In just 55 days, New Orleans will become the global capital of adult learning. From Oct. 31 through Nov. 1, the city will host CAEL’s 50th annual conference. Thought leaders from all corners of the education-employment ecosystem will gather at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside. There they will experience more than 175 speakers across more than 125 sessions, including a keynote presentation by Paul LeBlanc. Paul, the Former President of Southern New Hampshire University, is a renowned leader in higher education innovation. Together with Ruth Watkins, President of Postsecondary Education at Strada Education Foundation, he will delve into artificial intelligence’s (AI) transformative potential to shape the landscape of postsecondary education.
If you’re like me, you’ll have much to ask about the latest watershed event re-shaping education. In the meantime, below are a few questions Paul answered in advance about this and other pressing topics in education and employment. I look forward to seeing you in October! It’s still not too late to secure a reduced registration rate.
CAEL: There are many factors making partnerships between educators and employers must-haves rather than nice-to-haves. What do you see as the biggest challenge to forging them?
Paul LeBlanc: The biggest challenge is that educators and employers must live in parallel, if loosely connected, universes. They speak different languages, have different values, move at different speeds, and are rewarded for different behaviors. And each has a desire for a student or employee that may or may not reflect that student’s desires and goals.
CAEL: If you could snap your fingers and make one immediate policy or process change in postsecondary education or workforce development, what would it be?
Paul LeBlanc: A wholehearted shift to competency-based education, in which the credit hour as a measure of learning is replaced by well-defined competencies and skills and verified through rigorous assessment.
CAEL: What’s one piece of advice you would give to an adult who needs to upskill or reskill but is uncertain of where to begin?
Paul LeBlanc: Guidance. Find good guidance. It’s not something you read about or the fact that your uncle’s job looks interesting or that you saw a TV show that featured a cool job. You need to know yourself—your skills, passions and interests—to determine what career path, not next job, might be best suited for you, then confirm that there is demand for that pathway in your local area—unless you are willing to move. It’s a huge problem, the lack of guidance.
CAEL: In one or two sentences, can you share a sneak peek of what you’ll be discussing at the conference?
Paul LeBlanc: I’ll be in a fireside chat exploring the ways AI will impact workforce and thus education.
CAEL: Besides viewing your presentation, what’s the number one reason someone should attend CAEL’s annual conference?
Paul LeBlanc: It’s the one place entirely focused on the nontraditional learner, the working adult for whom the incumbent system often is inadequate. If you think about opportunity for youth, the 40 million people with some credits and no degree—and often debt—and those working in dead-end jobs with little prospect, this is a huge population that needs what CAEL works to develop and support.
CAEL: Can you make one contrarian prediction about the future of postsecondary education or workforce development?
Paul LeBlanc: Overnight, with the arrival of ChatGPT, all university curricula were rendered obsolete.
CAEL: Anything you’d like to add?
Paul LeBlanc: AI is a tsunami that is washing over society and thus higher education. If we get it right, we can move from an information economy to an economy of care, in which humans doing human jobs that improve society and make lives and communities better comes to replace the soul-deadening jobs of the information economy. It means teachers and nurses and social workers would enjoy status and support, while we would place little value on accountants, lawyers and IT work. Sound impossible? It’s exactly that world-upending kind of change that happens when a paradigm-shifting technology comes into the world. This is some of what I want to talk about when we are together in New Orleans.
I look forward to learning more from this keynote session and the hundreds of other presentations during our conference. I hope to see you at one or more of them. Registration information is available at cael.org.
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