Greg Edwards, head of learning at Rize Education, discusses how Rize helps colleges quickly launch new career-oriented majors. Topics include specialized courses, online course development, advantages of a four-year degree, and meeting student demand for relevant majors.
Rise Education partners with colleges to quickly launch career-oriented majors, offering shared online courses that meet rigorous standards and can be added to existing catalogs.
Faculty from the consortium colleges play a crucial role in course design, providing subject matter expertise and ensuring continuity, while online components facilitate cross-institutional collaboration.
Deep dives
Rise Education: Helping Colleges Launch New Programs
Rise Education is a company that works with a consortium of 135 small liberal arts colleges to quickly launch new career-oriented majors and programs. They provide a range of shared online courses that can be added to a college's existing course catalog to create in-demand majors, such as cybersecurity, data analytics, and web design. Through their centralized curriculum design process, Rise ensures that courses meet the rigorous standards of all colleges in the consortium. By partnering with Rise, colleges can get new programs up and running in just one or two semesters. The involvement of industry representatives and the emphasis on projects and discussion forums in course design help drive valuable career outcomes for students.
The Role of Faculty in Rise Education's Model
Faculty from the teaching institutions involved in the Rise consortium play a crucial role in the design and delivery of courses. They provide subject matter expertise and work with the Rise instructional design team to design courses that meet the standards and objectives of the program. The involvement of faculty from the home institutions ensures continuity and expertise in teaching the courses. While the courses are primarily offered online, they also have optional synchronous components, including live classes and office hour support. The courses run on Rise's instance of Canvas, and students from multiple partner institutions can participate in the same course section, allowing for cross-institutional collaboration and exposure to different perspectives.
Program Development and Course Identification
Rise Education identifies new programs to develop based on the needs reported by the consortium of colleges. They review these programs against internal rubrics that focus on student outcomes and teachability. Rigorous assessment is conducted to ensure clear career outcomes and viable program design. The rise instructional design team works closely with faculty and industry representatives to build courses that align with program and course learning outcomes. Key features of the course design include an emphasis on projects to develop portfolio work, discussion forums to foster communication skills and reflection, and adherence to diverse learning design standards from multiple institutions.
Pros and Cons of the Four-Year Degree and the Future of Higher Education
The four-year bachelor's degree remains valuable due to the extended timeframe it provides for learning and the opportunity to engage in a broad range of subjects and experiences. It enables students to develop a holistic set of skills and knowledge, preparing them for various challenges in life beyond specific career paths. However, the rising focus on the return on investment (ROI) in education poses challenges. Alternative options, such as boot camps, offer condensed and specialized learning, but may lack the depth, contextualization, and time needed for broader understanding. The challenge lies in finding a balance between ROI considerations, ensuring solid career outcomes, and preserving the value of taking time to explore diverse areas of learning.
On this episode, I talk with Greg Edwards, head of learning at Rize Education. Rize is a for-profit company that works with a consortium of over 135 colleges and universities to help them quickly launch new, career-oriented majors and other programs. The institutions partner with Rize, which can provide half a dozen core online courses for these majors, sourced from the consortium, that layer on existing courses at the home institution to get these new programs up and running in a semester or two.
As head of learning at Rize, Greg is involved in all aspects of course design and development. In our conversation, he shares how Rize goes about identifying new programs to create, how course design works at a consortium scale, and the roles that faculty play in this new model.
