 Let me start off by welcoming everybody. Welcome to this week's Future Transform, special Halloween edition. I'm Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator. I'm the cat herder for it and your host for the next hour. I'm very glad to see so many of you here today to discuss a very, very interesting idea. The next 55 minutes are entirely conversational. I'm gonna show you one slide because they're really nifty one that our guests provided. But other than that, it's been entirely conversations, question and answer. There are no pre-canned slides here, no pre-canned presentations. This is all about you, about the interest you have, about the ideas, the challenges, the problems, the topics, the hopes that you have. So please use either that question mark or the chat box or that raised hand to join us and ask questions. Now, speaking of asking questions, let me just bring up on stage our two guests and these are two wonderful people who both work in leadership roles and edu-cause. So let me bring them both up so you can see them. First, let me welcome Malcolm Brown. Malcolm, greetings. Hi, Brian, thanks for the invitation. Oh, my pleasure. Where are you today? Are you seeing sunny New Hampshire? No, you're seeing rainfield New Hampshire. It's raining cats and dogs here. But it's not snowing yet. It is not snowing yet. All right, all right, very good. We'll have to do. And let me welcome Susan Gryak. Susan, where are you today? Hi, Brian. I am in my home office in Connecticut and it's very rainy here. And you can see if you look on my wall that although I'm not dressed up for Halloween, I'm a dog lover and those are two paintings that my husband did of our dogs. Good. Well, I'm glad to see all of that. And do you two, I mean, as colleagues, I mean, do you know that Susan, you send weather to Malcolm? I mean, is this a typical thing? It's only the bad weather. She only sends the bad weather in my way. Yeah. Go to Malcolm. Go ahead. Man, this is New Hampshire. This is New Hampshire all over, I've got to say. Well, let me just welcome. I'm so glad to see both of you here. I really appreciate your time. And I'm really excited about this project that you've started up. Just to begin, let me just ask you really quickly as a way of introducing both of you to the few people who don't know you. What are each of you going to be working on for the next year? What are the big projects, the big topics that are going to be occupying your brains? You want to go first? Oh, OK. You go first, Susan. All right. Well, I really am going to be working a lot on digital transformation. I think that there is a lot that EDUCAS hopes to do to be able to help our members and the community understand what the heck digital transformation is and what it isn't, which is something that we're going to be talking with you about today. And to give you materials for you to really be able to learn more about it and to think about how it might apply to your job, to your institution, and then to try to develop some initial resources to help you actually embark on the digital transformation journey of your choice. So that's what I'm most excited about. I just finished the first draft of the 2020 Top 10 IT Issues article and I was working on an infographic today and just proved to myself that I am no artist. But anyway, I sketched things out and then developing some ideas that are kind of related to digital transformation and where higher education might be heading and how to think about that. That's what I'm most excited about, but I'll also be doing all that work that we do in our regular jobs that may not be glamorous or interesting to talk about, but certainly keeps things running. It does, and I'm glad to hear about all of it. Thank you, Susan. Yeah. Malcolm, how about yourself? What's the next year hold for you? Well, let's see. Like with Susan, I'll be working on our digital transformation project, particularly with its ramifications for the teaching and learning side of the house. I'll be working on the Horizon Report. The Horizon Report is a sort of never ending project when you finish one, then you start work on the next one. So we'll be finishing up the 2020 Report and announcing it and launching it at the ELI annual meeting in early March and then we'll start on the next round. So that's been a very, very interesting project. We're also working on version three of the Learning Space Rating System, and that work will spill over in the 2020. We also hope to announce that at the ELI annual meeting. Those are just a few of the things that will keep me occupied and out of trouble. When is the ELI meeting? The ELI meeting is March 2nd to the 4th. Our location will be Bellevue, Washington, which is right across the water from Seattle. And then Susan, when does the new top 10 list come out? It comes out mid-January. We already previewed it at the annual conference, so it is coming out there. Anybody who wants to see a preview can download the slides from the EJECA's website, or you can just shoot me an email and I'd be happy to send them to you. Oh, that sounds great. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we've had you as a guest before talking about that really indispensable list. So I'm glad to see it continue. Thanks, thanks. Well, friends, I promise I would break habit and actually show a slide, and this is because the two of you spent a lot of time developing the slide, and it's a rich one. I wanted to get people to think, what the heck is digital transformation? And here's the image that you gave me. Let me just put this on the screen so everyone can see it. So why don't you two kick us off by talking us through the slide? What does all this mean? Sure, I'd be happy to, Brian, and I'll tell you a little bit about how we're defining digital transformation. We've also got a little icebreaker question that we'd love to ask. So while I define it, I'll just queue up the question for you all. And then after you've sort of listened to me and looked at the definition, we'd love to hear you weigh in. And what we'd really like to know is we'd like to know whether or not your institution feels the need to change its strategic priorities, its business model, or its value proposition in order to stay relevant or maybe even solvent in the 21st century. So we'd sort of like to know where your minds are at regarding that. This is a question that the media asks actually when they interview us, they're sort of curious. Do they know what's going on? So anyway, we'd like you to think about that. And we're really excited by hearing your answers. But let me just narrate this slide. And what we have found is, we have found that one of the things that's very helpful with digital transformation is that it's really useful to see it in context. So when we've gone out and we've talked about it, Malcolm and I and Betsy Reinherts, our colleague and Karen Letzel, we're kind of the gang of four who've been really working on it the most within EDUCAS. But when we go out and we talk to people about digital transformation, one of the things that we've done is we've said, well, what is digital transformation? And they've said things like, well, it's efficient use of the technology that's available to us. It's getting rid of paper, automation, let's stop the manual madness. It's information anywhere all the time. It's getting connected to Gen Z because they're digital natives, rethinking how we provide service to our students in an innovative way. Those are some examples of when we don't show the definition, but we just ask people, those are the top of mind thoughts. And we would agree with some of those definitions. We would say that some of them are approaching what we believe digital transformation is and has to offer. And yet we would say that many of them are really a little bit earlier in that maturity journey. And if you'll forgive me, I'll have the hubris of talking about the journey that we've been on in higher education and other industries over the last several decades with technology as perhaps three different revolutions or three waves of an overall digital revolution. And the first wave was really about digitization. And that was taking paper and photos and sounds and other analog forms of information and digitizing them, putting them online. And I'm certainly old enough to remember when a lot of that was happening. And that was really, really exciting. Look, we can store words online. I remember my master thesis, I typed in one of the early word processors, W script for those who might remember that. And it was just so thrilling to be able to sit down with my master thesis advisor and she would say, would you mind just changing this paragraph? And she came from the days when everything was on a typewriter. And if you change the paragraph, you might have to re-type the whole chapter. And it was just groundbreaking for me to say, no problem, sure. And so it was a very exciting time. And we learned how to use images and words and things like that in ways that felt very innovative at the time. That was the digitization phase. That was the digitization phase, really moving information from analog to digital. Then the next phase of this revolution that we're in is a fussy word, I think it's fussy, digitalization. And digitalization is more than just, let's try to work in an extra syllable to this word. But it's a useful distinction from digitization because digitization is saying, we've got the data online, we've got it in digital format. Now we want it to move and interact with one another. And so it's really about creating digital processes with the digital information that you have, moving data. And that was a lot of work that we all probably remember and are still working on in many ways in the services that we provide. You could say that the ERP revolution was a revolution or the ERP era was an era of digitalization and really getting the data in these systems to move so that we could pay people and order things and understand who our students were and take grant proposals, for example and submit them to funding agencies and the like. And those are all some examples of what digitalization is. Well, over the last really 10, 15 years and probably not much longer than that and maybe arguably less, technology has evolved to the point where we could do even more things with information than to get it to be digital to get it to move and interact. But we can actually radically rethink the way we deliver teaching the way we learn and experience learning the kinds of research that we do and the way we can personalize digital experiences and information so that they can really be more relevant to us as individuals. Digital transformation overlaps a lot with the analytics revolution and there's a lot to the extent that analytics is letting us manipulate vast data stores and draw conclusions and inferences and maybe even make some predictions from them and to help inform decisions. That is a lot of the digital transformation journey but that's not entirely it. And so our definition of digital transformation is on that slide but I'll read it to you. It's digital transformation in EDUCAS's estimation is a series of deep and coordinated shifts in culture, workforce and technology. And those shifts are enabling new educational and operating models and helping transform an institution's operations, strategic directions and value proposition. So it's leading to a set of outcomes that are unfolding and so we've had some ideas of potential outcomes but a lot of the outcomes really remain to be viewed and imagined we believe that the outcomes can change the way as I said learning is experienced and education is delivered. We'll be able to change what we're able to do, perhaps create entirely new disciplines of research and techniques, change the way institutions operate and the way they connect with learners and the community and researchers and the way they connect one another. So we think it's really quite dramatic. As I said, we think that there are three components to going on a digital transformation journey when changing the institution's culture. And we've got a nice set of signals that you can look at around is your culture changing, what it meant. The other is that it's gonna change the workforce. It's going to change jobs. Some jobs are gonna go away, some are going to morph some new jobs and roles are going to come into play. And then obviously the changes that we think of right away, which are all the technology changes. So this is what we think it's gonna be. And I'll just say one more thing before I pause and invite reflection and reaction. And that is that this wasn't just me and Malcolm and Betsy and Karen kind of sitting there on our own in a smokeless room coming up with this definition. We actually commissioned the task force of our members. And Malcolm was one of the facilitators of that task force. And they talk long and hard and deep about what digital transformation is and this definition was developed by them. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for giving us the backstory of how that was created. And I appreciate the networked origin of it, community origin of it. And thank you for walking us through this very large concept, this very large model. Before I go further with any more questions, let me just ask everybody, please ask us your questions. What do you think about this sequence? What do you see as some of the opening promises and potential of digital transformation? Are you seeing any signs of this on your campus or is your campus still stuck in digitalization or even still digitization? Let us know, we'd love to hear from you. So please bring up your questions and either click the raised hand button if you'd like to join us on stage or just click the question mark and type in a question. We're glad to hear from you. I have a quick question that came in from Twitter from the wonderful friend of the program, George Station, who unfortunately this semester is teaching right this hour. Fortunate for his students, unfortunate for me. And he has a question. He wants to know about the... He refers to an Egy Knoll's review article by Alton Keynes and a colleague who talked about students in the role of student data in digital transformation. And he wonders, how can student agency and privacy become a real part of a digital transformation conversation rather than add on? I'm happy to take this, but do you want to take this Malcolm? I don't want to dominate the conversation. Well, I mean, there's a lot of ways you could take that one. Part of the challenge with this concept of digital transformation, it turns out to be pretty slippery and to some extent relative. What one institution might think is digitally transformative for itself may not be in the eyes of yet another. I think though that that comment has touched on a nerve. I think that the impetus to transform and the ways that institutions are transforming perhaps are most visible and conspicuous in relation to their students. I think there's been a real sea change in higher education. I know from institutions I've been at the past, students were valued, yeah, kind of sort of, but research kind of comes first, that sort of thing. And I think that higher it has realized that students have an important role to play in the future of higher education in their institution. And that's one area where I think there is a lot going on that really can be called transformation. Susan, I don't know if you want to add to that. Yeah, yeah, I'll just add to that, that I've been thinking about this and I think that a big component of digital transformation is going to necessarily be developing our principles and standards and supports around digital ethics. And because as we use analytics and as we use student data for more and more consequential things, the privacy risks and the ethical challenges just get more and more serious. And we've all started to see examples about that as well. And you could kind of be naive and say, well, hack, Amazon and Netflix and name your favorite store, they're using my personal data all the time to try to sell to me. And so why should higher education be different? Well, I think it should be different for a couple of reasons. And one is that students aren't, they aren't buying a degree, they're buying a future when they come to our institutions and really to really think carefully about how we can help them thoughtfully prepare for that future. And then the other thing is that higher education is a noble mission as I've said before and we're a trusted industry, although certainly if you look at Gallup and other data, the trust in us is decreasing as it is with all different institutions and industries. But I think that we are held to a higher standard and we should be grateful. We should take the badge of honor. So Brian, let me just add one of the comment in here is that I'm grateful that Susan mentioned that, you know, what a huge role that data is playing now. However, I would go back to something George Seaman said years ago when learning analytics was just taking off. He said, the interesting part of learning analytics is what you do once the analysis is done. You've collected the data and you analyze the data. So what happens next based on what you've analyzed? So here in this definition in the slide that you showed, one of the things I think is important is that you can have lots of data and lots of analysis, but it's not influencing your institution's strategic directions or its value proposition. Then it might not be quite in the ballpark of what we're looking at as institutional or digital transformation. Same thing with student input. If your student input isn't contributing to discussions around those big institution-wide issues that we're all struggling with right now, it may be very useful, but it may not be quite in the domain of digital transformation, which just means it's not important. It just means it's not quite there. So all defense of how all these inputs are being orchestrated and what ends their serving. So in a sense, I mean, both of your answers to George are campuses now are increasingly attuned to student needs and they can use all of these different tools to try to bring about better attention to students. I guess the question is how, what kind of active role do you see students playing in that, either in terms of policy or governance or student workers or simply students having a more active role in helping shape their technological environment? Well, one way is certainly I would say somewhat passive. I mean, the demographics are shifting in a way that perhaps were not even dreamed of 20 years ago as we're seeing the decline of the traditional higher ed undergraduate. And the growth in the number of non-traditional ones. In fact, the usual adage is today that majority of students who are seeking their bachelor's degree, all the vast majority of them have at least one non-traditional characteristics. So that whole demographic is shifting plus the fact that the way they work with their technology is forcing us to shift very things very carefully. How do we support this new diversity of students because they're not all of one cloth. They're much more diverse than they have been in the past. So they're forcing these questions to be asked on campuses as to how to provide experiences and support and to make this student successful and have a whole list of success on their campus. It's a nice change to think about. So let me ask again the rest of you. So this is your chance to ask questions about this. We'd be happy to zoom in to different aspects of it. Susan, in your ice-breaker question, I tried to paraphrase it and I think I kind of humbled around with it. I mean, you were asking about how people see this kind of transformation happening on their campus. Is that right? Yes, yes, yeah. And whether their campuses at their campuses, leadership and others really feel that they need to change or people pretty complacent and they feel like, what we're doing today is just really directionally correct. And we don't need to think about making any big changes. Well, we have one question that's just popped up immediately from the Austin Kelly Walsh. Let me see if I can bring him on. Kelly has been a long-term friend of the program as well as a previous guest. Hello, Kelly. Hey, Brian, how are you? Good, how are you doing in upstate New York, correct? Good, good, doing well. Also, Rainey, that rain is really covering the Northeast today. Oh my gosh. And hello to Malcolm and hello to Susan. Hi, Kelly, how are you? Hey, hi, how are you? So this is a fascinating topic I believe that all businesses need to digitally transform. You're either ahead of the curve, you're running right alongside or you're behind. And if you're behind, you may go the way of blockbuster and borders and blackberry and such. But one thing that fascinates me having grown up with this technology and have it become my career, there's a lot of, the economists have been showing that despite all this increase in technology, we don't seem to have measurable increases in productivity. And I sat in a very interesting discussion yesterday which I learned of the, I don't know if I'm gonna say it, the Conjurative Wave, which goes this 50-year arc that has happened for quite a bit of history and he was kind of predicting that 5G will be the thing that will help us kind of really bring things together in a way that hasn't happened and get us on the upswing again because we haven't been. We've got, which is kind of mind blowing to think of the incredible technology advances in the last 30 years, yet we haven't seen increases in productivity. I'm wondering if anything about that bigger picture has kind of surfaced in your explorations of these ideas at eduPhones? Just some initial thoughts. I mean, one, it would be really interesting to explore the notion of productivity in the context of higher education and what that kind of might mean. Also, don't you think there's a pattern here? I mean, haven't we been hearing the siren call for many, many years? When this technology arrives, everything will be good or improved, right? The latest one is probably the 5G example that you just mentioned. There's also been data and analytics and stuff like that, but I would go back to a comment I made earlier, you know, all this hulking gear and stuff like that isn't really gonna help us that much if we're not focused on really what our values are in our direction. That's a non-technical, I think that's a non-technical question. So the institution needs to comport itself around these questions and then orchestrate the technologies and say, if we have a direction, how will these help us move in that direction? How will it help us also? What changes do we need to make in our culture? Which is a big thing, right? And that's, you could say, is a non-technical thing. Nope. I think we lost him. Just had a pause there, Malcolm. I'll pick up from here. Ordinated chips. Oh, okay. Yeah, sorry, you just had a hiccup there, Malcolm. Oh, sorry. It's okay. You know, a couple of other things that, you know, I agree with what Malcolm is saying and a couple of other things related to that. I was just at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando last week and that's always a really fun meeting to go to. But I listened to one of the Gartner guys, Mark Raskino, and he gave a talk that was based on what they learned from interviewing and surveying CEOs of many, for many different types of industries, almost 400, excuse me, almost 500 CEOs. And he talked about that the CEOs are getting impatient. So kind of like, oops, sorry about that. You're impatient. Yeah, I know, my goodness. It's one of those CEOs calling right now who express their impatience. But what they're getting impatient about, and this relates to, I think, some of the things you were talking about, Callie, they're saying, show me the value from all of these digital investments that I'm making. And Raskino's prescription is not, let's just pause, let's step back. His diagnosis is that there's been a lot of, he used this great phrase, digital dithering going on. Digital dithering. And this kind of relates to what Malcolm was saying, this lack of focus, right? Let's invest in this, let's invest in that. Let's do this, let's do that. And he threw out the idea, which was appealing to us at EDUCAS, because now we run the Horizon Report, of doing your planning and focusing your planning and your digital transformation work on different digital horizons. And thinking of breaking up your digital transformation journey into perhaps several three to four year journeys. So saying, what are we going to accomplish with digital transformation in this initial journey? And maybe what we're going to accomplish, and this is me filling in now, is maybe we're gonna focus on making sure that we've got strong digital foundations and working on some initial culture change. And perhaps planning out what are some of the initial directions in which we think the workforce might need to go. And then thinking about what the next horizon might be. And delaying the work that might really be sexy and exciting for maybe one of the later horizons. So think this notion of focusing. And another thought that I've been thinking about in relation to this is that we talk about culture, or excuse me, we talk about people, process, and technology, right? That's the gang of three, or the pyramid, when we think about technology projects. And don't start with the technology, start with the people in the process. And I think we need to add a fourth piece to that, people process, technology. But I think we need to start thinking about product. And to what outcome? And very often we think of the technology itself as being the outcome. But if we think of the technology as another dimension that can develop a product that we're creating, and that product ought to be a product that the institution is creating. And maybe that product is serving adult learners, for example, or developing micro-credentials, or something like that. But if we focus on what technologies do we need, to be able to get to those products, to those real tangible outcomes. Maybe that will help us develop a sharper, more concrete return on investment that our presidents and provosts and students and alums can see. Great. Well, thank you for those thoughts. You know, just one other thought here, I'll just add here, we use this term digital transformation. And I think the term digital in this phrase is tricky. It can be, if you're not careful, it can be distracting and somewhat misleading. In that, you know, if I just haul in all this technology gear, I'll be transforming, certainly there are lots of people who would like to sell us lots of systems and hardware and have us believe that if we just do the digital thing right, then the transformation will happen. So again, not to go on that length about this, but that's why we're talking about these deep and coordinated shifts in culture and technology and workforce that are going to point to these more strategic institution encompassing changes. Sure. Yeah, it's not a transformation that is digital. It's a transformation enabled by digital. Yes, I mean, and we leave it in there because who can ignore the digital part of this because it's so enabling. So it's hard, you know, damn, did she leave it in, damn, did she leave it out a little bit? Sure. Thank you, Kelly, for the really great question. Thank you both, Susan, Malcolm, for a really great day. I love that concept. Is it condriative ways? K-O-N-D-R-A-T-I-E-V. Sometimes it's spelled I-E-F-F. Right, because it's Russian. Contrary to you. And we have a fascinating term, civilizational waves and it's a fun thing to look into. I just put it on the chat. I'd be happy to talk about that. But friends, if you're new to the forum or if you're new to this technology, bringing Kelly up on stage is really that simple. So if you'd like to join us on stage, please do. We have a question from Greg, who just had to run out the door. Actually, wait, Greg, let's see, if your camera's on, I can actually beam you up. Let's see, I thought you were escaping, but now I've got you. Hello, Greg. Yeah, I think we kind of already addressed it and hi to another Connecticut folk. So those from Connecticut might know why I'm being a little extra like a cervic in my things. But I think you kind of already getting to this because it's to me, it's a human transformation problem. Technology, this has been around for 30 years. This reflects 30 years of bad hiring and firing. Like we can't, we're not gonna buy a tool that's gonna fix this. Sorry, I don't know, I guess it's more of a question, but yeah, how do we focus more on the staff development, the people development to you? I mean, we in fact, they don't use email correctly. I mean, you're talking about, and so I don't see this digital, I see digital transformation is just a gigantic waste of money on data surveillance tools of students. Sorry, a little bias came out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, go ahead, Susan. I think it's important to share your viewpoint because if we just like say, what's the party line? Okay, I'll mimic that. We'll never really think carefully about these issues and if we don't, God help us, right? You know, we're lost. What I'm seeing, I was able to interview a couple of dozen higher ed leaders as part of the IT issues project this year and about half of them were college or university presidents, the rest were provosts and CBOs and they know they're on a burning platform. They really, really do. They know they absolutely have to change. So, you know, I think that your point about culture as being the key, I think is a really important one. I think that any new technology may or may not make things different, but when you take all the financial and reputational challenges, all the new external competition and you kind of add all that together, that's when suddenly institutions are willing to make some of those hard and disruptive cultural changes that they wouldn't even have contemplated before. One of the reasons we're surfacing this term and trying to engage with the community around this idea is that as we all know, and you both said that, you know, higher ed is experiencing headwinds that it's never experienced before and in a strength probably that it's never experienced before, which is gonna kind of continue on. And I got lots of numbers and stuff that, but we all know about the numbers about the students and things of that sort. So part of our effort is to really try to get the community really thinking about this and taking it seriously. And I myself couldn't agree with you more. We're really talking about the human factors that surround this issue and the human factors in terms of changing the culture. The cultural shift in that triad that we've been talking about is by far the most challenging, I'm sure. Well, that's a great answer. And really, Craig, I really appreciate you focusing us on the human aspect of the question. Thank you. Thank you very much. And again, you can see this is... And thank you, by the way, both Malcolm and Susan. And when we talk about such institutional technological changes and huge framework of change, it's important to give the human focus in place. And you guys did a really great job of that. We also had a question from... Let's see if I can bring her up, from the awesome Joyce Ogburn. And let's see if we can turn. Hi. I want to really support some of the definitions that you did on digital transformation. Transformation definitely depends on a culture shift. I'm an anthropologist and I start every framework I do with culture. That's where everything comes from, values and all sorts of other things. And another big aspect is behavior that's the very human and organizational element. And one of the things I've found, in addition to all the things you need to learn about technology, is a lot of times people struggle with technology because they don't even know basic management practices. They don't use sound archival practices. Their everyday work is not well done before. So you add technology on top of that, it doesn't solve that problem. So people need to be better informed about real aspects of work and what it takes to do things before they can really use the technology well. I think that's a missing piece. So we can add practice to Susan's list, if you want to, of things that people, particularly in higher ed, you start talking to people who are new to using technology, your leadership or management, and they're totally clueless where to start. And we don't train people well and then suddenly they're no longer in that role and they're thankful they're not. And so they haven't really learned anything. And so the organization doesn't progress on those basic everyday practices that enable us to do our basic work and then use the technology more effectively too. So that's my two cents on what you have to say. And I love the diagram. I think it's really great. I know some other organizations are talking about digital transformation that aren't higher ed and our businesses. And I'm gonna share that and say it's just what you think your organization's doing and what's really gonna make that happen. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think your points are really great, Joyce. And coming off having been really immersed in the top 10 IT issues project this year, when we interviewed the panelists and they talked about what are the big priorities and issues that they're facing and that they think higher education is gonna be facing, a lot of it really was this kind of house keeping. And they talked a lot about how do we manage the data? How do we even know what data we have? And how do we govern it? How do we think about it? So that kind of connects to that diagram because I think an important point about that diagram is that that diagram looks like it's this nice ladder, right? I'm on the bottom wrong. Now I'm going to the second one. Now I'm going to the third one. But really, if you were to kind of track the journey that we're on, we're sort of at all of those levels at our institutions. And we kind of try to advance in one level and we realize, oh my goodness, all this work that we have to go back to the previous level to do. And a lot of it is overlapping. So it's quite a lot messier than that. But I think you're right, doing those basics. Yeah, people don't want to fill out forums in the first place. It doesn't matter if it's online or not. They're not gonna try to circumvent the process. So anyway. You know, Joyce, you being anthropologist, it'd be interesting to hear your points of view on the role of leadership and all this because leadership and cultural change seems to be somewhat tricky. If you push too hard or don't push hard enough, you don't hit the right balance, things could go askew. And I assume that this is something that you and your colleagues have studied is the role of leadership and things like this. Well, I'm an anthropologist in training but I'm recently retired librarian and higher ed administrator. So my field has really been in the librarianship but that's my additional training has been in anthropology. And so absolutely there are ways to study, you can do ethnographies on the ground of what people actually do. It's very different from what they say they do. Oh yes, oh yes. And people lie, right? They lie all the time about what they do. So surveys don't necessarily- We tell ourselves, let's put it politely, we tell ourselves stories, right? We tell stories that they have elements of truth and elements of fantasy. So there's, and I don't think we give people enough time to learn often in these new roles that they have because they're very different from being a faculty member or something else. And that it's not valued that you be a good administrator or manager of the work. So by the time somebody does catch on, they're off to the next thing and they're glad not to have to deal with it anymore. And so it just puts a lot of pressure on an institution if there's not a lot of value in the management of processes and making them good. You know, people think higher edge isn't a business and it isn't, but if there are business practices it really helps things work a lot more smoothly that need to be valued more. And that needs to come from the top and the middle and every which way that you can because the organizations really struggle if they don't have those good practices. Thank you. Thank you very much. Great to see you again. We have a whole bunch of questions that are just piling in and I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to take a crack at them. And let me bring up one, and a couple of these from people who can't do video right now, so let me bring up one from Nicole Weber. She's excited to hear that edgy college is working in materials to support digital transformation work from both sides of the house and he sneak peeks. Well, yeah, I mean, we have some stuff stockpiled and Brian, I sent you some URLs. If you're gonna post those, that's the way of beginning to get that's kind of a hub we have where you'll find the signals document that Susan was alluding to that is sort of, these are the characteristics of transformation. Do any of these apply to your, that's a good way to get a sense as to whether what level of things that you're working on. But that's one place to start. Yeah, and I pasted in the URLs to our two kind of foundational documents that we have published right now. And one is a document that talks about the shifts that we're seeing in culture workforce technology in some level of detail. And then the other one is the one that Alka mentioned, the signals document. And the signals document is just this nice summary of it that's organized in checklist format that you could actually, read and you could walk through, or even use it in conversations at your institution to see the extent to which you're seeing signals already. Yeah, the signals document, our motivation for doing that is that when you talk to people and say, are you moving into this sort of space at your institution and they'll say, yeah, we're starting to recycle, or yeah, we just got a new SIS or something like that. And you kind of say, okay, somehow there's a frame that the frame is wrong. And so we're hoping by means of the signals document to try to see if this is a way of helping people to see kind of what frame they're in, whether they're one of the two preliminary Ds or whether they're really as an institution moving more into the transformational domain. And the other preview that I can give you is we just collected some data on digital transformation about almost 300, I think, people's college and university CIOs and IT leaders responded to the survey. And it's a landscape study. And what I mean by that is we're just trying to get the lay of the land of what is really happening today with digital transformation, how much of it is hype and how much of it is reality? Why are people engaging in digital transformation, et cetera? So one of the questions, and we were very careful to give those three definitions of digital transformation, digitalization and digitization. So that people weren't responding to our questions about digital transformation and misconstruing it. So we were real careful about that. And one of the things that we asked was we said, are you doing digital transformation now? Remembering that it is this series of deep and coordinated culture workforce and technology shifts in service of trying to develop new educational and operating models and transform the institution. And so with that sample, 13% said, yes, they're doing digital transformation today. And you would think I would just find that very depressing but actually I was encouraged to see that because that's invested to me that they had really answered the question. But another 32% said they're in the process of developing a digital transformation strategy and 37% said they're exploring. So if you're quick at math, you can see that 16% said nothing, they're not doing anything at all. So that's really pretty cool. And we found that the top benefit of digital transformation that people see today, 84% said that they believe that digital transformation can help improve the student experience. So that's really the top one right now. That's very optimistic. That's good. We have a question from Ed Gray. This is a text question. Let me just read this out from the chat. He says, one digital transformation that I continue to look forward for schools to significantly make ubiquitous enriching the student experience both campus life, residential and virtual, as well as in the classrooms, residential and blended. For instance, campus information and services need to fit our students' pockets. Likewise, as teachers, you should strive to substantially increase the level of engagement interaction with students. Again, that kind of circles back to this theme of anchoring digital transformation on students very. Yeah, again, my point was that it's probably gonna be most conspicuous in the student area. And I would be interested, if there was some way to do a poll here, I would wanna do it, would be to say, in the think of your institution for the past 10 years, do you think that your institution has become more student-centric over these past 10 years or not? I would wager that most institutions would say that they have. So I think that there is powerful momentum in this direction kind of already. It's a good question. Let me see if we can put up a quick polling tool to do that right now. While this is up, let me just raise another question, which is from the wonderful Roxanne Risken, another longtime friend of the program. And she asked, apart from students, what do you see as faculties, specific or general role in facilitating digital transformation at the end of the world? I think the faculty's biggest contribution would be to sort of think more like a student in the sense of adopting learning engagements and learning designs that are really focused on helping the learners of all types and support multimodal course designs. I think, and I think again, I think I see a lot of momentum there. I mean, just think about the design of classrooms over the past five or six years. We've seen a tremendous shift away from continuing to turn out these transmission style rooms into active learning spaces. And I think that's informed by, I think everybody knows that active learning is probably the single most effective mode of learning. And therefore the things around the learning need support that mode of learning. And I see adoption of adaptive courseware, for example, as one symptom or signal, if you will, as a way of trying to kind of aspire to Benjamin Bloom's challenge, the Two Sigma challenge in providing tutorial and mentoring type of experiences but on a broader scale that higher it is forced to. So I think faculty as ever have a huge role in that. If you can see the vote slide, if you're the vote object, Malcolm, your question was, it was a binary question, right? Yeah, it was. I mean, do you think that something like this, do you think your institution has become more student-centric and more student-friendly? How do you want to phrase it over the past, say, 10 years? And so far it looks like, here, let me see if I can, let's see if I can get the results. It looks like a huge reason. It's like 98% more, let me see. Yeah, yeah, it looks like 98% or so said more rather than only 2% said less. Okay, so the question here is, in terms of your institution's progress in this area, is it sufficient? Is it going to, is it proceeding at a pace and at a volume, so to speak, that will allow your institution to really address the significant headwinds it might be facing? So that's one way of calibrating what the institution needs to do in order to be successful in the 21st century. Can you type that maybe in the chat, Malcolm, because we had another bullet. Okay. And maybe that you're getting way too much, right? Speaking of too much, we are right at the end of our while right now, which is kind of astonishing and I think a testimony both to the rich and breadth and richness of your model, Susan and Malcolm, as well as the generosity of your responses to all of our many questions. Let me thank you so much for both sharing this innovative idea and also for taking such time to engage with us really deeply. We appreciate all of that. Thank you. Thank you. This was so much fun. It was great that we just talked and that we had a single slide. So thanks very much for letting us do that and thank you all for being so thoughtful. Please don't be strangers. Reach out to Malcolm and me with if you have additional thoughts about digital transformation, if you wanna get involved, if you wanna push back on any of this too. What's the best way to find you? And what's the best way to keep up with all of this? The best way to keep up with all this would be to go to that URL that you typed in, Brian, or you could just Google Educa's digital transformation. That's probably the easiest thing. And then Malcolm and I just put our emails in the chat. So if Malcolm's name is easy to spell, my last name is easy to misspell. It works like a charm. Greg is easy. Brian, if I could just throw in one real quick plug. We run a blog called Transforming Higher Ed. It's kind of approaching this thing from the teaching and learning side. So if anyone is interested in blogging about this or other things related to teaching and learning at Higher Ed, just send me a pop main email. Great, thank you, Malcolm. Thank you both of you. And thank you especially to the foreign community for such great thoughtful questions and consideration. Don't go yet. I just need to introduce where we're going for the next week. Next week, we're gonna shift ground a little bit and we're gonna welcome one of the leading presidents in liberal education world. Michael Roth, who's the president of Wesleyan University will join us. He's a brilliant instructor, a brilliant thinker, just a terrific, terrific person and have a really looking forward to his conversation. And the topic is what's going to happen with liberal education? What's the fate of liberal arts colleges in the 21st century? Please join us. Now, that session, this session, all of these sessions are recorded and up on YouTube. So if you'd like to look at some of our past sessions, including Susan's previous appearance or any other discussion on the different topics that we've been touching on, just head to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. Now, if you wanna keep talking about all this great stuff, I mean, how do we facilitate digital transformation? What does it mean for students? What does it mean for faculty? What does it mean for policy? We have a lot of different venues for discussing this. We have groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. On Twitter, we use the hashtag FTTE and we have a Slack channel and it's great to see all of you there. In the meantime, thank you so much for all of your conversation, for all of your thoughts. This has been a really, really great forum. We really appreciate it. We'll see you next time. And I'll be here for another five minutes if you just wanna chat. Until then, bye-bye.