May 26, 2025 • 13 mins
In this episode, host Phil Tower speaks with Steven Hodas, executive director of GV NextEd Co-Lab.
The GV NextEd Co-Lab furthers GVSU's commitment to creating new paths to and through the University for all learners in all communities.
The Co-Lab works with traditional and non-traditional partners inside and outside GVSU, and harnesses universities’ powerful credentialing fulcrum to improve outcomes, not just in higher education but in the K12 and workforce sectors as well.
As an incubator, the Co-Lab values growth and impact equally.
The Co-Lab welcomes ideas and new partners and is especially interested in facilitating innovative research and practice ideas from GVSU faculty and students.
Reach out to colab@gvsu.edu.
Online: GV NextEd Co-Lab
The GV NextEd Co-Lab furthers GVSU's commitment to creating new paths to and through the University for all learners in all communities.
The Co-Lab works with traditional and non-traditional partners inside and outside GVSU, and harnesses universities’ powerful credentialing fulcrum to improve outcomes, not just in higher education but in the K12 and workforce sectors as well.
As an incubator, the Co-Lab values growth and impact equally.
The Co-Lab welcomes ideas and new partners and is especially interested in facilitating innovative research and practice ideas from GVSU faculty and students.
Reach out to colab@gvsu.edu.
Online: GV NextEd Co-Lab
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is iHeartRadio's West Michigan Weekend. West Michigan Weekend is
a weekly programmed designed to inform and enlighten on a
wide range of public policy issues, as well as news
and current events. Now here's your host, Phil Tower.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Welcome back to West Michigan Weekend from my Heart RADIU.
I'm so glad you have joined us, And in this segment,
we're going to talk about college and paths to college. College,
it seems and the way people get there. It seems
like those changes are becoming very diverse and a lot
of people deciding I don't need a post high school
(00:37):
college education, or maybe doing community college and a couple
of years at a university like Grand Valley State University.
That path is really changing. And the goal here really
is don't we want as many paths as possible. That's
why I'm really excited to talk to Stephen Hotis. Stephen
Hotis is the executive director of a new and exciting thing,
(00:59):
relatively new and exciting thing happening at Grand Valley State
University GV nextdaed Co Lab. It's all about creating new
paths too and through the university for all learners in
all communities very much about inclusivity and kind of thinking
outside the box, to use an overused phrase for ways
people can attend a four year university. Steven Hotis, welcome
(01:23):
to the program. I'm glad you're here.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Thanks for having me. Shall well, I.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Hope that set up was pretty much the essence of
what GV next ad co Lab is all about, because
I think a lot of people think about going to
college and they think about the traditional way. You've got
to fill out a bunch of forms, you've got to
apply formally, and then there's the waiting game. Why was
gv nextdad Co Lab created, Let's start right there.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Sure thing. Well, when President Vantella came in, I guess
about five years ago or so, she realized that all
of the conditions that created institutions like Grand Valley State,
which was set up in nineteen sixty and has been
the fastest growing higher ed in Michigan, those cultural conditions,
(02:12):
those workforce conditions, those demographic conditions, all those things have
changed over time. And as you mentioned, you know, people
are starting to think, hey, you know, is college for me? Really?
Am I going to get a return on my investment
of time and money? Is it something I should do
right after high school? Is a four year degree really
(02:34):
the best thing for me? And as part of the
President's retire twenty twenty five initiatives, we want to think
as an institution, we want to challenge a whole bunch
of our assumptions. You know, who is the typical Grand
Valley student. They're not necessarily eighteen anymore there afresh, and
they're not necessarily coming straight from high school. They may
(02:55):
have been in the workforce for a while and need
to upscale in a way that he wasn't the case
thirty forty years ago. And so among the initiatives that
the President created was this Nextead Collab, which is the
unit that I head up, and as you said, we
just think about new paths to and through the university.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
And it's set up on the idea of liberatory co
design co design. Liberatory co design. This is a phrase
I've never heard of, Steve, and I'm sure a lot
of our listeners have not heard of that phrase. Liberatory.
Did I get that right? Liberatory co design? Yeah? Talk
about that? What is that?
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Yeah? Sorry, It's a little bit of of a term
of art inside the design community. The idea is that you,
Grand Valley exists in a community. It exists in a
community of K twelve schools, of community colleges, of employers,
of other four year institutions. And that if you want
to design something that really serves people, whether it's a
(03:59):
bought of or process, you need to design not for them,
but with that. And that's the code design aspect of things.
You really can't be of service unless you're working closely
with your partners. That's just a fancy way of saying
work with the people who you hope to engage.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, I want to read a quote. This is on
your website GVSU dot edu forward slash co Lab. It's
a quote from doctor Mantela, and I really love this quote.
Gv's next ed co Lab is designed so innovative ideas
that push public education forward can be implemented. It aligns
with our deep commitment to inclusion, our communities and social justice.
(04:45):
We will be able to test ideas and rapidly expand
those ideas that work, so we can have a profound
impact on our access and learning outcomes. This concentrated effort
will advance the public good in Michigan and around the country.
It's a pretty bold statement, but it's an exciting statement.
It really at the heart of this, and I think
(05:05):
people fail to realize at any level how valuable that
vision and that type of thinking is for a leader
and for doctor Mantella to realize, we've constantly got to
be looking at the way we do college or a
university like this and in constantly innovating. Every university is
challenged with this. This is pretty exciting stuff. So I
(05:26):
didn't ask you one of the most important questions, when
did this all get started? Stephen? Now?
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Four years ago? I think it'll be four years ago
to June. And I think that statement really captures the
vision for the university and for the collab. Our job
in the collab is not just to have ideas. We're
not a think tank. The idea is to turn them
into actual working projects and see if the idea is
(05:52):
useful and functional, and if it is, scale it up
and then spin it out as a free standing entity,
a free standing nonprofit for example, or sin that project
out inside of the university to the department or the
administrative office that really should be the owner of it,
(06:13):
but didn't necessarily have the time or the resources or
the bandwidth to stand it up, end and rote to
type it. And correspondingly, if we run a project and
it's not working for whatever reason, to shut it down
really quickly and go on to the next thing.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
That's really that Yeah, I was just going to say,
you read my mind, So failure is okay, just realize, hey,
this didn't work. Oh yeah, move on to the next thing.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yeah, exactly, I mean you kind of. I mean, the
conditions for success look a lot like the conditions for failure,
because none of us is right all the time, right,
and so the idea is to create a place that's
safe for failure that doesn't have, you know, negative consequences
for the institution, or for the students, or for the communities.
But if you're not constantly trying things, then you're probably
(06:59):
going to just keep on doing what you're doing.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Steven Hotis is with us, executive director of the gv
next ed co Lab. You can learn more at GVSU
dot edu and forward slash co lab. The typical process.
I'm really interested in what you just talked about spinning
off these programs that were born out of an idea.
First of all, you've got a team assembled at the
(07:22):
gv NEXT ED co lab our students involved with some
of this creative, innovative thinking that eventually might get spun
off into a program. Talk about that if you would please.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Yeah, we have the staffing mod is also really flexible.
We try to stay lean because that's one of the
things that sometimes burdens universities is there always the impulse
to add a lot of staff. We try not to
do that. So we have a small core team and
then each particular project has a team associated with it
(07:54):
as it grows, and we add to that team as necessary.
And yeah, very often those folks are students, and we
especially also have a mandate to work with our work
study students because we know that for work study students,
having really rewarding work on campus is one of those
(08:18):
factors that leads to better graduation rates that are on
time graduation rates, better college persistence. So we try and
make our work a benefit to the team as well
as to the people of the project is trying to
serve And.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
What kind of partners or stakeholders do you work with
in the collab, Well.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
It depends. We have internal stakeholders at the university. For example,
we have a project that just launched a couple of
weeks back on a digital credential wallet, and for that
we partnered with the Registrar's office. That's actually a good
example of a project. We have external partners in the
community at a number of K twelve schools and districts
(08:57):
who are part of this new crudential pilot, and as
that expands, we'll also be incorporating local workforce partners and
two year institutions as well.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
This is really cool. It's a new platform that uses
this digital wallet pilot, a new platform that uses blockchain
technology to securely store educational records for a student at
Grand Valley, like courses, certificates, other achievements in a digital wallet.
The wallet can hold any type of record. This is
(09:28):
not about bitcoin or cryptocurrency. This is about holding critical
data that a college student would need to access for
the rest of their life, especially as a successful Laker graduate.
We just had a class of them and this is
a really innovative thing. So tough question, how do we
know if this is a long lasting thing or is
it still in the testing phases.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
So it's really in the earliest testing phases. As I said,
we just launched last week. We launched specifically with the
population of Grand Valley juniors. Students will be seniors next year,
and then this spring and fall we will also be
launching with our K twelve partners their juniors, and we'll
(10:10):
expand to other classes of students as well. As you
said the importance of the wallet, and this is one
of these changes that you know, President Mantella was, you know,
visionary about all of us as students, no matter how
old we are, as learners, we are acquiring skills and
(10:30):
knowledge and competencies in a much wider range of places
than we did. I think you know when you and
I were coming up hill. It's not just high school,
it's not just college. There are all kinds of internship,
you know, certificates that people are earning, experiential learning, competency
based learning that's hard to capture on the traditional high
(10:53):
school or college transcript or on the traditional resime. And
it's sort of like it's the tree falls in the
forest and nobody hears it. If you're learning all these
things and acquiring all these skills and you don't have
a way to demonstrate them, to store them, to transmit
them in a way that is secure and non falsifiable,
(11:14):
then it's almost as if they don't exist if you
can't present them. And so that's the idea behind the
digital credential Wallet. I think we will have students, you know,
by this time next year as young as elementary school
in our partner districts who are starting to accumulate these
skills again all the way through the workforce. And as
you said, it's portable, and it's lifelong, and it can
hold the credentials from any institution.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
That's really exciting. Steven hotis with us, executive director of
gv's Next ed co Lab. The website is GVSU dot
eedu forward slash co lab. Stephen, before I run out
of time here, just got a minute or two left,
let's talk about the long term goals for the next
ed co Lab at Grand Valley State University. You're going
(11:57):
to hit your four year mark in June. How do
you measure this three years from now, five years from now, Stephen?
Speaker 3 (12:04):
You know, I think because the projects are so different,
each project has its own sort of set of indicators
as to whether it was good, as to whether it
didn't work, and you know what did we learn most
importantly from the successes as well as for the projects
that weren't viable for the collab. Overall, I think it
(12:26):
can we continually embody this spirit of innovation, of trial,
of iteration, of adding value to the university and to
the community and to our partners.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
And that's an exciting thing because who knows what's going
to happen in that three to five year period. I
would say that's any kind of a future like that
is not only bright, but it's exciting. Stephen, Absolutely exciting.
Thank you so much for being a part of this,
or is there anything you wanted to share with our
listeners before we wrap up?
Speaker 3 (13:00):
You know, I want to thank you Phil for this,
and I would just encourage everybody to keep their eye
on GVSU and all of the exciting initiatives that university
at large is rolling out and will continue to roll
out over the next few years.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Absolutely, I couldn't have said it better. Steven otis our
guest on this segment of West Michigan Weekend, the executive
director of the next ed collab at Grand Valley State University.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
You've been listening to iHeartRadio's West Michigan Weekend. West Michigan
Weekend is a production of Wood Radio and iHeart Radio,
This is iHeartRadio's West Michigan Weekend. West Michigan Weekend is
a weekly programmed designed to inform and enlighten on a
wide range of public policy issues, as well as news
and current events. Now here's your host, Phil Tower.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Welcome back to West Michigan Weekend from my Heart RADIU.
I'm so glad you have joined us, And in this segment,
we're going to talk about college and paths to college. College,
it seems and the way people get there. It seems
like those changes are becoming very diverse and a lot
of people deciding I don't need a post high school
(00:37):
college education, or maybe doing community college and a couple
of years at a university like Grand Valley State University.
That path is really changing. And the goal here really
is don't we want as many paths as possible. That's
why I'm really excited to talk to Stephen Hotis. Stephen
Hotis is the executive director of a new and exciting thing,
(00:59):
relatively new and exciting thing happening at Grand Valley State
University GV nextdaed Co Lab. It's all about creating new
paths too and through the university for all learners in
all communities very much about inclusivity and kind of thinking
outside the box, to use an overused phrase for ways
people can attend a four year university. Steven Hotis, welcome
(01:23):
to the program. I'm glad you're here.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Thanks for having me. Shall well, I.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Hope that set up was pretty much the essence of
what GV next ad co Lab is all about, because
I think a lot of people think about going to
college and they think about the traditional way. You've got
to fill out a bunch of forms, you've got to
apply formally, and then there's the waiting game. Why was
gv nextdad Co Lab created, Let's start right there.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Sure thing. Well, when President Vantella came in, I guess
about five years ago or so, she realized that all
of the conditions that created institutions like Grand Valley State,
which was set up in nineteen sixty and has been
the fastest growing higher ed in Michigan, those cultural conditions,
(02:12):
those workforce conditions, those demographic conditions, all those things have
changed over time. And as you mentioned, you know, people
are starting to think, hey, you know, is college for me? Really?
Am I going to get a return on my investment
of time and money? Is it something I should do
right after high school? Is a four year degree really
(02:34):
the best thing for me? And as part of the
President's retire twenty twenty five initiatives, we want to think
as an institution, we want to challenge a whole bunch
of our assumptions. You know, who is the typical Grand
Valley student. They're not necessarily eighteen anymore there afresh, and
they're not necessarily coming straight from high school. They may
(02:55):
have been in the workforce for a while and need
to upscale in a way that he wasn't the case
thirty forty years ago. And so among the initiatives that
the President created was this Nextead Collab, which is the
unit that I head up, and as you said, we
just think about new paths to and through the university.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
And it's set up on the idea of liberatory co
design co design. Liberatory co design. This is a phrase
I've never heard of, Steve, and I'm sure a lot
of our listeners have not heard of that phrase. Liberatory.
Did I get that right? Liberatory co design? Yeah? Talk
about that? What is that?
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Yeah? Sorry, It's a little bit of of a term
of art inside the design community. The idea is that you,
Grand Valley exists in a community. It exists in a
community of K twelve schools, of community colleges, of employers,
of other four year institutions. And that if you want
to design something that really serves people, whether it's a
(03:59):
bought of or process, you need to design not for them,
but with that. And that's the code design aspect of things.
You really can't be of service unless you're working closely
with your partners. That's just a fancy way of saying
work with the people who you hope to engage.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, I want to read a quote. This is on
your website GVSU dot edu forward slash co Lab. It's
a quote from doctor Mantela, and I really love this quote.
Gv's next ed co Lab is designed so innovative ideas
that push public education forward can be implemented. It aligns
with our deep commitment to inclusion, our communities and social justice.
(04:45):
We will be able to test ideas and rapidly expand
those ideas that work, so we can have a profound
impact on our access and learning outcomes. This concentrated effort
will advance the public good in Michigan and around the country.
It's a pretty bold statement, but it's an exciting statement.
It really at the heart of this, and I think
(05:05):
people fail to realize at any level how valuable that
vision and that type of thinking is for a leader
and for doctor Mantella to realize, we've constantly got to
be looking at the way we do college or a
university like this and in constantly innovating. Every university is
challenged with this. This is pretty exciting stuff. So I
(05:26):
didn't ask you one of the most important questions, when
did this all get started? Stephen? Now?
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Four years ago? I think it'll be four years ago
to June. And I think that statement really captures the
vision for the university and for the collab. Our job
in the collab is not just to have ideas. We're
not a think tank. The idea is to turn them
into actual working projects and see if the idea is
(05:52):
useful and functional, and if it is, scale it up
and then spin it out as a free standing entity,
a free standing nonprofit for example, or sin that project
out inside of the university to the department or the
administrative office that really should be the owner of it,
(06:13):
but didn't necessarily have the time or the resources or
the bandwidth to stand it up, end and rote to
type it. And correspondingly, if we run a project and
it's not working for whatever reason, to shut it down
really quickly and go on to the next thing.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
That's really that Yeah, I was just going to say,
you read my mind, So failure is okay, just realize, hey,
this didn't work. Oh yeah, move on to the next thing.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yeah, exactly, I mean you kind of. I mean, the
conditions for success look a lot like the conditions for failure,
because none of us is right all the time, right,
and so the idea is to create a place that's
safe for failure that doesn't have, you know, negative consequences
for the institution, or for the students, or for the communities.
But if you're not constantly trying things, then you're probably
(06:59):
going to just keep on doing what you're doing.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Steven Hotis is with us, executive director of the gv
next ed co Lab. You can learn more at GVSU
dot edu and forward slash co lab. The typical process.
I'm really interested in what you just talked about spinning
off these programs that were born out of an idea.
First of all, you've got a team assembled at the
(07:22):
gv NEXT ED co lab our students involved with some
of this creative, innovative thinking that eventually might get spun
off into a program. Talk about that if you would please.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Yeah, we have the staffing mod is also really flexible.
We try to stay lean because that's one of the
things that sometimes burdens universities is there always the impulse
to add a lot of staff. We try not to
do that. So we have a small core team and
then each particular project has a team associated with it
(07:54):
as it grows, and we add to that team as necessary.
And yeah, very often those folks are students, and we
especially also have a mandate to work with our work
study students because we know that for work study students,
having really rewarding work on campus is one of those
(08:18):
factors that leads to better graduation rates that are on
time graduation rates, better college persistence. So we try and
make our work a benefit to the team as well
as to the people of the project is trying to
serve And.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
What kind of partners or stakeholders do you work with
in the collab, Well.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
It depends. We have internal stakeholders at the university. For example,
we have a project that just launched a couple of
weeks back on a digital credential wallet, and for that
we partnered with the Registrar's office. That's actually a good
example of a project. We have external partners in the
community at a number of K twelve schools and districts
(08:57):
who are part of this new crudential pilot, and as
that expands, we'll also be incorporating local workforce partners and
two year institutions as well.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
This is really cool. It's a new platform that uses
this digital wallet pilot, a new platform that uses blockchain
technology to securely store educational records for a student at
Grand Valley, like courses, certificates, other achievements in a digital wallet.
The wallet can hold any type of record. This is
(09:28):
not about bitcoin or cryptocurrency. This is about holding critical
data that a college student would need to access for
the rest of their life, especially as a successful Laker graduate.
We just had a class of them and this is
a really innovative thing. So tough question, how do we
know if this is a long lasting thing or is
it still in the testing phases.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
So it's really in the earliest testing phases. As I said,
we just launched last week. We launched specifically with the
population of Grand Valley juniors. Students will be seniors next year,
and then this spring and fall we will also be
launching with our K twelve partners their juniors, and we'll
(10:10):
expand to other classes of students as well. As you
said the importance of the wallet, and this is one
of these changes that you know, President Mantella was, you know,
visionary about all of us as students, no matter how
old we are, as learners, we are acquiring skills and
(10:30):
knowledge and competencies in a much wider range of places
than we did. I think you know when you and
I were coming up hill. It's not just high school,
it's not just college. There are all kinds of internship,
you know, certificates that people are earning, experiential learning, competency
based learning that's hard to capture on the traditional high
(10:53):
school or college transcript or on the traditional resime. And
it's sort of like it's the tree falls in the
forest and nobody hears it. If you're learning all these
things and acquiring all these skills and you don't have
a way to demonstrate them, to store them, to transmit
them in a way that is secure and non falsifiable,
(11:14):
then it's almost as if they don't exist if you
can't present them. And so that's the idea behind the
digital credential Wallet. I think we will have students, you know,
by this time next year as young as elementary school
in our partner districts who are starting to accumulate these
skills again all the way through the workforce. And as
you said, it's portable, and it's lifelong, and it can
hold the credentials from any institution.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
That's really exciting. Steven hotis with us, executive director of
gv's Next ed co Lab. The website is GVSU dot
eedu forward slash co lab. Stephen, before I run out
of time here, just got a minute or two left,
let's talk about the long term goals for the next
ed co Lab at Grand Valley State University. You're going
(11:57):
to hit your four year mark in June. How do
you measure this three years from now, five years from now, Stephen?
Speaker 3 (12:04):
You know, I think because the projects are so different,
each project has its own sort of set of indicators
as to whether it was good, as to whether it
didn't work, and you know what did we learn most
importantly from the successes as well as for the projects
that weren't viable for the collab. Overall, I think it
(12:26):
can we continually embody this spirit of innovation, of trial,
of iteration, of adding value to the university and to
the community and to our partners.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
And that's an exciting thing because who knows what's going
to happen in that three to five year period. I
would say that's any kind of a future like that
is not only bright, but it's exciting. Stephen, Absolutely exciting.
Thank you so much for being a part of this,
or is there anything you wanted to share with our
listeners before we wrap up?
Speaker 3 (13:00):
You know, I want to thank you Phil for this,
and I would just encourage everybody to keep their eye
on GVSU and all of the exciting initiatives that university
at large is rolling out and will continue to roll
out over the next few years.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Absolutely, I couldn't have said it better. Steven otis our
guest on this segment of West Michigan Weekend, the executive
director of the next ed collab at Grand Valley State University.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
You've been listening to iHeartRadio's West Michigan Weekend. West Michigan
Weekend is a production of Wood Radio and iHeart Radio,
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