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Our Impact

We work with educators and workforce groups to design, implement, and scale equitable approaches that put today’s learners on a trajectory toward meaningful careers and higher wage earnings.

We measure our success by the Lab’s influence in the creation and co-design of scalable education models that are more affordable, more relevant, more visible, and more portable for learners.

Since 2013, we’ve crafted a powerful, structured design + build process for colleges, high schools, employers, and regions to harness the capacity of diverse stakeholders to create living pilots that provide a laboratory for innovation and scalable impact.

 

The Lab by the Numbers as of December 1, 2022

These numbers cover our work since the Lab’s founding in 2013.

1,190

Institutions and organizations trained in learner-centered design + innovation

 

1,210

Higher education leaders co-designing solutions

 

2,100

Education-to-workforce practitioners co-designing solutions

 

950

Employers co-designing solutions

 

2,840

Ecosystem stakeholders directly engaged

 

137K+

Audience members reached

 

Our Impact Model

 

The Lab’s impact model tracks progress toward scale with an equity lens. We begin with prototypes, preliminary versions of a learning tool, model, or process that provide a strawman to build upon. We then publish prototypes to share new learner-centered models as they emerge and invite others to take action. Together with our partners, we prepare the highest potential pilots for launch. These structured and deliberate implementations are observed and iterated. Our ultimate goal is to scale the best pilots to reach large numbers of learners, based on evaluation and learner satisfaction.

 

 

Explore our Prototype Bank: Learner-centered Models

We believe that sharing ideas, processes, and learnings helps spark opportunities and enable wide-scale adoption of new models. With our Prototype Bank, you can explore and build off of our experience and collection of co-designs.

  • The design process really affords participants the opportunity to think about things critically, but also provides them the boundlessness to come up with some things that they wouldn’t have otherwise. It really challenges them to think differently. And higher education needs that.

    Janet Marling
    Executive Director, National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students (NISTS)

  • What we really love about this project is not only that the campuses are getting the technical assistance and the resources to implement new creative, innovative ideas to help single moms achieve greater success, but that we can use the lessons they learned to share with other campuses, with policy makers, and with funders to hopefully scale the best practices that can be learned through this innovation.

    Jennifer Zeisler
    Senior Program Director, Career Readiness, ECMC Foundation

  • When we got to work with the Lab, we got your expertise on the design thinking, as well as the other colleges to work with, and learning from them, with them, bringing in the experts that you’ve brought to help us better understand our students and what the world of possibility is. It has been amazing.

    Dr. Sue Ellspermann
    President, Ivy Tech Community College

Dig Into Our Process

See the Lab in Action

We’re on the ground, creating proof points and supporting institutions as they transform their models to respond to the changing needs of learners and employers. Explore our growing media gallery for insights and glimpses into our work, alongside explainer videos that breakdown big concepts in the learn-to-work space.

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