Heather Hiles, president and CEO of the California Online Community College District, said the 115th community college in the California Community Colleges system, created last year, is still hiring senior-level executives to build out the organization’s lines of business.
It should reveal potential vendor opportunities later this year, she said. Among the takeaways:
• The district’s first training programs will debut Oct. 1, and according to EdSource, its first three offerings will ready students for jobs in medical coding and information technology, and for supervisory roles in vocations like retail and government. The goal, Hiles told Techwire, is to maintain a “mutually beneficial” relationship with brick-and-mortar community colleges and focus on offering additional skills and training for people who are transitioning into new jobs — and so-called “new economy jobs.”
• Pre-existing content is already available throughout the state’s community college system, Hiles said — highlighting the areas of medical coding and cybersecurity. But for the most part, she said the district, which she joined as president and CEO on Feb. 19, will “blaze our own trail around building our own tech stack."
“I think that a lot of the technologies that we need to utilize are relatively new and haven’t necessarily been tapped within the existing community college system,” Hiles said, referring to artificial intelligence, blockchain, augmented reality and virtual reality.
• A release date is unclear but the district is preparing its first RFP, she said, calling it “Version 1.0 of the value change that we envision,” and an “iterative process.” The online system won’t be building any unique technology through its minimum viable product (MVP), Hiles said, but will be able to test different technologies and continue with research and development.
“The analogy I use for a lot of people is, Oct. 1, you’ll see, like, an added Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station for us. And meanwhile, on a parallel path, we’re constructing ... and designing our own Hyperloop, if you will,” Hiles said, indicating the process of identifying where mission critical process may already exist elsewhere; and where the district will need to build its own.
• The RFP, for two discrete programs, should be something of a rolling process, Hiles said, for a technology that could be brought online the following year.
“We’re really talking about other technologies we might need to utilize for online assessment, online proctoring of exams or other kinds of intervention. What we’re going to do in the RFP is just lay out all the different pieces and then see what’s available and then go from there,” Hiles said.
• Hiles said she has roughly 30 years' experience in “workforce development and innovation in the educational, learning and work environments.” Most recently, she was CEO and managing partner for Imminent Equity, a Bay Area growth equity fund that uses AI, extended reality and blockchain to optimize performance and growth. From October 2016 through December 2017, Hiles was deputy director of solutions for postsecondary success for the the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. She founded Pathbrite, an online, cloud-based digital portfolio system, and was its CEO from 2012-2015; and founded and built SF Works during the late 1990s, a company that took more than 11,000 women from welfare to living wage jobs.
SF Works, Hiles said, showed her “the power of e-learning, where you can take your time, double back on stuff that you haven’t quite mastered.”
