It's a Wonderful (Learning) Life: What it Means to Be Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning

by InstructureCast

We're kicking off a new season of Educast 3000! In this episode, hosts Ryan Lufkin and Melissa Loble welcome back Professor Martin Bean to discuss the future of education. They explore the importance of lifelong learning, the evolution of credentials, and the need for educational institutions to adapt to the changing workforce landscape. Martin shares his personal learning moments and emphasizes the significance of recognizing prior learning. Together they discuss the need for equity in education and the vision for a connected learning system by 2026.

Takeaways

• Lifelong learning is essential for success in the modern world.
• Credentials must evolve to reflect continuous learning and skills acquisition.
• Recognition of prior learning can enhance educational pathways.
• Equity in education is crucial for inclusivity and relevance.
• Educational institutions need to adapt to the needs of adult learners.
• The future of education requires dynamic and flexible pathways.
• Assuming competence rather than deficit can transform learning experiences.
• Collaboration between educators and employers is necessary for relevance.
• Shared skill descriptors can help align education with workforce needs.
• Investing in a connected learning system is vital for future success.

What is Educast 3000?

Ah, education…a world filled with mysterious marvels. From K12 to Higher Ed, educational change and innovation are everywhere. And with that comes a few lessons, too.

Each episode, EduCast3000 hosts, Melissa Loble and Ryan Lufkin, will break down the fourth wall and reflect on what's happening in education - the good, the bad, and, in some cases, the just plain chaotic. This is the most transformative time in the history of education, so if you're passionate about the educational system and want some timely and honest commentary on what's happening in the industry, this is your show.

Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and join the conversation! If you have a question, comment, or topic to add, drop us a line using your favorite social media platform.

• It's a Wonderful (Learning) Life: What it Means to Be Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning
  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. This is the first episode of our new season. This is Ryan Lufkin, your cohost. I'm very excited to be back with my cohost.
  
  Melissa Lobel. I'm excited to be here as well. And in honor of our new season, we are actually bringing back a guest that was our very first guest on our very first season. And that is professor Martin Bean.
  
  Martin is a deep friend of ours. So happy to have him here. But what I love so much about Martin, he's a huge visionary for where the future of education is going and how that aligns to the future of work. Martin, it is just wonderful to have you here.
  
  Thank you again for coming back. We've got new exciting things to be talking with you about. So thank you for being here.
  
  Ah, it's great to be here and very happy new year to both of you. And it's, it's great as I kicked you off on your first series and here I am after the hiatus getting you going again.
  
  No better way to start the new year.
  
  Yeah. Yeah. And as as you both know, I'm my home is Philip Island in Melbourne, Australia. So I'm enjoying a fun summer here for all of the the listeners.
  
  So you've got a well energized bean on your hands this morning.
  
  Well rested bean. Excellent. I love it. Well, Martin, for our audience that may not have listened to your previous podcast or may not be familiar with us, give us a little bit about your background. I mean, obviously, as Melissa mentioned, we're great friends, and we learn from you every day. But introduce yourself to our audience if you would.
  
  Sure. It'd be my pleasure, Ryan. You know, my career is three really, it's sort of a career in three innings. So first part of my career was all in education technology, working all around the world with some wonderful organizations.
  
  And my last tour of duty was actually running global education product solutions for Microsoft out of Seattle, Ryan. And then the unthinkable happened. The second chapter of my career opened up, which is when I got to run the amazing Open University in the UK as vice chancellor and President, so I went on then to run that magical institution and then subsequently was asked to come home after thirty years to run RMIT University as their Vice Chancellor and President Ryan. And then the third chapter which I've been planning since my early days is now my preferment chapter where I only work on things I prefer to work on now Ryan and Melissa which is a wonderful chapter so I started my own think tank called the Bean Centre, I'm a professor at the University of New South Wales.
  
  And all of my work now, Ryan, it focuses on the future of work, the future of leadership in work, including a book I published a couple of years ago with Brian Winter called Toolkit for Turbulence. But then what do education institutions need to do to keep up to stay relevant and sustainable? That's where my scholarship is, that's where I focus the work of my think tank but it's been an amazing ride along the way and absolutely love the fact, I often think of myself as a good bottle of red wine that people still want to pay me for my wisdom as I get older rather than diminishing in my qualities.
  
  So that's a bit about me, Ryan.
  
  I was gonna say we are so glad that you prefer to spend your time with us. And we get to we get to spend a little time with that red wine.
  
  So and we'll also link in the show notes to your book as well so our listeners can Right.
  
  Thank you.
  
  Find that as well.
  
  Absolutely. Well, part of the foundation I know of your work has been your teaching throughout your career.
  
  And would love we always ask our guests for our audience to share a favorite learning moment. It could be you in that sort of teaching mode. It could be you observing it. It could be you as a student or a learner. But please share maybe one or two of your favorite learning moments in your life.
  
  Yeah. You know, I thank you, Melissa. And if it's okay, I'm gonna share sort of a positive and a negative. Is that alright?
  
  Please. Yeah. That's perfect.
  
  Both had a profound impact for me. I guess the positive one for me was very early on in my study, I did actually a Bachelor of Adult Education at University of Technology Sydney. So I'm one of those few people that actually used what I studied at college in my undergrad, which is kind of fun. But I remember during that time, Melissa, I got exposed to the experiential learning cycle as a way of thinking about the learning process.
  
  And for me, it's become an organizing principle in my brain about how can you get people of all ages to really immerse in learning to make it enjoyable, long lasting, and enriching. And the reason why it was so powerful is it really introduced me to the notion that irrespective of all the technology that swirls around us and the fact that we have access to the sum of all human knowledge in our pocket these days, there is still really a need for frameworks, for building blocks, for scaffolding, for models to really help the human make sense of the complexity, to really turn information into meaningful knowledge.
  
  And so that ability to really begin at quite a young age with that as my blueprint, and then in all aspects of my life, leadership management, teaching, scholarship, really as I've engaged with humans being able to step my brain through those phases has been incredibly useful but also transformative for me in the way that I I do it and the other one which is the negative one was I remember earlier in my career, sorry in my study undergrad because I switched my major, I was studying economics and anybody that and again I was a victim of very bad information advice and guidance like a lot of young people because Martin Bean and microeconomics never should have mixed.
  
  But I remember after one of those, remember those old horrible end of year exams that were worth like sixty, seventy percent of your overall grade, it was like do or die, and sadly a lot of institutions still do it, which of course is such a broken model of assessment, But I did a microeconomics exam, and after the exam, the professor called me up to his office, kind of unheard of as an undergrad, right? I think I was first year. Anyway, I walked into his office, walked through his door, he never got up from behind his desk. He just sat there as I walked into the room, didn't ask me to sit, looked up from his desk, and said, Martin, I just called you into my office to tell you that that was the best real world answer to a microeconomics exam question I've ever read, but unfortunately microeconomics has nothing to do with the real world so you failed and pushed my paper back across his desk to me.
  
  Absolute true story and as you can tell just by me retelling that story, it has fueled me forevermore to change my perspective about the role of an educator, not being there to feed their own ego, their own power, their own sense of self importance, but actually to be there for the learner. To be there for the learner to help them grow, to develop, to guide them, to provide them constructive feedback, and to celebrate any victory along the way irrespective of what milestone of the institution might be. So off the top of my head, there's a couple of examples for both of you.
  
  And I just say, this is something for most of we've done forty something podcasts now, something like that. And this is my favorite segment because every single time our guests tell that learning moment story and it triggers a new memory in my head about, oh, yeah, I experienced something very similar. Oh, my gosh. I had that segment. By far, it's my favorite. I think Melissa, introduced this as a segment early on and it it's definitely my favorite part of every interview we do.
  
  Yeah. Well, it also grounds the conversation, and we never plan it for that way. These are very conversational discussions. I mean, it it's they're very loosely constructed, but it always grounds it, and and you did it again.
  
  You ground where we'd like to take this conversation Martin, both your good and your bad example, talk specifically about to sort of learning and learning no longer just being something you do and finish but that learning is something that is continuous throughout your life.
  
  And there may be cycles where it cycles up and cycles down. I've had the pleasure of seeing you Martin present on this but explain this to your understanding of this and and how you look at this to our listeners, particularly, you know, from a learner but also employer perspective, also educator perspective, this cycle of learning.
  
  Yeah. Be my great pleasure because actually it is without doubt the survival skill capability competence of the future Melissa. I honestly believe that the most powerful graduate attribute from any college or university has got to be the ability to learn for life because if you look at the pace of change, innovation, disruption, just look at the impact of generative AI for example in just the blink of an eye and it's only just got going, it's right at its infancy and so the ability to treat learning now as a capability not an episode is really what underpins all of my thinking and quite honestly nearly all of the advice I give people starting out in their careers or looking to lead a meaningful life because unless we actively build the habit of stepping in and out of learning when life or work creates the need and the readiness, rather than waiting for the perfect moment or a single qualification to complete us, You know, I still kind of despair when I see people say chasing a master's degree, and I ask them, well, why?
  
  What do you want to learn? What do you want to get out of it? What do you and what they play back to me is somehow the master's degree itself is going to be this magic pill they can take, like the matrix that is going to just transform them and open up the opportunities, but unfortunately that's not the world we live in. I actually think it's a good thing that it's not the world that we live in, but we do need to treat learning as a capability as the individual.
  
  For employers, I think the thing that I think employers need to realise is that they need to normalise their staff, people, employees moving in and out of learning as a normal part of operations. They need to plan for periodic re skilling, reflection as part of the career development, not as a response to crisis failure or deficit, And I think we're still a long way from that. Very few organizations, even though they'll tell you explicitly that their most important asset are their people and their people's capabilities, even more so now in the face of generative AI, when you start interrogating their culture of learning within the organisation, what you'll find is still that hangover from the late 80s early 90s of expecting the burden of learning to sit on the shoulders of the employee rather than that being a shared responsibility and imperative between the employee and the organisation.
  
  And then when it comes to us, the four of us, the educators, I think we've got to just have a fundamental shift in the way that we do our instructional design delivery and teaching from the ground up. And we really need to design for reentry, not just for completion.
  
  So true.
  
  Yeah. Just about all of the language we use and all of the structures and all of the systems, they're all wired for completion, aren't they? I mean it's really interesting even, yeah and you can see why because we used to have these lovely clear, rigid milestones of yep, you got into college after high school with your diploma and then you graduated in an undergrad and then you maybe went on to do some type of post grad award and they were episodic and clean and easy and all of our systems were built around that and our tuition support and financing is built around that, but that's not the life that we lead now, so I think for us to really enable our communities to be what we want them to be, for institutions to be relevant but also sustainable, we're really gonna have to pivot to know how do we have a relationship from sixteen to seventy five rather than from eighteen to twenty six, which is where nearly all of our thinking for a college and university is right now.
  
  So few thoughts for you, Melissa.
  
  That's great.
  
  To that point, you've emphasized Alvin Toffler's idea that most important skills today are the ability to learn, unlearn, and then relearn. And we talk a lot about learning, but we don't always talk about that unlearn part. Why is that so important? Letting go of those assumptions as as part of that process. Why is that so important?
  
  Yeah. You know, and it's interesting, Ryan, because this will make some of your older listeners laugh. But, you know, I used to be a DOS wizard. I could do things with Microsoft DOS that were magical but at a certain point in time I had to realize that those skills just were not relevant anymore and I needed to let them go So part of the barrier to unlearning is we internally think of it as a failure if those skills and capabilities are no longer relevant rather than actually celebrating where they've got us in our life and our career and having the courage to just simply let them go.
  
  A lot of my work on adaptive leadership actually is about helping leaders let go of those things that have served them well in the past but no longer are going to serve them for the future and so that's the first. The second is really that the pace of change has overtaken our assumptions. You know, technology work, learner expectations are moving faster than most of the mental models that institutions use to do their work. I often say that one of the biggest challenges at an institutional level we have is pace, because most institutions are built and structured in a bygone world where there was time to think and pilot and act and when it comes to the way we build our programs, know as I wrapped up at RMIT University, the average program life cycle for an undergraduate program was two years, Right?
  
  Just imagine that. If we spend two years developing a program, by the time we're done, nearly everything that we're teaching is no longer relevant in the real world except obviously for those enduring human capabilities that we need to double and triple down on in institutions. And then the final one that you know is really you know I think about is instead of humility has become a practical capability right, know being able to say that what I have is no longer applies like my first point is one of the most reliable indicators of being able to adapt to unlearn and and let go. And this plays out in all aspects of our life, but in the book we talk about one of the superpowers of a modern leader is vulnerability, the ability to be vulnerable.
  
  And so being able to be vulnerable and letting people know when you don't know something, something, but then demonstrating your ability to go figure it out and bring that new knowledge back into what you're doing. But if you walk into any situation with a sense that somehow being vulnerable to admit that you don't know or what you know is no longer relevant, that will be your biggest blockage of all.
  
  Yep.
  
  Totally so.
  
  Just think of those skills too similar to yours at DOS. It's like, I don't need those skills anymore. And yet you like you said, you still hang on to them because it's been so integral and part of your identity. You have to be flexible to shift your identity over time, which I think is also so valuable and so interesting.
  
  It's similar to my next question. You know, you also talk a lot about credentials and it's just not the degree. You've already mentioned this, right? It's not the endpoint.
  
  Does it necessarily need to be a degree? It can be so many different forms of credentials and so many different experiences. And in fact, I love you've introduced this concept, macro, mezzo, and micro credentials. So talk our audience through what those are and why those are important to this larger, you know, continuous cycle of learning.
  
  Yeah. And it is perhaps the the piece of my work Melissa that as you know I've been talking about for many years now, disruption is really clear and it's happening. I am intrigued a little bit though why it is taking as long to mature as it is and we might be able to explore that a little bit as well but before our listeners click off and just say what's he saying degrees don't matter I'm not saying that at all and so I just want to get out there and say you know those degrees that we've known, we love, we're proud of absolutely still matter but the thing we need to realize is they don't tell the whole story anymore.
  
  In fact they're quite analog in a digital world. They're a really important signal that helps make sense of a world of continuous learning, but they're not enough. It's the reason why you're seeing platforms like LinkedIn and others that are able to curate the three sixty degree view of the individual, their skills, their capabilities, their formal awards, their micro credentials, their experience, their testimonials, and putting them in a digital wrapper where they're expressible, discoverable, and verifiable, that really is the future. And so the degree itself still matters, but how we take the degree and make it expressible in ways that the new world of life and work can understand, find, discover, there lies the challenge.
  
  And that's why these layered credentials I think are a much more granular, interesting, holistic way to show how people have built their capabilities because as we all know, we learn in stages through experience, through practice, through reflection, not in one big hand off at the end. I mean, you look at my Spotify year end wrap up and look at what I've listened to in my podcasts and see the number of hours that I've invested, my persistence, the themes that I focused on, my self curated majors, that is all learning, right? So we need as institutions to really think about a well designed credential ecosystem that is designed to give people the recognition and credit they deserve no matter how they learn and when they learn to show their progress and relevance rather than waiting for, you know, what could be years for a single moment of validation.
  
  So, you know, that's where micro credentials come in, which are, you know, really a tapestry of anything that has what I call meaningful tangible market value. You know, it can be as short as a few weeks to as long as a few months, but these are short, sharp, often very skilled aligned practices or packages of learning that institutions through their brand and through their trust credential to send a more dynamic signal to life and labor markets around what that individual has learned and mastered. Miso credentials, they're the wonderful ones that sit in the middle. They could be industry backed certifications, of which there are a plethora in the IT industry, for example.
  
  They can be professional licensure, which are very powerful markers, not just of becoming part of a professional association, but the CPD that could be referred to as micro credentials, the continuing professional development, and then there's the macro ones, and the institutions that are going to remain relevant and sustainable, they'll have the ability to dynamically embrace all of that tapestry of layered credentials with the student at the middle.
  
  And a lot of people say, well, Martin, there are millions of micro credentials, so there is no trust, they're meaningless. And of course, there's always been a lot of learning. What's always been our marker for what is valuable and quality versus not, it's always been the brand reputation and rigor of the conferring institution, and we see that in learning platforms of all types from iTunes, you in the early days to the MOOCs to some of the more blended platforms that scale platforms that we have now, great content and learning always rises to the top. Why? Because of brand reputation and outcomes, and so it is in a world of micro credentials. So if anybody's listening to this who is not diving in because they're worried about quality, just reassure yourself you get to decide Yeah.
  
  What a micro credential is with your brand on it.
  
  You get to decide what a MISO credential is with your brand on it. The consumer will trust you if you do your job well and if your brand stands for something meaningful. I love that.
  
  It's so helpful. You know, you talked about why hasn't it taken off, and I think you just got to that question. There's this question of currency, right? And how do you establish currency?
  
  But you're absolutely right. Educators, we're in the driver's seat of that currency. And to your point, Martin, it's about the quality and what are the outcomes from it? I also highly encourage people when they're looking at building micro, meso and macro credentials to think about what's the demonstratable output that a learner can actually present as well.
  
  And that's always been an eye opener. Was the first one in a group of faculty in a program that I was teaching and to use badging, but I badged aligned to a work product, something that in the workforce was transferable and was understood and could show quality in learning. And so I think you're absolutely right. We're in the driver's seat as educators and we can craft it in such a way that that quality can be very much demonstrated.
  
  I love that.
  
  Yeah. So this whole conversation is little out of institutions to rethink who is the audience they serve. Right? Not just that traditional eighteen to twenty two year old, you know, incoming freshman student.
  
  Let's talk a little bit about the kind of the forces that are driving some of that. Because there's everything from equitable access, looking for new revenue streams in difficult funding times, the talk about the skills gap, right? You know, lot of employers say, you know, these students are graduating with the skills I need for my employees. What are the biggest kind of it feels very disruptive and then you lay AAI on top of all of that, it feels even more disruptive.
  
  How do you can make sense of that? And how can institutions really stay focused?
  
  Yeah. It's a great question. The first is I'm talking a lot for institutions these days Ryan as you know about them having either a crisis of relevance, a crisis of revenue or a crisis of both. And I'm predominantly talking higher educational post secondary education here but you see it playing out across the tapestry of education up through K through twelve as well and so the first is that relevance is really the dominant force, right, like if because that's often tied to your funding anyway.
  
  If institutions stay tied to a single life stage, they risk being becoming misaligned with the reality of the communities and society that we live in and serve. And so you don't need to go much further than relevance to be the driving force as to why your institution needs to adapt to support your learners and your staff to survive and thrive in the world we now live in. That'd be the first. The other one which I think is tied to relevance but I wanted to call it out discreetly and that's about equity because if we approach this from an equity perspective it amplifies every other benefit.
  
  You know lifelong models open access to people who have historically been excluded from education for a variety of reasons and so again one of the driving forces of any institution I believe needs to alongside their economic imperative has got to be the equity imperative, and the beautiful thing is the more you focus on equity, the more it forces you in your instructional design, your learning and teaching, the way you run your institution to open yourself up, which makes it even more likely you'll succeed in supporting people at every stage of their life. And the final one that I wanted to touch on though is that if you do want to support people of all life stages, then you have to come to grips with the fact that employer alignment is both inevitable and necessary.
  
  So as learning and work blur, institutions and employers have to naturally converge. But it's not necessarily a comfortable place, Ryan. Yeah. Historically, we've sort of celebrated this distinction of, you know, tertiary education is here and employers are over here and there was something evil or unholy about that collaboration.
  
  We just can't live that way. Yeah.
  
  So those those would be my the three things that I would foreground as to the impetus for why institutions need to snap out of just looking disproportionately at those eighteen to twenty two year olds.
  
  And even segmenting them as a separate audience from adult learners. Right? I mean, traditionally, you have this approach of adult learning or or distance learning being very separate. And, you know, most of those, I throw my daughter out as the guinea pig for all that I I experienced her experience in college, and she's a strategic communication major with a psychology minor, and then she wants a certificate in data analytics, right?
  
  She wants to be able to create that stackable set to show her skills. But it's most institutions would consider that certificate an adult learning experience versus just an element. Right? We've gotta kind of break down those barriers and make it a a consistent approach to education across the spectrum.
  
  Yeah. What's also a little bit frightening to me is I could not agree more with you around relevance, equity, and then that workforce alignment piece. But usually the first thing you hear out of institutions is revenue, as Ryan mentioned. Right?
  
  That's immediately where their heads goes. And I always feel like that's backwards with relevance, with equity and with workforce alignment will come revenue. But if you start with revenue, you could miss those pieces. I want to lean into the workforce alignment piece because you also talk about, let get at this, how do we do this, right?
  
  Do we need a common language from the skills? Do we need tools to do this? Once these institutions in the workplace, once you're collaborating with industry, education industry come together, but how do we make this work in practice? What does the space need to be thinking about?
  
  Yeah, it's a fantastic question. In my mind there are these fundamental building blocks that need to be put in place at a system level to take the friction out Melissa and if we sort of quickly step That'd be great. And what's interesting is some of the building blocks need to be taken care of by the educators, some of them need to be taken care of by government, some of them need to be taken care of by employers, but all of them need to be thinking about putting the learner at the middle, which is not always the case. But if we just quickly step through more of a systems level approach, So absent of there being a digital skills taxonomy to underpin the skills capabilities and competencies that we want to teach and assess, the system is always going to be disconnected, fragmented and suboptimal.
  
  And so around the world right now you're seeing governments, the Australian government, the EU, Canada, there's just a few examples, states in the United States, they're busily building libraries of rich skill descriptors that are refreshed constant basis, I believe Western Governors University published over fourteen thousand of theirs for example. Those are really important because they become the basic building blocks in a digital world of being able to then build our learning on top of that and so that's where we need to start thinking a lot more deeply around the skill descriptors being the basic building blocks of what we teach and that teaching needs to really no longer be thought about in as we've already chatted about formal program structures, but what about informal learning?
  
  What about workplace learning? And we'll probably come back and talk about RPL or recognition of prior learning at some point, but how do make sense of all of that and actually give people credit for what they've done? Then it is really about that credential ecosystem, that fully embracing our credential ecosystem.
  
  And by the way, what we teach and how we assess, as I've already described, that needs to be done in collaboration between educators and industry because otherwise we're going to continue to graduate people who have invested an incredible amount of time and effort and money with credentials that aren't recognised or valuable in the world of work.
  
  And then of course it's really dynamic pathways so again if you think our pathways to qualifications right now they're unbelievably rigid and very supply side dominated, we want to teach, assess, and credential in these rigid ways because it's comfortable for us to do it.
  
  We've always done it, How we've always done it, Ryan.
  
  So the ability to move to more three-dimensional fluid dynamic pathways where people can enter and exit as and when they need to, still to get those milestone credentials along the way, but to support them in a more dynamic way. And then of course the two final pieces, one of the building blocks has got to be the ability for me as the individual to have my lifelong learning portfolio or wallet where I can showcase all of my learning, formal, informal, my experience, my service, all of the things being written into a digital wallet. Now again, in some governments are building that for all of their systems.
  
  In other cases the private sector is doing it. Again a platform like LinkedIn is similar to that. Some institutions are completely rethinking their transcripting to start thinking about giving their graduates and their students this more holistic view of what they've done and how they've done it. In my ideal world I would carry forward what I've done out of high school and that would move seamlessly into what I do at college and university and then move seamlessly into the world of work, and why not?
  
  It goes back to what Ryan said before. What I learned in high school and the evidence that I have for what I was doing with leadership at the age of fifteen and sixteen as a marker of persistence of leadership for the rest of my career, that's powerful stuff, and yet all of that was lost in the way that I was thought of. And then the final building block, is sort of, for the Star Trek fans, the final frontier, is really how do we crack the code on effective, equitable, scalable and repeatable recognition of prior learning so that we're not wasting our time having people demonstrate skills, capabilities, competencies that they've already mastered by going through the learning process again instead of just being able to do a better job of saying yep we know it, you've got it, you've demonstrated it, let's move on.
  
  So those, Melissa, those would be the components.
  
  It's really helpful.
  
  And you for a long time, you've been, we've talked a lot about that prior learning. A lot of the amazing learning that happens outside of the that rigid educational space, that is the biggest challenge right now is how do you self identify learning? How do you track co curricular activities? How do you add to your you know, we talk a lot about the CLR or the LLR or whatever that is. How do you make that more complete picture with those elements that fall outside of the traditional educational experience?
  
  Yeah. And so much for it, Ryan. I'll come at this sort of from an institutional perspective. You know, so much of it is mindset.
  
  Yeah. You know? We are really stuck in the tyranny of conventional wisdom. Yes. Is how we've always done it.
  
  So the three recommendations I would give would be start by assuming competence, not deficit. That'll be the number one.
  
  That's it, yeah, I love So institutions should treat work, service, life experience as credible sources of learning and design their RPL processes that begin with what does this person already know and do?
  
  Yet we don't do that, do we?
  
  Most of our RPL are almost designed by definition to be skeptical and unrelenting.
  
  Trust in these people that we have clearly vetted to be within our trust circle is really interesting. I hadn't really thought about that before.
  
  Let's get at why institutions are so afraid of RPL because I think some progressive institutions understand it and value it. But there's a lot of institutions that are afraid of it. And whenever I start to push, I hear the but it wasn't taught the way we taught it. Or we have special sauce, right, versions of that. What what are you seeing, Martin, is Why recognition or is it a revenue thing? Like, I'm not making any money off of this. Where do you see the barriers to RPL?
  
  Yeah. And I think you touched on a couple, Melissa. I think sadly, sorry to be so frank, but sadly it's because it's done well, it requires an investment to build the system, an investment to run the system and that's not cheap in the early days, right? And what's interesting for me is the EdTech community really hasn't stepped up in a big way to help here either and I think we need to, I think you really can't as an institution go find some enabling technology that you can become a part of an ecosystem to do that and so it's really hard for RPL to be a core pathway rather than a side process right now and the side process is expensive.
  
  It doesn't necessarily have a revenue stream tied to it necessarily right? So who's going to pay for it I think is often the question.
  
  Yeah although interestingly Ryan if you look at the world of tuition reimbursement, employer tuition reimbursement program, and you look in the history of the United States, there have been some incredible not for profits that over the years have sprung up. CAEL was the one that I used to work with back in the day, the center of adult Experiential Learning and they developed a process and a system of RPL where they got the cost down to a very affordable level, I think it was something like a one hundred dollars one hundred and fifty dollars an assessment and it was highly credible but I think it really requires you thinking about it is a core pathway into and through the institution rather than that side process and the other one that you touched on Melissa which we see sadly a lot in education is we are very stuck and wedded particularly around assessment of all types to the way that we've done things.
  
  Yes. We're very judgmental. We're unbelievably judgmental. Yes. You know, the people will still die in a ditch to defend summative assessment, high stakes exams, three hours, pen or pencil in the hand, even though all of the evidence for most of the way that we need to assess that type of assessment is no longer relevant for the world that we live in.
  
  And so it would be, I don't think it'd be right kicking the year off for us not just to be blunt and say it's about the money but it's also about our mindset and both are going to need to change if we're going to do this well. Interestingly though Melissa, institutions that really double down on this really think it through, really put scalable, equitable, repeatable processes in place and shout that from the rooftops, their relevance is going to go way up and most of their issues around sustainability are going to go away. I worry about the ones that stay stuck because they're gonna continue to become less relevant and therefore they're going to get weakened from a sustainability perspective in an ever increasing rate.
  
  I agree. I also think that some of the integrity challenges that we're seeing as AI has surfaced come from learners saying, why am I having to do something that I already know how to do? Right? And so I wonder if there's like as you were talking about that, I'm like, oh gosh. I wonder if there'd be a side benefit too to where cheating isn't as or academic you know, integrity challenges aren't as tempting because you're actually already getting credit for what you know and now you're sitting into a situation where you're learning something you don't know and you can see the relevance of that learning.
  
  Yeah and you know what's interesting for me having done a lot of work with my alumni over the years is alumni would love to be involved in being part of the assessment process of observed behavior too. There's all sorts of incredible ways to reach out into your extended community to say, hey, you're a knowledgeable practitioner, can you spend half an hour, forty minutes with Ryan having a conversation and then come back to us with your evaluation of his level of mastery, competence, application in the real world. I'm just picking that up because it doesn't always have to be super expensive and actually gives us a way of involving people in the learning process and involving industry in the real world in the learning process in a way that quite honestly we're guilty as charged, we're just not doing it as much as we need to do it.
  
  Absolutely. And extends that where you started with the experiential learning. Right? That's a way to pull in experiential opportunities.
  
  We'll have one last question and I know Ryan has one last So I'll ask my last question. Okay. You could wave a magic wand for twenty twenty six. You've mentioned two things that we need to potentially change.
  
  What part like, if you could change something about how education is working or how education looks at its twenty twenty six, wave that magic wand, what would it be?
  
  Yeah. Yeah. And if it's okay, Melissa, I might come in that almost as if I was talking to a policymaker, you know, somebody Please.
  
  Somebody in charge who's sort of running systems because I often despair because they're looking, they too are looking for the short term fix, the knee jerk thing they can do to get their PISA scores to jump through the roof or suddenly get their graduate employment numbers from fifty five percent to eighty five percent overnight and of course none of that's going to happen.
  
  To do system reform, it requires you doing a lot of hard work and effort and be persistent over years to make a difference. So the first thing I'd say is define and fund lifelong learning as a connected system, not a series of discrete programs. If you look at the amount of waste, the amount of redundancy, the amount of frustration that we cause in our learning systems because they're all chopped up into unnecessary and unhelpful silos. Ryan, you touched on it before, What makes absolutely no sense for us to think about you know these stovepipes of learning based on age, institution type, degree type, it just doesn't make sense.
  
  But I know and everybody listening to this know that if the funding doesn't follow that connected system, it will never happen. So part of it is having these wonderful blueprints for a connected system and there's hundreds of those, but it's really about having the courage to align the funding systems to support, nurture and sustain. The second, I would say from a policy perspective, is to shift all the incentives for institutions and employers toward recognition and progression. So institutions for example should be rewarded for acknowledging prior learning, supporting re entry, helping learners move forward faster, not for forcing repetition or worse still measuring themselves by those they exclude rather than those that they include.
  
  And that, and just to quote ASU's charter that I absolutely love, so that means that they will need, the system needs to fully embrace flexible, dynamic, atomized pathways so that every step forward is funded, celebrated, not every time somebody stalls, we characterize them as a failure and put them in harm's way socially and economically. And then finally, it would be back to an earlier question, Melissa, it would be we need to invest in those enabling building blocks, those shared skill descriptors, the interoperable credentials, the digital wallets, because somebody's got to do it, and I think for a lot of those, that incentive needs to either be created, and if it can't be created, that's the role of government to step in and make sure that they're putting those building blocks in place, because that really in my view is the role of government is when you so clearly see there's system failure, the incentives aren't aligned, you've got to create the incentives or you've got to step in for a period of time and build the building blocks.
  
  So those would be the things that I would say, but I'm taking a very clear eyed real world look at it, Melissa, because I've never seen education as underfunded as it is right now. So this reform and change will not happen unless we're investing the scarce resources we've got in the right way with a systems approach where the funding is aligned to the behaviors and the outcomes that we're looking for.
  
  Yeah. So if we do all these things right, what does the learning journey look like in ten years? Twenty thirty six, you look at your magic wand. We've managed to accomplish all the things you just said. What does that learner's experience look like?
  
  Yes. I mean, it I might come at this from a slightly different perspective than you might have imagined, Ryan, but because I had fun thinking about this, you know, like, what? Because I knew you were gonna say, okay, Martin, play soothsayer.
  
  You're gonna go into the future and be George Johnson.
  
  But Flying houses, robot pets. Yeah. Yeah.
  
  Well, look. I the first thing which I just think is an incredible provocation is sort of two thousand thirty five, I think we need to all get real that we're all going to have a personal learning agent that lives across all of the devices that we use, all of the platforms we run on, all of the ways that we learn, and so it is going to be deeply personalized personalized with individuals really having dynamically the ability to sense change, identify gaps, to guide their learning decisions, to have content served up, and I actually think that's going to emerge faster than any of us realize, and yet most of us aren't even talking about that.
  
  And I love it, right, because I think technology has finally got to a point where personalization and learning is gonna become real. We all have our learning advantages, and we all have our learning deficits, now we're going to have some wonderful technology that's going to help tailor the experiences for me to help me be successful and I think that that's something we need to be thinking about. I think two thousand and thirty five the currency that we all will need for life of work is going to be this living learning portfolio, not a set of discrete or individual credentials, Ryan. We've
  
  talked about it, but that three hundred and sixty degree digital wallet that captures skills, experiences, and feedback, and evidence over time, I would argue has already replaced the value of static qualifications. But twenty thirty five, that's all we're gonna be talking about. You know, you'll apply for a role, you'll apply for, you know, becoming a politician to serve your community. It doesn't matter where we'll be.
  
  It won't any longer be those markers that we've historically thought of as degrees or qualifications.
  
  It is going to be that three hundred and sixty degree digital view that is expressible, discoverable, and verifiable. And my great hope, Ryan, is if we do that well, that I will have agency in that, that that will be my portfolio. It won't end up, I will have the choice to decide if and when I want to express it, have it discovered and verified. Think it could go horribly wrong if we allow it to go in another direction.
  
  Yeah. If it limited people or it it did close them off from opportunity because of misassumptions or things like that, it would be the dystopian version of that. Right?
  
  Exactly.
  
  And my final one, and maybe I'm being a bit Pollyanna here or a bit too glasses half full, but I'd like to think in two thousand and thirty five that learning is scaffolded to the pace of change that we as the educators flex in intensity and depth depending upon context that we're super comfortable embracing lighter when change is incremental, deeper when transformation demands it, and that we will finally, finally step up to what we need to do to make assessment relevant and valuable in the world in which we now live. If I could just pick one thing, one great hope for where we are in two thousand and thirty five is that we have finally let go of irrelevant outdated assessment practices and we've used the technology, research and know how that we have to assess our learners in ways that enrich them and allow them to send signals to life and work that allow others to rely upon them and for people to live the lives that they want having invested in their learning.
  
  So those those would be my headlines for you, Ryan. I'll I'll see you in twenty thirty five to see how I did.
  
  We will check back in on this probably many, many times between now and then. Yes. Fantastic. Martin, you're always amazing to have as a guest on the show. Every time we have a conversation, I certainly leave smarter and more thoughtful about what the future looks like. Thank you so much.
  
  You're welcome. Thank you so much. You're inspiring to listen to and to brainstorm these ideas with, so thank you so much.
  
  You're very welcome. And everybody listening, you take good care and enjoy twenty twenty six. I hope to see you one day soon.
  
  Oh, great Spartan. We'll talk soon.
  
  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 players 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 episode of Educast three thousand.