 In fact, I think we should start now. Hello, welcome everyone. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm glad to see you here today. We have a community session, which is always one of my favorite, and I'm really glad to see you. For years, our main practice on the forum has been to invite one person up here, sometimes a couple or three or more, but a guest in order to take a dive into their expertise, to learn from their experience and what they are focusing on and what they're working on. But every so often, we take a break from that tradition. Instead of a normal guest, the guest is all of you. We bring all of you together in order for us to collectively think about the future of higher education from each of our standpoints, from each of our perspectives, from the point of view of our individual work. And that is something which I find emotionally very powerful and very satisfying. And I'm really grateful to do it today. Today, the occasion is the start of the fall 2022 semester. And so what I would love to do is hear from each of you what you think, what you're looking for, what you're anticipating, what does the future academic year hold for you? In order to get things going, let me clear this out of the way, in order to get things rolling, I'm just gonna share a couple of thoughts based on my research, what I'm seeing right now. And then I'll open the floor to all of you. So please at any point feel free to chime in with something that I'm saying or to go completely in a different direction. Again, this is an open mic and open floor for all of you to participate in. And by the way, as we've been doing for the past few months, our good friend Wesson or Dolmski is here and they will help you if you have any technical glitches. So please ping Wesson if you have any issues at all. Let me just mention a couple of the trends that I'm tracking right now. And then I'll turn it over to you. So one that is very, very important is economic. That is many nations in the world, especially Europe and the United States have been enduring an interesting kind of opposing trend. On the one hand, we've been enjoying very, very low unemployment rates. On the other hand, we're suffering from unusually high inflation rates. The eurozone has been hit especially hard on this. And we know that there are many, many problems and dangers caused by inflation, including pressures in higher education upward on tuition, as well as making it more difficult for families to be able to afford tuition and other payments. In terms of the unemployment rate, it seems that this is potentially causing people to not necessarily enroll in higher education because the job market looks so much more competitive. A lot of data, a lot of complexity in that, but it's an interesting pressure on all of us, as we especially as colleges and universities try to recruit students. So those two issues are very interesting. Also, by the way, am I going too fast, too slow, just right? Give us a response in the chat. Lisa says, good, Lisa's tough to please. So I've got to be happy with that. A second point that just came up in the chat from Ed and Carolyn, is that of long COVID? So let me get to that. We have short code, if you will. We still have the dangers of infection and different campuses are responding in different ways. They have different regulations. Within the United States, the Biden administration is ramping down its COVID efforts. The pandemic is still pandemic. It is still killing several hundred people a day in the United States and sickening some much larger number than that. In fact, I'm here in Georgetown's campus. We are required to be masked in all classrooms. Now I'm not in the classroom right now and I'm also by myself, so I'm happily removing the mask so you can hear my dulcet tones more effectively. But that's just one example. So we still have these issues and the long COVID issue is one that is just growing salience. So of course, long COVID refers to the tissue damage suffered by people. Some number of people, maybe 10 to be 20% of people have been infected and the tissue damage can occur in multiple places in the body, including the brain and the nervous system, leading to brain fog or memory issues or coordination issues or joint pain. It can also affect other organs leading to, for example, difficulty breathing or heart problems. And the heart problems may be actually quite severe. One of the reasons this is a major issue is first, some number of academics, students, faculty, staff, have long COVID and that is going to affect their performance and what they do. So think about what happens if you've got an administrator who has brain fog or what happens to a professor who is just perpetually wracked with joint pain or what happens to people who have to retire early because either you have heart problems or brain functioning. All of that plus the fact that there is emotional and personal pain and suffering as a result of this. So that's one piece of the impact. Second is a possibility of this may change the work environment as well. If we have some degree of the workforce that is weakened or driven out by long COVID, again, that impacts unemployment and that impacts how we prepare students for the workforce. And third problem with this is that we may see medical costs go up even further because this means tens of millions of people potentially within the United States have long COVID who exert greater pressure and have more needs for medications, treatments, all kinds of therapies. So we may see that problem as well. So I'm tracking this as closely as I can. There's a great deal of complexity and we also don't have really good data about COVID in higher education. I would love to hear more and more of your thoughts about this. In the chat, Carolyn says, there was an article on LinkedIn about compassionate re-enrollment from Kim McNutt at CSU Dominguez Hills. Students may be stopping out due to long COVID, medical costs and the usual reasons. Carolyn, if you can, as a librarian, if you can find that link, that would be great to see. I'm not saying, wow, that's a happy story. I'm saying it's very, very important to see that. So this is a good point, especially as we're trying to keep students enrolled. So COVID, in addition to macroeconomics, let me add to this as well some of the interesting dynamics that are happening now around demographics. Some of you know demographics is something that I obsess over and I've been researching for some time. There have been some interesting developments of late. One is that we are seeing the American lifespan drop seriously by something like three or four years. This is primarily as a result of COVID, which especially kills older people, as well as a continuing problem, the nightmare problem of deaths of despair, mostly due to alcohol as well as other forms of substance abuse. So while the American birth rate continues to lower, it may be that our mortality is beginning to accelerate as well, which is an awful thing. The second issue along with that is there has finally been some interesting public traction around issues of fertility. I'm seeing more politicians, more thought leaders, more people in the nonprofit space and some business people, most notoriously, Elon Musk expressing anxiety about falling birth rates. And so this is a political third rail to grapple with. It's very, very challenging, but I would expect to see more and more of that continue and there's no sign of American birth rates going back up. Now the usual way that we have accounted for that were balanced that I was by immigration. And of course, immigration is not being that great either. Oh, thank you, Carolyn for sharing that in the chat. Thank you very much. Deborah says, they have a new president who has implemented a stricter standards academically for students at her small college. So numbers are down and students in her courses seem to really want to be a college and to learn. They're all in person. Interesting, Deborah. So the quantity is lower, but the quality, at least of interest, is higher. By the way, Deborah, tell us what you're teaching. Also in the chat, Tom Heymans, we need to meet students where they are in order to stem the role of declines. We assume far too long that they would seek us out. If higher ed is increasingly seen as optional, then we can't assume they're gonna make the effort. So just really, really quickly. This is an absolutely good point, very, very important. Over the summer, I published a piece which got some attention about the idea that a major consensus seems to be shattering. So in the United States from the early 80s, up until a couple of years ago, we had a pretty solid cultural consensus that the more people go to college, the better. The more college experience a person gets, the better. And this was a bipartisan consensus. It was across all geographies. It appeared in everything from national politics down to high school guidance counselors to employers. It seems of late the consensus began to break down in a few ways. You're seeing it politically with more and more Republican skepticism about higher education, not just Republican, but also independence and Democrats. But we're also seeing more and more anxiety, of course, over student debt. And I'll get to student debt in just a minute. But all, plus we're also seeing some interesting anxieties about the quality of higher education. So it may be that COVID kind of hit that with a hammer and now we're starting to see that consensus begin to weaken so that not everybody is convinced everybody should go to college. Ed noticed that in addition to lower immigration, there's a huge backlog in USBs and processing worldwide which may reduce international student numbers. Indeed, indeed, agreed. And Sergio Costa says, on my mind, at my school, enrollment for in-person is down. Online and synchronous, all popular. I am concerned that the push to reach old goals and practices, there is limited interest in 100% in person. Afraid we're not building on upscaling what we did. I assume Sergio, even by upscaling, you mean the increasing skills of teaching online and learning online. Yeah, I'm seeing examples of that across the country. That's a major, major issue. Thank you, Sergio. In fact, before I go much further, I'm gonna make it easier for you to all join me on stage if you like. This big teal of color box, this is a daring move on my part. If you press that button, it beams you on stage right away. I don't have to do anything. So you can just stumble on stage, or leap on stage, climb on up as you like. I'm happy to keep reading aloud from the chat, but I'm also happy to hear your voices and to see your faces. Deborah, thanks for telling me about the classes. I'm glad you're Emerita, but also glad to see you teaching English. Now, the student debt issue is, of course, a huge one because the Biden administration announced by executive order a new plan to forgive some chunk of student debt. I don't wanna go into all the details right here, although if you don't like, we can explore them together. The key thing is forgiving up to $10,000 in debt, up to 20,000 for those who have certain health conditions with an income limit. So people over a certain amount of income are not eligible for it. This has become a huge political firestorm. Already there are Republican ads and think pieces, Democratic ads and think pieces. There's a real question about how popular or unpopular this is and how it will play out in polling matters because we have a major American legislative election coming up in November. So that is a major, major issue. I'm gonna mention one last point and then I wanna turn it over all to all of you. And that has to do with geopolitics because right now the United States is engaged in some kind of new Cold War-ish experience with two world powers, with Russia, over Ukraine, and with China over a variety of issues, including Taiwan. And the reason I'm mentioning this is because this impacts higher education in a few ways. One is that we've seen different academic units around the world try to distance themselves from Russia and to much smaller extent, Belarus. Everything from closing joint programs to making a show of not teaching Dostoevsky. So we're seeing some of that. And we're also seeing the obverse of that, which is academics trying to help Ukrainians who are academics who are fleeing their country for safety or who are in country and trying to be supported. So that's one part of what's happening with geopolitics in the higher ed. The other is the Biden administration is continuing now a decade-long American stance of opposition to China, which has played out in some interesting ways. Already, there are noises that Americans shouldn't collaborate with Chinese researchers on certain key themes and fields, namely advanced technologies, biotechnology, AI, et cetera. There's also the US trying to build up an alliance across the world. So it may be that we see more international collaboration, sorry, collaboration or cooperation with countries in those alliances. And we may also see at some point a decline in the number of Chinese students who come to the United States. There've been some interesting numbers about that already. It's a little unclear in part because of the other reason that Ed Webb mentioned about visas, but we may see this big battle across the Pacific play out in higher education. So those are a few of the trends that I'm tracking. I'm gonna go through the chat here and pull up some of the topics that you have all come up with. And if you would like to comment, again, remember in the bottom of the screen we have all those different buttons. So just if you want to type in a question that you want me to flash on the screen, hit that in the Q&A box. And if you want to join us and you're feeling bold, press that teal color button next to me. And if you wanna join us, but you're feeling a little shy or diffident, just press the raise hand button and I'll bring you up when it's especially good. So going through the chat here, Caroline Coward has mentioned, part of her work is in open science, finding a new metric to measure the influence of published research beyond the age index, citation numbers, and journal impact factor. Is there a better way to judge the effect of riskology work? Yeah, that's a great topic. And there's kind of two that are evolved here and they're both really, really powerful. One is that measurement issue and there's a lot of debate about what kind of metric we use, measure impact and some of the metrics are published by companies and there's debate about each of them. And I haven't seen one that strides forth as uniformly universally accepted yet, but we need something better. But the other is open science. And we're seeing this both in terms of open access and the scholar of the publication as well as open education resources. Open access, excuse me. Just got a boost from the Biden administration where the Office of Science Technology Policy just issued a directive that previously the federal government had a policy of encouraging, if not requiring, all scientists who create scientific research and federal funds have to publish their research in open format within 12 months. It was a kind of 12 month embargo period or the OSTP just removed that embargo. So if Carolyn and her colleagues work on a project about, say, planetary mechanics and it's published, it has to go open right now. So that's a federal push for open right there. Open access continues to grow, OER continues to grow. There's a lot, a lot of power for that. Flipside is what Ed Webb just pointed out. And my thanks to Ed for sharing that. That he's tired, he's exhausted. And I think this is true across the board in academia. So many of us have been for the past nearly three years now being asked to do a lot more under increasingly bad conditions and in some cases of a lot less. Thanks to the COVID pandemic, thanks to the anxieties and dread, experiences felt by our students, as well as the political turmoil within the United States. There's a strong sense that academia is being pressed to the breaking point. I hear you, Ed. I wish I could give you a big hug to help you keep going. Just wanna say for you personally, Ed, your puppy is unbelievably cheerful and always does me good to see a Instagram shot. Lisa Chimeson says, yeah, I thought it was just me. No, Deborah agrees. We're weary. And Roxanne brings in a related point here. Hello, Roxanne. Noticing the reported teacher shortage in K through 12. And it doesn't seem to be at all impacting a higher ed right now. Yeah, I'm interested in that disconnect. In fact, not to keep going back to national politics, but the Biden administration this week announced that it was gonna be working with private providers to try to beat the bushes in order to get more and more candidates for K through 12 teacher jobs, but did not reach out to higher education, teacher ed programs in order to do more of the same. And I haven't seen any new activity in teacher ed and higher ed along those lines. Although if anyone has, please let me know. But this ties in neatly, I think, Roxanne to the unemployment rate being low where a lot of workers feel a bit more empowered in order to demand better conditions or better jobs. Plus we have K through 12 teachers who are suffering the same kind of exhaustion and weariness that we all are at higher ed. Plus they're suffering the real direct brunt of a lot of politicalization of education right now. I'm glad you mentioned that. John Hollenbeck wants us, and John, good futures comment here. Give it a year or two. This could be the next crisis as K through 12 teachers leave the classroom. Yeah. Now it may be that a lot of local and state governments feel that demographics are driving this, that the demand, the number of students may be smaller. But this is something we have to really work hard on. Of course it takes time to produce a teacher who can teach in those levels. Let me scroll back a little bit more and find some more. But first, Philip Lingard wants to join us. So let me bring Philip up on stage. Hello. Hello. Good evening. Just picking up on the shortage of K-12 teachers, there is a particular section which is the English for foreign language, the EFL section, which I don't know what it's like in the States, but in Europe, UK, Ireland, Malta, more than 50% of the EFL teachers have left the profession. Because during COVID, obviously the EFL is entirely private, so therefore they laid off the teachers. The teachers are well-capable of getting other jobs, and they have done so, and so they haven't come back. And that is creating a huge amount of pressure at a time that your English students beginning to come back internationally, but they're simply on the teachers there to teach them. Wow. I thought that that's the same in the States. My sense, Philip, I haven't gotten a sense that, well, in the US called ESL, English is the second language, I haven't seen the same kind of drop that severely. But this is something for me to look for, and I would love to hear from other people, if anybody else has noticed, in particular this decline. I wonder too, Philip, about how much of the decline is caused by native English speakers, Britain, Canada, the US, not traveling abroad because of COVID and not finding ESL jobs like that. I think it's broad. The whole industry just effectively all shut down in 2020 and didn't reopen in 2021. So that's two years gone by when people who either had their lives arranged around teaching during the peak summer period, but that was with additional incomes than normal teaching. They've simply reorganized their lives. And certainly, the figures, I'd say in the three countries I'm aware of, molten UK and Ireland, are dramatic. They say easily 5%. And they don't know where they're coming back from, because whilst obviously unemployment is higher in Europe, unemployment has also fallen dramatically here in the same way it has in the States. So there isn't that buffer of unemployed who would be thinking of taking English teaching tuition and doing the qualifications to come into the industry. What's the, what was Marx's term, the reserve army of the unemployed? Yes. No, that's very interesting. I just tweeted this out, so I'm going to look to see if anybody has any instances of this. And in the chat, people have related comments, but none that directly bear on this. Evilde, I have to say, I miss Malta. I haven't been there for a few years, and I would love to know that. Indeed, yes. I've never seen you here. Well, thank you. And thank you for raising that. If I may, just one other point. Looking at the UK, the UK is going through an extraordinary difficult time. And I think that the university sector is likely to run into very severe trouble. All institutions are facing huge financial pressures. I mean, some of my chances of talking about the price of tuition going up from 9,000 pounds a year to 24,000 pounds a year because of the problem, but also the impact of Brexit. Almost certainly, we're going to see this trust become Prime Minister, and she will then pursue the end of the Northern Ireland protocol. And the direct impact of that is that Britain will be off horizon altogether. And that will have a huge impact in terms of the British research standing and the British universities. There could be enormous disruption in higher education in the UK. What's the time frame for settling in with a new Prime Minister? Well, I mean, 5th of September is when, I mean, almost certainly it's a trust, is when she will be announced as an UPM. OK. So it's only four days away. Well, that's a huge issue, especially given Britain's extraordinarily influential role, both in terms of research worldwide and, of course, teaching students both at home and abroad. That's something, thank you. We should look hard at the trust and where she'll take us. And I'll try to avoid all the bad puns involving her name. I'll have to watch that in the image. I mean, something to keep an eye on. Absolutely. There is, I think, there is an incipient crisis. It's not there now. 12 months from now, it could be a huge crisis. Well, my best wishes to you, Philip. And I hope you weather that crisis. And thank you for sharing it with us. I'm still OK. Pleasure. We have, again, if you're new to the forum, by the way, and I think I don't know if any of you are, but if you are, that's an example of a video question. So anyone can just join us like that, which is very easy. And it's, of course, great to hear and see everybody. But the chat box is on fire. People are just putting in comments of all kinds. Tom Hames is getting us, as usual, to do deep thinking about the purpose of higher education. And Suzanne, sorry. So I'm trying to read this. And I'm actually having a hard time with my screen. So I don't want to mangle your last name. It's hard for me to read. I think Suzanne Trelko says, the valuable quality of higher education and education in general have been significantly derided by certain groups in the US. Yeah, that's part of what I was talking about, the shattered consensus that the benefits of higher education, the perception that there are benefits is beginning to slide. Vanessa Vale, hello Vanessa, says students, faculty, and prospective future faculty are on pause to see what happens next and changes before jumping in the deep end. What a great comment. What a great description of our moment. So we don't have a clear decisive change happening. We haven't declared, for example, COVID to be over. The war in Ukraine continues. We have the tensions I mentioned before still rumbling. Being on pause, waiting to see what happens next. It's like we're in a phase change about to switch over. Thank you Vanessa, thank you. And again, if Evan else would like to join me on stage, I'll open the open podium there. And of course you can also just click the raised hand, but also type something in the Q&A box if you'd like something to be splashed across the screen as well as read out loud. We have Lisa Durf asks us to think about what if high school went for online asynchronous and offer community centers instead of school and those teachers were shifted down grades. All undergraduate teacher ed programs prepared us to teach anything back in my day. Is it still the same? A great idea and great observation. Thank you Lisa. And thank you for tweeting out Lisa, really appreciate that. There's also talk here about some of the credentialing of K through 12 teachers. Carolyn Coward mentions, I think what's going on in Florida of Governor DeSantis pushing for military veterans to be able to teach K through 12 more easily with fewer hoops to jump through. And also Joseph says there's a movement toward technological tools and self teaching and learning. Shorted teacher is adding fuel to that. Quite true Joseph, quite true. Now, if I can just ask, where about the halfway point of our session? And we're talking about the major forces reshaping higher education. Can I ask what you are personally expecting from the next academic year? For example, are you looking forward to changing your student population? Are you seeing a major shift in your own work in some way? Are there connections between the different trends we've been talking about that play a direct role in your life? Just to give you a weird example, in my own case, I'm teaching two classes this semester. Supermajority of students are international, which is really exciting, very interesting. Also getting my new book out, which is available for pre-order already. I'll tell you more about that as we get closer. But I'm also traveling to more and more speaking and consulting gigs. I haven't been doing that for the past year, but it seems like a lot of in-person work is ahead. So I'm going to be in New York, I'm going to be in Illinois, I'm going to be in South America. So those are little signs of changes in my life and seeing those connections there. How about the rest of you? What kind of personal future do you see for the next year? The awesome George station response to Vanessa's on pause comment on the anecdotal level that I think he's saying his first time freshman engagement is slower and different. By the end of the second week, the 18 year old are just settling in. I guess George, that means they're taking longer to settle in than before. Debra says she's expecting more online graduate education. So much interest in that now. They hear that, especially as it's more and more, well, we have more proof of concept, more and more use of it. Ed Webb notes that Dickinson has significant focus on sustainability and international education. He teaches a bit in both or a lot in both. Great programming this year around the IPCC report and around sustainable development goals. He's concerned about whether a study of broad programs can recover post COVID. By the way, Ed, hopefully I'll see you next month going to Carlisle for a IPCC event. I'm looking forward to that very, very much. How about the rest of you in terms of either sustainability programs locally, but also in terms of international, excuse me, study abroad? Are you seeing any uptick in that or any changes in that? George answers my question. Yes, it's taking longer to settle in and they're hardly connecting with each other, except for athletes who I'm guessing already have an extra amount of socialization. That's very important, George. I don't have enough data on my end personally to experience that. Our program is also, it's a very small program, so it's a lot easier for us to socialize, but we'll have to keep an eye out for that. John Hollenbeck says that he's interested in how Khan and others such free curricula are marketing themselves as remedial and preparatory resources for students returning to school. Yeah, that's a really good question because they are free and available material and if you're struggling with algebra or biology, the stuff is there and that's a really good use of it. Ed mentions that they have lots of international students on campus as usual and lots of international content. Their number of studying abroad is significantly down, so that's for him and for Dickinson, that's primarily study abroad. So the students haven't recovered yet. And then Tom, all right, this is just unfair. I have not yet brought Tom on stage and I just, every day I have to do that, every week I have to bring Tom on stage. It's just part of the program and I think he'll appreciate my shirt color today because Tom asked a huge question and I want to give him a chance to voice it out loud. Tom, is that a new microphone and boom mic? Not that new, I've had it since January or so. Maybe I may just keep it out of screen, I don't know. Yeah, it looks good. Yeah, well, thanks. It was recommended to me by our mutual friend, Ruben. But yeah, I like it. I think it has pretty good sound quality too, so. No, are you trying to get me to ask the question I put in chat? But regularly. Yeah, I mean, it just seems like, you know, all of the things you're talking about, this slow deterioration of enrollment, problems with international students contributing to that. A lot of people, you know, this idea that maybe college isn't for everyone that you were writing about this summer. At some point, somebody's gonna have to ask the question, you know, is what's going on here? Is that the system that is, you know, driving this, you know, I've been trying for years to get people to say, okay, look, you know, we're gonna have this demographic change. It's gonna happen, you know, it's math, right? I mean, you can see the numbers spilling their way through the system, you've been talking about this for a decade, you know, it's not news. So, you know, but what are you gonna do about it? And, you know, the question there is, how do you expand the audience? You know, if our only prime audience is 18 to 24, of a percentage of 18 to 24 that are quote unquote, college ready or whatever college, you know, capable or whatever you wanna call it, then that number is gonna shrink. So, if you wanna maintain this, then you've got, you know, you've got to rethink who you're hitting with this. How do you change the informal nature of education so that institutions support that over much longer periods of time as a revenue stream, for instance, you know, things like that are not really being discussed. And on top of that, you get this slap in the face that we call COVID and the pandemic and remote teaching and all that sort of stuff going on. That, again, should be a wake-up call that, you know, you saw time and time again, people falling back on very traditional ways of teaching that, you know, because they, you know, they just basically talked at the camera, et cetera, et cetera. And the problem with technology, as I like to say, is that it shows the emperor with no clothes because this stuff was all being recorded. Before, these people were probably doing the same things in their classrooms and the students were sort of nodding and going along with it and everything, you know. How do I pass the test? And that's all it really matters, right? And do you learn anything? And occasionally you run across a great teacher who goes above and beyond and changes the way you think about things. But that's a luck shot, you know. I could probably count those people from my own academic experience on one hand out of the dozens and dozens of teachers and professors I had in my academic career. So, you know, this, there's something completely amiss with the way the system treats the way we think about learning and teaching. There's the disconnect. I actually just posted a blog on the Shaping EDU site about open loop learning versus closed loop learning and the fact that I'm kind, that I'm, I constantly, what's really come snap in the face again. I mean, this is not a new thing, but you know, this semester, at this, at the beginning of the semester as I try to explain how my class works and my class is very much built on this idea of, which I stole from Doug Engelbart of Collective IQ and that we need to strive toward the margins and try to do things and grow as learners. And my students are like, well, just tell me what you want me to write so I can pass. And that's a product of closed loop learning. I mean, we have trained them with the system for the last, you know, the last 18 years of their, or 12 years of their lives or however many years of college, how many of them in years of education they have, that this is how you do it. You know, you run your way through this little rat maze and you count out of the teacher and you pass the test at the end and any learning that happens along the way, there's fairly incidental. And so, you know, and in higher education, you get to a point where it's voluntary. And there are people I know that ask, why would I pay to have this inflicted on me when I didn't like it, when it was inflicted on me for free in K-12, you know? And so, these are all hard questions that I don't think anybody's really looking at. And, you know, I kind of wonder, you know, I'm thinking about systems theory and systemic change. You know, what is it gonna take for, you would think that COVID would have just knocked things off kilter enough. And maybe it will, maybe it's just a delayed reaction. But I, the trend I see now is actually, in a lot of ways, there's a big push to go back to quote unquote normal. And I don't know if we can do that. I don't know if we have the teachers for it either. That's the other question. We're losing the people who can run the system too. That's the one, unusual, Tom, you've said several great things and I wanna grab them. And friends, I would love to hear your responses to Tom even better. Tom and I talk every day and I'm sure he's bored of what I have to say, but you mentioned one key structural component, which is that if we have a lot of faculty and staff right now who are not interested in doing something bold and exciting in terms of teaching, and on top of that, as we established earlier, a lot of us are worn out, exhausted from the past few years. Well, how do we go about changing that? And so the one hand you have how do you transform the faculty who are currently working, but then how do you add more into the mix? And we know it takes years to develop faculty at a college level. So it may be that that's a long-term problem and that we have to, so we need some kind of massive amount of professional development, but at the same time we have to do it a way which doesn't burn people right out because we have so much of that dread and pain right now. I think we need to deconstruct teaching and think real hard about what you do in the course of a general semester and ask yourself how much of that is, has to be done by you as a faculty member? How much of that is specialized in a way that has to do with your discipline or what you're trying to teach and how much of that is just pushing papers and or pushing content, right? Which is out there anyway. One of the things I've done in my classes is I've moved almost all of the content out of the live sessions. We rarely talk about content except as it relates to the projects we're working on. We bring it in, but I don't start that way and it's all in my canvas shell, it's all recorded. And you just, if you need to know that, then you watch, watch it. And what I'm giving them in person sessions is how to learn and how to process the information, how to do things cool with it, how to build communication and stuff like that. How much of that can we use technology to distribute to where we got, we can put the experts doing expert things as opposed to doing dumb things? A quick question from the chat, clarifying question came from George Station. Deconstructing versus unbundling, can you clarify? Well, when I'm saying deconstructing is I'm saying analyzing. Unbumbling applies action, but when I'm saying deconstructing, I'm saying, I did an exercise a number of years ago where I very carefully took every piece of my class or the way I teach and say, what exactly am I doing here? What's my intent here? How can I use technology to ease the workload? So to speak on me so that I'm not, so that I can concentrate on the student rather than the workload. And so that's a complicated process and it's a self inventory. That's what I consider deconstructing. Unbundling is the second part of that where you take that information and you say, okay, these are the parts that I need to do alive. These are the parts where I need to be having a conversation with you. A live conversation where we can talk back and forth. These are the parts where I don't need to be having a live conversation where you're sitting in the back of the room sleeping. So I'm gonna put those parts where you can watch them when you're awake and when you're mentally ready to engage and then I'm gonna leave the other parts in the classroom. And my classes are a lot more efficient. I spend, I actually use this as an opportunity to break up my classes into two halves so that I'm dealing with smaller groups of students and each group only meets for half of the class time and the other half is online. And so I can essentially teach a 32 person class like it's a 16 person class, which helps a lot. And Tom, as always, I tell you, and you hate when I say this, I would love to be one of your students. But we have comments that came in the chat. I wanna make sure in these I think directly. One is from Joseph who says, I'm not really pivoting anymore. The barriers between work and personal life are dissolving with online teaching. I am outside the LMS as much as in teaching, whoops, sorry, teaching on closed social media networks, the expectations from my students of a 24 seven availability is real. I just wanna, if you wanna respond to that. Well, I mean, you gotta set expectations with your students. I mean, I say, look, you know, I try to get back to you within 24 hours, but I sleep between the hours of 11 and five or something or 10 and five. So I'm not gonna answer an email at that point unless I have insomnia. Every so often I do. And I'm sure I surprised the heck at them because I'm like, I'm at two o'clock in the morning and I can't sleep. But as I get older, that becomes more common. You know, but no, I mean, I definitely set boundaries in terms of availability. I also schedule individual time into my class time. So every week, a couple of weeks during the semester I canceled the group classes and I meet with every student individually. And instead, and I set that up as a scheduled time. And so that time is, and I prioritize listening to them during that time, these are the, and a lot of times I get stuff from students who don't normally talk in the group sessions, you know, and I can concentrate on, hey, this is what I see you struggling with. And that's immensely valuable because I can really target. That's another part of efficiency is targeting the learning. As opposed to. Yeah. So, John, I don't work 18 hours in a row. I work, you know, I say, look, I've got a reasonable expectation of response time. If I happen to respond at eight o'clock because I'm sitting in front of the TV and watching a baseball game and I'm not really doing anything else. Yeah, I can sit back and send an email. But I don't feel, I don't feel enslaved by that in any way. And if I'm gonna leave Tanon for an extended, if I'm gonna be traveling or something like that, I'll tell the students, I'll say, look, you know, I'm gonna be unavailable because I'm gonna be on a plane or something like that. Just be aware and I'll get back to you as quick as I can. And I've not had a problem with that. And I don't feel like it, it's not about, everybody talks about the work bleeding into your, into your personal life. And I've never really felt that as being, I have personal life during the day. I don't work nine to five in an office where people are watching me all the time to make sure I'm not playing solitaire or something. And so during the day, I'll take breaks, I'll go do something else for a while. Like everybody does at work and they just don't tell you about it. The reality is you just sort of integrate it all into an overall flow. And there are times when you do say, and I'm sorry I'm shutting this off. Well, I think you're, I think you're ahead of everybody on this. I have a similar life and similar structure. But there's a question. I had a conversation. Oh, I was good. Real quick, I had a conversation with another faculty member this morning as part of a oral history thing we're doing on the pandemic. And she said something really amazing in the sense that, you know, in the digital world, time changes. And we, if we, if we expect it to conform to the way it used to work, it's a little like evaluating aircraft on the basis of trains. And so we have to sort of think a little differently about how we don't work eight to five anymore. You know, we have little chunks of work here and there and there and there. And then we spread that in between the stuff. You know, so I mean, it's a different mentality. We don't punch the clock. Sorry, go ahead. You need to send me that naval war gaming title that you were recommending me before, I missed it. Charles Roberts, speaking of war gaming, and he hates it when I keep saying this to him. Charles Roberts says, in history in some other fields, you've got something like a one out of four chance of putting a tenure track job with a PhD. I'm not sure how much you can encourage bold instruction in a published and still probably parish environment. You know, the biggest proportion of faculty in the U.S. are adjunct, you know, the majority are holding the track. And so it's, I guess, from some of the research we've seen, that if administrations ask adjuncts to be bold, they become bold because that's a condition for hire. But again, we're running into problems of supply and exhaustion. But I run into disconnects on the same front. I mean, in the sense that I had a situation this summer where I had a long conversation with an ADA counselor who was trying to figure out a different way to make my course work. And I'm like, it doesn't work a different, it's a design process, you know? And so were there alternative assignments? No, but the assignments I do give are not timed and they're not set up in a way that would, I've never had problems with students with disabilities in this class. And as a matter of fact, every ADA letter I've gotten since I've redesigned my class, I've basically ignored because they're all about extended test times. Well, give tests, so that's not an issue. So I mean, but the idea that you're doing something very different from the normal flow is a real challenge, not just for the students to wrap their heads around, but also for administrations and things like contact hours, you know, how many contact hours, how do you measure butts and seats when there are no seats, when there are no chairs? We're gonna come back to that topic, I think. Tom, let me that you are doing your chair in peace. And thank you, thank you, Adore, for coming on stage. A bunch of responses camp and chat. And I just want to, I want to hoist a few of these up because I think they're awesome. Lisa Durf, a committed teacher says if a student pops up in teams, yeah, she'll answer them. Deborah says that she's done individual visits and small groups for 30 years now. So you, Deborah, are another person ahead of the crowd. Excellent. And it drew real criticism at her three year review many years ago. Now no one questions it. It's always the challenge of doing something new. Always that challenge. Thank you, Deborah. And then there was a, oh gosh, a whole series of comments. This chat is just terrific. George answers one of my questions. Thank you, George. And then Carolyn Coward points out, you don't need to teach facts. Facts can be found anywhere. Expertise is teaching context, analysis, understanding and next level thinking. Absolutely, absolutely. And then Don mentions being haunted by my comment about this opportunity we have for doing bold and creative rethinking of higher ed yet we're overwhelmed. And he asks a really, really good kind of leadership question. Is there a way to identify the innovators and run interference so they can meet this moment? Yeah, run interference and really support them. That's a good question, Don. I wonder how that might play out at your institution. We have more comments that are coming in and people are just talking back and forth which I love and it's great to see. I'm gonna try and sum things up if I can a bit. It seems that all of you are seeing certain things happening over the next year and certain things not happening. So you're talking about exhaustion, fatigue, a sense of overwhelm. You're talking about students who are coming to us some for the first time with some disconnect as a result of the COVID years. Some of you are also talking about different ways of teaching and being creative about teaching that may or may not be supported. And yet at the same time, there's the sense that we're in a strange kind of interzone, a kind of interstitial moment where we don't have a clear direction forward and it's not clear what is actually happening in a major way. And that gives a lot of us pause and makes it more difficult for some in order to do something experimental and new. It may be that some of the giant trends I was talking about at the very beginning of the hour are playing a role here in terms of everything from the economic stresses to some of the flows of international students and geopolitics. But this is definitely a moment that has a lot of possibility. Josh Kim last year found a interesting article which called for us to avoid a snapback that was a sense of trying to imaginatively drive teaching and learning back to fall 2019, maybe January 2020. And there's a big push, a big desire to do that for all kinds of reasons. And we have to not let that snapback happen. I think that's a useful phrase and important I desire. Charles Roberts in the chat says optimistically, while by mostly first-generation students do seem less prepared for college, they also seem excited to get to it. That's good, that excitement can make up for a lot of that. Carolyn says, we're in the zip disk VHS era of higher education, the transitional and uncomfortable phase. Carolyn, yes, we're in the era of jazz drives and scuzzy drives. Yeah, yeah. Don says, he's seeing the snapback and I need to wrap things up because we're just at the end of the hour. I shared something in chat before, just really quickly. The Dickinson College event that I mentioned before about sustainability, we have, there's a nice website for this and I'll do this in the chat. I'll be there, I hope Ed Webb will be there and I would love to hear of anybody who wants to come to it, taking a look at climate change and higher education. So there's a link there in the chat and if you'd like to look at it. You know, I usually summarize the, or wrap up a feature transform session by sharing a few slides and I don't do that out of reflex, I do it out of deliberation. What we're talking about is vital for higher education and I would love to continue this conversation and that's why I put this slide up. Some people can tweet like Lisa Durf, sorry, you've been doing and of course at my blog, where it'd be great to see you if you want to pursue this further still. We've been talking about a lot of these issues over the past few years. We've had a whole run of COVID sessions, for example, we've had multiple sessions on faculty development and a bunch of sessions on students and of course throughout been thinking about how to restructure higher education for the 21st century, for the present day. So we have all those recordings that are available and we're continuing to explore more and more topics coming up. We're hitting free speech and academic freedom, for example, coming up. We've got a bold plan to reimagine higher education along with secondary education. We have more sessions on COVID and the climate crisis coming up so you can register for those. And I would still really, really like to hear about any of the things that you're doing or anything that you're seeing. Just shoot me a note and I'd be glad to share with everybody else here. Now, I don't know about you. I love these sessions. They feel smaller and yet more intimate. I love just that we can explore what we're thinking about directly in the community. And I'm really grateful for all of you for taking the time and brainpower to do that. Thank you all. We can do another one of these, perhaps December or January, depending. If you have any suggestions for that, please let me know. But again, as I say at the end of every session, please take care, please be safe. I love you all dearly and I wanna make sure that you survive and keep doing your great work within higher education. Until next time, we'll see you online. Take care. Bye-bye.