What Higher Ed for the AI Age Looks Like

What would higher ed look like if someone built it for the AI AGE?

I’m so glad I asked such an insightful question for you! Let me tell you . . .

There are three defining characteristics that any post-secondary institution will need if they want to thrive in this new era:

1. laser focus on mastery of job skills;

2. ai-first graduates; and

3. an agile program

For this post, I’m going to focus on that last item—an agile program.

In a world where AI can make a tool, a skill, or an entire career path emerge or evaporate OVERNIGHT, higher ed needs to be able to pivot just as quickly in order to serve the needs of employers and students.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done at pega6.

WAIT! I know you probably want to click away because you’re thinking, “This son of a &#%! just tricked me into reading some promotional post about his company.”

Not my intent. I promise.

I’m only using pega6 to illustrate my point because we’re the only post-secondary institution in the world who is building higher ed for the AI Age.

and I think our model will be THE model for building modern higher ed

elements of an agile program

Our agile program enables us to change the entire direction of our career accelerators in a timespan measured in DAYS. Yes, literally days.

There are five enablers of our agile model:

1. Our “contentless curriculum;”

2. The strategic use of “intentional chaos;”

3. Our AI scaling engine;

4. The fact that we will never seek accreditation; and

5. An agile mindset.

Today, I’m going to talk about one of our most unusual elements . . . our contentless curriculum.

contentless curriculum

Unlike universities and bootcamps, pega6 has NO lectures, videos, textbooks, exercises, or tests. That’s right—zero, nil, nada. In other words, no content.

Our program is entirely experiential. Students in our product manager and software developer accelerators are building commercial-grade software in cross-functional teams 50 hours every week for an entire year.

The benefit of this experiential (i.e., contentless) approach is that when AI causes the world to pivot in a moment, we don’t need to spend an eternity updating our lectures, refilming our video series, or revamping our written materials.

For us, it’s as easy as saying:

“Oh, Python is no longer an industry standard?

ZimZam is now the backend language gaining dominance? (I made up that language, so don’t bother Googling it.)

Well, now all student product builds that required a Python backend will be coded in Watermelon going forward.”

Or . . .

“Cursor is on its way out and Jelingo is on its way in? (I made up that company, so don’t bother Googling it.)

Okie dokie. Students shall henceforth use Jelingo as their IDE.”

Done. Declaration made. “Curriculum” changed.

student skillset kept perfectly in sync with industry needs

THAT’S higher ed built for the AI Age.