Wendy Colby: 0:11

This is Wendy Colby, Vice President and Associate Provost at Boston University and the host of BU Virtual Connects. I am excited to welcome Nelson Baker, whom I’ve come to know as a true pioneer, innovator, partner, and collaborator in higher education. At a time when the higher education landscape presents unprecedented challenges and opportunities, Nelson has remained steadfastly focused on expanding reach and impact for learners. Nelson serves as the interim dean of the College of Lifetime Learning at the Georgia Institute for Technology, which was one of the first to launch affordable online degrees at scale. Now, he is steering a new college for lifetime education, which is reaching over 250,000 teachers, students and working professionals. Today, Nelson and I will probe on the topic of academic innovation and the role it plays in helping our universities become stronger and more resilient in the face of disruption. As university leaders, our greatest opportunity may be in opening the dialogue, learning from each other, and working more closely as a community to advance knowledge and impact across higher education. Welcome, Nelson.

Nelson Baker: 1:25

Wendy, thank you so much for having me today. Look forward to the conversation.

Wendy Colby: 1:29

Absolutely, such a pleasure. So let’s get started. You know, Georgia Tech has such a long history of innovation. You were one of the first universities to introduce online at scale degrees at an affordable price point. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to be a pioneer in that space and what you’ve learned over the years?

Nelson Baker: 1:49

Happy to, and I think we’re privileged to be able to say that our faculty, our administration, our university system have been behind us the whole way because we’ve allowed them to join in this process. And I’d say one of the things that you have to be able to do is listen, and listen intently to your stakeholders. What are they seeking? What are they trying to do different? Why are they trying to do it? And then how might you map into that so that you’re actually meeting their needs in different ways and different fashions? And that’s really what led to our degrees of scale activities.

Nelson Baker: 2:29

We kept hearing that people can’t come to our campus. Well, that’s not a new thing. We’ve had distance programs for a long time. But they said could you make them more interactive? Could you make them more engaging? Could you make them shorter, perhaps, as opposed to a 50-minute lecture? Could you make it so that I can come at my time, not just your time, so not synchronous, but asynchronous. Could you reduce the price?

Nelson Baker: 2:52

There’s this whole long list that we hear and you can’t necessarily meet all those needs, but intently listening has been part of our DNA and continues to be part of our DNA as we think forward. The second component that I would say, though, is to be able to take calculated risks and to make those big bets on where you think the future might be, but to have plan Bs and Cs in case the plan A may not necessarily work out the way you had intended, because we’re in a business that we want people to learn and be educated, and we don’t want that to fail. So how might we deliver in a way that gives us the plan B and that, for us, was falling back on the traditional methods of distance learning.

Wendy Colby: 3:35

Absolutely, and, of course, you know, we’re now at a time where there are many more online at scale degrees, many more universities have a portfolio of online programs, and I wonder, I’d love to get your thoughts on how should we be thinking about the online portfolio, if you will? Is it as important as the residential portfolio in our higher education institutions? Should every institution have an online strategy? You know, curious as to how your online strategy has changed the student population you’re serving at Georgia Tech.

Nelson Baker: 4:10

Yeah, so your last statement, the student population, I think, is where this for Georgia Tech anyway conversation began. Who is our student? And so, to the first question, should every university have an online program? Well, it depends on who your student is and what are their needs? And I think it’s really trying to figure out who is your customer? What do they want? How do they want education delivered? And then you get into what are the modalities for delivery? Could be residential, could be online, could be a hybrid. All those things become possible.

Nelson Baker: 4:45

And so those are the questions we ask, and, as a public research university here in Georgia, we want to consider our students, our constituent base, of all citizens, not just those post-high school students. Although they’re a tradition of our university, we have no plans to jettison it or change it, because that’s a meaningful part of who Georgia Tech is and our role in servicing the industries and citizenship of the state of Georgia and far beyond. But we were hearing from others that wanted a Georgia Tech education, who couldn’t come to our campus, and we wanted them to be our students. This mission actually began in 1908 with the Georgia Tech Evening School, and we opened classrooms available to working professionals in the evening to come and get degree programs. It’s evolved since then, and one of the things we heard back to that intense listening is could we make them more flexible and less expensive? Thus a degrees at scale idea.

Wendy Colby: 5:46

And what have you seen, Nelson, as some of your most popular online at scale degree programs? You know, when you talked about opening access and listening and identifying, you know, the kinds of students or the learners who want to also take advantage of a program at Georgia Tech.

Nelson Baker: 6:04

Well, our first one was in computer science, so we’re doing these at Georgia Tech at the master’s degree level. They’re not quite as long as what an undergraduate degree might be. The student population of those individuals is more varied in terms of demographics, age, gender, et cetera, than what we may see on campus, but we wanted those kinds of capabilities also, and so it also helped business move forward. So where we see the most success are what we’re calling these high demand career initiatives. So computer science, data analytics, cybersecurity, those are the three that we currently have that are reduced tuition prices and that scale because they’re in high demand. So we were listening to our students, but also our employers in our state and far beyond, as to what were their needs? Where were they having challenges finding talent, and how might we work together to find solutions?

Wendy Colby: 7:04

That’s great. I may come back to some of those points, but I’d like to go a bit into just the landscape of higher education just a bit here. You know, often higher education institutions have been criticized for being slow to change and at the same time we’re seeing pressures on our institutions like never before. You were talking there a little bit about the workforce and industry. So the workforce of the future, it seems, will be dramatically different, right, than it is today, and so I wonder how you’re thinking about this right? Data science, computer science, cyber, AI, we’ve talked about a number of those topics. You know, how do you prepare the next generation of learners, and how are you addressing this, maybe from more of a point of differentiation at Georgia Tech? You know, are there things we as institutions can be doing to future-proof our offerings for example?

Nelson Baker: 7:57

So I think it goes back to listening. You know, most of us will do some type of course evaluation or exit survey for our graduates and whatnot, but what are we doing with that information? Are we really asking the right questions as we go through those kinds of processes? So that would be where I’d start is, you know, does our current stakeholders, like, get value from what we currently do? And then what are those who aren’t in our program seeking that perhaps we could look at to do better with? So, as we’re thinking about those kinds of things, it’s one of the items that is newest in our strategy, the creation of a new college here at Georgia Tech, the College of Lifetime Learning, because we believe we as a public institution need to do so much more for our K-12 youth and teachers to prepare them for this world ahead that likely will look different. There’s certainly going to be careers that aren’t even invented yet that many of them will enter into. How do we build that foundation? We think we have a role in helping prepare that.

Nelson Baker: 9:05

Likewise, as our graduates go out into the world, it continues to change, and so many have said that, you know, the lifespan of a college degree no longer equals the lifespan of work. So how do you re-educate somebody and give them the new tools of the future along the way? And so that’s where this concept of the College of Lifetime Learning became. So how are we instilling in them the curiosity, the motivation to keep learning, despite going through a two or four year or even a doctoral program with us or with any higher ed institution? There’s a lot of places that you can learn that aren’t even higher ed. You know businesses do on-the-job training all the time they have for years. How might we find ways to couple those kinds of things in? So this new college will also think about those kinds of endeavors too. So it’s really meeting our students where they are, with what they want.

Wendy Colby: 9:57

Yeah, that’s awesome, and you talked a little bit about K-12. Who are you targeting as part of this College for Lifetime Learning? I’m very interested in that connection and that bridge you just mentioned, relative to also the K-12 piece of this and teachers, and so how are you bringing that all together?

Nelson Baker: 10:17

So Georgia Tech is a very STEM or STEAM-focused university ecosystem, and so STEM and STEAM is our connector. So it’s how can we take the digital technologies, the learning sciences, the humanities, and blend them together to prepare a future for a digital world, both for the K-12 youth as well as for adults? I mean, it hasn’t been that long ago that I can remember going into a movie theater, because that was the only way I could watch a movie, and then Blockbuster and other entities came along like that, and now we stream. Life keeps changing and we have to prepare for those kinds of changes ahead.

Wendy Colby: 11:02

And does this new college for lifetime learning, does it also bring in K-12 students as well? Are there opportunities at all spans of the whole life cycle of learning?

Nelson Baker: 11:21

That’s its intent. So the college is being formed from three units at Georgia Tech who already have existed for a number of years. One of them is Seismic, our K-12 outreach arm that does summer camps and programs for teachers in the K-12 space, again around STEM and STEAM-related topics, including how to code. We actually have a program that’s called the Rural CS Initiative. There’s just not enough CS computer science teachers in our state, so how might we try to bring a way in which existing teachers have a digital and CS background that gives them the capabilities to teach those things in a digital world to our existing student population without necessarily having to retrain computer scientists to be educators in the K-12 setting? And that’s a big endeavor for us as we’re thinking forward.

Wendy Colby: 12:14

It’s great, Nelson, and you know you’ve done, the creation of a college is a pretty big deal, right, as well. And I’m curious, you know, for those who might be listening here, how did you get leadership and faculty on board with this? How long had you been kind of working toward this goal?

Nelson Baker: 12:31

Well, I think we had an advantage in that we’ve been doing this work collectively across the university for a number of years. Remember I said, the night school or evening school started in 1908, so working with the adult population isn’t new. Our K-12 outreach arm actually started within the university in 1990. So that’s you know, 30 years ago.

Wendy Colby: 12:55

Evolution.

Nelson Baker: 12:56

Yeah, exactly. And so we’re bringing those pieces together. So professional education, which is that online adult and non-credit space, with the K-12 seismic piece, with C21U, the Center for 21st Century Universities, which is our research think tank, where should higher education be going? Those three units are coming together to form the ethos of the new college as we start a building of this enterprise. So we’ve been doing work in this for a while, and that work has engaged faculty from across the entire university forever. So they’ve seen the richness, they’ve seen the quality, they’ve been part of it. So this extension to say a new college and tying it to research, which, at a research university, is at our ethos, wasn’t a big leap, and so to see a faculty vote that was vastly in the majority was certainly humbling, because creating a new college at a university is not a simple task, nor happens every day.

Wendy Colby: 14:00

So it shows in some ways you have the spirit of innovation and ambition as a university to evolve. I mean, just those stories you talked about about evolving over the years. This isn’t new to you, but you’ve advanced to sort of stay current with the times.

Nelson Baker: 14:16

I would say that’s true, and I’d say that spirit goes through our students also. So there’s more than 100 student startups every year out of Georgia Tech, and so this startup innovation spirit is something that’s alive and cultivated very well across our university.

Wendy Colby: 14:36

Talk a little bit about the Georgia Tech Atrium Project. You mentioned this to me in a previous conversation, so talk a little bit about what guided the creation. What is it doing today to promote workforce readiness, upskilling, career advancement?

Nelson Baker: 14:51

Yeah. So the Georgia Atrium Project came from listening again to those initial students in our online programs. We realized there’s a social component to education and that was something the students were missing. It’s like, yeah, we can be together, we can go to chat rooms, but there was something about the human spirit that they would love to have. So we started sending faculty out to locations where we had a fair number of online students and when we did that, hundreds of people would show up and it just seemed to be such an event. So we said, well, what if we tried to create a small footprint location, so kind of like an Apple store or a bookstore? So, you know, a small footprint. It’s not a campus but a place for, rather than co-working, you co-learn. We could put a TA or somebody like that. Faculty can go and do TED Talks at that location. We can work with local industry for what are their industry-specific needs for their workforce and then tailor programs for those locations and whatnot.

Nelson Baker: 16:01

So it’s largely been an idea to this point, although next month here in the spring of 2025, we’ll actually open our first atrium here in metro Atlanta. So it’s not in the downtown area where our campus is, it’s in one of the suburbs so we can try out the business model we can try out. Did we listen right? Is it working? But it’s also a concentration of where some of these individuals are located. There’s business that wants us there, but we have several other, both domestically and internationally, that would love us there last week if we could do it. We just want to make sure that we do it with the Georgia Tech quality for the right reasons.

Wendy Colby: 16:39

So there are larger goals, depending on the success and proving out the concept here as you establish this first atrium in Metro Atlanta.

Nelson Baker: 16:48

Absolutely, and I think those larger goals is really something that higher education has been seeking to do for a while and we’ve all struggled with, and that’s the connection with industry, connection with people across their lives. It’s really bringing Georgia Tech to the people, rather than the people having to come to Georgia Tech.

Wendy Colby: 17:08

And talk a little bit about, just a moment on that one like how did you identify, you know, the workforce partnerships? This has again long been a conversation in higher ed, right, how to sort of marry the higher education piece with the workforce piece. So I’m curious as to how you approach those partnerships. I know you talked about listening and talking to the students and faculty and no doubt you had a lot of partnerships in place locally. But how have you brought that forward?

Nelson Baker: 17:34

So not only do we listen to the students and to industry, but all of our programs here at Georgia Tech, like many universities, have advisory boards, and industry sits on those advisory boards. So we ask them very pointed questions when they’re with us across all of our colleges, not just this new college, and gathering that information together gives us insights on what are some of their needs. It forms partnerships. And we go to an industry and say, hey, we heard you say last time we were together X, what if we did something together? What do you think about? And they usually come back and say, well, that’s kind of right, but we’d like to modify it this way. And that’s how partnerships work, right? It’s give and take and it’s the forming of a communal set of goals and objectives that you work on collectively together. And that’s how we’ve done it. And with our alumni being all over the world, we’ve done it. And with our alumni being all over the world, we found some great relationships both with large and small size enterprises, and we all help each other.

Wendy Colby: 18:38

You know, what I love about what you’re sharing here, Nelson, is there’s a simplicity around knowing how to listen and learn and then synthesizing a lot of what you’re hearing to bring forward. You know, that’s something every university can take forward. It’s perhaps not as easy as it sounds sometimes, but I think, I love the fundamentals of what you’re sharing. Let me pivot a little bit here now, and we’re all facing, and I touched on this a little bit earlier, just the growing pressures, right, that we see in higher education, whether that’s the perceived value of higher education. Enrollments are under pressure, changing demographics, the rate of technological advancements like AI, and so I’m wondering how you think about this. How do you think, you know, today? You’ve been in this industry a long time. You collaborate with a lot of other leaders across higher ed. How can universities lead with distinctiveness? And how do you think what you’ve done at Georgia Tech the advancements at Georgia Tech have impacted your current students and will attract more students. Let’s start there.

Nelson Baker: 19:37

So I would say you have to stick to your core. What’s your fundamental capabilities and strengths as a university? Why do you exist? And you begin with those premises because you exist and you’re creating value around those kinds of things. I think when you create items on the fringe, sometimes that value proposition your alumni don’t understand, your external constituents don’t understand, perhaps even internally your own faculty and staff don’t understand. So start with the core. Where are your strong suits, and how does it resonate with your populace and what is that value proposition? Those are the areas that you can really start to innovate.

Nelson Baker: 20:19

And just because we did it last year, last month, last decade, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what people want next week, next month, next year. Go back to my story about the videotapes and movie theater etc. The world’s a changing place. It always has been, always will be. It just seems to be changing faster my opinion, but perhaps that’s an incorrect opinion. But keeping up with the changes and truly listening to make a better product, our educational process, and the outcomes therein are what we’re all about. We want our students to succeed and do well. All of us do in higher education. That is not unique. And so how do we find ways to deliver better in new ways that perhaps are even higher quality.

Nelson Baker: 21:09

So there’s another analogy I like to use, again tied to that theatrical rendition. It used to be people, they still do, go to theaters and watch a play, and somebody said well, the theater only holds so many people and not everybody can come. What if we put a camera in the back of the theater and we broadcast the play? Well, you lose something in that, but you can also see the play. Well, then play turned into movies and we had special effects. There’s some things you can do with technology and cameras you can’t do on the stage. You can take time frames and stretch them or shrink them. You can do animation in different ways. I think education is still looking for its special effects.

Wendy Colby: 21:55

That’s a wonderful example.

Nelson Baker: 21:57

A lot of what we do is put a camera in the back of a classroom, even if it’s not a real classroom anymore, but we still have that kind of central camera, instructor on the stage, that four walls kind of thing, even though there’s not the walls. What is the breakthrough moment when we think about education differently? Is it around gaming technology? Is it around AR, VR, XR? Is it around something that doesn’t even exist yet? That’s the moment that I think is going to change our world tremendously, and we’re trying to prepare, as this new college, what that might be and actually perhaps find it.

Wendy Colby: 22:36

You know, just a couple of things you’ve shared there. First, I loved the what’s the why right for a university to be thinking about, because it’s not always a one size fits all. So what’s your why? And the breakthrough moments. And I love your example of the theater and how almost a new experience can be created by thinking about a different way in which to deliver that experience and leverage innovation and technology to do it. So I love those examples, that thinking boldly. I’m wondering too, you know, again in our university environments and it sounds like you’ve figured out some of the recipe for this, Nelson, is how you bring faculty administrators along, particularly those that just might not have had that same level of familiarity moving into these new modalities?

Nelson Baker: 23:19

Well and I was going to say as a follow-up to the last question too not everybody can follow those changes or want to follow. So there’s a human aspect to this and it gets to your last question. What we try to do is let people try it out on their own, let them dabble in it. If you just throw something at them, they’re usually not going to react well to it, no matter what happens, and so let them try at their pace.

Nelson Baker: 23:48

You’re always going to have the first adopters. Those first adopters will try some things. Oftentimes they may fail. They may succeed. But those first adopters will also be your ambassadors to go out and talk to other faculty and staff about what their experiences were like and they start to share what new modalities, what new experiences that they’ve had. And that’s been our biggest success factor is faculty talking to other faculty staff, talking to other staff about the exciting conversations they’re having in these new environments that they weren’t having in their traditional environment. It pushes them in good ways to up their game, and so even our residential programs improve because of this new cadre of individuals who we call students in these new programs.

Wendy Colby: 24:42

So true, I know I’ve had the same experience, you know, as I think, about some of the online programs we have launched here, and faculty have come from the residential side and are now teaching online and they’re bringing some of those learnings back to the residential side. It’s been really wonderful to kind of watch how that evolves. So, we met a few years ago at one of your affordable online at scale conferences, which I loved, by the way, and that you host and it must be, you know, I was reflecting on how it must be really rewarding to see the kinds of impacts that you’ve had across our industry right? Bringing many together who are now doing a lot of online and innovation and in new ways. And so I’m wondering, you know, what inspires you across our industry today? Do you sort of feel that role you have played to kind of catalyze some of the innovations and evolution that we’ve seen? And then, what might you see on the horizon?

Nelson Baker: 25:37

So, yes, I’m certainly very proud. We, Georgia Tech, are very proud, but I also would be remiss to say we have also not learned from all of you who have been attendees. And that’s the value, I think, of higher education is we’re willing to share, we’re willing to fail together, learn together, and that’s the value proposition of having events like that. In fact, this fall, fall of 25, we’re going to pivot again, and we won’t have a degrees at scale summit that we’ve had. We’re going to have a lifetime learning summit because we believe that this evolution of what we’ve done with affordable degrees at scale is pivoting into how do we think about these things as lifetime pathways from k to gray? How might we do more as a collective across that K-12 space, preparing young youth for a future that would include tertiary education and education across their lifetime? And what could we collectively do post-graduation into that adult space to help our workforce be competitive in a global marketplace?

Wendy Colby: 26:43

That’s wonderful and I look forward to that conference. I’m really excited about it. Is there any advice you have for, you know, other universities or leaders who might be coming into this space and, you know, trying to learn from those who have been successful in advancing some of the kinds of bold initiatives that you’ve been successful in doing, Nelson?

Nelson Baker: 27:04

So listen would certainly be the first one. Listen to your stakeholders, because that’s constantly changing, but be willing to take some calculated risks. I’ve always said to myself that if I don’t fail someplace, I’m not pushing myself enough, and I certainly don’t want the spectacular failure that makes its way to the evening news kind of thing every day. But there’s little failures along the way that we’ve all experienced. What do you learn from that and how do you pick up the pieces and keep going forward? So being able to take risk and learn, fail, keep going, I think are some of those things that I would suggest to other individuals. Try some things out.

Nelson Baker: 27:46

Just because we’ve done it this way, and I think all industries, not just higher education, has this dilemma where, just because we’ve done it this way, it’s the way we’re going to do it tomorrow, because we think that’s what our customers want, but our customers find other avenues, and then all of a sudden they disappear. Where’d they go? What happened? And we look around, we weren’t listening. And what’s happening to our landscape? So there’s as many individuals that are going through educational journeys through their employers perhaps more than there are going through our traditional higher ed system. Are we listening? So I keep asking those why questions. I keep asking the what if questions. How do we adapt to a changing world? And that’s always the question that leads me.

Wendy Colby: 28:35

Are we listening? I love that. Hey, one final question, Nelson. So I know you’re an engineer by background and I’m wondering if you look back at where you started in your early career to where you are today, did you ever imagine your early career to where you are today? Did you ever imagine that this would be where you are today, leading these kinds of innovations, standing up a new college, online at scale degrees. Given the focus on lifetime learning here, I’m just wondering how you reflect on that personally.

Nelson Baker: 29:03

Yeah, no, it’s been an interesting journey and as I tell my children, I tell my students put yourself in a position where you have a broad enough background that luck can happen. You have enough experience that you can pivot and move into different directions. But I’ve been fortunate in my life. Not everybody has been. I was able to go to really good schools and universities. I had artificial intelligence as part of my PhD program. In fact, my PhD thesis was an artificial intelligence design agent for civil engineers system and all of a sudden it dawned on me that people were always struggling in the same part of the course. It was like well, could I use these same techniques to help people learn? And poof, along came a new idea. It was fledgling at first and and here I am, leading an initiative across the university with lots of great people around me and helping also lead the charge, and that’s just humbling as an individual to see those kinds of capabilities and the impacts that we’re making for all people.

Wendy Colby: 30:13

Well, Nelson, I am so grateful for your time and I think what you just said there, you know, the power of collaboration, community sharing, trying to elevate what we’re all doing across our university communities. I am grateful personally for all you’ve done for our industry at large and really appreciate the conversation today.

Nelson Baker: 30:33

Wendy, thank you so much for having me and I look forward to continuing learning because it is a lifetime of learning with us, our new college. We’re all on this journey together.

Wendy Colby: 30:44

Indeed, it is. Thank you, Nelson.

Nelson Baker: 30:46

Thank you.

Wendy Colby: 30:53

Thank you for joining us for this BU Virtual Connects podcast. Special thanks to my colleagues at BU Virtual and to our media team who produces this podcast under the leadership of our studio director, George Vago. To keep up with our BU Virtual Connects series, be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. You can also learn more about our portfolio of online programs at Boston University Virtual by visiting bu.edu/virtual.