we don't get to 30,000 students in just two years, I think we're going to make strong strides to get there. And I'm excited just by that potential.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. Well, thank you for providing so many really practical, tangible steps and so many resources for people who are looking to, as you said, maybe take a baby step into this work or looking to scale or take a more holistic approach. It's great to know and be reminded of how many resources are out there. and what a community there is around this effort. So as we close out our podcast today, how can our listeners continue to follow your efforts at Texas Credentials for the Future?

Kelvin: Yes, well, they can definitely check out, and I can make the link available, the Texas Credentials for the Future website. We have some just basic information there, including some of our press releases to kind of keep track of us there. Anyone could reach me at [e-mail]. and the K is for Kelvin, not Kevin. I just say that because for some reason, people still call me Kevin. I go by both. My mom still calls me Kevin, but it's interesting that the L goes away. But the K is for Kelvin. So, but if you email me at K, Bentley, like the car, I don't have a Bentley, but Bentley with an E at UTSystem, I'll be happy to share information. I also have a... a social bookmark site using a platform called Raindrop.io. And so I've curated a lot of different articles and reports. And so some of your listeners might be interested in that. And I can also share that link. And it's part of the notes for this interview as well.

Julian You know, really appreciate your time today.

Kelvin: Yeah, no, thank you. I appreciate you all and look forward to hearing from some of your listeners. You can also follow me on LinkedIn as well. I'm available there. but thanks for the opportunity and would love to circle back with you in another year to give you some updates.

Julian: Yeah, that'd be amazing.

Kaitlin: We look forward to that.

Kelvin: Yeah, thank you again. All right, thank you.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Workforces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. Workforces is available on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Spotify. We hope you will subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends. If you have interest in sponsoring this podcast, please contact us through the podcast notes.