 All right. Well, I think it's time to begin. So let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have some great guests on a really, really important topic, and I'm just delighted to be able to bring it to all of you. We have two wonderful, wonderful people at very, very different stages of their career. We have Peter Felton, who is, for me, a glorious scholar and practitioner who's been doing lots, lots of great work on how to enhance and improve undergraduate teaching. He's written a series of great books. He's a fantastic teacher, a great organizer, and just always, always grateful to have him back. And with him is Oscar Miranda Tapia, who is a grad student, a rising grad student, as I told him. And this is, by the way, one of the great functions of the Future Trends Forum. We like to have great experts on here, and we like to have people earlier in their careers so you can all get to see them. And you can say later on, I knew them before they became superstars. Now, both of them are part of the authorial team for a new book called Connections Are Everything. And if you look on the bottom left of the screen, you'll see a kind of tan-colored button, and that, if you press that, that'll take you to the publisher's page for it. And this book dives into a topic that Peter and others have been researching really carefully, which is, how can we support and how can we extend the relationships that are crucial to students' learning in the undergraduate world especially? And this book from Johns Hopkins University Press looks at that from a student's perspective. It tries to give students the keys to how to develop and build their relationships as they learn. So here, without any further ado, let me bring each of these folks on stage so that they can join us and start talking with us. First of all, let me bring in Peter. Good morning, sir. Oh, good afternoon. Sorry. Hey, Brian. Good afternoon. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. Are you on campus in your office? Yeah, I'm at Elon University, Central North Carolina, where it's surprisingly not hot, hot, hot like Tucson, Arizona right now. You're not under the heat, though? No, it just went away. And so we're going to have two days of glorious 70-degree temperatures and then a swamp again. Wow, that's a shock. That's a pleasant shock. Enjoy. You're lucky I'm inside, Brian. We're fortunate that you're inside. Listen, Peter, we asked people to introduce themselves, not based on their past, but on their future. What are you working on for the next year? What does the next academic year hold for you? Well, so one of the things, I'm going to say two things really quickly. One that I'm really excited about is the university where I am, Elon University is really trying to do some hard work around how do we support students relationally, systematically. We've been really good at things like undergraduate research, but that tends to affect only some students. And so trying to think about how do we surround all our students with really powerful relationships. And it's, you know, one thing to write about this in researches, and it's another actually to do it. So being involved in that is really exciting. And then I'm going to put a shameless plug out there because you all can help me with something. In the new year, I'm taking over from Mary Hubert as the book review editor of Change Magazine. And so I need good books and pairings of books to write about related to higher education. So I heard you have a book, Brian, that seems sort of interesting. But everybody out there, I would love if you have thoughts and ideas because I know people see things I don't see. And I think part of what makes that column so powerful is the way it connects different ideas and different books together. Excellent. Excellent. Well, please, if you can, just what's the best way to find you with those requests? Should people email you directly? Yeah, I'll put my email in the chat. I'm sure you'll get a bunch of. Shameless self-promotion is a perfectly helpful thing to do too. So if you have a new book coming out, tell me. Oh, excellent. Excellent. And in all seriousness, one of the functions of the forum is individual professional development. People network here like Mad and they share work. So please take advantage of Peter's kind offer. And I'm looking forward to that. I'm going to throw some books in your direction. Thank you. But before we go further, let me bring your collaborator, your co-conspirator on stage. Let me bring on Oscar. Is your last name Tapia or Tapia? Tapia, please. So Oscar Miranda Tapia, it's a pleasure to meet you. You're out in the West Coast, so I should say good morning. Yeah, yes. It's around 11, 11 a.m. over here. I'm currently visiting California for a board meeting. The President's Alliance on Immigration and Higher Education. We're doing some work over here around supporting undocumented immigrant refugee students at the graduate school level. So just visiting here for now, but hope to return to North Carolina soon. Thank you for having me. Well, my pleasure, and thanks for being there. I've got to ask, since Peter's already been bragging about the relative safety of his meteorological climate, are you still basking under the heat, though, or are things cooled off? Oh, yes. No, it's still pretty hot out here. It's a different kind of hot, definitely more dry than it is humid in the East Coast, but enjoying it as much as I can. Very good. Very good. Now, the tradition Oscar on the form is we ask people to introduce themselves, not in the kind of obituary way people like to do in academia, but to look forward to what's ahead. And since you're a grad student, where are you in the process? Are you dissertation right now? Yeah, no, good question. So I just actually finished my first year in grad school. I'm a full-time student at NC State. And just trying to figure out what this path is like, and also this profession in general, as a first-generation college now graduate student. It's a lot of news, and just trying to get acclimated, trying to find my niche in this world, in the research space, and enjoying the process so far. Oh, excellent, excellent. Well, congratulations on finishing that first year, and good luck. And I'm sure people, all kinds of people here, would be glad to give you unsolicited, unpaid advice about the experience. But good luck, good luck. Oh, I think you just, in case people don't know, what field? This is a higher education administration? Yeah, good question. So the department is the educational leadership policy and human development, but my concentration is higher education opportunity and justice. Excellent. We're just going to keep bringing you back as you continue to ascend. So friends, if you're new to the forum, what happens here is, I ask our guests a couple of questions about their work, very basic introductory questions, so they can cut loose. But then what I want to do is get out of the way and clear the floor for you, for your questions, your comments, your requests. So please, if you haven't had a chance to read the book, go buy a copy. But listen to what they describe and see what resonates for you. Think back to your own student years in terms of relationships that really made a difference for you. Think back to where you are in your profession, the kind of relationships that you conduct or that you support, or that you just see that you'd like to support. So just to begin with, if I could, can you just quickly describe what's the importance of student relationships in higher education? And how come we haven't been paying enough attention to them? Oh, no, you go first. No, you go first. No, go ahead. No, no. Peter, you have to unmute yourself there. I wanted to do that. So we got that out of the way because it's a record part of it. It is online gathering. So just me being a leader here. We know, Brian, good question. And one of the things we try to be really clear about in our work, Oscar, in my work with our colleague, E.C. Sartsevega, who is provost and vice president of academic affairs at Valencia College in Florida, and Leo Lambert, who is president emeritus here at Ewan. And one of the things we try to be really clear on is that in some ways we're not plowing new ground by talking about relationships. I mean, for decades and decades, scholars have demonstrated that the quality of relationships students form with faculty, with other students, and with staff are really just essential for student learning, for their progression to graduation, for their success, and for their well-being, which is now something people are paying a lot of attention to. But where we came from at this work is that in some ways, everybody who works in higher education knows this. You just don't act like it's the most important thing or one of the most important things. And so we've tried to write this book and our prior book, inviting people to say, you know, what if we actually centered relationships? And so the new book, which is published by Johns Hopkins, like you said, and we were fortunate to get support, so it's available open access for free forever for all readers also. I might put a link in the chat to that. But it's for students to say, you know, students, you can help build your own relationship rich education. You can do things, even if you're a part-time student, if you're a fully online student, you can do things that make your education much more powerful by building connections with your peers, with faculty and with staff. So that's what we do. I just want to make sure that you saw that in the chat, a link to the book available for free. And I just put it here on the screen, you know, blindingly large font and my kudos to both Project Muse and to Johns Hopkins for making that available. And since the publisher Greg is here, you should also buy a copy, but you can get a free copy for now. It's vital to all of this. So this is great. I mean, Oscar, I'm curious from your perspective, I mean, thinking in terms of both of your own experience as a first generation student, but also with your focus on social justice and equity, what do you see as the role of these relationships? Yeah, no, I definitely want to second the point that Peter made around how, you know, colleges and universities are aware of the impact relationships can have on students collegiate journeys. But it's, there's a second part to that, right? It's not just the universities and colleges themselves knowing, but also the students themselves knowing and knowing of the importance of relationships. I think oftentimes in, you know, K-12 education, students have go into college with this mindset that college is supposed to help find them a job, right? And it's supposed to do all of these things. And that is absolutely true. But it's more than just excelling in the classroom and getting, you know, good grades like we've been accustomed to in K-12 education. It's about facilitating those relationships that can help with you finding a job, finding an internship, applying to graduate school, and, you know, having a letter of recommendation, having a relationship with a professor that you can reach out to and say, hey, are you willing to, you know, write me a letter of recommendation for this next path that I want to take. And I think oftentimes students, rightfully so, don't always understand or know the importance of the relationships. And if they were to go into college reframing how they think about college success, you know, they can certainly get to the A's, they can certainly get to finding a job and finding, having a great experience in college. But at the core of it, it's, you need relationships to do many of those things. Wow. This is, I love this idea. This is such a powerful realization and kind of reframing where we normally think about higher education. I guess let me ask one practical question. Now, how do you do this at scale? If you have a university of 10,000 to 50,000 students, how do you, how do you make this work at that level? So, go ahead Oscar. So, just to kind of, you know, kick us off. I think, I think it's, it's tackling it from multiple different angles, right? It's not just a student connecting with a faculty member. It's also our staff connecting with students and vice versa. It's also students connecting with other students. And that we begin to create these webs of relationships for students to be able to like lean back on and be able to connect. I mean, it's definitely a whole group effort. And there may be times when we don't do this perfect, but we can always keep striving, right, to make relationships at the center of college success. Just to illustrate one, one thing Oscar said, one of the people we interviewed for the book, Joyce Smith, who's president of Oakton Community College outside Chicago, had this great phrase. She said at her community college, one of their goals is to create inescapable opportunities for connection for students, right? And that requires the classroom has to be a space where students are connecting because for, especially for community college students, if the classroom isn't a relational space, the students aren't going to have opportunities to connect. But as Oscar said, outside of the classroom, I mean, one of the things that's humbling as a faculty member when you interview students is you ask them, you know, who do you have a powerful relationship at your institution? They'll mention faculty, but they mentioned the campus work supervisor. They mentioned the people in the coffee shop. They mentioned custodians. They mentioned advisors and librarians. There's a whole bunch of people. So sometimes faculty tend to think we're central and we're really important. But it's not all about one on one relationships between students and faculty because at scale that won't work. There's too many students, not enough faculty. And that's not really what students need either. This is so interesting because it's an interest. This gives us an interesting way into approaching the so-called administrative load problem that, you know, we've massively expanded the non-teaching faculty population of college universities. And this is a way to understand the value of that and to expand the value of that. If those are student-facing, student-connected people, right? And they might not be apparently so. I mean, you mentioned a work supervisor, for example. Oscar and I have been talking with an institution that's worked really hard with their financial aid office, for example, to help the folks who work in financial aid to recognize that they're building relationships with the students in every interaction they have. So it's not just about the money. It's about how is the student feeling connected to the institution, connected to other people? Do they feel cared for by the institution or not? And so thinking that, you know, financial aid staff can have a small role to play in this, I think it's powerful. They can be decisive. Right. Yeah. You walk in there and they're like, what do you want? We've got some, we have some discussion in the chat about this, including our friend Lisa Durf has a really good story to share. And then our friend Ed Webb, excuse me, I can't say this today. Ed Webb says, when I talk to first-year students, particularly first generation, I always emphasize that office hours are actually there for them to use. Faculty actually want to see them, get to know them, which is another part of this. We have a quick question coming in from Kim DeBaco. She asks, how does relationship building go beyond the networking aspect? That's always been an important part of university life. Yeah. Yeah, I'll start this one. And Kim, great question. We draw on the work of two scholars, lots of scholars, but two to start with in response to that question. One is Janice McCabe, who has this really lovely book called Connecting in College, which is about student friendship networks in higher education. McCabe is a sociologist. And one of the things she demonstrates in her research is that there's three kinds of connections students have with peers. And basically, there is academic-related connections, so intellectual connections, there's social and affective connections, and there's instrumental helping me do the day-to-day work of living. And one of the things McCabe finds that's really interesting that I think we need to help students understand is the friendships that are most likely to persist through and beyond college have multiplexed ties to use her language. In other words, we're not just social friends. We study together, too. We're not just instrumental friends like we ride together to school. We're in some classes together. We do some socials. So helping students see that if you're thinking about who you're connecting with among peers, how do you build those multiplexed ties with these people? So yes, maybe this is going to be a professional contact for you in the long range, but how are they also just someone who helps you navigate the ups and downs of school? So that's one. And then the second is Brad Johnson, who is a scholar mentoring at the Naval Academy. And he has this lovely phrase that we use in the book. Brad writes about constellations of mentors is his language. And we've actually adapted it for connections or everything. We talk about constellations of relationships, partly because we want to get away from the networking language, which feels really businessy and really instrumental. Or the some people will say like you should have a board of directors, which maybe is a good idea, but makes my skin crawl. And the idea of a constellation is, you know, you have a set of people and you're connected to all of them, but in different ways and for different purposes, because as the mentoring research shows, what students need is not undergraduates in particular, not a single mentor who's supposed to do everything for them all the time. That's actually not good for students and it's not really sustainable. But they need to be connected to me in some ways and an Oscar in other ways and to friends in other ways. And so saying to students, you know, you're a multi-dimensional human, you should have multi-dimensional connections. You should build a constellation over time of people who can support you and challenge you. So that's part of our answer, Kim, to your question. I think adding adding on to that as well is, you know, maybe one could argue like right that there isn't or there shouldn't be. How do I say this? Even if we were to try to get students to connect, you know, whether we want to call it networking or relationship building, however you want to say it, I think at the end of the day, it's important for students to like even know how to do that, right? Whether we want to call it networking or relationship building, there are some students out there that are not connecting at all and not seeing that they don't know how to network. And if we were to break that term down to say, hey, this is just relationship building, does that change how students then engage with that? I was speaking to a student the other day that I'm currently mentoring now, their recent graduate, and they made it all the way to Wall Street and have been working for a bank over there. And they recently came up to me and said, you know, Oscar, I don't know that I fully understand what it means to network. And this is a student who's like in the business world who's made it to this like level in their career, you know, 24 years old first generation college student from a low income background, and they're telling me that they don't know how to network. It's baffling to me that they've been able to go through their whole collegiate journey and feel like in their mind that they're not networking or don't have those skills. Where did we as an institution go wrong? To not make that connection for the student that, you know, this is networking is relationship building. And in fact, you know, you've done it, whether you've realized it or not, you have relationships even coming into college that will form part of, you know, your constellation. But here was this student that that connection wasn't made for them. This is fabulous. And what a great story. I've got two quick questions. One comes from actually in the chat. Tom Haynes, well, it's not a question, it's a comment I think is a serves a good question. He says most of my students have a hard time seeing learning as a community process, because they've been systematically deprived of networks before coming to college. Now he's teaching the community college space. And I'm wondering how, how, you know, is this is this where higher education has to intervene and help these students or do you have another response? I think we definitely need to intervene and we need to explain to students some things like for example, the research is very, very clear that students who have study partners, students who study with peers, do better academically and are less stressed academically. And, you know, active learning works and it works. And it helps close equity gaps. And so helping students understand that I'm not just doing this in the class, I'm not just asking you to do this work together. Because, you know, I don't know, I want to, I don't want to talk so much. It's that this is actually going to help you, because we can't assume students understand that that is true. And to pick up something Oscar said before and illustrate it with a quote that's really stuck with me from our interviews for, for the connections book. So we interviewed a student named Oligaria Gonzalez at Nevada State College outside of Las Vegas. And Ole, first generation, American first generation college student. And she said, she really was told before coming to college that you have to do college on your own. So she was baffled when professors said, come to my office hours, use the writing center. She's like, are they trying to trick me? And she thought it was cheating. That was literally her word in the interview. She thought it was cheating to get to go to the tutoring center, to go to the writing center, to ask your professor questions. That's cheating. If even a fraction of your students have that belief coming in saying I'm available, come to my office hours, isn't enough. We have to help students understand what, why we're saying that or why we're asking them to work with their peers. Wow. Well, friends, let me get out of the way and put your questions up. As you can see, this is an incredibly rich topic. And already your questions are coming in. So please feel free to go to the bottom of the screen and either click the raised hand button if you want to join us. Peter is proof that you don't have to have a beard to be on stage here. And or click the Q&A box to type in your Q&A. And we already, we have a question here. This is from our dear friend, Roxette Risks, coming to us from your head. And she asks, she thanks you for the resource book. Loneliness is a huge problem in society. And I'm wondering if your book relates directly or indirectly to college loneliness. It seems like a perfect resource. So there is stuff, loneliness is a topic that, you know, is like mentioned in the book, you know, coming out of it's still working through, you know, the pandemic COVID-19 left created, left this very isolating experience, right, for college or for students, faculty, you know, staff. And I think us coming back into, you know, in person and trying to begin developing those relationships can definitely seem hard. And I think too for a generation, right, that has had to do high school online. It can be very isolating. And we try to, in the book, you know, let students know that, you know, this is not easy, that it's, you know, it's not just difficult creating these relationships, but even maintaining them as well. And letting students know that, you know, even if they haven't been able to make these relationships early on in their college years, that they still have time to be able to, you know, establish these relationships that they also don't need this, you know, large amounts of relationships in college, that, you know, it starts with just one. And with that one relationship, it can really blossom into this web of relationships that can be very crucial in college success. So that the topic about loneliness is certainly one that appears in the book and, you know, we need to keep an eye out for as well as we move forward in the higher space. Well, this is a, first of all, Oscar, that's a great answer. And if I could, I want to link this to another question that came in from our dear friend, Tom Hames. He's the one who mentioned the point about students not having networks before. And he builds on this, building communities of practice in the atomized environment of a commuter school is extremely difficult. How much does that impact student achievement? And what else can be done to build connections? So let me pick this one up first. Great question, Tom. And recognizing that context matters a lot. You know, if you're at a residential small college, you can sort of assume there's going to be a lot of connection that happens outside of the classroom naturally. If you're at a commuter institution years ago, I taught at a community college. And one of the things was we did a study when I was there. One of the things we saw is that students went to their cars between classes. So even when there was, you know, a gap in passing time where students could have connected, most students actually went and isolated themselves or went, you know, on their phones or whatever. So saying, well, we have a cafeteria and we have a library and we have a coffee shop and there's ways to connect, that doesn't necessarily work. And one of the lessons I have taken from all this work is, I guess it's a two-part lesson. One is we who work in higher ed have to take it as our responsibility to create the conditions where students can connect and really actively to do that. We can't just say, well, I hope they're going to connect or, you know, good luck, but really structure things. And then there's a brilliant dissertation that I was fortunate to be part of coming out of Lune University in Sweden. And I can put a link to it in the chat. And what this, it was by a business professor at a university in Sweden who was studying how students connect in large intro business courses. And she was really interested, especially in the difference between commuter students and students who live close to campus and in her context between immigrant students and students who are native Swedish. And what she found is, and there's this lovely matrix on page 92 of her dissertation, there's student stress and there's faculty choice in who creates the group. So if students get to pick the group, they're much less stressed about the work they have to do in their group in this business class, but their groups are very homogenous. If the faculty pick the groups, the groups are more diverse, which is one of her goals, but students are much more stressed. And what she demonstrates in this dissertation is what we should do is start this, and she's thinking about first year students in a mostly commuter institution, start the semester, start the year with faculty, lots of faculty constructed groups of low stakes work where students are cycling through groups meeting lots of their peers. And then as the semester progresses, increasingly higher stakes work in the groups and more student choice. And what she finds is when she did that, the diversity of the groups goes up and the stress in the groups goes down. That's low stakes, right? Well, it ends up being high stakes work. But the beginning it's low stakes when I'm with strangers. And then I find out like I really like Oscar. I never talked to him before. He's great. I want to be in a group with him. And so the fact that I chose to be in a group with him later in the semester for the high stakes project makes me happy, not stressed. Oh, that's fascinating. What a great takeaway. Yeah. Oh, it's a brilliant work. Well, as always, Tom Haymes, thank you as always for a brilliant question. And thank you, Peter, for this answer. In the chat, people are going wild about this. They're talking about how commuter students sometimes use their cars as lockers and people all want to copy this idea that you're describing. And we have more questions coming in. Again, if you're new friends to the format, same example of a typical Q&A question. So please don't be shy. We're here for your questions. Ed Webb has a really, really important question. I don't think we've touched on so far. Does the book address neurodivergent students and others who might have neurological or learning differences that can make social interactions daunting? I guess this is over to you, Oscar. Do you want to take this, Peter? I can. I was looking up Annika's name. I'll put her name in the chat, the sweetest scholar. Ed, this is a great question that we don't do enough justice to in the book because it's, well, we just don't do enough justice in the book. I think the answer is it's very complicated. I do think learning fundamentally is social. And so recognizing that different students are going to relate to other people and take in stimuli in different ways means there's not one way to do this. So one of the things, and Oscar already identified this, one of the things we say really clearly in the book is that one connection, the research says one connection with a peer, with a faculty member, with a staff member that's meaningful to you as a student, is where the power comes from. So the difference between students who have zero such connections and one is significant in the research. And first gen students are much more likely, for example, to have zero than one. But so thinking about neurodiverse students, obviously we have to work with everyone's capacities and interests and abilities, but also recognizing that you don't need to be in a group of 20 students. In fact, we try to say in this book over and over that social media has given so many of us this sense that if you have more connections, that's better. Right. That's not true. That's one or two might be good. So perhaps for some of our neurodiverse colleagues and students helping them find the place where they can feel connected, where they can think alone or with somebody, that's really powerful would be enough. But there's a lot we need to learn on this. I appreciate the question. Oscar, this reminds me of what you were saying before. I'm going to paraphrase it and probably get it wrong, but you said you don't have to emphasize getting too many relationships. That's really, that's really, really helpful. In the chat, Christine Morris says, what we're learning about working with neurodivergent students is overtly stating what we normally assume is laying out the groundwork for interactions with peers, service staff and faculty members. That's interesting, which Ed calls the hidden curriculum. Yeah, no. This information that is hidden in colleges and universities are things that institutions need to make more clear. I think one of those ways to be able to begin to break down some of the hidden curriculum is through relationships. If colleges and universities would spend time to connect students with one faculty member, staff member on campus, that that student feels comfortable enough to be able to go to, that that student feels like that staff member, faculty member, that they can trust them. That one person could serve as the vehicle to learn how to navigate the college space. This is what we see with mentoring programs, peer mentoring programs. The reason why they're so successful is because there's a relationship that has been established between two students and when a student feels like they're scared or intimidated to ask that question in class or whatever it may be, they know that they have someone in their corner that they can go and talk to in a low stakes space. Because even going to office hours can be intimidating. If you've never stepped foot in an office before talking to a faculty member one-on-one, and I mean, there's even a physical divider at times. The table itself serving as a separation that can be intimidating to students. In the past, I've talked about how I've always enjoyed it most when a faculty member has maybe like a table off to the side that we sit around and we can just kind of talk as on the same level, on the same plane. That's a good design point. That's a really good design point. Can I pick up on one thing here too and something I saw in the chat before about office hours and requiring students to come to office hours. One of the great places we visited for our research, and I got to learn a lot from, is Oakton Community College, which I mentioned the president of before, just outside Chicago. They do this thing, I'll put a link in the chat. It's called the Persistence Project, which is a faculty initiative to support students. Faculty opt into this. They tend to do it in one section of one course each semester, so it's not every course because it's hard to scale, but what faculty commit to doing is in the first three weeks learning and using students' names, giving feedback on formative feedback on students' work, talking about using resources on campus, and then the hard part is a one-on-one, five to ten minute conversation with each student. Two things about those one-on-one conversations. They found the first three weeks are really important and that it's actually a faculty member you teach because the effects of the Persistence Project are so powerful. The college tried to scale this by saying every student is going to talk to somebody in the first three weeks. That didn't have the effect of talking with one of your faculty members, but the effects, Brian, are powerful. I haven't seen the latest Oakton data, but the data from a year ago was there was almost 10% increased semester to semester retention in sections with the Persistence Project, then compared to sections of the same course taught by the same faculty member without the Persistence Project, and the effect was about 25% for male students of color. This is a huge effect from basically one required conversation in the first three weeks. The other thing is the faculty from Oakton told us over and over, there's a huge difference between talking to some of your students and talking to all of your students. The students who come in because they're required to in the Persistence Projects are the ones you're least likely to see, but those are the connections in some ways that are most powerful for us to make as faculty and for our students to have. Thank you. I thank you for weighing in on that on that angle. That's it. I mean the two of you, and of course the four of you, because this is a quartet if you wrote this book, you're giving this really powerful way of revisioning higher education in a very, very practical way with immediate effects. That retention difference is huge. Oh my god, it's, yeah. We have more questions coming in, and this is one from our great friend Don Shawless who couldn't make it today, so he gave me this question in advance. He asks, is student engagement a luxury for working class students, particularly for working adults? How can they even think about engagement when they're trying to juggle all their responsibilities? Let me start and then Oscar, you'll clean up my mess, which is I think out of class student engagement is a luxury for students. You know, if you're a working parent and who's trying to do school too, saying now come and be part of a campus club or something, that's a ridiculous coin, I mean whatever. That's not a sustainable thing. And so this is why the classroom, whether it's virtual, hybrid, in person, that has to be a place where students are really engaging and connecting with each other, with the material, with the professor in meaningful ways. Because if we don't do this relational work in the classroom, the students who are going to miss it, miss any connections are the ones like he's describing. Oh, that's well said. Thank you. I was going to add, yes, it can definitely be a luxury. Students are working, you know, if not part-time jobs, full-time jobs, you know, trying to and going to school. But at the same time, I think another disconnect that tends to happen is, right, students may not see that supervisor that they have in that one job that they're working as someone that they could have this very meaningful relationship with, someone that they can connect with, not just about job responsibilities, but also to talk about maybe their supervisor's professional journey to learn from this supervisor, to, you know, learn some advice from this person on how to navigate life post-college, you know, life in this industry. And there's a missed opportunity right there. I think in some ways some students see those jobs as just, you know, a way to make a paycheck. And at times it can be more than just that, right, that they have someone in their corner that they can talk to about things. And it doesn't necessarily have to be someone that can help them in the professional space. Maybe it's just having someone in their corner that they can go talk to about, you know, emotional, emotionally taxing things that haven't gone on in college. And that relationship itself can be very, you know, still helpful, beneficial. And, you know, that's what, that's one of the points that, you know, we want to make in the book is that there are activities that students can engage with which we coin relationship accelerators that students can engage with and develop some of these meaningful relationships. Undergraduate research is one of those. And again, it's just us trying to make that connection for students letting them know that. Yes, even though there is, there are, it can be a challenge, right, to engage in some of these activities. Some of them you may already be doing. And to rethink then how you can strengthen that relationship with that individual supervisor, whoever it may be, is important. Well, thank you. Thank you. First of all, Don, thank you for the great question. I love Peter Oscar the way you answered this. This is so important. Peter, you've been generously putting stuff in the chat. Let me just ask a question for everybody, including yourself. Would you all mind if I posted excerpts from the chat to a blog post? I'd anonymize it so it wouldn't be you individually. It's good for Peter. In the chat, please, if you have any thoughts, yes or no, just let me know in the chat. We, I love where this conversation is going. I love how what a defamiliarizing this is. We have a comment from Philip Lingard, who's a VC founder, our founder, and he says, comment, higher education students are on a transformational journey with diverse origins and destinations. The power of that experience determines the strength of student-student lifetime bonds and alumni. So I think that's that's a really, really good point. And thank you. And Brian, I think we don't tell students that enough. We don't say that to students enough in higher ed. We say, you know, come here, you'll have fun, you'll get a degree, you'll get a job. And it's important that students get a degree and get a job, right? But saying this is really a unique opportunity for many people, unique opportunity in their life to ask questions like, who am I and who am I becoming? And, you know, what better way to do that than in relation with people you trust, with people who are different than you, people who can really push you and support you in new ways. So I think we in higher ed have undersold the potential of higher ed to students because we so want to stress that you can get a job if you get a degree, right? Oh, that's an instrumental part. In the chat, Tom Hame says, schools become functional, not social. Yes. Or else it's social because we just, you know, we're going to all join fraternities and sororities and have a blast. Yeah. And that's fine, but that's not what we're talking about here. Well, this is, this is good, but friends, we're running low on the hour. We've got about eight and a half minutes to go. So this is a great time for you to ask your question. And if you put in a comment or question in the chat that we haven't gotten to, please just pop it over in the Q&A box or hit the raised hand button, you know, we'll, we'll be happy to, happy to see you all. I guess I had a couple of questions for myself. A lot of people are thinking. And one of them is we've, we've discussed at a few points some of the downsides of digital experience, especially in K-12. But we know, we know that we can experience the digital world in a way that does expand and deepen social connections. And I'm wondering what kind of design suggestions you would have for colleges and universities. I mean, so much of the student experience is online from learning management system to registration to various social connections. What can we do with the digital environment to really have it help expand the relationship rich world? Well, let me start and Oscar, if you can talk about social media, I will talk about one of my favorite examples of everything we saw in our research for these two books is something Professor Manda Williamson at the University of Nebraska does. Before COVID, she, she'd won a ton of teaching awards for teaching this 350 person in person intro to psychology course. So Manda, for being good at doing that was awarded with teaching a 700 student asynchronous online intro to psych course before the pandemic, right? So you're good. So here we go. But she did this thing that I think is just genius. And again, it's introduction to psychology. So the first thing they talk about in the class is efficacy about as a non psychologist, understanding how people set goals and work towards those goals. And then what Manda says is there and teaches her students is there's their self efficacy and there's collective efficacy. And so collectively, she says, I want you all to support each other in doing as well as possible as everyone can in this class. So one thing she has students do is they do a poll to say, what do they want the class average to be on each exam? And then she has a space in their learning management system that she calls. It's like this, the student study lounge. And she said, you don't get any credit for going there. But it's an open space for students to do whatever they want with to support each other towards their goals. And before the first exam, she said, it's a little active, but not super active. And then the students take the first exam, they don't hit their collective goal. She tells them that and they get mad. And they say, we're going to do better. So through the semester, they more and more support each other. And by the end of the semester, most students are in the study lounge every week. And they're doing all sorts of different things. Some of them are posting you can do it memes. Some of them are saying, you know, we're going to do a study group in zoom or Starbucks or whatever. There's all these different ways they're supporting each other. And Amanda says, part of why that works is because of the scale. You know, if you had 20 students, it probably wouldn't work as well. Yeah, 700 students, you get this huge buzz in this student study lounge, because they're working together. And she said, when they hit their goal, and the class does better than the average, there's a party in the study lounge. People are in there, you know, doing the virtual equivalent of high five. And I love that. That's fascinating. I mean, it requires that scale. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's, that's great. That's great, Peter. You wanted to jump into. Yeah. So to Peter's point about like social media, colleges and universities can't underestimate the power, you know, of these platforms. Many of the incoming students nowadays and, you know, ones we've already had, very much connected on online platforms, and they're using them. They're using them to connect with the institution, connect with each other. You know, some of this, with some of the students that we spoke to, they're talking about, you know, getting on to social media, getting on to like organizations, profiles, schools, just to check out, see, you know, what kind of services programs that they're offering. And then using those platforms to be able to connect with each other, reach out to those institutions, organizations, student organizations, those sorts of things. But also thinking even just about, you know, your typical platforms that we use to communicate with. One of the students that we talked to during one of the sessions, our listening session was talking about the impact that a professor's comments on her paper had on her. The students shared how, even though that they had not met the professor in person because this was an online class, that it was very meaningful to the student that this professor would take the time to really provide this constructive feedback and encouraging messaging along the way, telling her, you know, that her writing is getting better, you know, whatever it may be. But that meant so much to the student. And it kind of causes you to take a step back and think, gosh, you know, to think about every message that we're sending students, whether it's, you know, via an email, text, verbal communication, even the feedback, right, that we provide on student papers can have a huge impact on students' experience. Well, as Lisa Durf puts in the chat, social media on their phones is where students are. Yeah. Well, that's, well, thank you both. That's a great double barreled answer to my question. There's a better question coming to us from a wonderful Ithaca analyst, Elmyra Yankou Tazekant, I believe, and please don't worry, I hope I haven't totally brutalized the name. She asks, I wonder what kind of differences, if any, that you've noticed between domestic and international students in your research? What are some of the related implications? Well, so I want to be super clear that our research was basically narrative research and then synthesizing other people's research. So we don't have the kind of research where we can make our own claims that are really clear about domestic students, international students. We do see very strongly the effects of student expectations. So if you were coming to, you know, to a college or university in the US or a classroom anywhere with the expectations that this is how it works, that's going to shape how you behave. So one of the things that, yeah, so culture shapes that really significantly. We also see, and something Oscar's done, did some really great writing in our book about, is how students who don't have English as a first language often will see that as a weakness. And it can be, but on the flip side, the capacity to think and reason and explain yourself and communicate in more than one language is a superpower too. So helping students recognize the assets they bring, even when they don't fit, they don't feel like they fit in a context is important. Oh, good point. And thank you for the qualifications. That's great. Oscar, did you want to weigh in or are we out of time and I have to wrap it up? Your choice. I'm okay. Okay. Well, let me thank you, both of you, for a fantastic conversation. I mean, you've given us just an illuminating way to rethink higher education as we know it, in a really humane and very, very positive way. Thank you both so much. What's the best way to keep up with both of you and your work? And we know how to find the book. We know how to, you can grab it online and we can buy a copy. But how do we keep up with both of you? Oscar. So you can keep up with me. I put my email in the chat. If anyone wants to reach out to me, I'm happy to take on questions or connect offline. I'm happy to speak with y'all as well. And I think we're both on LinkedIn, although I think we're both sort of trying to figure out what that means. Used to be on that thing that is hard to describe, but I'm not quite sure about that anymore. We can find you both that way. And again, thank you both. And thanks to your co-authors for this wonderful book. But don't go away, friends. I need to point out where we're headed next. And let me thank you all again for your great conversations and everything you contributed to this hour. If you'd like to keep talking about this, we can carry on. I still call this Twitter or X if you'd like. Or on Mastodon, you can use the hashtag FTTE. And if you'd like, I can add some more contact points for other venues like Blue Sky if you'd like. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions where we've discussed different forms of supporting students on campuses, please just take a look at tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. Looking ahead, we have sessions coming up on a wide range of topics. Just go to our website, forum, thefutureeducation.us, define more. And if you'd like to think about the implications of this for AI, which we've been thinking very hard about, here's my new sub-stack. Just go to aiandacademia.substack.com. Thank you all again for all these great questions. I hope the way of thinking about relationship-rich higher education is helping you think about how to design your work this fall. Be you a student, a faculty member, a staff, or anybody else. I hope everybody else stays cool and avoids the blasts of the heat dome and other temperature problems up here in the northern hemisphere as well as in the southern. Please stay safe and be well. We'll see you next time online. Take care. Bye-bye.