ALIGN | KCTCS

A NEW EDUCATIONAL MODEL TO SUPPORT LEARNERS

At the charge of the President’s Leadership Team, more than 100 faculty and staff, another 100 plus stakeholders across the system, and external partners researched and considered various factors affecting higher education between August 2020 – November 2021 to make recommendations for what an alternative educational delivery model could look like. This dynamic process was documented through a first-of-its-kind Field Guide, a resource that distills the key lessons learned and implementation guidance from the planning process in order to help state systems think deeply about aligning learning with in-demand skills.

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The factors affecting higher education include:

The future of work and how it will be impacted by automation, artificial intelligence, other technologies, and remote work
Need to increase Kentucky’s ability to reach its postsecondary attainment goal
Competition from providers offering more flexible education models
Moves from large companies like Amazon and Walmart creating their own certificates and partnerships with education providers, making the education market more competitive
Need in Kentucky to increase labor participation rates, college-going rates, and, now, response to unemployment, permanent loss of jobs, childcare, and health concerns due to COVID-19 in 2020 and into 2021
Ability for dislocated workers, throughout time, to quickly reskill and upskill, shortening the timespan Kentuckians are out of work
Increasing attention from the philanthropic and federal departments to catalyze pilots of new and flexible education and student support frameworks

To support the consideration of more flexible offerings that focused on skills (including university transfer skills, effectiveness, and technical skills), the presidents supported the exploration of a learning fixed/time variable instructional framework for some or all coursework, including General Education, Technical Education, and Workforce Solutions – the whole system. In response, the KCTCS Chancellor’s Office (the Chancellor is the chief academic officer) staff was awarded a planning grant by Ascendium Education Group with the KCTCS Foundation, Inc. serving as the fiscal agent. To learn more about what excited colleges about this project, check out conversations with Dr. Greg Feeney, Provost at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

The project’s hypothesis: What would a new flexible educational delivery model, across all parts of the 16-college system, look like for KCTCS? ALIGN—Knowledge and Skills for the Future of Work was designed to explore this question over an 18-month planning period leading to the development of recommendations on how KCTCS can improve the ways learners are taught and supported, enhance employer partnerships, and help learners with their goals to transfer and/or secure a job upon completion of a credential.

From the President

"The ALIGN project provided us an opportunity to take a hard look at ourselves to determine how we can streamline our processes to become more efficient and student friendly. Our goal is always to do what’s best for students. It’s extremely important that we support what our business partners need as well, which is getting students through the pipeline quickly. That’s why I’m excited about the possibility of flexible learning models that can be prototyped and scaled."

- Dr. Larry Ferguson, acting KCTCS president, KCTCS President