Center for
Academic Innovation
The future of learning is relational. Michigan can lead it.
Prepared for James Cleaver, Jeremy Nelson, and Sarah Dysart, ahead of our August session, following two conversations with James DeVaney.
This is not a hunch. For four decades the labor market has rewarded social skill and penalized its absence, faster than it has rewarded technical skill alone.
Recreated from NBER, David Deming, "The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market." U.S. Censuses and American Community Surveys. nber.org
Recreated from a Financial Times graphic by John Burn-Murdoch; underlying data from Deming (2017), O*NET, and the American Community Survey. A worker strong in social but weak in math skills has out-earned the reverse.
The lesson for education is direct. Teaching content is necessary; providing opportunities to build relationships is what compounds over a lifetime.
Michigan Online is disciplined in building courses responsive to the market at a rapid scale. The layer it has not been built for yet is the one that turns that scale into relationships: learners who find each other, stay, and come back long after a course ends.
Not a concept. Here is what your Nunchi hub does for learners, for your team, and for the institution.
Today a learner can finish a Michigan course having met no one. That is the Coursera experience.
Flip for the Nunchi shiftOn day one, a learner is grouped with their course peers and shown who to meet and why. When they want to reach out, the AI drafts the message and coaches them on how to say it. A course becomes a community, and every connection is a rep in the social skills that decide careers.
You have millions of learners and a small team, with no way to see who is engaged or ready to give back.
Flip for the Nunchi shiftNunchi turns learner activity into recommended actions and surfaces your community champions. A small team can activate those champions to host learners in their own cities, turning a global roster into regional, in-person Michigan communities.
How do you turn an online learner into a lifelong member of Michigan, and open new revenue while you do it?
Flip for the Nunchi shiftTwo million learners have already told you what they want to learn. In August we will show how that becomes your course roadmap, and how an online learner becomes a member for life.
Not a directory entry. A living card that shows what two people share, what they can give each other, and exactly how to start, computed for the person looking at it.
Both moved into data science mid-career; both drawn to AI in healthcare. Priya took the same series two years ago.
Priya can map the path from coursework to a first ML role. Dana brings the frontline clinical context Priya's team is hiring for.
"Hi Priya, I'm partway through the Applied Data Science series you took, and I'm aiming at healthcare ML. I'd love to hear how you made that jump…"
Nunchi is not a CRM, a community platform, or an event tool. It is the intelligence layer that understands the relationships in your network, not just the records, and turns them into action. We call the category Relational Program Infrastructure.
"We design technology to make humans irreplaceable."
Not a CRM bent into shape, not a creator tool in disguise. The category was designed for communities like Michigan's.
Works with tools like Salesforce rather than replacing them.
The evidence above is where learning is already heading. Michigan would be leading toward it.
Enterprise-grade security, with a simple answer to the only question that matters: your data belongs to you.
In our session, we will show you how that signal becomes your course roadmap, and how a Michigan online learner becomes a member for life.