Audacious U: A Model for the Future
Our work at Audacious Futures is all around building a launchpad for bold innovations. Our research around higher education highlights three fundamental gaps that need to be addressed: the Access Gap, the Quality Gap, and the Readiness Gap. For access, we’re asking who gets access to learning experiences? And what type?” For quality, we’re re-thinking the relevance and effectiveness of those learning experiences. Are they still needed to solve today’s grand challenges? For readiness, we’re re-examining how capable candidates really are to land career opportunities. And how can we better coordinate the supply of ready candidates with employers ready to take them in?
We are starting test innovations around those questions through Audacious U, a debt-free, degree-free, lecture-free, AI-powered sandbox focused on addressing three critical components: assessment, learning, and placement.
Drawing on leading models and practices from around the world, we’re building Audacious U to incorporate five leading design principles that will guide its MVP:
- Learner-Centered: embedding personalized, experiential, real-world learning
- Technology-Powered: powered by emerging technologies, particularly AI, blockchain, and VR
- Future-Focused: focused on skills and jobs of the future
- Accessible: removing barriers to access for groups less represented
- Employer-Connected: including employers as partners from the start
Some of the innovations we are embedding into the model include no upfront tuition, leveraging income-sharing agreements without any obligation to accept or stay in a job, emphasizing character over credentials and grit over grades for our admissions process, using a holistic pedagogical approach that focuses on Head | Heart | Hands, leveraging a challenge-based learning model that constantly requires candidates to solve real problems for real people, and partnering with employers who provide interview guarantees for the candidates.
Audacious U is a human-centric, technology-powered model of higher education that aims to deliver a 10x improvement on the current system, aiming for 2.5x improvement in benefits at 50% of the cost in 50% of the time to all stakeholders – candidates, employers, and governments.
Building the Future of Higher Education Together
In a world of tech-only start-ups promising focused on nothing but growing their solution and promising to solve all of our problems overnight, we believe that no single venture will change all of higher education and that education is best solved through a human-centred, tech-powered approach – not through a pure-tech solution.
To that end, we are adopting a systems change approach and partnering with governments, employers, and existing higher education institutions. We invite you to join the journey by sharing your answers to this question: what does your Audacious vision for the future of higher education look like?