Welcome back to another episode of Ed Up L&D.
I'm your host, Holly Owens, and today we're diving into a
conversation that blends 2 worlds.
I know a lot of you will love business and higher education.
My guest is Rebecca Barnes, Program Director at Bellevue
University, who has a fascinating journey from project
management and finance in the teaching, instructional design
and program leadership. In this episode, we'll explore
how she's merging business know how with learning design,
weaving AI and emerging tech into higher education programs
and creating flexible, relevant learning experiences for today's
adult learners. If you've ever wondered what it
looks like to step into higher Ed as a professional, or how to
lead a program that actually needs learners where they are,
this one's for you. So let's jump right in and hear
Rebecca's story. Hi, we're ispring, an
international team of e-learning enthusiasts who helped more than
60,000 clients across the globe succeed with better online
learning. Our two flagship solutions are
ispring Suite and ispring Learn LMS.
Ispring Suite is an intuitive, all in one authoring tool for
creating engaging e-learning content, and ispringlearn is an
innovative online training platform for onboarding,
upskilling, and certifying your teams.
We also provide tons of free resources for aspiring and
experienced e-learning professionals, conduct weekly
webinars with top industry experts, and organize annual
e-learning conferences, challenges, and championships.
We'd be happy to get to know you and pick a solution that fits
your needs best. Go to www.icepringsolutions.com
to learn more about us, download our resources, and connect.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another fabulous episode of Add
up L&D. My name is Holly Owens and I'm
your host again. I'm super excited every time I
have a new guest on the show. And today I have another new
guest. I have Rebecca Barnes here.
Rebecca, welcome on in to add up L and.
D Thank you, Holly. Glad to be here.
I'm really excited. So, Rebecca, why don't you tell
us a little bit about how your background and how you move from
the world of business into education and learning?
Sure. You know, my background is in
project management, customer experience, consulting and
finance. And over time I realized the
parts I loved most were the moments where I was helping
people learn and succeed. So in matter of fact, at one
time, company had sent us, we were in a leadership class and
I'm sitting in that class and I thought, wow, I would really
like to be doing this all the time.
You know, And it is kind of one of those things you're always
sitting like, oh, maybe, maybe that'll be my, my retirement
job. And then I, I had an opportunity
to start teaching as an adjunct and I was like, oh, this is
really fun. This is cool.
You know, you go to your day job and then this is what you did
for fun. Yeah, I know a second job.
That's what I do for fun. That's a lot of comments.
It's not. And I really fell in love with
it. So now I get to merge business
know how with learning design. I was always kind of a I'm not a
technical person. I was in project management.
So I used to tell my grandmother how I explained my job was I was
a techie to normal person translator.
Yes, that is a great. I've never heard it explained
that way. That's a great way to explain it
because I always used to say like very complex topics make it
very simple. Exactly.
And being able to both talk to the the tech folks about what
you're trying to create and to the end user about what they're
needing and try to come up with the product that's actually
going to solve the problem you're trying to solve.
So now I really see my role as helping both students and
instructors thrive in this fast changing world.
And how do we use Ed tech to make education and the learning
process better? Absolutely.
Well, tell us a little bit about your role at Bellevue, like as
the program director, like what are some of the things you know,
I'm always fascinated by? Like you've, you started out as
an adjunct, you're still teaching in the program, you're
now the program director. So how, what does that look
like? What is that all entail on the
day? To day, sure.
So I'm the program director for the Business Management and
Leadership degree program at Bellevue University.
Our students are online, they're working adults, they're
balancing jobs, families and schools.
So my focus is really on making the learning applied, relevant
and usable. They want it to be something
they can actually go into work the next day and use what they
just. Love that.
Yes, completely applicable. And I also work on weaving
emerging technologies like AI into the curriculum in ways that
empower students rather than overwhelm them.
We're all kind of feeling our way around that's, you know, I
had a colleague who just in this was just a few weeks ago.
She's like, do you realize that ChatGPT has just been out for
1000 days? Yeah.
And so, so we're really living this disruptive technology and,
you know, in the classroom and when we go out and talk to
employers, they're very clear that they expect our graduates
to come out and help them figure out what they're doing with AI.
So making sure that we're we're covering that in the classroom
and staying up to date is really important.
That's great. And you know what's so funny is
like AI is literally everywhere now.
I went like yesterday my electric toothbrush went kaput.
OK, so I'm on Amazon or I'm doing like a what's the Oral-B
versus Sonicare or whatever? And the what pops up is an
electric toothbrush with built in AI AI to tell you where to.
I know I'm. So I'm like, this is like, you
know, that's like next level to me.
Like it's, it's integrated into that sort of technology.
Like I know there's generative AI.
I know there's things behind the scenes that are kind of helping
us write stuff or prompting. But I saw that I was like, this
is absolutely insane that this is already happening.
Because, you know, I imagine a world 510 years from now where
everything is integrated with AI and it's just something that we
use it every day and we don't really notice.
It I think so too. I really try to talk to students
too, about the saying is history doesn't repeat itself, but it
echoes. Yeah.
And when we talk about disruptive technologies, and I
think that's what we're living with right now.
Like, you know what, folks? I don't like to admit it, but
I'm old enough to remember when people use typewriters instead
of computers. So then you've got the personal
computer was a very disruptive technology for business.
And you thought, oh, well, this is going to be it.
This is the one for my lifetime. And luckily I started off in
school learning computers. So we kind of came out and
already we're ready for that. And then the cell phone came out
and yeah, I don't think people really realized how much that
was going to integrate into our lives.
And now you can't log into your computer without your phone.
Right. You can't log into anything
without your phone. You need to text message, you
have to do a passcode, you have to do face stuff.
It's absolutely, it's so different.
I grew up in the analog world as well.
I'm just like, you know, I remember getting our first
computer at about 10 years old and we had that.
We had rented it from Gateway. And my grandmother, you know,
she was all about, she made my sister, myself in high school,
take keyboarding. It was called keyboarding, not
computers or whatever they call it now.
So I'm so glad she did that because I can type really well.
But yeah, definitely the switch from analog to digital and
people say things, you know, at first there's people like
they're very much resistant to the fact that something is
changing and then now we don't even notice it anymore.
So I think, I don't know if you feel the same way, but I think
that's going to be something that where that AI is going to,
that's going to happen with AI with people as well.
They're just not going to be like, no, we can't use AI, know
it's bad, it's going to replace human jobs and things like that.
Oh no, I think we're, we're very much going to be in a human in
the loop world with, with AI. I'm laughing over your
keyboarding because they made us take a actual typing class on a
typewriter. And then the next semester we
had to take a class typing on the computer.
And unfortunately for me, neither one took.
I am not a good typist, but that is one of the things that I love
about, you know, how much technology is moved.
I'm typing away and I'm I'm actually a great speller,
terrible typist, and I'm watching my computer.
Just go ahead and be like, yeah, I know what you meant here.
Exactly. It automatically knows and knows
exactly what you're thinking. It's.
Really, you know, 20 years ago, me and Whiteout were really good
friends, but now, no need. Yeah, absolutely.
And that's, that's a real change in in how the world's going and
how we have to be really deliberate in what we're, what
we're doing and, and how we are approaching our education
product. And in our program, we think a
lot about how adults learn. You know, andragogy is really
different from pedagogy. Our students aren't kids,
they're working adults. Like I mentioned, they've got
families, jobs, experiences. They want their learning to be
very relevant, applied and respectful of their time.
Yeah. So we work real hard to design
our courses to meet them where they are.
And one of the things that we we work on, and this is where AI is
actually very helpful as well, is making the lessons as
accessible as possible. So, you know, not everything in
your course can be done on a phone or on a mobile device, but
we do try to make mobile friendly options wherever we
can. So that way a student, you know,
you're on your 15 minute break at work, you can watch a video,
you can complete a quick lesson or you know, the one I just had
a student done there. Like, yeah, so my kid had this
full weekend soccer tournament and them in the bleachers got my
iPad out and they were able to do a lot of the lessons for the
class right there. And I'm sure they were actually
watching their child when they were playing.
But you know when they're bring out the iPad?
They're multitasking, Right? Exactly.
So you're, that's a good transition to the next question.
Like you're, you know, you're working with the institution
that serves thousands of adult learners and you've taught many
of them. What are some maybe, maybe some
misconceptions or things that people don't know about adult
learners? Learners like you had mentioned
some things like they're, they wanted to be relevant right
away, meeting them where they're at.
So what are some things that maybe, you know, if we're
thinking about this from a learning and development
perspective that people just don't know about adult learners?
You know, in some ways I think it's adult learners and all
learners, but adults in particular.
We, we kind of have a saying that we talk about with our
students. We understand that school at
best for these students is in 3rd place priority wise.
You know, it's family, it's work and then school.
So one of the things that that's really helpful is flexibility,
making it so that you know, they have opportunity to work ahead
when they need to. Or, you know, I'm, I'm actually
fairly generous with extensions. You know somebody I have a
student of just, I have a student right now who is 2 weeks
in the United States and two weeks over in Europe.
And, and when he's in Europe, he's actually at a place where
Internet access may be limited at times.
He's out out on the ocean. And so really it's been great.
It's it's a great test of how of our course design is how well is
that working for him in order to be able to stay caught up and be
able to access what he needs and do things.
And it's actually worked really well, which is kind of one of
the things that we are really striving for in that y'all, like
I said, I've got my y'all folks who are just, yeah, this
weekend's going to be busy. I'm out of town at a soccer
tournament versus the next two weeks are going to be crazy.
I'm going to be. I'm domestic, I'm stateside and
then I'm overseas. That's a crazy travel schedule.
So it definitely has to be a program that's flexible.
And one of the things like you mentioned you do for your
students, you offer extension Ioffer flexible due dates
because you know, there's just not like everybody has something
going on. Like you said, school is
probably in the it's in the top five hopefully.
But other other than that, it's just like, I don't, you know,
like strict deadlines don't necessarily work.
I know there's something that we have in a corporate setting, we
have some strict deadlines, but from learning development
perspective, flexibility is key. And that's also good for for,
like you said, accessibility, making sure everybody is getting
what they need and you're meeting them definitely where
they're at. For sure.
Oh yes, Well, and even you. Know for.
Project management background. And there are we, we got some
strict deadlines like, you know, students know I'm like, OK guys,
the end of this course, I'm going to have a period where I
got to finish final grades and I have to turn those into the
university. That's a hard deadline camp.
Yeah, exactly. Yes, I do the same.
But in the meantime, there's different areas.
I'm like, OK, yeah, we can put some slack in there.
In that particular area, you have an extra couple of days
here and there, you've got something going on or need
something. Just a little flexibility can
really make a huge difference. And another thing that we really
focus on in course design is reducing the cognitive load.
We don't want students wasting time just figuring out where to
click or going to find the chapter that they're going to be
reading. We just go ahead and integrate
links directly in each week. It's going to take you right
right into that chapter that you need to read that week.
And the tools we use. Actually, the great thing too is
I click, I'm right there where I'm going to read, or maybe I
get to read 5 pages and I get interrupted because we have
lives. Then when I come back into the
class the next time, click that same link, it's going to take me
to the page where I left off so I'm not always having to go back
and OK, well, now I got to find, Oh well, here's the link to go
out to the get to the book. Now I got to sign into that
system. Now I got to go and you know
page forward to where I left off of where was.
Put a sticky note somewhere. There was a sticky note
somewhere. Exactly.
So just really making it to where when I do have time, I can
dive right into where I left off and go there.
My my son's a college student and he was in a class that was
not designed that way. And I got to kind of see first
hand, I'm like, OK, This is why we spend this time.
He had literally, it was like a page of just solid words on how
to access his textbook. And by the time, you know, he's
trying to skim it, you know how kids are.
And he finally comes to me, he's like, I can't figure this out,
you know? And I know most of the
publishers pretty well. So I was like, OK, hold on.
It took me 15 minutes to help him get logged into his
textbook. And by that time, he was not in
the mood. Like, you're not ready to read.
No, you're not ready to actively read.
At that point. There's like a barrier.
Yeah. Yes.
And so that, you know, that's something that we really work to
try to reduce and eliminate wherever we can is how can we
make this more student centric it easy for them to get to what
they really need to do. Yeah, absolutely.
I think like, you know, it's it, it takes a lot of work to kind
of figure out kind of balance between like curriculum content,
activities, all the different things.
So technology. So you're obviously including a
lot of different tools into your courses.
So what are some of the tools that you're using and how do you
see those tools as like benefiting the students that are
engaged in your courses? There's a lot of different tools
that we use. Kind of want to love to go back
to a episode of yours just earlier.
You did that episode about Disney and Taylor Swift.
Yes. And love, love that episode.
Thank you. I'm a Disney mom.
My my oldest child is actually down at Disney right now doing
their college program. Nice.
So super excited about that. But you know, what really
inspires me about Disney and, and what I liked about your
podcast is the storytelling. You know, my favorite ride at
Epcot is Spaceship Earth, which probably.
Oh my God. That's one people don't people.
That's the, that's the one that's in the Epcot ball.
It's not not Mission of Mars, that's the one that's in the
Epcot ball. They're redoing that one.
Yes, it needs some. It needs an update.
It needs it. Needed an update but you know
the storytelling and it is just yes that.
Is so true. And it talks about human
communication is, is, is the focus there.
But their big thing is they're showing you this.
It's storytelling all the way through from, you know, they're
talking about cave walls and and then they've got, you know, the
Socrates and the, you know, books and libraries and then all
through computers. But the whole thing is the whole
time you're just immersed. They're telling, telling you a
story. And I think that's really the
key to how people learn. I mean that we are just
programmed as human beings that stories are how we learn best.
You'll remember a story. Yes.
And I, I was reminded the other day, my, my husband works from
home. And so he likes to have the
oldies channel on in the background.
He likes background noise. And it was an old episode of
Andy Griffith. Yep, we've been to the museum.
My fiancee now, yeah. And you might not think, oh, I'm
going to learn something about education and and learning from
Andy Griffith. But in this particular episode,
Opie's complaining about his teacher and and having to learn
his history lessons. And you don't all make the
mistake of agreeing with him. And well, that's history.
Yeah, I know. So he kind of goes in thing
enough. This is old, so if I don't need
it and the teacher has to come back and get on his case anyhow,
how he turns these little boys around into being interested is
instead of asking them to go and read the history book and then
answer the questions, which is kind of how the teacher was
doing it, quite honestly. Yeah.
He starts telling him a story about this old boy named Paul
Revere and makes it really exciting and interesting.
And then they start asking him questions about what, when he's
like, oh, you know, I don't know that part, but you know where I
bet you could find it? And that history book your
teacher gave you, right. And all of a sudden, now it's a
story and they're interested and they're buying in and they're
invested. And I was just like, oh, that's
hilarious. That was not what I thought.
I when I went downstairs to grab something, I didn't think I was
going to get a lesson from Andy Griffith on how to teach better.
But there you have it. But that's the whole thing, you
know, or if I think about like Ken Burns documentaries, just
fascinating to sit through, you know, and that's the whole
thing. Storytelling isn't fluff in
education. It's actually what makes our
content real, more memorable and meaningful.
And, and that's where I really like and, and I'm going to call
out one of your sponsors, but we really enjoy using the Ice
Spring tool and the ability to use the role play function.
Yeah, you can build these, you take these business cases that
could just be here, read this PDF now, answer these questions
and go through these steps. We can take the same thing.
And all of a sudden it's characters and they're
interacting and it just brings it to life in a way that's
really way more engaging. Yeah, than just hearing somebody
talk about it. Another example I have there's
some great AI tools out there. One of my colleagues had just
done he did a YouTube video of just himself sitting at his desk
and and he's explaining some concepts and and that's still
that you know, it's like, hey, you know, great, it's a video,
you know, it's real person interactive.
But we what we ended up doing is we took the auto generated
transcript of this video that he just recorded of, of him
speaking and we put it into one of the AI video generators and
it's pulling in all this, this great, you know, stock video
content. It put music behind it.
So he's still saying the same thing.
It just made it, you know, better and he.
Was more engaging and made it more exciting and they connected
to it more. Oh, yes.
And that's, it's one of those things that's like, wow, you
know, this is something that would have taken me so much time
and effort if I'd had to do it manually.
Yeah. And now you, you know, you input
your script, you click and you wait and it just comes back and
it's done. So these tools are just really
enabling us to put things in our classes that, you know, before
our our imagination and our ability to create maybe weren't
completely aligned. Yeah.
But with AI, we can actually, you know, the things you
imagined that you weren't maybe capable of doing it maybe
because of time or skill. A lot of times you may be able
now to make that happen. You know, I am not a programmer.
I'm not a programmer. I well I should say I know
enough HTML to get myself in a whole lot of trouble.
But before that, when I was trying to build things in the
LMS, little things, I would be out, you know, looking up on
websites, making sure, you know, you know, trying to figure
things out. And now I can describe to the AI
what I'm trying to create. Yes.
And you know, then, you know, it may take some re prompting here
and there, but and I can create these really great interactive
learning objects to put into my classroom that really kind of
take it from this, you know, flat text environment to
something that that's so much more engaging and and the time
element that it saves us. And that's kind of what we came
back to. It's the human in the loop.
Yep. Being able, but that's where the
skill comes in too, of you have to know what you're looking for.
You've got to know whether what you could spit out.
Is that really what I want or I elevate prompt a lot of?
Yeah, spend. A lot of time re prompting.
Yeah, me too. Me.
Too. But boy, what I can get at the
end is something I would never have been able to create before.
Yeah, so it's the Super exciting.
That's crazy. Yeah.
I love this. I love the way that you're
thinking and you're thinking about this with your courses and
everything. And I heard that Bellevue won a
Catalyst Award. So congratulations on that.
Kudos, Hughes. But tell us a little bit more
about what that award means for the institution or what the, you
know, what is that all about? That sounds like something
that's very important. So the Catalyst award was for
our People, Business and leadership program, which is a
certificate program we have specifically designed for
Frontline supervisors. So these are those folks that
are going from line positions into that very first management
role. And really that's I mentioned
ice spring before, we use a lot of ice springs in that case and
those students into situations that they may not have
encountered before. So we can create it in a safe
environment. So here you are, here's his case
study. Now here's the role play.
You make the choice. And so you've got this whole
adaptive learning of, you know, depending on what choice you
make, you're going to go down which pathway.
And that's something that Ice Spring allows us to do.
The Catalyst award is from Anthology, which is the parent
company of Blackboard. So they're looking at all these
different courses and programs that they're a worldwide company
and really looking at who's innovating and making changes
and updates and things that are helping students learn, which is
kind of what we've been talking about this.
Whole time, yes, absolutely. And you got an award for it.
So that's awesome you're doing it.
It sounds like you're doing it the way that I was intended to
be done. So absolutely.
So we're, believe it or not, it's it goes by fast every time
when you have a good conversation.
So we're coming up on the end of the episode here.
And I think we have, we do have a lot of higher education
professionals, L&D professionals who are in our audience
transitioning teachers, people who are thinking about going
into different careers. So if you had to give those
people like maybe the top three pieces of advice, maybe they
want to go on higher end, they want to be an instructor at a
certain point or they want to be a program director.
What would you tell them? You know, the key is to look
for, if you're not already teaching, look for opportunities
to maybe be able to teach as an adjunct.
We have a lot of working professionals.
We are so fortunate in that the people who choose to teach for
us have this breadth of experience that is just
fantastic. And being able to bring them
into the classroom and combine that with our, our approach to
really very conscious design of the courses.
We have the technology set up for them so that that teacher
can come into the course and just share their experience and
interact with students that, that important stuff.
And the, you know, that's the whole thing.
If you've got a lot of professional experience and
you're want to share that with students, there are lots of
opportunities out there because particularly in business and
management programs, that's something we we really actively
are seeking. We're actually doing it, Yeah,
yes. Yeah, exactly.
So that's a really great way to get in the door.
And then you kind of have, you know, in my particular case, the
opportunity to move over into full time came about at an
interesting time. I still people.
I started full time in this program director position on
March 5th, 2020 so. My God.
I moved into my office on campus and thank goodness I did not
bring a live plant that day. Because 2.
Days later they closed campus and I did not see my office
again for months. So.
But the great thing is we were already online, students were
online, and, and while a lot of universities really struggled
through that, we actually thrived because if anything, we
had more students coming in because people were home and
they were like, OK, you had the. Infrastructure.
You had the support ready to go. Yes, and they couldn't go do
some of the things they used to do.
So it was a really good time actually to start a degree.
Yeah, if we only had new feeling on Notre Dameis powers.
But it, you know, and it was just, it was a very interesting
time to be starting out, but it was actually, it was great in
that we did continue to grow and focus and just kind of, you
know, kept down the path. And I think that was, you know,
kind of the main thing you had to look for.
And the, and the other thing is just particularly with online
education, and I think we're, we're moving more and more that
way, is being open to technology and learning everything you can.
And how can you leverage technology to make things work
better, both for yourself as an instructor and for the students?
And that's where I think this disruptive AI technology is
going to be really great for us. I know there's a lot of talk out
there about it. You know, it's the end of the
world and it's terrible. They said that about computers.
They said that about just think about all the different things
like Y2K, the world is ending, like, you know, all the
different things. Up to this point, it really
hasn't happened. It really hasn't happened.
This can you just it's fear. It's it's fear.
And you know, we realize, we actually start to realize that
this is not the case. This is not what's happening
and. And that's the thing, you know,
some of the skills, soft skills that we're trying to teach our
students that are, are hugely in demand are adaptability and
resilience. And so this is really an
opportunity for us to display those skills ourselves so that
we, you can really kind of stand there and, and say, yes, I can
teach this when you've displayed that skill yourself.
Exactly. And if and if we're not
displaying it, then are they going to take us seriously when
we tell them we're trying to teach them that?
Absolutely. Well, Rebecca, it's been a great
conversation and you've shared so much knowledge and
information and I, I so appreciate you coming on the
show and chatting with me about Bellevue's program and your
experience as well. Everything is going to be in the
show notes where you can connect with Rebecca, find out about
Bellevue's programs, all the different things.
If you like this episode, please subscribe to our show.
Rebecca, thanks again for coming on and sharing all the things.
It was a really interesting episode.
I appreciate it. Thanks so much, Holly.
Thanks for spending a few minutes with Holly.
She knows your podcast queue is packed.
If today's episode sparked an idea or gave you that extra
nudge of confidence, tap, follow or subscribe in your favorite
app so you never miss an episode of Ed Up L&D.
Dropping a quick rating or review helps more educators and
learning pros discover the show, too.
Want to keep the conversation going?
Connect with Holly on LinkedIn and share your biggest take
away. She reads every message.
Until next time, keep learning, keep leading, and keep believing
in your own story. Talk soon.
Hi, we're ispring, an international team of e-learning
enthusiasts who help more than 60,000 clients across the globe
succeed with better online learning.
Our two flagship solutions are ispring Suite and ispring Learn
LMS. Ispring Suite is an intuitive,
all in We'd be happy to get to know you and pick a solution
that fits your needs best. Go to www.ispringsolutions.com
to learn more about us and connect.