 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host, and chief cat herder, and I'm delighted to see you all here today. I'm absolutely delighted to have an unusual session today. We have a panel of four folks. Each of them has a position at an institution, a college or university, and each of them over the past few years has led some interesting innovation. We wanted to bring them all together so that they could share their lessons learned. How do you actually implement innovation in the real world of higher education as we know it? Now, there's four of them, and we just quickly introduce them by their titles and their institutional affiliations. I'm going to bring them up one at a time so they can tell their stories, and then you can bombard them with your questions and your thoughts. We've got Kate Miffett, who is Assistant Director of Innovation at California State University's Office of the Chancellor as a system-wide position. We have Matt Raskoff, who is now Associate Vice President for Digital Education and Innovation at Duke University. We have Michael Zward, who is Associate Director of Learning Innovation at Dartmouth College, although apparently he's hiding out in the middle of Vermont today. And Ari Badar Natal, who is the Chief Technology Officer for Cal Break College, which is the newly launched, wholly online, California Community College. So I'm going to bring this slide down and start bringing these folks up one by one so we can learn from them. I'm going to begin with Kate Miffett. Hello, Kate. Hi, can you hear me okay? Perfectly. Great, nice to see you all today. Well, thank you so much for coming. I'm really glad you came. And I have to say, I admire your background. That's for you, Karen. Thank you. Kate, there's so many ways that we can introduce ourselves in higher education. There's so many topics. And the way that we usually do it here in the forum is we ask you, what are you going to be working on for the next year? What's uppermost in your mind? What are the big projects and things for you personally for the rest of 2021? Sure. So I have a pretty diverse portfolio, but there was one effort I wanted to talk about today because while the effort itself isn't necessarily innovative, I think it points to an innovation challenge that many of us will share moving forward. So my role is situated in central IT. And when the pandemic hit, one of the priorities for all of our IT units across the system, we're comprised of 23 campuses, was to ensure student device and internet access. And so our IT units mobilized very quickly. We distributed something like, I think over 22,000 devices, over 10,000 mobile hotspots. We're very interested in 22,000 devices? Yes, yeah, across the system. So our system serves 480,000 students to give some context. So it was a really tremendous effort and all of the campuses worked really hard to support student learning. So we partnered with Educause in the fall to conduct a study on student access to devices and internet. And we piloted the quantitative phase in the fall and we're beginning the qualitative phase in the spring. So I think the provocation I want to share or my hypothesis that's gonna come out of this is that I think we're gonna enter a phase where the demand and adoption of digital learning is gonna be at the highest that it's been among learners and among faculty, while at the same time, we're just beginning to really understand the inequities in access and in digital fluencies. And so I think it's the counterintuitive innovation challenge in there is, I think we're gonna have to explore pedagogical approaches that are low bandwidth, that are mobile friendly, that are based on universal design, which while not new, I think cut against the perception that we often have that innovation is like the new shiny technology and the most exciting stuff, which while I think offer a lot of new possibilities, don't necessarily, they often also pose accessibility and equity challenges. So, but that's one of the things that we're gonna explore further as we move into the spring semester. Oh, fantastic, fantastic. That's an enormous amount of work. I'm impressed by the scale. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. I'm gonna bring up some of your colleagues right now. So, hang on for one second. I'd like to add to our mix, Ari Potter-Natal. And let's see. First of all, let's bring Ari up. Hello, Ari. Hello, how are you? Happy to be here today. Well, I'm glad you could be here. Did I massacre your name too badly? No, Ari, Bitter-Natal. Nice of you to be here. And I appreciate you having a great background that's completely appropriate. California. There we go. Exactly. Well, where are you today, I should ask. So, I am in California in Davis. So, it's sunshine here, but... It's very good. Yeah, so let's see. What can I share? Similarly on what we're working on this year? Yes, you in particular, what's the most for your efforts in your mind? Yeah, so, I work at Calbright College. Calbright is a newly launched college in the California Community College System. And so, a lot of what we're doing built on a very different model than other colleges in the system. And so, a lot of what our team spends time building and I myself will be continuing to spend a lot of time doing is the various parts of on the one hand, institution building, and on the other hand, trying to find sort of our own unique model. And so, that plays up in a couple different ways. One that's particularly interesting right now is Calbright's built on a competency-based education model. And there are some pieces of that, which are interesting and different challenges to sort of figure out. One that we've been looking at closely has been ways of modeling, visualizing, and measuring pace and progress, which is an interesting challenge in a flexibly paced program. Another, we're doing work right now in preparing for accreditation. And that process generally is designed for degree-granting institutions. And Calbright has been building programs around certificate programs. So how we do that looks a bit different. And then really just building out the right team. And so, in order to be successful, you need to have the right folks with the right experience in place in order to make this come to be. So that's the year. Well, that's quite a year ahead. I've got to ask a couple of quick questions about Calbright, Ari. First, you mentioned giving certificates. Are you also gonna be granting associates degrees? So right now we're focused entirely on certificates that are aligned with industry credentials or programs that are aligned with industry credentials. And, but in terms of what the, so that's where we're focused right now. Very good. The second quick question is, is this the first academic year of operation for Calbright? So we opened our doors in October of 2019. And so we're a little bit over a year now, but we don't work on a traditional academic calendar. So every student term start every week. So we don't quite have the same notion of wrapping up at the end of the semester. But yeah, just about a little bit over a year in operation. Oh, fantastic, fantastic. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for coming. And I'm really looking forward to hearing more from you. Let me bring up a couple of your other colleagues right now. And let's see who else we can fit on our stage if we can reach out to the middle of Vermont. Let's bring up Mike Goodsward who comes to us from Dartmouth College. Michael, hello. Hi, Brian. And hello to the panel and all your guests today. It's good to be with you. Oh, it's great to see you, great to see you. Tell us, so you get the pattern of the questions. What are you gonna be working on at Dartmouth for the next year? Yeah, and thank you for that framing just sort of about this present moment that we're all living through. And it certainly provides context and for our work. So I wanna just mention one thing about Dartmouth College is that we're on a quarter-based academic term system. So in the past year, as people in March at semester-based schools were kind of looking forward, looking towards teaching out a semester, we were preparing for our spring semester completely remotely. And so we've had now three terms to sort of explore and iterate. And I think in our further on in the conversation, we'll sort of talk about those different levels of innovation and how we define that. And certainly that's been fluid and evolving this coming year. So one of the primary things that I'm looking forward to is harvesting the lessons that we've learned through this grand remote experiment. That's happening in various ways in informally and formally. One of the ways is we're working with some sociology students in a capstone course, this term, who are looking at the survey data of students and faculty about their experiences through this remote learning time. And really hoping to learn more about what's working and areas where we've increased access and accessibility. I'll also be working with a team to explore our new multi-platform ecosystem of digital learning in partnerships with edX and Coursera at Meritus. And another area that I'm excited to be partnering with faculty on is something that happened right as the pandemic was starting. And that is turning the lens of information literacy to the information that was being put out about the pandemic, about the virus and about the vaccine. So I think that this is sort of near to my heart. I have a background in teaching information literacy at a previous institution in the New Hampshire public system. And I think many of your audience will agree this is a moment that we all need more information literacy in our society. So that's quite a bit, I'll leave it there for now. Well, thank you, thank you. That's quite a year ahead of you. And each of you seems to have a different angle. Now I'd like to bring up the fourth member of our panel. And this time I'm actually gonna need, Ari forgive me for a minute, I'm gonna need to clear some room. So I'm gonna knock you off just for a second. I'll bring you back in a bit. I want to invite, I think it was the presiding genius of this event, Matthew Raskoff coming to us from Duke. And let's see if we're on, hello. Hello, Brian. And thank you so much for having me here today. It's great to be with you and 119 participants in the Future Trends Forum, pretty amazing. Well, I'm so glad that you could be here. And the forum community is terrific. And you're obviously a major draw, all of you. So this is a huge question to ask you, Matthew. At Duke, what does the rest of 2021 look like for you? What are you gonna be spending most of your time and energy working on? And thank you, Brian. And I love this framing because it's so concrete and allows us to bring these big ideas down to the level of earth and projects and our plans. And I think that's very helpful to make this work more tangible. One very simple observation I would start with is that many more of our colleagues in our institutions and outside them recognize the value of what we do in our offices for digital learning, instructional design, faculty development. At Duke, we call it learning innovation and we bring together those different disciplines. But I think people now understand what we do and they value it so much more highly than they ever did in the past. And that creates new opportunities for us that I think build on what Mike was saying about harvesting the lessons of what worked and what did not and turning them into new programs that allow our colleagues, our faculty colleagues in particular, to synthesize and crystallize those lessons and turn them into new designs and new programs and new courses. So to me, I think that harvesting needs to happen now because as soon as the pandemic ends, we're gonna be looking to the future. Nobody is necessarily gonna wanna look back to a very painful year. We need to put in place the data collection infrastructure, the IRB approvals and the consents to do longitudinal studies and track the impact on students beyond this year into the future. And at Duke, what I would say is our focus is on helping faculty carry the innovation forward. That's what we're calling it. And we're launching a program with that title next week that combines technical assistance and small grants for faculty in four areas in research on innovative learning, explorations of new learning technologies, re-envisioning a course or a program for flexible or online learning and in building faculty learning communities. And we want to help them turn that experience, whether it was a good experience or a bad experience because failures can also lead to reforms and new ideas for what people wanna change. But we wanna be with them in that process and support them through this combination of technical consulting from our team and small grants that allow them to procure some new technology or get the tools to the hands of students that they might need in order to carry the innovation forward. So that's our message for this year that I hope is relevant to your audience as well. Well, that's very, very relevant. And I love the way all four of you now have all these points of overlap, but yet difference. How Matthew, you're talking about provisioning hardware to some degree, which is, which connects with Kate's far more ambitious and grand hardware provisioning work and thinking about all four of you in terms of research into what just happened over the past year. Now, each of you has a story to tell about innovation. And I'd like if each of you could tell your story for the audience, but before we do that, before we do that, you've already elicited questions. This is the kind of, the forum is always, always eager to bounce. And so I'll bring these quick. And I'm being them, I think at a couple of specific audiences, two of them, Kate are actually for you. So that comes to you from Michael Johnson, a great guest of Venetech. And he asks, what was the breakdown by operating system of the devices that were distributed? They were, I think almost entirely Chromebooks or tablets. So I think, I don't think we had any Apple products in the ecosystem that were distributed, mostly Chromebooks. So, and the tablets were all Chrome OS or Android OS. Yes, I think so. That's a great question, Michael. And thank you, Kate. Are there, another question, Kate, about your opening comments coming to us from the awesome, awesome, at-large, former member of EDUCAUSE and a great guest in our program, Malcolm Brown, who asks, if you could say more about the subject of the study with EDUCAUSE, what in particular will you be studying? So I think he's got a link in the chat that actually links directly to the survey questions themselves, but we are looking at both, so the kind of access, what type of internet access to just make, might a student have access to, and then the reliability of it. So there were questions like, are you able to successfully complete the tasks you have to do for a class with the access that you have? And then a similar set of questions around devices. And then when we move into the qualitative phase, we're gonna unpack some of the interesting findings. So like one of the things that stands out is that there was a question of, who do you go to for support when something, when you're having trouble with something? And the highest response was, I just try to figure it out myself. And so we really wanna uncover, the, I guess I'll characterize it as reluctance to go to support units on campus, because of course we want to be able to provide that support for students. So, as we move into the next phase, I think we'll dig deeper into some of the findings from the first round. Well, thank you. That sounds important, especially that everyone intending to try and solve their own problem. That's a very useful finding. Thank you. And thank you Malcolm for the question. Malcolm is another question. He's clearly on fire today. And this is aimed at you, Mike. And he wants to know, could you say more about the multi-platform environment that Dartmouth is implementing? Sure, thanks Malcolm and good to see you. So Dartmouth has been a partner of edX for a few years now. And we are like some of the institutions represented here on the forum, sort of entering this space where we have partnerships with multiple platforms. So we're kind of thinking about our institution, our liberal education value that we hold dearly and also the parts of the institution that are focused on professional education and how those all fit with these different partners. So it's a lot of, I think internal reflection and also external view that we're trying to bring together over the next year. Well, thank you. Good question. But don't meet yourself yet, Mike, because there's another question for you. And it's coming from the library world. Scott Vine at Franklin Emotional College or he's the director of their library has information literacy question. What will the application of information literacy principles to understanding our current social public health challenges? What will that look like at Dartmouth? Well, so I could talk about one particular project. One interesting thing that has emerged through this remote learning is that I think we have decoupled at least for the moment a bit from the classroom and from the term. So courses and beginning and ending. So we have a government professor, Mia Costa, who approached us and said, my students this fall studied political attitudes around the election. And the students are so engaged in this research project, they want to continue, even though the course is over, they will receive no more credit, but to look at the Georgia runoff Senate elections. And so we were able to sort of carry forward and sort of, I think this research will then feedback into future courses, both by professor Mia Costa, but also her colleagues and across the social sciences. We're also sort of looking at a logarithmic bias and how that could be a part of our curriculum. And so I think we're really trying to connect the curriculum that's often within disciplines, between disciplines with this critical lens. Well, thank you. That was a deep question and they revealed quite a bit, Michael. Thank you, thank you. We have one more question from, for you, Kate. This is from Matt Alex, who's the founder of the really interesting Beyond Academics Enterprise. And Matt asks, how did your system create a frictionless user experience to foster better remote learning models and also to support many while they were off campus with these devices that you distributed? So I'll answer that in two different ways. So as a decentralized kind of organization, sometimes academic technology is situated in IT and some of our campuses, it's not. We definitely, the CSU was I think one of the first institutions to make the decision to stay online. We made that decision in the spring. And so that enabled our academic technology folks and our colleagues in faculty development to really spend a tremendous amount of time over the summer. And I don't have them off the top of my head, but the numbers of faculty who were trained who completed a course in developing an online course were really tremendous. And so that I think helped on the user experience front where we were really able to deliver a lot of training and development on the, I'm forgetting the device question. I'll bring it back up. In terms of distributing the devices, yeah, I mean, IT teams created drive-through kind of options. Many campuses partnered with their libraries for inventory and tracking for the hardware itself. But campuses were just really creative and they worked really tirelessly to support students to continue their learning. They created parking lots with Wi-Fi access. The students could just drive up and complete their complete work on campus without having to be exposed and going to buildings and so on. Well, just I have to say thank you for that, for that detailed answer. And Matt, thank you for the really keen question. The California State University System was one of the first to proclaim they'd be online in the spring and to proclaim they were online the fall 2020. And also I think you're one of the first to proclaim that you're looking forward to probably face-to-face, face-to-face this fall as well. You guys are bellwethers, very, very important. Now we have some more questions but they all turn precisely on the topic of innovation. So I'd like to just quickly ask each of you, if you could just share your thought about what the heck innovation is. And I wanna pick on Mike Goodsward first because he shared an interesting visualization on Twitter that already got some commentary for a previous forum guest. So Mike, just quick, what is innovation for you? Yeah, thanks for that introduction. And I was, wanted to share a graphic and I think the chat only allows for text. So it's on Twitter and tagged with the hashtag. But in thinking about innovation in my own career and also in the communities in which I work, it's never a solo endeavor. So I like to think about how it happens at different levels. And so talking about the, I think of like four big spheres, I, G, D and W. And I is individual. So things that are new to the individual that they're trying to adopt. I think the parts of my career where I've been working as a learning designer, collaborating with individual faculty, there were some pretty big innovations that we were working on. They might not have been brand new to the world but they were just as important as impactful. So I think it's important for us who have the word innovation in our title or work in centers that have innovation, that innovation is happening all over at different levels. So the G is something that's new to a group. So this could be a group of faculty, a group of students who are adopting something new into their learning experience. And D is sort of self-referential to my particular institution of Dartmouth. But we might say, well, bringing in a multi-platform strategy for online learning is brand new to Dartmouth, but it's not brand new to the world. Others have done that before. And then W is the world. And depending on where you work and the size of your team, you might be doing more in the W column. But I think all four of those spheres are important for learners and for educators and innovators. Well, thank you for sharing that. I, and thank you for sharing that on Twitter. I just put a link to it in the chat. And also, Rollin Moe says, he was doing a lot of work on innovation, says, this reminds me, it's a good way of thinking about innovation as communal. So we go back to the G there. It's similar to George Coros' education innovation definition, recognizing the product and process, or deliberately noting the sphere of influence, which is a good thing. So Mike, now that you've said that, my reward to you is to knock you off stage for a minute and bring up your colleague, Ari, because I'd like to hear what Ari has taken innovation as well. So let's bring him up. So Ari, what does innovation mean for you? Well, I could answer that a few different ways. I think one is just in terms of how we solve, how we're solving key problems that ultimately techniques that allow us to get at new solutions that let us sort of far outperform how we've prior solutions in terms of impact, access, accessibility, a couple of different, I guess the metric itself could vary in case to case, but I liked the framework of looking at it in terms of in what spheres it's, you see that influence. And I think what I'm seeing, what I think is particularly interesting and a little bit I think unusual about the context that I'm working in is a lot of the innovation that our team at Calbright is doing is actually baked into the legislation that brought the college into being. And that's a, so a lot of what we're doing is operationalizing that. And I think in some sense, the innovation is in the designs, but it's also in how we go about finding implementations of that that work. So that's sort of what we, what I see sort of on the day to day. Well, that's fascinating. Because I mean, in part, your whole institution is an innovation because it's brand new or a year and a half old really, a little less than a year and a half old. But also it kind of, it blurs the world and Dartmouth world institution distinction because the state played such a key role in shaping this. Yes. And I guess the last thing I would say is just for context, this is created as the 115th college in the California community college system. And so it operates within a context of other institutions, but was built on a very different model. Yes. For the previous governor, Jerry Brown. Thank you. Thank you. Well, let's take this definition question back. I think we're fleshing this up pretty nicely. Kate, everyone wants to ask you questions. I have to join the line now. What does innovation mean for you? Is it the same as what the Ari and Mike have been saying or do you have a different spin? I don't think a dramatically different one. I really appreciate the idea of thinking about innovation in communities and in spheres. And you mentioned Rollin-Moe, I really liked his article from a couple of years ago on a definition, working towards the definition of academic innovation where it was really important that it be driven from, you know, educational theory and practice. I think one point I like to emphasize in innovation is thinking of it as a novel solution or improvement. And I think the idea that innovation can be iterative, it can be evolutionary, it doesn't have to be the revolutionary disruptive new thing, but that it can be an improvement to, you know, a product, a process, an experience. I think we're all finding how experiences can be innovative as we're doing virtual conferences and we're learning online. I'm not sure if it was online learning before, but I mean at the scale that we're doing it now. So I think the iterative component is a key part of the definition for me. Have to add that iteration. Thank you. Thank you. It's very, very important. In the chat, Malcolm Brown adds recommendations for thinking about Stephen Johnson's work. He mentions the where good ideas come from. Focuses on the embedding of innovation in social context, as well as his earlier book, Emergence. I second that. Matthew, you're in many ways kind of the shepherd of this flock. How does your sense of innovation match onto your three colleagues? Do you have a different one that's Duke specific or? Thank you. I enjoyed all those definitions and I agree with all of them. And so I guess what I would add is that I think the frontier in learning innovation is in connecting our work to the broader missions of our institutions. And I think for too long, what we've done has been seen as peripheral, as marginal, as something nice on the side, but not really at the heart of what we do. Maybe Ari's institution aside, because it is a fully online place where the technology is at the center. But I think for many of us, the challenge is in really helping our colleagues understand what those connections are and in us to make those explicit to say that the reason we're doing this project is so we can further this mission that we share, this mission of equity, this mission of access, this mission of making a more inclusive learning experience in language that doesn't include some hardware solution or some software solution, which does not resonate with most faculty and most provosts and presidents and trustees. So to me, maybe this is the frontier of the social layer that we're talking about. It's in drawing one wider concentric circle around our work to say, this is not fundamentally about one technology or another. It's fundamentally about strengthening our institutions, reinforcing what they do and helping them fulfill our missions for the future. And that's why we're doing this. Those are the stakes at which we're working. So it's not, experimentation for its own sake is one thing that can happen in the lab. To me, innovation is intentional experimentation for the purposes of improving your institution, improving its ability to fulfill its mission and its goals. Oh, thank you. The social context seems to be a major theme coming up today and the importance of people, albeit in different ways. On Twitter, we just had a quick shout out from let's see, Dr. Patricia Prosko, who says that we use that for IGW framework when she was at Cornell for an initial round of innovation grants. So this is a powerful thing. Now, just to remind you, the forum is here for your questions and your thoughts. So again, if you've just joined us at the very bottom of the screen, if you wanna type in a question, click that little question mark button and we have a few of those in our pop-up. And if you'd like to join us on stage or video, just click the raised hand button and I'll beam you up. It's really easy to do. Some of these questions now concern innovation per se. So I wanna bring up one from Eric Mistry. Hello, Eric. Who asks a very practical question? How do you sell the investing in innovation when so many resources at schools are limited or overwhelmed? Great question. That's for anybody who wants to take a wing at that. So I could take a stab at that. So the unit that I'm in was created, I think about two and a half years ago, in part because it was driven by the CIOs that all the campuses saying, we know innovation is really important, but we don't have time to kind of carve away from our regular day-to-day operations to dedicate to it exclusively. And so I see part of my role as kind of being some of the connective tissue or the innovation is happening on the campuses, but it often happens in silos. So I think the return on investment in our context is the amplification of the learnings that are happening on the ground. So by kind of centralizing innovation in the chancellor's office, we're able to build upon the experiments that campus is already doing and build on the learnings and the outcome so that every campus is not starting from scratch, but they're all building on what the other campuses are doing. And again, in a decentralized environment, that can be really powerful. And one of the ways we helped to seek that is I administer several microfunding programs. Some are monetary, some are with club credits and things like that, but those kind of planting a lot of small seeds and see what blossoms and then what can be built upon across the system, I think is where we're able to sell that investment. Kind of the opposite of selling in a sense, you're giving them literally. That's a good answer, Kate, thank you. Matt or Ari, did you want to add to that? Well, one thing I would add as we're thinking about a new grants program is that we really believe in the combination of technical assistance and small amounts of money. I think many innovators on the faculty actually feel very isolated and very alone. And if we can bring them into our communities and give them a good thought partner and interlocutor and support them financially, but also more intellectually and to kind of create, like include them in this conversation that we're part of, that actually is incredibly validating for those faculty. They're out there and they need this support. It's not necessarily the majority, but if we can help them be successful, help them get a publication out of it, help them kind of be successful on their own terms, I think we'll get more of them coming following on from that. So it's maybe kind of a focus on the innovators among your faculty who are there who are looking for a partner and a thought partner, figure out how to help them and then build on that for the future. That may be one strategy. I don't think selling is the right analogy. I think it's really more of a collaborative thing. If you really have to sell that hard, you probably don't have the right product in this case and you should be thinking about like what is really needed among your faculty, not what can you push upon them, you know? Oh, good answers. Thank you, Matt. There are more questions coming in. Ari, did you want to jump on that quickly? Yeah, I guess I was gonna... So when we started, I mentioned something about one of the projects that we're looking at is ways to measure pace and progress. And I mentioned it in the context of individual students, but really there's a version of that, an institutional version of that, that I think does connect to this question because I think often when you're... In terms of justifying investments in something new, there's often, it takes some time to get up to speed. And that's a particularly challenging time during which to make the case for that investment. And but when I think of pace and progress, one piece of that is what have you accomplished so far and another is at what rate or pace are you moving forward? And so to some extent, I think that that's a particularly relevant thing to look at which is at what rate are you moving forward or moving towards your goal. And so I could imagine in other contexts when you're looking at the value of an investment in innovation, one metric to be looking at is at what rate as best you can model it, is this moving you towards whatever the goals are that are the reasons that are motivating that work. That pace is important and being able to measure that is crucial. Thank you, Ari. I'd love to see how more you learn from that. We have another question here coming from Todd Russell, who's the director of Power Notes. He asks a very precise in particular question here. With so much as tech zoom fatigue in 2021 across education, how does true innovation gain meaningful attention? And I'll give you three a first crack at this, but also I wanna make sure I can bring up Mike to add more of his as well. So how do you do this when we have so much technology and in particular zoom fatigue? What one observation that I have is that faculty are now aware of the affordances of these technologies like zoom and their limitations. And we can channel their frustration, including with zoom fatigue, but also the limitations of breakout groups to do active learning, whatever it is, into new designs, new features, new requirements. I think we've done a mass experiment in faculty taste development and judgment development, more than even in digital learning. I think faculty now have views on these technologies that previously they were just indifferent about. And I think we can turn those views into new products, new designs, new requirements from our vendors, new startups are emerging, that are solving some of these problems of zoom fatigue, new more asynchronous models that maybe don't depend as much on the bandwidth and the connectivity and the resource constraints of synchronous learning. So all of that frustration, I feel like we need to crystallize it and bottle it and make sure we don't lose it because it's gonna be a fertile ground for our new ideas for the future. So again, the importance of tracking this and researching this now, harvesting this now before it goes on. Thank you. Thank you. Kate, did you wanna drive that or grab that or should I bring up Mike? I think one thing I'll add to is, I think we're learning the value of the analog. And so because we're all kind of burnt out and suffering from some fatigue, I think people are having to be really deliberate in developing practices to manage that. And so I've never talked so much to colleagues about going for a walk or things that you have to just build more deliberately in your day. And so I think it's some of those offline practices like going for a walk, writing in a notebook that are also gonna be kind of the home for innovation to kind of bubble up and bring back into the technological space. Thank you. Thank you. Let me give our neglected friend his chance to come up and see if he wants to add more to it. And then we have another question coming in. Actually a whole pile of questions. Mike, did you wanna take a run at that one? The question of tech fatigue and Zoom fatigue? Sure. So I think in, right out of the gate when we were starting with remote learning, I noticed socially that everyone was willing to do a Zoom dinner. And then it tapered off. People were just sort of like, I can't spend more time online. And I think a similar thing happened in classrooms and faculty were experimenting with the multiple ways in which they could have presence with their students and their students could have presence with each other. And it wasn't the same for everyone. So I think that's an important lesson about how we structure these. There were also some like technical improvements to how Zoom was being deployed. So in our engineering school, when people are in person, there's a maker lab. People couldn't be in the maker lab. So they made a digital representation and sort of tied a Zoom meeting to every lab table with the API. And then you could see who was there before coming in. So you're not sort of like dropping in blind to a Zoom meeting and you could sort of collaborate socially and informally in those ways. I also did some work with our music department and they sort of bravely tried to perform live music together on Zoom. And it was just a painful experience. The tool is made for one presenter at a time. There are some tweaks, but they quickly rediscovered some things that people have been making music at distance for decades, which is recording a track and sending it to each other. So they're sort of like bringing back these asynchronous deep experiences to allow for our various presences in collaboration. Thank you. Thank you. That does sound painful, but I'm glad. But it also sounds like you're all kind of flipping that question on his head that we have technology in Zoom with fatigue, but we're turning that around to innovate on the use of the technology at the evening of Zoom. But before I don't wanna seize the floor, I wanna make sure people get more questions than and we had one from Gary Myle at Yodig who asked a really interesting question. How does innovation play into helping empower peer to peer learning amongst your students? So this is a pedagogy focused question. See, this is the moment the panel when they're like, no, you answer it. No, you answer it. No, you answer it then. Yeah, that was good. Okay. Michael's bail, thank you. So I have a non-classroom example. We have a number of our mini grants often go to projects where the primary budget need is for student assistance. And so we have really rich examples of how our innovation efforts are really helping to enable student learners. And especially in the CSU is one of the most diverse systems in the country. So now we're bringing students into cloud computing, robotics, AR, VR, and we're helping to bring diverse students to those areas. So, and I'll put a link to one of our digital transformation hubs that has a mix of over 20 student assistance interns, volunteers, and they are from across disciplines and they work together on projects. And so I think that's a really rich learning environment that's peer-to-peer, but also mentored by IT professionals where innovation is taking place. Well, that's a great answer. I want to make sure that we don't lose sight of that because we have, I wanna give Ari a chance to follow up on that, but we also have a follow up question for another person, which is actually pretty close to that. Thank you, Kate. Ari, did you wanna take a whack at this one or should we move on? I think it's a great question. I mean, peer-to-peer learning can be very powerful. So far we've been building our program asynchronously. So on the upside there isn't really, we haven't really seen Zoom fatigue. I think that's more on the staff and faculty, not on the student side. But what I would point to is, there is I think some very interesting peer-to-peer learning that's, so prior to Calbright, I was working at Minerva, Minerva project building Minerva schools. And I think there's some very interesting examples of innovative models of peer-to-peer learning in that program. Yeah, Minerva is fascinating. That's a key part of your background. If you haven't had a chance to click through the bios of each of our panelists, each one of them has a fantastic career. Let me, if I could bring up one more question, because we're running low on time. We've got five minutes left. And Peter Wallace had a question, which really falls up in that nicely. He's at UW Continuum College and asks, where do you see opportunities to center learners in our innovations? I think each of you may have something to say about that, but Ari, I was wondering if you could go first, because each of you represents a different swath of higher ed with the community college area, which is so learner-centric. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of really the entire learner success team is really built around that. So any student who applies to Calbright can enroll. And so what we're looking to do is to provide whatever support people need in order to be successful in the program. So a core component of the team, one is on the instructional side, but another is on the academic success counselors and that whole team. And I would say that's very much student-centric, I think, or designed to support the needs of students. And I'll stop there. Well, that's good. I mean, if I may, Matt, that seems to echo some of your earlier concerns about taking innovation, expanding it out in a concentric circle, connecting with other people on campus, in this case, student success, for example, is very important. Did you want to say more to that, Matthew? I would add that our team is learning innovation for a reason. We used to be the center for instructional technology. And I think shifting the mindset from instructional, top-down, center-driven to learning, which is the needs of our students and where they are and what we can do to support learning. I think that's an important move. It's not just a semantic one. It's a strategic one that I think is valuable and supported by, I think, what we know from cognitive science. That there are things that we can do for our students that will enhance their learning, totally separate from what happens in the classroom. Some of the peer-to-peer models are examples of that. So I think that's been a move that we've made. But the other thing I would say is, have the learner in mind, whenever you design something and help your faculty do that as well. And I think a big role of offices like ours is to kind of be a broker between the supply side, which is our faculty expertise, and the demand side, which is our students, and including students who don't even exist yet, who haven't shown up yet, because if we're designing new programs, they're not yet there. They don't have a voice. And I think being kind of broker in between so that we create programs where there is both supply and demand, that is a very valuable role for us to play in our institutions, to make sure your program is successful, that there's a genuine need for it, that it's where the skills market is headed, where industry is headed, what people want to learn, and also that your faculty have the ability to do something that's differentiated and compelling and true to their expertise and an expression of what your institution does and what their disciplines can do. So that I think is one way of how I think of this. It's not learners versus teachers. It's kind of bringing them together to create programs where you have both of those in tandem. Matthew, after the program, I'd love to catch up with you on that question about students who aren't here yet. That's a very, very important topic and it's a subtle one. I'd love to follow up with you on that. But I am conscious of the fact that we have two minutes left and we have a doozy of a question that came in from Arizona State University. I wanna make sure that you guys get a chance to take a look at this because this might be a great way to wrap things up. This is from Wayne, who's the senior director of a strategic design there. And Wayne asks, should real innovation in higher ed lead to an academic business model? How should we define that model? Can it just be the bottom line? Adoption, learner success? I'm thinking hard about this now. I'm thinking, oh, we're out of time. We gotta go, no, but I'll put that back up on the screen again. So it's a good question. Should the innovation lead to an academic business model? You know, it's interesting because I was gonna respond to the previous question and talk about how in the CSU context, but I'm sure other institutions have similar goals where we are all operating under a graduation initiative. It's called the GI 2025, focused on improving four and six year graduation rates. And I think having that unifying mission has ushered in an era of innovation and collaboration across business units, across disciplines. And I think it points to one potential metric in an academic business model is certainly graduates. And I think having that kind of unifying goal has enabled a lot of collaboration that's really key to that success because there's so many of the wicked problems require cross-functional teams to address in so many of the opportunity areas. So I'm thinking of technology spaces like smart campus, eSports. The minute you start to dig into any of those, they require cross institutional cooperation for those to be successful. So I think Wayne raises a really tricky question at the end of the session, you know, so that's, but I do think that one of the metrics that we can look to as our graduates and our economic impact as kind of a way to define some of those things. And that's so different for each of your institutions. I mean, Ari is looking at a certificate-based program. You know, Matthew and Mike are both at research universities where they have the undergrad degree, but also graduate programs on top of that. And I know Kate in California, the graduation rate and CSU system is such an important issue for the state government. But friends, we have just blasted past the end of the hour and I can't keep you any longer. And I'm so grateful to all four of you for these fantastic, fantastic thoughts. This is, you four are a panel that I need to bring back down the road, especially as you develop and harvest your learning. Can I just quickly ask each of you, I'm just gonna call on you to ask, what's the best way to keep up with you? So let me ask first, Kate, what's the best way for people to keep up with your work there at CSU system? I think on Twitter, I'm on Twitter and that would be the best place I'll put my handle in the chat. Great, thank you, thank you. And Ari, how about you? I think I'll do the same. I haven't been active in a while, but I might jump back in. Okay, well, given the brilliance you've been showing today, we'd all appreciate that, thank you. And Matthew, how about yourself? I put my Twitter handle on the chat as well, and that is the best way to connect. Very good, very good. Last but definitely not least, Michael Goodward, how do we stalk you most effectively? I'm gonna follow the trend, I put my Twitter handle in the chat and I wanna confess that my head has been down in 2020, so I look forward to sharing that more in 2021 and convenings like this and maybe even in person later this year. Mike, I have a Twitter based project coming up, so if you're interested, let me know, specifically in 2020. And thank you. Thank you. And my thanks to all of you. All of you in the Future Transform community for fantastic questions, great commentary, great thoughts throughout. My hats off to you. This was a really, really terrific conversation. But don't go yet. I just need to let you know what's happening in the near future for the forum. So just to remind you, we have coming up a whole series of great programs for the next two months and if you'd like to learn more about them or to sign up, just go to tinyurl.com slash forum 2021. If you'd like to go keep this conversation going, talking about the social nature of innovation or how to sell it or what happens to lonely early adopters or more, we have all kinds of social media dimensions going on right now. And if you'd like to go back into the past, if you'd like to see what we've talked about so far, the mysterious Rollin' Moe who we discussed, other forms of innovation, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and you can see 236 videos of what we've been talking about previously. And in the meantime, if you'd like to learn more about the forum, just go to ftte.us. If you wanna learn more about this technology go to shindig.com. And in the meantime, January, 2021 is a pretty chaotic and dangerous time. I hope all of you stay safe and do well as we get through this. I'm really glad that we can all get through it together. Take care, I'll see you online. Bye-bye.