New Chief of California’s Virtual Community College Wants to Help Solve the State’s Work-Force Problem

Heather Hiles will be the new chief executive of California’s fledgling virtual community college, the California Community Colleges system announced on Wednesday. The state’s ambitious first online community college hopes to test its first cohort of students in late 2019.

The college, the brainchild of former Gov. Jerry Brown, seeks to reach nontraditional students left behind in the education system — those with some college but no four-year degree, or those who have never been to college at all. The virtual campus will serve primarily adult learners who want to take classes on their own schedules.

The institution will offer postsecondary credentials and certificates to help these students gain a foothold in a changing workplace, said Hiles, who has a background in educational technology, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy.

The new system will, among other things, help solve the state’s displaced-worker problem by giving students new job skills.

Hiles discussed her plans for the new online college with The Chronicle this week. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. How has your ed-tech background prepared you for this role?

A. I’ve worked in helping people prepare for employment or helping people get college-ready, either with academic or professional outcomes, for the past 30 years. My position as CEO and founder of Pathbrite, the cloud-based digital-portfolio system that I sold to universities, gave me experience in working with instructional design, faculty, and administrators to understand their learning objectives and how to best realize them. Recently, I worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and it was my mission to invest in or make grants to organizations helping people complete college.

I’ve focused on student-success areas ranging from financial security to developmental education, from advising to digital learning. I’ve also done research into emerging technologies and how they could be applied to the learning experience in higher education. All of those past experiences certainly line me up to have an understanding about the current higher-education learning experience, the needs of roughly 10 million Californians who are unemployed right now, and the kinds of skills that they need to be job-ready today.

Q. Are you ready to make the transition from the nonprofit and business sectors to the public sector?

A. I served as a commissioner of San Francisco Unified School District in the early 2000s. I understand the judiciary responsibilities our Board of Trustees has taken on. Being a CEO of any kind of organization, you have to work effectively with your board. It’s no difference in the public sector, although there are oodles of regulations and rules that you have to follow. I know how to work with legal counsel, and I’ve got the entrepreneurial experience of how to start from a blank canvas. My experience in governing helps me understand how critical it is to also work within the guidelines.

Q. How will this online college system help different types of students?

A. Nontraditional students who have not been successful in traditional learning experiences do much better with a blend of learning types. I am a huge believer in technology being used as a tool so that human interaction is optimized. There’s a lot that technology does well in terms of rapid assessment of specific competencies, like spitting out the 10 skills that are attached to a particular job.

This online college can bring this technological experience to students. A lot of people realized that you can learn a lot of things on Youtube. So we have to make interfaces that are user-friendly. Most of the public-sector institutions, like community colleges, usually get the worst technology instead of the best, but I want the best software made available for people who don’t usually have access to it. These students need and deserve these tools if they’re going to be thrust in new-economy jobs.

Q. Some critics are worried that a virtual college will undermine California’s existing community-college system. How do you respond to that?

A. There’s a huge opportunity for us to share with the other 114 community colleges content curricula that have been impactful, and to make it available to the entire system. There’s a lot of good give-and-get. If I can deliver a platform that they can plug into better, and get acknowledgment and credit for delivering that curricula, there’s going to be more exposure to and usage of community-college content.

If we have a more user-friendly platform owned by the system and link students’ needs to the jobs they want, we will all succeed. This college was envisioned to target those who have already completed community college or were not planning to come. We may be working with older students, and adults who are employed but want to rise up the ladder. We’re more job- and competency-focused than a traditional college, so there’s more flexibility.

Q. What do you have in mind for an instructional model?

A. We’re going after a lot of training, skills-upgrading, and connecting people to job opportunities. This can bring more people into community colleges and increase the system’s visibility. We are going to be delivering a training module in medical coding by working with our union partners and other health-care players. That’s going to be our first alpha product to test some of our principles. I’m envisioning an architectured platform that optimizes lots of different types of technology and links an experience that helps students have the most flexibility they need. I also want to create a new IP that is built and owned by the community-college system. It’s important that we own our own IP, and that we build a work force and evolve the platform so that it’s not obsolete by the time it’s built.

Q. So is this program more skills-based than traditional higher education?

A. The platform will be a mix. Soft skills and critical-thinking skills are just as important, if not more important, than the hard skills. We have to prepare students for all of it. If we’re not teaching people how to be gig-minded and learn new material, we will have failed. There aren’t any stagnant jobs anymore. You can’t learn one set of skills and ride them for the rest of your career.

Q. How do you see this college changing as you assess students’ needs?

A. This will be a platform that has a solid foundation, but it has to evolve. It will be the largest distance-learning solution in the country, and that’s fitting for California especially. Silicon Valley, for example, is where the problem of displaced workers was created. We have to solve that problem. Year after year, people are removed from meaningful jobs because new technology is becoming more complicated. Then, fewer and fewer people understand it. The gaps are staggering.

Q. Do you think the future is in online education programs?

A. This college is a way for people to get back into new-economy jobs or develop their careers further. There are jobs at every level and skills that need improvement. This platform will meet people wherever they start and help them achieve goals up the ladder.

Follow Terry Nguyen on Twitter at @terrygtnguyen, or email her at terry.nguyen@chronicle.com.