Faculty Roundtable: All I Ever Really Need to Know I Learned on YouTube

Mrs. Ute Delaney, UTS Senior Associate Dean and Registrar, presented at the fifth Virtual Faculty Roundtable of this academic year on Tuesday May 4th. She spoke on the topic, “All I Ever Really Need to Know I Learned….on YouTube: Reimagining Higher Education: Badges, Microcredentials, CBE and CLR.”

Delaney is a native of Germany and graduated from High School with a Great Latinum (9 years of Latin studies) and a Graecum (5 years of Ancient Greek). She has a B.S. in Sociology and an MRE from UTS, and has been working at UTS for more than 30 years, first as secretary and since 1995 as Registrar. She is a member of the regional and local professional associations of registrars.

“I was surprised that so many people at UTS were interested in this topic,” she said. “It’s not a deep, philosophical discussion about the mysteries of the universe, which you might expect that a faculty member deals with at seminary. This is a much more administrative topic.”

The bottom line, Delaney said, is that higher education needs to change. Students are not learning what they need to be successful in their careers in the field. Employers are complaining, and educational institutions seem to be out of sync with students and employers.

Delaney showed some statistics about the changing opinions people have about higher education. A staggering amount of people said that they learned skills relevant to their current job specifically on YouTube. Colleges are concerned about the perceived decrease in the value of higher education, and there has been an overall drop in student enrollment across higher education institutions.

She then defined and gave examples of alternative credentials, micro-credentials, competency-based education, co-curricular transcripts, and comprehensive learning records (CLRs), which employers are turning to more and more. Many institutions, she said, are already engaged in non-credit activities that lead to alternative credentials. Competency-based education in particular, is not about the hours in the classroom, but the student’s ability to demonstrate their mastery of a subject. Co-curricular transcripts and CLR’s are higher institutions’ attempt to give a view of all of the experience and education beyond the classes they took.

The presentation inspired many comments and creative applications during the Q&A session. Click here to view the recording of Dean Delaney’s presentation, and stay tuned for the details of the next Roundtable event!