How to Redesign Your Institution for Adult Learners, Not Just Recruit Them:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 326 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton with guest Dr. Evan Kropp

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 326 – with Dr. Drumm McNaughton and Dr. Evan Kropp

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:31] Guest Introduction

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Dr. Evan Kropp, executive director of distance education at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. Evan leads one of the online graduate programs for the University of Florida there at the College of Journalism and Communications, and he’s really done some amazing things with this program.

Some of the thoughts that he passed out in the conversation were how adult learners are in fact different from undergraduates and how we can learn from graduate programs to adapt to the online learners. So without any further introduction, let’s take it up with Evan.

Evan, welcome to the show.

Evan Kropp: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Drumm McNaughton: I am looking forward to a good conversation today. We’ve had a couple of really good conversations thus far. I think this is just going to be one heck of a conversation on adult learners and how the enrollments are changing because of them and what we need to do.

[00:01:35] Dr Evan Kropp’s Background

Drumm McNaughton: But before we get into that, give us a little bit of your background, please. For me, you’ve got a fascinating background.

Evan Kropp: Oh, absolutely. So I am actually a career changer. I came into higher education as a second career. I started in the field of communications, which I studied in college, so I have a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a PhD in communications. And decided to go into higher education to really give back and help people achieve their dreams.

And now in my current role at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, I get to impact a lot of lives, which I really love. In my role, I oversee the online programs, so our undergraduate and graduate online programs. Most of my focus, has been on our graduate program which currently enrolls about 650 students. I oversee everything from admissions to advising to student support, curriculum. Everything is kind of wrapped up under my title, but I get a lot of great colleagues to help me out throughout the college, which I really enjoy.

Drumm McNaughton: Hmm.

[00:02:39] Why Are We Seeing An Adult Enrollment Surge?

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I’m going to ask you a question because this is something I have been wrestling with a little bit. With the change in demographics, we’re seeing more and more adults, adult learners, for lack of a better word, we’re seeing more and more adults going for undergraduate education. How did we get here?

Evan Kropp: Well, we got here for a few reasons. I think two of the more impactful reasons, first of all, there’s fewer traditional age students. So we’re seeing fewer traditional students, and universities are trying to fill their seats with non-traditional students, which are our adult learners, which actually the adults are becoming so prevalent we’re starting to stop calling them non-traditional students because their population is growing so much.

We’re also seeing a need from adults to adapt, advance, restart in their careers, and in order to do that they’re seeing the need to upskill. So, first with the fewer students, we’re at this enrollment cliff. I think everybody’s probably heard the term enrollment cliff, which is really tied to the falling birth rates after the 2008 recession. And that created a lot of pressure on these institutions that are relying on these students, especially those that are tuition driven. And as we’re recording this week, there were already three articles out about schools failing to meet their enrollment numbers for fall, and how much of a negative financial impact that is having on those institutions that they’re having to, conduct layoffs and cutbacks of programs and other things. So this is a really serious problem.

So the schools are looking at this going, “Well, if we can’t fill from younger students, let’s look for some adults.” And the numbers out there range from 40 to 42-ish million adults that exist in the United States that have some credit, college credit, but no credential. So this is a prime group of people who at one point tried to go through college, didn’t get all the way through for whatever reason, but now universities are saying, “Hey, let’s go back to this group as well.” So those are the two major driving factors.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, you’ve also got political factors that are coming into it. There’s far more publicity about going into the trades. You can, quote, “Make as much money,” et cetera, in the trades as you can in over your career, and that’s not true, but that’s the publicity that’s out there. College costs too much. But people are finding, especially adults who may have started and dropped out or just never started, that they really can’t get to where they needed to and wanted to go without that higher education degree.

Evan Kropp: Yes, absolutely. I have a family member that is exactly dealing with this. He’s a great example. Has an associate’s degree and has been working in the same field for 15 years, and has hit the ceiling and is unable to move up. And what we’ve been working on is trying to get him to advance and move to another job, and rethink about how his skills can be repackaged.

And it’s been really interesting to me to see what a challenge he’s running into without that college degree. And it really does feel so limiting. And despite our conversations of, “Hey, you don’t need a college degree,” like you say, “Go to trade school, find other paths in life.” For certain careers, it is still limiting to not have that degree. And for us, we make this promise to people, “Come to higher ed and we’ll have all these positive impacts on you.” And really, what this opportunity is for people, it’s an opportunity for us to go back to them and try and fulfill that original promise that went unfulfilled in their first attempts at school.

So it’s really it can be a really positive thing. It’s not just necessarily let’s refill the coffers with this group of people, but it is let’s go back and look at people who had the dream but weren’t able to fulfill the dream, and now how can we help them do that?

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Your brother I think is a really good example of what typically happens. You’ve had many states, the government saying you do not need a four-year degree for this. But the reality of the situation is if you want to move up to those higher levels, and if you think about what the purpose of college has been and why people go to college, they need a job, they want a promotion, or they want a raise.

When you think about that, the current thinking and the way people believe is to get to those higher positions, you have to have a college degree. It’s not just about having the quote, “Sheepskin.” There’s learning, there’s transformation that goes on with those type of things.

[00:07:38] Adult Learner Needs

Drumm McNaughton: But getting back to the adult learners, you said something that I thought was really poignant when we were talking a few days ago, and you said, ” Undergrad degrees are designed for 18 to 22, 24-year-olds, and we’re getting more and more adults in there.” I would have to bet, and I know this to be true because I’ve worked with adult learners, is adult learners have different needs. What we’ve done is essentially dump them into a system that isn’t designed for them.

Evan Kropp: Absolutely.

Drumm McNaughton: Are those needs that they need?

Sorry, that’s a department of redundancy department.

What are the needs that they need?

Evan Kropp: What are the needs that they need? They, they need needs that they need.

Really, I think it’s super interesting that universities are going out and saying, “Hey, here’s this population of 40 some odd million people. Let’s take them and insert them into this system that we already have built.” And the, the system’s not necessarily built to meet their needs, to be attractive to them in some areas, or even be accessible to them in many instances. I always talk about the classes that are happening in the middle of the afternoon. Well, if you’re an adult and you’re working full-time, how do you leave work and get over to a class in the middle of the afternoon? So that is a structural problem that exists that we need to be aware of, and we need to consider how we can make changes to the structure in order to serve these adult learners. So really the flexibility that we need to build into our programs is required, it’s not a luxury. It’s something that the adult learners need in order to be successful , and to access this education in the first place.

We need to have clearer program pathways. Let adults know exactly, “This is what you’ve accomplished so far, and this is what you need to continue working through and achieve the degree that you’re working towards.” We need to have transparent costs. This is incredibly, incredibly important. A lot of people who are working are getting reimbursed for education by their employers, but many others aren’t. And what is this going to run me?

I just redid, on our graduate program page, the graduate adults and the undergraduate adults have the same questions here, I redid our whole financial page, and I made it really clear, here’s the cost of a degree. If you pay for a class, you pay as you go. Here’s the cost as you go if you take this many credits, and really help people have the information presented in a way that helps them with their budget and their financial plans. Adults are obviously very worried about that. We need to be very clear about what they’re working towards. They don’t want a degree for the sake of having a degree. They want a degree for a very specific purpose. So are we offering a curriculum that aligns with that purpose? And then are we showing them why they’re doing certain things and how that is going to positively impact their goals, their careers, and professional aspirations that people have.

Drumm McNaughton: Sure. And this is one of the, the big hacks against higher ed is they’re not really teaching how to, they’re teaching more theoretical. And when someone goes back, an adult learner goes back to college, Yes, they need the degree to move on, et cetera, but what’s the immediate impact of the education? What are they learning, and how can they apply it in their job next week, not next year or two years out?

Evan Kropp: Right. And these learners, these adults are different from the high school to college students, in which case they’re looking for a certain experience. They’re looking to grow as individuals. They’re starting out their lives and maybe their brains aren’t fully developed yet. I don’t know what age they say the brain’s now fully developed in this day.

Drumm McNaughton: 26. But that’s okay.

Evan Kropp: Yes so they’re not fully developed yet.

Drumm McNaughton: Yet I know a lot of folks who don’t have a developed brain at 54. I can, I resemble that remark.

Evan Kropp: Oh.

Drumm McNaughton: But that’s okay.

Evan Kropp: We’ll move on from that one.

But Yes, the, the adults approach education in different ways. They want immediate impact. If I learn something, how can I take this out into the real world and have it work for me immediately? So that doesn’t mean eliminating theory. It really means connecting the theory to the action. For me, when people understand how the theories connect to their professional practice, it makes it much more useful for them.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And that brings me to just a random thought.

[00:12:28] Authentic Adult Learning Program Design

Drumm McNaughton: Schools are being forced, and I don’t want to leave this topic, but just something to think about, schools are being forced to look at more workforce development versus programs. This is not an either/or, this is a yes/and type question because these adult learners need that, but the undergrads need that type of thing as well. You’re not throwing the theoretical out, you’re making the theoretical more real.

Evan Kropp: Yes, bringing it to life, making it applicable. Absolutely. And it’s interesting, too, when we say workforce development, all of these terms are changing right now. 20, 25 years ago, workforce development was trade school. Today, it’s not necessarily. We talk about preparing people for the professional world, and we’re calling that professional development as well. And I think the, the terminology doesn’t matter as much as the intent and the way in which we design our programs for these students to be successful. So like you say, yes, we want them to bring these things to life. What does that mean? Like, what does that look like?

So assignments, for example, for adults, they want them to be authentic. Give me a question that I will run into in the real world. Let me produce a document that I can bring in to my employer and show them what my capabilities are. Right? And in order to do that, we need faculty who understand these needs from the adult learners. We need them not only to understand the professional needs, but we need them to understand that adults are balancing school, work, parenting, caregiving, financial stress.

And as educators, we need to have some empathy for these adults who are now adding yet another thing to their plate. For me, I look at it and I go, “Well, how amazing is that, that somebody wants to come back and get this education?” And we need to recognize that it’s not going to be necessarily as easy a path as it may be for a younger student for these reasons. That’s a grand generalization, of course, but what can we do to help? And I think that help mindset is extremely important in this case.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, assignments being one of those. Undergraduates, we’re trying to teach them deadlines, things like that. With adults, they know deadlines already. If they don’t submit on time, generally, not always, but generally it’s because they’ve had work, they’ve had family caregiving, they’ve had other things that jump up.

Evan Kropp: Yup.

These students are busy, and I think a lot of times, academics may be looking at students as, ” you’re here to learn. This is your job. Your education is your career.” And, it’s not the case. And interestingly, the last few weeks I’ve gone down a little bit of a rabbit hole in social media, and I’ve been following all of the students at the University of Florida who have made careers for themselves as influencers. And it’s really interesting to watch these students go through their day and how busy they really are. And you say to yourself, like, this is different than probably a lot of other people are thinking about what’s going on with students as they’re studying. So they’re really busy people and a lot of times they need support too.

I think we need to do a better job recognizing that a student could need career coaching, financial advice, help with the technology. Just even in an online program, not assuming that adult learner coming back knows what a learning management system is. And when I say, “Hey, hop onto Canvas and do this assignment,” they might look at me and go, “Canvas what?”

You know? They’re-

Drumm McNaughton: I don’t need to put something over my boat right now.

Evan Kropp: Yes. We love our technical terminology in higher ed, so just remembering.

Drumm McNaughton: And our abbreviations and our acronyms.

Evan Kropp: Oh we love our acronyms for sure.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. It reminds me that the Navy used to have a DICNAVAB, a dictionary of naval abbreviations.

Evan Kropp: I’m glad we don’t have a dictionary yet.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Yes, that’s part of the problem. Yes. We have a PhD, which means we know all the acronyms. No, I’m just kidding.

[00:16:42] Adult Learner Credit for Life Experience

Drumm McNaughton: There’s one other piece, too, and this goes with the support services that we were just talking about, but also the faculty, is these adult learners have experiences beyond high school.

So they’re bringing in a wealth of knowledge, which frankly, a lot of times, and this kind of leads us into our barriers, this extra experience that they have isn’t necessarily transferable into credits, things like that. This is one of, the competency-based education, this is one of the ways that this came into being, was to give these adult learners the credit for their life experiences.

Evan Kropp: And there’s great schools that are offering prior learning credit for work experience. Western Governors University is a great example of a school that will help you with that competency-based education. Of different approaches and I think obviously it’s great when we can give people credit for experience. And if somebody has been an accountant for 25 years but never got a bachelor’s degree, and they’re going to come back and we’re going to force them to pay $4,000 and spend 16 weeks taking Introduction to Accounting, that’s not doing anybody good, they’re just having to go through the motions.

So these are some of the barriers that people look at it and go, “I don’t want to waste my time. I don’t think this is for me.” Sometimes it’s simply, “I’m too old to be sitting in a classroom with students.” And I hear that from people who are 25, and I hear it from people who are 65. And nobody in this day and age is ever too old to go back to college and pursue their dreams.

And I find a lot of people pursuing online education for that reason because they just don’t want to be the, quote unquote, “old person in the room.” We talked about the external barriers. We talked about time and cost and scheduling and childcare. I think this anxiety about technology, being an internal barrier. I think there’s that embarrassment, there’s a fear of failure. All of these things are potential barriers or challenges for people that we really need to move out of their way. We recognize, “hey, you’re going to come in and time’s going to be a barrier. How can we not waste your time? “

One simple thing that we enacted in our program is we’ve designed all of our online courses with the same course navigation. And we realized that if we have 40 different faculty members and they’re designing courses differently, students need to figure out at the beginning of every semester how to navigate an online course. What a waste of time. So if we let them do that in their first semester, and then from that point forward they know where to find the grade book, they know where to find their assignments, they know how to find the things they’re doing, we’re saving them time. And we’re allowing them to use their valuable time to focus on things like learning activities as opposed to where’s the button that I need to push?

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

[00:19:37] Transfer Credits and Pathways

Drumm McNaughton: There’s another piece with this is transferring in credits. We talked about credits for prior learning, but credit transfer is also a big challenge. The best one that I’ve seen at this was Franklin University, David Decker, the president, and they had eighteen hundred schools that they would just automatically, it’s in their database, automatically accept credits for, and you’d submit your transcript, within five minutes, they would be able to tell you, “Yes, we can transfer in all of these. This is where they go,” without having to wait a week for the faculty to make a decision on whether it’s transfer or not. This is a huge barrier for many adult learners, and it goes right back to your saying an accountant having to pay four thousand dollars for an introduction to accounting class. It makes no sense.

Evan Kropp: Yes. And these transfer agreements, we’re seeing more and more of them. And in my book, they’re awesome. They’re telling students, “Hey, you’re going to take classes,” or, “You took the classes already, and we promise you they’re going to transfer.” And I remember when I was an undergraduate and I would take a summer class at this community college or another class over there, I would cross my fingers and hope that it was going to transfer back at the end of the, the summer. Nobody had that guarantee for me.

So today, we see those agreements in place. It also allows more opportunities for adult learners because now if we can, like at the University of Florida, partner with our community colleges throughout the state and build these transfer agreements the adult students can come back and say, “Hey, here’s what I’ve taken already. Here’s what I need to take,” and then that will allow me to start on my path, whether I want to finish at the community college, transfer to a regional, transfer to one of the larger R1s at the state. It opens up many more options for people, and it gives them that clarity of path that we were talking about.

Drumm McNaughton: And it’s a mindset by the college or the university. If you’re thinking about this as degree completion versus A to B baccalaureate.

Evan Kropp: Right. It’s also, traditionally a financial decision. Every credit that you give a student who’s coming in is one less credit that they’re going to pay for at your institution. So we can’t think like business people in these instances. We have to think like academics who are here working in a nonprofit environment. We need to create revenue in order to keep the, the lights on, of course, but we shouldn’t be making decisions based on squeezing money out of people or anything like that. So making the decisions for the right reasons is critical.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

[00:22:22] Redesigning Higher Ed for Adult Learners

Drumm McNaughton: And the beauty of it is all of these things that we’ve mentioned can be overcome.

Evan Kropp: Yes. These barriers have not been around for a long time. Let’s think about the, the history of higher education in this country and the system that we now work under. We’re not talking about hundreds of years. We’re talking, our system today was really built over the last 50 or so years. So the barriers aren’t permanent, they’re design problems.

So how do we redesign our schedules, our advising, our onboarding, our technology support? How can faculty maintain high standards but be more flexible with these students and be more accommodating in instances where an accommodation is appropriate? Adult learners can succeed, but they need the environment to support them. And we can’t toss them into the existing environment and say, “Go succeed.” We need to adjust the environment for them. So for us, I think the most important shift is mindset. The adult learners should not be treated as a special population who exist at the margins of higher education. They should be treated as a core audience for us that we are designing for.

Drumm McNaughton: And that doesn’t mean that every college and university have to do this. There are some that are exclusively undergraduate 18 to 24 year olds, and what you’ve got in place is probably good. But for those colleges who are doing more degree completion work, who are bringing in more adult learners, you don’t need to necessarily change your programs, although you do have to change them in some way to make them more relevant. What can I use that I learned in class today, next week? That type of thing. And that’s really a curriculum and a faculty. Adult learners want to be treated the same, but they need special, and I hesitate to use the word accommodations, but that’s really what it is. They need special accommodations to understand higher ed a little bit better. How student services can better work with them. Make it career services as well.

Florida’s done a really good job.

[00:24:36] UF Program Innovations

Drumm McNaughton: What are some of the things that really distinguishes your program and what you’ve done to help the adult learner?

Evan Kropp: Yes, I think in our college, within the university, I think the most important thing is we recognize the issue and we’re willing to address the issue and we’re willing to deal with the change and the effort that’s involved. We are journalism, communications. We’re a professionally oriented college, so this should be aligning better with our efforts. So we’re very fortunate our leadership within our college recognizes the value of adult learners and the need for us to not try and stick them into the same system.

So the value that we can create, I think, for these students is incredible. I hear stories at both graduate and undergraduate all the time of, “Hey, I took this class and then I went to my work and I did X,” or even just, “This week’s assignment, I went and did that.” And helping students bridge the academic to the professional is really important. One of the things that I did, not too long ago, this was at the graduate level for our adult learners, was at the end of every one of our graduate level classes… Well, let me start here. At the beginning of every class, we list course learning outcomes. So at the end of this class, you will be able to, and we list five to ten learning outcomes. At the end of the class, we tell students, “Let’s look back at that and make sure that you’ve achieved all of those learning outcomes.”

What I realized was that these are adults working in professions, and they don’t necessarily know how to translate the academic to the professional. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken those learning outcomes, and we’ve put them as resume items at the end of the course. So when the students finish, we now have a bullet point list of this is how you can sell your knowledge and skills that you’ve acquired in this class. And in that program, there’s 12 classes, and if there’s an, let’s say, an average of eight to ten outcomes in each class, you have a hundred, hundred and twenty bullet points at the end of the program to put onto your resume to sell yourself and things to talk about.

not going to put that many, obviously but look what you can curate from, which is awesome. So that’s a change that we have to make to help these students sell themselves and talk about the new knowledge and skills that they’re acquiring in order to help them achieve those dreams of finding a new job, moving up within their job, and things of that nature.

Drumm McNaughton: And it gives me a great idea for a final project or a cumulative project for a course is for the students to go through and write all the course learning objectives, the CLOs, and say, “What have you done to demonstrate learning in your workplace of that?” So it really ties the academic to the workforce development piece.

Evan Kropp: Yes. Absolutely. And the students love it. The adults say, “Hey, I am getting an immediate return on my investment.” Whether the investment they’re looking at it as money, as time, as effort, however they’re classifying that. And for me, that keeps them motivated, it keeps them wanting to come back and learn more.

[00:28:04] Lifelong Learning Access

Evan Kropp: And we really set up for our adults that they need to be lifelong learners. Think about it now, what we studied in college years ago, we’ve had to learn a lot more since then. We can’t just rely on what we learned when we got our bachelor’s degree. So we’re trying to help them understand what it means to be a lifelong learner.

And then something that we actually do in our graduate program is that anybody who graduates from our program can come back and participate in a program that we call Master Access. So for $500 a year, they can audit as many of our graduate classes as they want, and we have a catalog of 80 classes. So whatever’s running, ” hey, you took that social class in 2015, and it’s 2026 and you want to see what’s changed, come on in and audit the class.” And for us, it’s standing by our words to say, “We want you to be a lifelong learner. Now we’re giving you the opportunity to be a lifelong learner.”

And the number of people that take advantage of that and tell me “This is amazing,” or, “I have this change of job,” or, “I want to move in this direction now,” because people’s career paths and hopes change over time, too. So, providing and thinking more broadly about these adults’ needs is really something that we’ve taken to heart and are trying to incorporate within our activities to make sure that everybody can be successful.

Drumm McNaughton: Can that be applied throughout the university? I know it’s just within your college and your programs right now, but if someone were to change careers, they wouldn’t necessarily get the diploma. But I’m– my gosh, what a great opportunity for them to go back and learn at this five hundred dollars a year.

Evan Kropp: Yes. We’re doing and testing. The great thing about the University of Florida is we have all of these different colleges within the university that we’re all testing and experimenting and trying things, that are doing things centrally. We’re all talking with each other and sharing ideas and moving forward together. And that for me is really important that, like you say, these things shouldn’t happen in a bubble in one college or in one program, but these days, that’s where things need to start. Right? You can’t say, “Hey, I’m going to do this initiative for 40,000 undergraduates.” Y- you can’t start and roll things out that way. You have to start small, test, refine, roll out to a little bit of a larger group, and then make those moves to hit more students after that.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Well, I want to say, Evan, that this has been a fabulous conversation for me. I’ve learned a lot. I always do from all my guests, but this one was fun because we both know a bit about this, you probably more than me. But thank you. This has been fun.

Evan Kropp: Yes, thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun for me too.

Drumm McNaughton: Good.

[00:30:55] Three Takeaways for Higher Education Presidents and Boards

Drumm McNaughton: As we always do, wrap up with our two questions. Three takeaways for higher ed presidents and boards, especially those who are considering or working with adult learners at their institutions.

Evan Kropp: First, I think adult learners cannot be treated as an enrollment patch for the demographic decline. If the institutions want adult learners, they need to design for the adult learners.

I think the value proposition for adults needs to be clear. They need to understand the connection between their program, the credentials that they’re going to learn, what skills, and then how that ties to their professional aspirations.

Third, student support, and student support is a lot more important than many people really understand. This is why a lot of people quit in the first place. They weren’t getting the support that they need. So advising, financial aid, career services, we mentioned tech support, faculty training, all of these things need to be reconsidered for our adult learners.

So for me, I would say the presidents, the boards, they need to ask, ” Are we asking adult learners to adapt to us, or are we adapting to the learners that we want to serve?”

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm

Evan Kropp: That answer to that question will help us see and understand what we’re really doing to serve this population.

Drumm McNaughton: Now those are great takeaways. Thank you.

[00:32:21] What’s Next AI and Community

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you? What’s next for your program?

Evan Kropp: For me, I’m doing a few fun things actually. AI is everywhere, of course.

Drumm McNaughton: Really?

Evan Kropp: Have you heard of

Drumm McNaughton: what is AI, Yes, what does AI mean?

Evan Kropp: Yes. I mean, for us, AI means change, and we need to understand AI, and the best way that we can understand AI is talking to our employers and saying to them like, “How are you using AI today? How do you plan on using it in the future?” But also how are you not using AI? I think that’s an important question too.

I’ve been talking with my faculty about integrating AI across the curriculum and most of my faculty that I deal with in my role are adjunct faculty, so they’re working in the field, they’re working professionals who are teaching part-time for us on the side. And I say to them like, “What are you doing in your office, and how can you bring that into the classroom?” And we don’t need to all be AI champions. It’s not all about, “AI is going to be this great positive thing.” If you think AI is not going to be good for your field, let’s have those conversations too. So right now for me it’s about getting those conversations to happen in the classroom about how work is potentially going to change based on this new technology.

The other side of that, I’m focused very much right now on community building. I think this is a problem that a lot of people are having and nobody’s really solved that well. Adult learners, if you can imagine, they’re at work, they go home, they’re sitting at their computer. It’s very isolating and lonely, and do they know the other students? They don’t see them in a classroom if they’re online. If they are on campus, maybe the adult feels awkward talking to the 22-year-olds who are sitting in the classroom. So how do we look at this community of adults and really get them to connect with each other and feel that sense of belonging and build professional networks amongst their classmates?

Even between faculty and students, I’ve seen faculty get students jobs. I’ve seen students get faculty jobs. It’s all about like working together, and I think that our culture here in the United States is much more divided than it ever has been before. So it makes the work a little bit harder to bring us all together, but when you have the same interests and desires and goals, we can build on those things to get people to connect and grow together.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. That’s some great ideas. Please keep doing what you’re doing because it’s so critical for our students and even more importantly, our country.

Evan Kropp: Thank you. We will.

Drumm McNaughton: Evan, thank you. I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

Evan Kropp: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I had a great time.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to Evan Kropp. Evan, really enjoyed our conversation. Keep doing what you’re doing at the University of Florida. Some amazing stuff you’re doing for the adult learners and the programs there.

For my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.