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.
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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.