As adult learners balance education with work and personal responsibilities, institutions must pair flexible pathways with clear milestones and personalized support to help them succeed. Recognizing existing knowledge and connecting learning to career goals can help higher education build experiences that strengthen confidence, sustain progress and encourage lifelong learning. In this interview, Shantanu Bose discusses how structured flexibility supports adult learner persistence and how recognizing prior learning creates more efficient pathways to a credential.
The EvoLLLution (Evo): Higher ed has made significant progress in expanding flexibility for adult learners, but what are the next steps institutions need to take to truly meet adult learner needs?
Shantanu Bose (SB): Flexibility has been the cornerstone of adult education for a long time. Our national study, “Beyond Flexibility: What Today’s Learners Expect from Competency-Based Education,” surveyed 600 prospective graduate and undergraduate students and confirms this. 89% of graduate students and 88% of undergraduate students want flexibility. What is new is that prospects are asking for structure along with flexibility—something we’re calling structured flexibility. Some might call it an oxymoron, but structured flexibility is emerging as the new paradigm.
While we’ve heard loud and clear that adults appreciate flexibility, we’re also aware that flexibility alone doesn’t always translate into strong completion rates and learner outcomes. This is where structured flexibility is the next evolution that higher education must embrace. Yes, we give you flexibility, but we also provide the right structure for you to be successful with that flexibility.
That means flexibility with the right milestones, personalized support and even integrating experiential learning, so you can see how coursework applies to the real world. It’s a program built for you, an adult who’s busy and balancing multiple things. It’s no longer about seat time. It’s about structured flexibility. Almost 90% of students and prospects we surveyed said, “Yes, we love flexibility. However, give us the structure to be successful.”
Evo: How can institutions balance learner autonomy with the structured support adult learners need to stay on track and continue to succeed throughout their education journey?
SB: How exactly do we balance that? Again, we relied on our research to give us insights on what parts of structured flexibility adult learners wanted to emphasize.
One thing we heard loud and clear is that adult learners want control over their time. It’s not about dictating a specific day and time for classes, say 10:00 AM to 10:50 AM, but about giving you the opportunities to engage with faculty and peers. You may choose to attend live sessions if you are available, but if you have another commitment, you can watch the recorded lessons or converse with your peers and faculty at a later time. It should be noted that the recordings of lessons have come a long way in terms of making the content more digestible. After watching the recording, you can engage in asynchronous discussions and complete assignments in the learning management system to show you’re still making progress on your coursework.
The second thing we found is the need for guardrails. Flexibility is great, but if you go two weeks without engaging in your coursework, we’re going to nudge you. Faculty are going to make sure you’re okay if they haven’t heard from you. Perhaps something urgent has come up with you or your family or in your life. And we understand you are juggling more than your education. We respect that, and when you are ready to engage, we help you get back on track.
The study also revealed that almost half—49%—of graduate students want deadlines. So, we set deadlines while providing the structure and support you need to meet them. And if you need more time, our fast track modality lets you continue into the next subscription period. That’s how we balance autonomy: control over your time, with guardrails to keep you moving.
Evo: How should colleges rethink recognition of prior learning to help adults move more efficiently toward a credential without compromising any academic quality?
SB: To me, prior learning is an important feature of how our fast track modality has been built. It’s designed to fast-track you through courses where you have prior knowledge. If you’re a marketing guru who spent 25 years in marketing, we want you to be able to demonstrate that. We will, of course, validate that.
For example, you breeze through the formative part of the learning and move straight to the final summative portion of the course. In that example, if you say, “I know how to write marketing plans. I know how to create marketing budgets. I know how to conduct a robust media spend analysis.” We would say, “Great, show us.” If you demonstrate the required competencies for that course in a week, you could fast-track through your marketing course. But when you get to your accounting class, you might say, “I’ve never taken an accounting class before. I need the full 16 weeks.” Great, we’ll start with the first course in accounting. If you ask, the professor may even cover some basic math needed for accounting in a live session to make sure your math concepts are right. A built-in AI assistant may also help you get up to speed.
So, prior learning assessment is a very critical component of our competency-based fast-track education. Every course has three competencies, with a summative exam at the end of each one. Coursework includes formative assessments that build toward the summative exam under each of the competencies. This structure lets students flex based on how much or how little they know. The student can take advantage of their prior knowledge without compromising the academic quality of the program.
Evo: What roles do these clear milestones and that proactive support play in helping learners persist and complete the program?
SB: We take a holistic approach to the scaffolding we provide. During the design phase, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to give students visibility into where they are in their courses and their overall program. We created a progress bar that allows students to see how much of the course they’ve completed and know exactly what they have left. Those milestones are really important to keep students motivated.
We had the benefit of our research, which was screaming: structure, deadlines and milestones. We also wanted to keep jobs and competencies front and center in the fast track design. Ultimately, students want to use their education to attain better jobs and better careers. Fast track meets this need by aligning competencies directly with career-based skills. Then, we created the structure for students to learn and demonstrate those competencies.
Within each competency, students move through lessons, knowledge checks, formative assignments and ultimately summative assessments. The knowledge checks are low-stakes and can be taken multiple times, so students can verify what they learned and ensure their foundation is solid before they move forward.
We also provide live sessions with faculty members and peers, as well as flexible office hours. The goal is to move from the sage on the stage to the guide by your side. Students can connect with faculty and peers synchronously through live sessions and asynchronously within the learning management system. They can also watch recordings or live sessions and reach out to the faculty one-on-one via office hours or email. Additionally, the course includes an AI learning assistant for immediate support when students are learning online. In short, there is plenty of support and a well-designed structure that provide students with the necessary tools, milestones and timely help to keep them moving forward in their learning.
Evo: If you could challenge higher ed leaders to rethink one assumption that they may have about serving adult learners, what would it be? And what should they do differently moving forward?
SB: If I could challenge one assumption, I’d probably ask higher education leaders to move away from treating learning primarily as the delivery and testing of knowledge toward creating an experience that builds curiosity, confidence and a lifelong passion for learning. We can all relate back to how we learned from a textbook, chapter by chapter, cramming for exams. And truth be told, we forget half of what we learned soon after the final exams are over. Through this process, we often end up alienating our students. My question to higher education leaders is: How can we bring the spark, interest and passion back to our learners? Education is not meant to judge. Testing has become the end goal instead of being a means to a greater purpose. The classroom is a place to explore your passion and a platform to practice in a risk-free environment. If you mess up, it’s okay. You get to keep trying, and we as educators need to create that risk-free environment.
Everybody starts at a different place. So, my challenge to higher education leaders is: How do we create a forum where people look forward to learning, where students can bring their prior knowledge, learn from their professors and peers and explore their interests? Perhaps this is an ambitious vision, but I want to challenge our assumptions and bring passion and joy back to learning.
Photo caption: Dealing with competing responsibilities and armed with prior job experience and knowledge, adult learners are seeking higher education that provides structured flexibility, recognizes what they already know how to do and allows them to move forward in their careers.