874: Higher Ed's Next Frontier - with Marni Baker Stein, Chief Content Officer, Coursera

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to ed up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio back with you on another episode. A little under the weather today. Excuse me, my six-year-old had to come in and sleep with me because he wasn't feeling good. He had a fever and coughed all over me last night. And I mean all over me. So I woke up today with a little bit of the sniffles, but no rest for the weary as they say.

We have students to serve and we've got to get in here and serve them. I want to remind everybody very, very soon, if you listen to this episode, it'll come out pretty quick, but we're going to be at Ellucian Live in San Antonio, Texas, recording live. Elvin and I will have eight live hot mics to capture as many conversations as possible at Ellucian as we talk with leaders there. There's a solar eclipse coming up, so we'll get to see the eclipse.

And lots, lots going on in and around higher education as we bring leaders back to this microphone to tell you what those things are. And we've got a returning guest today. And before I introduce her, I want to introduce my guest co-host. I think this is the second time he's guest co-hosted, but I cannot remember, but he has been a guest before. And then I had a couple of cocktails with him last time we saw each other in person. So I'm actually a little fuzzy on how many times he's been on the podcast before. Ladies and gentlemen, he's the president of the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. It's Mr. Brent Fitch. Brent, what's going on?

Brent Fitch: Hey, Joe. I'm doing great. Now this is first time co-hosting.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I see. And then yes, we, although had a few cocktails, we would like to think about what happens at a conference, stays at the conference. But you know what, except for the evening time when, you know, we can catch up on what's happening in higher education over an adult beverage? There's nothing wrong with that. We're adults. That's where you actually learn the most.

Brent Fitch: Right. Yeah, we had pretty good conversation. 

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Didn't we Brent? Where are you and what's happening with the weather where you are right now?

Brent Fitch: Yeah, I'm in Denver. Woke up this morning to about six inches on the car so I'd be pulling that off and then you look outside the campus is just a winter wonderland right now. Nothing but snow all over the place. And our fantastic crew has got everything prepared for classes today.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, all it takes is a little bit of sunshine to clear off the snow. And we brought you all here at the EdUp Experience, a ray of sunshine, aka my guest today. She's like a ray of educational knowledge and sunshine. You've heard her before. She's big. I like I told her I said you're big time. You know that right and she goes no no no I was like no you are, you're big time. Ladies and gentlemen back again now a year into her role here she is. She is the chief content officer at Coursera. She is Dr. Marni Baker Stein. What's going on? Welcome back!

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Thanks for having me back. I'm also clearing out the snow this morning in my own winter wonderland in Park City, and I'm super happy to be here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Are you super happy about the snow or you're super happy to be at the EdUp Experience?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: I'm happy to be here and get me through this late spring, or excuse me, early spring snow because it's rough. After five or six months in a row of snow, we're ready for spring.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You thought you were out of it, but alas, one more last positive snowfall, right?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Hopefully, yes.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, Marni, last time we had you as a guest and people will know that listen to the EdUp Experience you guest co-hosted with me. So I had to remember exactly how long it had been since we had you on as a guest and a very important guest because you're doing very important work at Coursera. You were one month into your role and what surprised me about that episode is I went back and listened to it. How much was hitting you? I was asking you questions about classes and content and you're just going thousands and hundreds of thousands. How do you get your arms around that? So here we are a year later. Can you talk about what the journey has been like for you at Coursera to get your legs under you?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Sure. So I would add to sort of just the enormity and the global scale of Coursera. I joined right about the exact same time that Gen AI hit in a very big way, not only in the U.S. but everywhere in 2023 and into these first months of 2024. We had a sort of front row seat, as a witness to sort of the most rapid evolution of the job market that I've ever seen. You know, we're in the midst of this revolution where AI and machine learning are not just skills, but superpowers.

And Coursera is right in the middle of that revolution as the place where people are coming to keep up and to skill, upskill, re-skill, whatever skill their way into both opportunity, but also into a place where their futures are secure.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: With that, that's one part of the job, right? You've got a consumer, that consumer wants more skills, Coursera is going to be there, but you also had this internal infrastructure you have to navigate. The courses, the people, the employees that you have, the development, the marriage of relevant skills to the course, right? Because that can go away really fast if you're not updating all the materials. Talk a little bit about the internal, give us some inside baseball and what it's like to keep this stuff going.

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Sure. I've said this multiple times recently in 2023, we had one student every minute enrolling in this new Gen AI and other fresh tech content. In 2024, that's quadruple. That's four people every minute demanding this content. It's people from across the spectrum, from cybersecurity specialists to front-end developers to our teachers or nurses who are really looking to understand how this content is going to impact their futures in positive ways, as well as in ways that they need to be aware of so that they begin to build their career around where we're going.

That demand, that enormous demand is something that we have to keep up with, as well as the fact that this technology, these capabilities, are moving faster than any we've ever seen before. So that combination of this massive diverse demand with the fact that this area of content, these technologies, these tool sets, these capabilities around very specific tasks from cybersecurity to nursing, that's a lot for a content engine to keep up with. So we've had to supercharge our focus in these areas, both in terms of keeping up with all the research on how Gen AI is impacting jobs.

For example, we've learned that almost 50% of jobs, job tasks across domains, across disciplines, across sectors are being sort of radically impacted by these new technologies. We've had to really almost adjust the way that we think about job roles and tasks in an era where those roles and tasks are evolving so quickly. And we've had to start working with all of our partners from university partners to industry partners differently in the types of content we're looking for, the formats of content we're looking for toward a more agile system so that we're able to keep up, and not just once, continuously as this whole world unfolds.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Four people a minute? Did you, is that what I heard you say? Four people enrolling in that a minute. So that's like eight people in two minutes, just for anybody that's... Yeah, it just, you know. I mean, it's pretty amazing when you start doing the math on it. But it is, right? Four people a minute and you start to think about that demand, that scale. And it's monstrous. It's unbelievable. Brent, kick it over to you, man.

Brent Fitch: Yeah, it's crazy Marni. And as you expressed, you know, we are just trying to understand how you can read Gen AI and other groundbreaking technologies came to our courses and then figured out how the programs could, along with Gen AI, whether it's the technical part of it or the user experience and what does that look like. I was talking to somebody last week about, you know, what's to happen with the regulations and laws that are going to come out of that. You know, getting back to, you know, helping to sort of represent a ton of institutions. What does it look like for a college president, or, you know, or try to at least try to understand what does a connection look like and how can we use that to serve more students in the class as well as, you know, think of using the classroom as a vehicle of the Gen AI?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. It's just another thing for a college president in today's world of being a college president to keep up with. One more thing. Just one more little thing on top of all the other things. I think like just generally, it's important that everybody understands that the rise of generative AI and LLMs as the fastest growing skill set of 2024, maybe ever, it's not just about technology. It's not just about technology's advancement. It's a clear signal for the future of teaching and healthcare and communication and creativity and problem solving. So it's got very, very interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary use cases that are important for us to all be incredibly intentional about as we're building them into these sort of pathways of knowledge and skills and ability development for learners who are going to have to go out and get jobs in a job market that's really radically transformed.

In fact, I think there's been a 20-fold increase just in the U.S. of job postings that require these skills, and it really is across all kinds of roles, not just tech roles. So I think that's the first thing. This is a very interdisciplinary tool with applications way beyond just tech and that could, if we're intentional about it, have really positive impacts on our pedagogies and our ability to get students to think and be creative in their uses of these tools. So that's my overarching statement.

At Coursera, we know through some of our programs, we have a program called Coursera for Campus where we work with universities all over the globe, thousands of universities all over the globe, to think about how they can intentionally build some of this Gen AI content and other types of content, data, cybersecurity, et cetera. But let's call it fresh tech content. It's very difficult for a university or an institution, for most universities and institutions to keep up with, to be able to build that Coursera content into their curricula.

So we have Coursera for Campus. It allows an institution to look at all this amazing content from deep learning, from Google, from Unilever, from Meta, to look at that content and figure out how, as we're keeping it fresh on the Coursera side, that an institution can incorporate it inside of courses or inside of degree pathways that they're offering on campus. And that's been a really great, I think, influence to solving this problem with universities kind of everywhere.

Brent Fitch: Amazing. A follow up, if I may. As you look at the two offerings, Career Academy and Full Catalog. So if an institution uses the Full Catalog, do you work with them all the way down to the course level and incorporating it into the learning objectives in the LMS? Or how do you play in that space?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: So we have, as we're working with universities, we have conversations about their use cases and make recommendations on how a university can incorporate this type of content into a course at a course level or into a curriculum if they're sort of embedding a certificate, for example, from Meta inside of their curricular pathways. We have a new tool that is actually Gen AI powered called Course Builder that is essentially an LLM driven course authoring tool that allows faculty to curate targeted Coursera content against their learning objectives and also helps them to think through what the appropriate objective-aligned assessments are around that content as well.

So a faculty member could kind of create a course that was components of their own content as well as components of Coursera content inside the same course. And that tool, Course Builder, is great because it almost provides just-in-time assistance to faculty using it to figure out how best to use Coursera content in their particular instructional context. So we're super excited about Course Builder because we think it makes our catalog much more accessible to any faculty who's interested, regardless of whether they're teaching a design class or a data analysis class.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Marni, one of the interesting things that you said, I think it's a lesser talked about part of what Coursera can do for schools. You know this, in Higher Ed, we typically create a program and we're going to take that program, we're going to go start marketing because we think there's some validation out there that says we can get students in this program. And then you look at something like Coursera where you've got short courses, skill building. And the students selecting these courses is almost determining what a degree should look like if they take those skills and they wanted to elevate those skills. It's a reversal of, hey, we're going to build this degree and see what happens in the market to here's what the market's already saying. Can you build something to match the speed of the market? Can you just talk about that and how you discuss with university partners? Because I think there's still a traditionalism set within higher education. Many of us experienced that of, well, we're going to build this program the way we think it should be built. We're going to go out to market and hope students choose it. Well, the consumer has much more bang than they used to now because they don't have to do that anymore.

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we had over 4 million enrollments in entry-level certifications with job-aligned skills in 2023. And that was a 25% year-over-year increase. And we're seeing market plays for what we all call micro-credentials that are skills-aligned just growing. Why? Because there's a clear value proposition for learners against how these skills align with jobs that they can get in the places where they live or where they want to live. But also they're short and they're agile in that way that a learner can come in, gain a set of skills and then use those skills to sort of build their brand and their profile in the economic reality that we all live in everywhere, whether that's in the US or whether that's in India or Mexico or Europe.

So we're seeing massive demand for micro-credentials and we're also seeing, which I think is really interesting, really creative ideas coming out of university partners for how those credentials can be integrated into that degree pathway, whether it's as an on-ramp into a degree and with performance-based assessment capabilities or prior learning credit, or whether they're actually components of the degrees so that a learner will graduate with a degree in political science or fine arts, but also a professional certificate associated with that degree credential in UX design or in data analytics.

And I love seeing that happen. Of course, in my own past, that's something that I've seen work really well at scale. And it allows a learner to sort of develop this holistic profile by studying the things that they love, as well as adding on sort of these professional credentials that help them get a better job, hopefully. So that's kind of what we're seeing out there. And I think it's really exciting because if I am a person, an adult working professional who just needs skills to get promoted in my job pathway, awesome. My credentials are great for that. But if I'm at the beginning of my career, these same micro-credentials can help me add on to a degree program that we know is so critical for career starters in ways that can really add value.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Brent, I'm going to pass it back to you, but just one quick follow up, because I'm going to ask you to get real with us, Marni. As you talk to university partners, is there still an adoption cycle spectrum that we're going through? You know, where maybe a university scenario is this out, university comes to you and says, yeah, we'd love to take these Coursera micro-credentials and work them into our courses. And then you actually try to go and do that within the institution. And the institution is elastic and snaps back and there's committees and this, that's, all of a sudden, you know what? We didn't get to where we thought we were going to go because this inertia takes over. Is there still some of that out there or do you think that we're getting over ourselves to some degree?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: So there's of course some of that out there, right? Because university curricula is generally designed to move pretty slowly and there are operating constraints around it and kind of governance constraints around it that faculty, like innovative faculty have to go through if they want to do something radical with their curriculum pathways. So, you know, that's still the case, of course. And that's the case everywhere around the world. But I would say in the last two years, there's a lot less friction on that front and a lot more momentum around doing some innovative things that align more traditional degree pathways with some of these skills-based credentials and achievements. That's true in the U.S. And that's also true in India. We've been seeing in our work with some of the top institutions in India, some of the most creative use cases of bringing together industry-wide skills-based curricula with critical degree pathways that align with those workforce needs in India. It's kind of a global phenomenon we're seeing. We're trying to really help by working with ACE or ACE in the U.S. as well as ECTS in Europe and others, credit recognition agencies around the world to make it as easy as possible for faculty to make the case that these are valid, rigorous, educational programs that are worthy of being built into degrees.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Thank you Brent.

Brent Fitch: Yeah. Pretty interesting. The way the website kind of focuses on different users. So obviously we talked about universities and how they took part in with you. Two other areas you offer degrees directly from your site and another section for employers. Could you talk about those two other areas, first degrees and then how you work with employers to help them? It sounds like you're trying to solve the access and equity equations for education and your role in that. That's a pretty daunting task, but if there were to do it, Coursera could. So chase out, I thought it all works.

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: No pressure. No pressure. I think that the most exciting idea on the degree front at Coursera is we really want to create an environment in most cases with our degrees where learners can almost start any time in our open content or what many people call MOOCs. In our open content for free or very low cost, exploring pathways into degrees, figuring out if they like it, figure out if they're good at it, figure out if they've got like the passion that it's going to take to move that forward. And then working with our degree partners as much as possible to create pathways from that open content into their degree program through prior learning credit or progress recognition, also progressing open content or even performance-based admissions in some cases.

So that's kind of where we're heading on that front. That's exciting to us because that is an opportunity machine for learners everywhere at scale to get started in building the skills they need in these particular high impact areas, whether in cyber or UX design or generative AI or whatever it is, and then find their way into the degree credentials they need to actually be competitive. That's what's up on the degree front with us. And I love that work.

And outside of the degrees focus at Coursera, we have three verticals. We call them inside of enterprise. One we've already talked about, which is Coursera for Campus. So it's how we sort of deliver our catalog and tools like Course Builder to university partners who can build our content into their curricular pathways. Our biggest C4C customer of late who has one of the biggest sort of micro-credential initiatives in the country and in the world is the University of Texas system, where they're offering micro-credentials as part of Career Academy to over 250,000 learners and doing some really innovative work on that.

We also have C4B, so that's our work that we're doing with employers. And that work really focuses on working with employers and their chief learning officers or their learning departments to curate Coursera content with similar tooling as we use for C4C to their specific business needs given the industry that they're in and the types of roles that they're trying to impact.

And we also have Coursera for Government where we're working with government agencies like big labor departments of labor or workforce commissions all over the US, notably in New York and Louisiana, Nevada, but also all over the world, like in Kazakhstan and Greece. You know, it's just working on the problems that governments are facing in their countries with building out that kind of educational infrastructure that they need to keep their talent pipelines flowing.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Amazing. If you've been listening recently to the podcast, Marni, which I know you have because you never miss an episode, of course, we have started something called the EdUp Either Or Experience. And this is where - let me play the music. This is where - can you hear the music? Is it light? Is it too light? Let me turn it up. There we go. It should be. It should get your anxiety levels...

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: What's that? That was good effect. You like raise the thought process.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yes. Hey, get you thinking. I'm going to ask you either or. I'm going to give you a word and a different word. You've got to pick which one resonates more with you. You can of course add anything into it that you want. These are higher ed terms or business leadership terms, just to get an idea of how you will think about your day, about our semantics that we use in higher ed. And if you say both or neither, you owe me $5 for that question. I will collect later. Brent already owes me a cocktail. So just add it to the tab Brent.

And Marni, we're going to start with you. And here we go. SIS or LMS?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: SIS

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Brent, SIS or LMS?

Brent Fitch: LMS.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Okay. Marni, paradigm shift or pivot?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Pivot

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Brent?

Brent Fitch: Paradigm shift.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Okay. Marni, the student's a consumer or something else?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Yeah, the student is a consumer. Like everything we should be doing in our institutions should send you down value with intention. Yes, I think that should be consumer information. I'm with the consumer because they are a consumer outside of the classroom.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Power skills or durable skills?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Power skills.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Brent.

Brent Fitch: I agree.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All right. This is where it gets really fun. This is where you start getting neither or both. Unpack Marni, unpack or deep dive?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Unpack.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Brent.

Brent Fitch: Yeah. I'm going to come up on the, sentence on this one, but I'm not going to owe you five bucks. I'll do deep dive.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: See how it makes you choose an answer. Cause you know, I'm going to see you and be like, where's my... I know you will be like. I'm Italian. I will come get my money. We'll do a couple more of these. Marni, lifelong learner or pre-K to gray?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Pre-K to grayest. Right? Yeah, pre-K to grayest. That's a better route that one.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Marni, unlearn or relearn?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: I'm going to use your candy. Two souls. Yes, first one. Yeah, I'll go with the third option - always learning.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Okay, so that's another five bucks then right?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Yeah, yeah that's right.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All right this is... it gets fun leaving some money. That's right. That's too an Italian. Bad move. Marni, table that or circle back?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Circle back.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Brent?

Brent Fitch: Circle back.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Okay. We'll do two more. Marni, culture or strategy?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Culture.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Brent?

Brent Fitch: Culture.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Okay. Last one. Last one. Marni already said it once today. Andragogy or pedagogy? That's nasty. Marni?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: It depends. It depends on the day for me.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ten bucks for Marni. Ten bucks. Pedagogy or andragogy, Brent?

Brent Fitch: Heutagogy. 

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I mean, what would we? Looks like coming out the big winner on this episode of the EdUp Either Or Experience. Thank you guys for playing. Did the Music Stop? Just a little bit of fun in the episode here as we get to learn a little bit about each other and I get to have people across higher education owe me money, which is one of my long-term goals to call and start calling in favors to these people. So I'm setting everybody up. Hey, Brent, remember that one time that 15 bucks, right? We try to have fun here. And you know what? Pre-K to gray was something that came across last year. I can't remember who said it, but it was like lifelong learning or pre-K to gray. These are the terms that we use to describe learners in multiple different ways. So I thought let's bring all that terminology in into a little fun experience with it. And Brent, I'm going to pass it back to you to ask Marni any final questions you have before we close out the episode.

Brent Fitch: Yeah, this is more of just leadership. I know you've had to read the roles Marni. So for, for, for I guess, tips of the trade, if you think about your inside circle and you have those three on tough conversations where it yourselves. When you're going to, actually get in and out of access everyone. What does that circle look like? Share your thoughts and ideas to get work done and make a difference considering the fast daily change.

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: So, I think that one of the big learnings that started when I was at Western Governors University and definitely has accelerated in my new role is that in the kind of role I have now, you have to be able to balance long-term thinking and investments with sort of short-term requirements that you have more control in the long-term and less control in the short-term and like getting to balance it, particularly in a year like the one we've been having where we've had to put so much focus on Gen AI and these new types of content that are moving so fast. But we also, as I mentioned before, have some really systemic sort of projects going on with degrees and with workforce and talent pipeline.

So sort of figuring out how in my inner circle or my leadership circle to keep those things balanced and on track so that one doesn't upset the other is really, really critical. And then the other thing I've learned is that my job is to then create the safe creative space for really talented, smart, amazingly passionate people to figure out how to keep that balance together as a team.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: When you say balance, real quick, is it easy to get lost on the Gen AI pathways because it's demanding so much attention that you could lose sight of these other really important skills that aren't in as high demand that people still really need? I think that's just one example, but there are always things that have to be, that are on the front burner and then boiling over that you have to attend to. And you can really plan for those things. Sometimes you can, but a lot of times it just, these are just things that happen. And so focus goes on those things and you have to though, as you were adjusting your focus to take care of business in the present, you absolutely have to not lose sight of where you're going. And I think that is an age-old challenge of leadership, but it gets harder and harder it seems every year that goes by as the world is moving so quickly, the structure of work is moving so quickly, the technologies that allow us to sort of understand what's possible in learning spaces is moving so quickly that you can very easily get caught up in that and lose sight of where we're going for learners and what needs to happen for learners in the future to make sure that they have equitable access to opportunity everywhere. Go ahead, Brent. I think I cut you off last time.

Brent Fitch: No, that's okay, Joe. You got to know, doing that, taking over. He's not looking at us like that commenting, but that's okay. It was a good question. Marni, thanks for that. That's very insightful. And I think you said it best when you were doing either or. You discussed the rate of our culture. Right? You need the right culture in order to draft strategy. And I think we all agree in what you just explained was a great example of making sure you set the right culture, the right tone, accountability, trust, constant play, as you manage it. Pretty big, long term and short term. But the levels are up according to strategy. Thanks for that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Marni, tell us what else you want to say about Coursera. And I'm going to put one quick question there and you can take it how you want. I'm also wondering what you, because you made a big move, you were in higher ed for a long time. And so this move to Coursera that's higher ed adjacent, what do you miss about the higher ed institutional environment? What do you feel like you could leave behind? You know, let's not call it leaving it behind, but what things don't you miss as much, but you still miss? But you don't miss them as much. And anything else you want to add about Coursera?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Yeah. So I would say that when you move away from a campus, whether that campus is on ground or a big online institution, you're moving steps away from the learners themselves. And I felt that throughout my career, I used to be on a physical campus. I'd see learners walking by, and I'd talk to them in the halls and then I moved to online education where you're one more step away. You're still connected with them. You still have commencement ceremonies, et cetera, but you're a smaller step away, this is just one step further. And so I try to do my best at Coursera to connect with learners and learner stories as much as I can. We certainly have, you know, over 143 million learners and they're amazing.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Pick one. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Across the globe. And I think that's the bridge to what I don't miss, to be able to work on educational equity and access problems and challenges and opportunities at the scale of the world and be learning about not only what's happening in the US, in Texas, in Illinois, in Florida, but also what's happening in Southern India versus Northern India versus the UK versus Germany versus Mexico.

That perspective is so powerful for me because I have learned that the themes and the problems to be solved and the moral imperatives that we have to sort of address are so unified everywhere. I mean, there are differences, but the similarities are much, much more powerful than I think I even suspected when I started.

And I think that's the cool thing about Coursera that we kind of touched on, but in the kinds of offerings and pathways we have, whether it's clips or courses or micro-credentials or pathway degrees, like we are really driving equity at scale. We have like in our certificate programs alone, almost 40% of the enrollments in those certificates, for example, are women in job and career pathways that have a very, very low percentage of women today. So in terms of the Google certificates on the offer, some 55% of the completers are low-income learners or learners of color who are making under 30K a year in the US. I mean, these are huge impacts that we're having at a very accessible price point for learners with some of the best content in the world. And that is something that I don't know when people think of Coursera, I think they think that, but the actual reality of the impact it's having on learners is extraordinary.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What do you see for the future of higher education, Marni? Or post-secondary education?

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: I think that... Higher education is already starting to grapple with the fact that the new traditional learner population they're serving is a lifetime learner population. And I think the educational system in the US is going to have to start thinking about lifetime learning, not just as when you're 18 and on a campus, but with a K to gray lens, as you were saying, because the whole system needs to be repointed to address what learners are going to need into the future. And that's not only in the U.S., that's everywhere. I think the U.S. really needs to start raising its gaze and looking at what's going on in some other parts of the world, because there are really innovative strategies on this front in countries like India and countries like Mexico, where just really amazing thinking is going on around what the future of education is going to require. So I'm hopeful that we will be more global-minded in the future as well.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know, one thing I noticed, Brent, I don't know if you noticed it or not, that I'm going to go back and when I transcribe this episode, I'm pretty sure that Marni didn't say student one time. She said learner every time, but never said student. I don't know if that's intentional, Marni. Or not, I'm assuming it is. I bet it took a lot of brain training.

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Actually, it is. Well, I guess it's just true in many, many hundreds, well over a hundred million learners on Coursera, they weren't necessarily students in the computations, but they are learners. So, yeah, I guess there has been a lot of brain training over the last year.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Student comes very natural to us, doesn't it? And I tend to say the students, the students, the student, but the student's evolving. Brent, you know about that. And how was your first co-hosting gig here on EdUp?

Brent Fitch: It was fantastic. I learned so much and it was such a pleasure learning just to listen to you and to learn what Coursera is doing. I think it's just so a host of information for sort of for learners and people who influence learners from corporations to institutions. And we had to talk about it. I think, you know, all the way down the chain to first grade, what times we find for a chance where we can help them be better and provide them access as you so eloquently described, people that don't really get access for how Google will do that. I think as administrators, it's our role to make sure that we understand that and that have a partner like Coursera who we can rely on for installation and contribute that declaration to our learners. Thank you so much for sharing with us.

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, first, he's Mr. Brent Fitch. He is the guest co-host and the president of Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. Brent, thanks for coming on, my friend. And I think we got another one or two coming up together in the near future. And of course, she's my third time guest, two time co-host, and probably we'll be back again in one of those capacities, ladies and gentlemen. She's Doc-D, Doc-Doc-D, and a doctor, Marni. So what happens when you're under the weather, sometimes your brain isn't working all the way. Hope you forgive me, Marni. But thanks for coming back on and we hope you had fun.

Dr. Marni Baker Stein: I absolutely did. Thank you so much for having me and I hope you feel better.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-uped.