Faculty-Led AI at Scale: From UC Santa Barbara to the California Community Colleges
Changing Higher Ed
At UC Santa Barbara, Kavitta Ghai recalls, students waited two days, on average, to get a question answered. For a student whose scholarship was just pulled or whose tuition is due tomorrow, that is too long, and at community colleges, she notes, most classrooms have no teaching assistant at all. She argues AI can now offer the round-the-clock support students have never had, if it is built and governed the right way. In this episode of the , speaks with , CEO and Co-Founder of Nectir. The conversation covers why faculty-led adoption works, how to guardrail AI at the course level, and how to...
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AI Guardrails for Universities: Why an AI Policy Needs a Tech Stack to Enforce It
Changing Higher Ed
Most AI risk at a university does not start with a hacker. It starts with a student, a faculty member, or a researcher copying something out of the learning management system and pasting it into a personal AI account, where every safeguard written into the institution's enterprise licenses no longer applies. In this episode of the , speaks with , Vice President of SLED (State, Local Government, and Education) at Island. The conversation covers the three AI issues facing presidents: academic integrity, compliance around sensitive data, and responsible AI use aligned with institutional...
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FIRE's 2027 College Free Speech Rankings: What Actually Moves a School's Score
Changing Higher Ed
Texas A&M holds a green light rating for its speech policies and still fell from 47th to 192nd in this year's College Free Speech Rankings. Harvard climbed from 245th to 71st without changing a single policy, a sign that how leadership responds to speech controversies matters more than what is written in the handbook. In this episode of the , speaks with , Chief Research Advisor at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The conversation covers the seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings and why institutions with strong written policies can still see their free...
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Washington Update: Title IV Risk, Neg Reg, and the Midterms
Changing Higher Ed
Student loan default and repayment rates have continued to be calculated through years of dormant collections, and some institutions could soon face single-year default rates high enough to threaten their Title IV eligibility. That risk is arriving alongside final OB3 rules, sweeping accreditation proposals from the AIM negotiated rulemaking, and midterm elections that will reshape every committee governing higher education. In this Washington Update episode of the , speaks with Tom Netting, President of TEN Government Strategies. The conversation covers the federal regulatory and political...
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How Gies Gives Every Junior a Live Client Project
Changing Higher Ed
Most institutions measure access at admission and affordability, then ration the experiences that actually change student outcomes to whoever finds them. The experiential learning that employers say they want gets delivered to honors cohorts and groups of thirty while everyone else gets the catalog. In this episode of the , speaks with , Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. The conversation covers how Gies scaled experiential learning from a selective offering into a curricular requirement across every program, and what it cost on the staffing, funding, and...
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Workforce Readiness: Why Higher Ed Struggles to Use Employer Support
Changing Higher Ed
Workforce readiness is usually framed as a funding and program-design problem. In some states and at some institutions, the funding and the employer willingness already exist, and what is missing is a structure on the institution's side that can take the offer and act on it. In this episode of the , speaks with , president of , a central Ohio technology firm building custom software for nonprofits, local governments, and growing organizations. The conversation covers where the public-private partnership between employers and institutions breaks down, and what leaders can change on their own...
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Diversifying Revenue Without Diluting Mission: Inside Rollins College's Innovation Triangle
Changing Higher Ed
Private colleges under enrollment pressure get told to diversify revenue. The venture that follows usually either fails to earn or drags the institution away from the academic identity families were paying for. In this episode of the , speaks with . The conversation covers how a tuition-dependent private structures a diversified budget model without compromising the curriculum that gives its degree value. Barnett walks through the Innovation Triangle, a three-part portfolio Rollins spent more than a decade and $200 million building. The parts run on deliberately different economics: a...
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Adult Learners: Redesign, Don't Just Recruit
Changing Higher Ed
Institutions recruiting adult learners are inserting them into schedules, deadline policies, and course structures designed for 19-year-olds, then treating the resulting attrition as a student problem. The barriers doing the damage are recent design decisions, not fixed features of higher education, and several of them cost almost nothing to remove. In this episode of the , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with , executive director of distance education at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. The conversation covers when adult learners stop being an enrollment...
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Reputation, Revenue, and the Cost of Silence in Higher Ed Communication
Changing Higher Ed
Most institutions in a crisis don't believe they're in one. The word calls up a scandal with a camera crew outside, and nothing on this week's agenda looks like that, so the answer is often no. In this episode of the , speaks with , founder and CEO of Red Banyan, a strategic communications firm built around high-stakes rapid response. The conversation covers why , and what that definition changes for colleges and universities. Nierman explains why the old instinct to stay quiet and avoid giving oxygen to a fire now cedes the battleground to whoever is willing to characterize your institution,...
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Why Is Enrollment Falling Short When Applications Are Up?
Changing Higher Ed
Applications keep climbing while the class comes up short. The gap sits in the phase most institutions treat as the finish line: what happens after the acceptance letter goes out. In this episode of the , speaks with , Vice President of Spark451, which he co-founded. is a Jenzabar company. The conversation covers why enrollment falls short when admissions and marketing are both performing. Drawing on twenty-five years in university marketing, branding, and enrollment marketing, McGetrick explains what Spark451's focus groups revealed about when families actually begin their due diligence,...
info_outlineInstitutions recruiting adult learners are inserting them into schedules, deadline policies, and course structures designed for 19-year-olds, then treating the resulting attrition as a student problem. The barriers doing the damage are recent design decisions, not fixed features of higher education, and several of them cost almost nothing to remove.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Evan Kropp, executive director of distance education at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. The conversation covers what has to change structurally when adult learners stop being an enrollment contingency and become a population the institution designs for.
Kropp oversees UF CJC Online and its Master of Arts in Mass Communication, a 36-credit online degree enrolling roughly 650 students. His operational focus areas include course design standardization, cost transparency, transfer and prior learning credit, and the translation of academic learning outcomes into professional language students can use.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating whether to build degree completion and adult learner pathways at their institutions.
Topics Covered
- Why the "I'm too old for a classroom" objection comes from 25-year-olds as often as from 65-year-olds, and what that means for online positioning
- How course learning outcomes can be reissued to students as resume language at the end of every course
- What lifelong learning costs an institution that treats it as an operating commitment rather than a slogan
- Why transfer and prior learning credit decisions are traditionally financial decisions, and what a competitive response time looks like
- The recurring time cost created when faculty design online courses independently
- Why deadline policies written to teach 19-year-olds accountability misfire on working adults
- How to build an AI curriculum by asking employers where they are deliberately not using AI
Real-World Examples Discussed
- UF CJC Online converts course learning outcomes into resume bullet points, producing 100 to 120 curated items across the 12-course Master of Arts in Mass Communication sequence
- Master Access, which lets graduates of that degree audit unlimited courses from an 80-course catalog for $500 per year
- Standardized navigation across every online course in the program, eliminating the semester-start relearning cost created by 40 faculty designing independently
- Franklin University's transfer database of roughly 1,800 institutions, returning a transfer decision in five minutes instead of a week
- A rebuilt program financial page showing cost per class and cost by credit load for students paying as they go
Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership
- Adult learners cannot serve as an enrollment patch for demographic decline. An institution that wants them has to redesign schedules, advising, onboarding, and technology support rather than recruiting into the existing structure.
- The value proposition has to be explicit at the course level, connecting the program to the credential, the specific skills, and the student's professional aspirations, rather than leaving that chain implied across a degree.
- Insufficient support is a primary reason adults quit the first time. Advising, financial aid, career services, technology support, and faculty training all need to be reconsidered for this population rather than inherited from the traditional model.
Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/redesign-an-institution-for-adult-learners/
#HigherEducation #AdultLearners #DegreeCompletion