 All right, well, we have the top of the hour. So let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm glad to see so many of you here today. We have a terrific panel. Before I introduce them, before I introduce the program, let me just introduce myself. I'm Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator. I'm the host for the next hour. I'm your chief catherter for conversation. And I'm really delighted to welcome all of you here today. We have three people here today who are gonna be helping us think about the idea of digital transformation, how higher education institutions are changed in the process of grappling with the digital world. And we have three people from three different institutions, each with a different perspective. We have Marina Armey from Saddleback College. We have Jessica Phillips from the Ohio State University. We have Michael Berman, the CIO at California State University System. Now, one person I'd like to bring up right now is from Campus Technology, because we are doing this work together. We're trading some programs and we're partnering up to try to share our ideas and connect our audiences. So in order to do that, let me just bring up to the stage Reha Kelly, the presiding genius over the Campus Technology Enterprise. Reha, thank you for helping make this possible. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be collaborating on this event. And actually some of the speakers we have today will be presenting at a virtual conference that Campus Technology is putting on in a couple of weeks. So I think it'll be great to start a conversation about digital transformation here and then continue it at our conference. So on November 3rd, the Campus Technology Leadership Summit will be focusing on all the ways that IT and higher ed has needed to innovate and flex and be agile through the pandemic and beyond. We have some great sessions, one on rethinking learning spaces. We're gonna be talking about making flexible work policies sustainable, this seizing the opportunity for digital transformation, particularly in student services. And also having Brian speak for us, which is really exciting as only he can do about how the plan for the future in the face of so much uncertainty. So I would love for all of you to join us in a couple of weeks, looking forward to the conversation today. Oh, sounds terrific. Thank you so much, Ray. Henry, if you wanna post a couple of links in the chat box, please go ahead. Oh, yes, I will. Great. Well, let me make room for our guests and bring them up one at a time right now. And let me make sure that everyone gets a chance to welcome all of them. So first, let me just bring up Marina Aminay. Marina, hello. Hi, good morning. Well, it's morning here in Orange County, California. I bet it is, I bet it is. How are you doing today? Wonderful, thank you. I'm joining you from Saddleback College here in South Orange County. Excellent, excellent. Marina, we have a tradition here in the forum, but we ask people to introduce themselves. We do it in a certain way. We ask you to talk about what you're gonna be doing in the next year. What are the big projects and the big ideas that are top of mind for you? I would say my biggest topic is the intersection of instruction and technology. That's kind of where I live as a dean of online education, helping faculty members who have now been transitioning to fully online come back to campus in some part, but then also reassess how it's been going while we've been fully online. For example, our STEM faculty who've been highly utilizing proctoring solutions. How's that working for them? Are there equity issues at play that those proctoring solutions have brought up? If so, how can we solve that through some pedagogical means and suggestions? So I'll be really looking closely at bringing people back, especially faculty, and examining some of the complexities and really problems that technology has posed and thinking about some creative solutions around it. Well, that sounds like you have a lot of work cut out for you. Excellent, excellent. Well, let me get your colleagues on stage so that we can all put our heads together and see what they want to add to our overall conversation. So hold on tight, Marina, and let's reach out across the middle of the United States and bring up Jessica Phillips. Hello, Jessica. Hello. So excited to be here. Good to see you here. And I should say good afternoon because I think it's one or two o'clock there. It is, it is. And it is a sunny day. However, if you'd asked me a half an hour ago, I would have said it was a rainy day. So welcome to Ohio. It's the Midwest, indeed. Jessica, you do so much there. You do so much at the Ohio State University. Tell us, what are you gonna be working on next for the next year? What are the big projects and ideas for you? Well, the first thing will be potty training my daughter. So I'm just gonna throw that out there. That's forefront of my mind recently. How old is she? She's 21 months. She's getting close here. Yeah, but beyond that and more work focused is we're doing some exciting work around Swift coding and app development. And so we have some courses that are public and we're starting to work with some higher ed institutions to share in some of that course access with some of their community partners and their students so that we can cross institutionally create some pathways for students to learn how to code if it's maybe not a part of their major or area of study. So I'm really excited about that collaboration. And we're also in the same vein looking at workforce development and micro credentials and thinking about how we can support a growing number of learners, a growing audience of learners all with different kinds of needs and expectations that they hope to gain from their learning. So there's several things that are happening. They're all really exciting. And I think our fantastic stepping stones as we go forward. Wow, that sounds terrific. Good luck. Just have to get out there. I'm a university, so I'm being really nice here. I'm being very, very kind. Brian. So now there's two of you, two thirds of the panel. Now let's go back out to California and bring up our third member of our panel today. Michael Berman, long time friend, CIO for the California State University System. Welcome, sir. Thank you, Brian, such pleasure to be with you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Well, first of all, I've got a remark. Beard is coming along, I approve. I keep mine a little trimmed, but it's never quite gonna match yours. But who could really? It suits you. It suits you very well. So you know the drill now, looking ahead, what's ahead for you for the next year? Well, one of the really fun things about my job and working with the Cal State System is we get to work on a lot of things all at once. But I'll just mention a couple, our C Success Program, which is our chancellor's initiative to assure that every student in the Cal State System has an excellent device to do their work on and a way to connect it to the campus is very exciting. And we've already distributed about 25,000 devices. We're moving into the telecommunication space. So we're gonna start distributing mobile hotspots to students in a very systemic way and working closely with a couple of telecom partners to do that. And we wanna make sure that every one of our 475,000 or so students has a way to get online to do their work. And so that there's no equity issue in terms of our students' ability to be successful. You can't learn online if you can't get online and we don't want any student to not be able to. And online learning is a component of every student's experience now. So whether they're fully online or they're primarily face-to-face, they're always gonna have online components to their learning and we wanna ensure that every student can be successful. So that's a very exciting, we started with eight of our 23 campuses and we're hoping to add more in January. I think we'll add another three or four and eventually it's gonna reach all of our campuses in quite sure. So that's called C Success and we're super excited about that. And I'll also mention, you know, great to see my colleague Marina here from Salabac, such an important partnership between the community colleges and the Cal States and California. We really depend on each other to promote student success. And I know we've got some very specific work to do over the next couple of years in terms of easing the transfer pathways between the community colleges and the CSUs. I'm super excited about that. My daughter just transferred from, she's in the process of transferring from a community college to a Cal State. And anyone who, any parent who goes through that can see lots of room for improvement. So we wanna make that to where it becomes just transparent and natural. And that for the students, the literally over a hundred thousand students who go through that pathway every year in California, we wanna make sure again that they don't need a parent in the education business with a PhD to guide them through the process. Because again, that creates huge equity gaps and we know we lose students along the way. We wanna make sure that that's viable for every student and that they can focus on their learning and not on how to play the game of getting from one campus to another. So looking forward to working with our community college partners on that transformation. That's terrific, that is so much. And I love the way Michael, you and Jessica both brought in your children. My own daughter several years ago did also transfer for community college to State University. So making that easier is a great thing. Friends, I just wanna crow a bit. In the first five minutes, we've covered teaching, technology, proctoring, ethics, course ethics, coding for general education, micro-predential, student hardware, digital advice, inter-campus collaboration, transfer credits, and the link between family and family. There's a lot going on with this group here. And so they are here. We're all here for your questions and your comments. Remember in the bottom of the screen, you can click the raised hand button. If you wanna join us on stage or you can type into the question mark, type in your question or comment. And before I can even finish saying that, we have a question coming up right now. So this is from Peg Sherwin. Let me bring you up on stage. Hello, Peg. Good morning, how are you? I guess it's afternoon, afternoon probably where everyone's at. So I haven't been to a Shindig in a long time, but I'm curious and I joined a little bit late. So if you already covered this, apologies. I'm just wondering about any hybrid work environment tips, things that people might be experiencing there. Great question. Why don't we all take it then? Marina, start us off. Yeah, we are increasingly leaning toward different forms of hybrid coursework to both satisfy student needs and then also give our college a little bit of agility because with the Delta variant, we just have no idea what's happening. We have to kind of create a bit of agility. And so we handled it a couple of different ways. Hybrid is not really monolithic, right? So it could be a hybrid online course in the sense that there is both asynchronous and synchronous content, or it could be a hybrid online and on-campus class in the sense that every other meeting is synchronous or asynchronous and then there's a physical meeting on campus. And then we also have courses that are simultaneous streaming in the classroom. So the faculty member is meeting with, let's say 25 students, but there's another 20 that's zooming in and the class is designed such that there's some interactivity. There's a couple of screens, they're able to hear each other, there's microphones and cameras placed in the classroom to allow for some interaction. I would say my biggest learning from incorporating a lot of these different methods has been training, training, training, allowing faculty to get into those classrooms, play with the technology, do some practice Zoom sessions is really critical. And then really setting up guidelines. You know, people don't know, how do you take attendance with a synchronous asynchronous hybrid course? How do you establish faculty student contact? What are some strategies for collaboration so that students feel engaged and they feel like they're part of a community? So that training and that support has been really critical. Defining the various elements our own faculty are confused about the difference between synchronous, asynchronous, high-flag, simultaneous streaming. So you can imagine a student, especially a second language learner, especially a first-in-college student, they're going to be very, very confused. So we've had student videos that we've created, there's tutorials, there's flowcharts, there's lots of support there but we can totally improve that area and constantly a challenge for us. Thank you. Wow, thank you, Marina, thank you. Jessica, do you want to pounce on that? I certainly do. So I think when I first heard your question, I was thinking of it in terms of my team of employees and how we're managing and how we're working through some of these things. And it is so reflective of what students are experiencing as well as it very much should be. But I think what's really difficult is that it's very hard to present flexibility, have experiences with flexibility and then pull that back. People want to continue to experience flexibility. Staff, instructors, students, once you taste that it's really hard to go back. And so I think on a workforce side of this, we're very much looking at what are the job descriptions that people have and what are the interactions that we really need to have in person with students and where do we have spaces that it makes sense to be able to work from wherever you're most comfortable working. And there is a little bit of a variety there. And it's a conversation with staff to find out what their comfort space is, what their comfort zone is as well. But I think in both instances of students and staff, when you have people all over the place or primarily interacting online, it becomes ever more critical to make sure that people know where to find resources because some of those water cooler conversations or on your way to the next class conversations where you might learn some of those resources, that interaction may be missing. And so that's been something that we have focused on pretty significantly is how we can make sure students have resources, know where they are, when they need them and have that sort of more curated for where we can predict their needs are at a certain time. And I'm happy to talk more about that later. Thank you. Why is it West, Jessica? Thank you. Michael, what have you learned from your approach at the CSU system? Well, not a lot to add to those excellent comments. I'll just say that thinking about the student perspective, we're in this time of really tremendous experimentation. We went in the Cal State, all of a sudden we had more online students than WGU in Southern New Hampshire put together. And with nowhere near the experience of the structures in place that those institutions add. And I think we acquitted ourselves well, but when I think about the students, the level of uncertainty, the rate of change is very high. And on the one hand, it's kind of exhilarating for some of us to see the number of experiments. And as Marina said, all the different modes of instructions that are possible. And we can tailor that to a particular course, a particular faculty member, but I think I worry about the students just being overwhelmed by the number of options and the number of different pathways. We're not really great at communicating with students and mass in general. And in this time of change, I think it's really tough. So I just hope that we continue in talking with some students, they've actually been very complimentary of the faculty and CSU in the level of flexibility and support they've gotten through the past year and a half. I hope as all of us continue to go through such challenging and tiring times that we continue to do the best we can to support those students. I think it's just, I really feel for what this generation is going through right now. Thank you. Thanks all three. Peg, does that help? All right. Well, thank you. Great answers. It's good to see you back again. Take care. Friends, if you're new to the Future Transform or you're new to this technology, that's how a video question works. In fact, let me make it even easier if you'd like to join us. Let me just set up a little teal-colored button. If you wanna join us on stage, just press that button and you're right up on stage before I can stop you. It's perfect. And now you get a sense of just how generous, thoughtful and differently experienced all three of our guests are. We have a couple of questions that have come in the Q&A box and we flash these up on the screen so people can take a run at them. And this comes from Leslie Harris. I was wondering how you can reply to the faculty member who asks about lockdown browsers or remote proctoring exams. Is there a way to get them to rethink their assessment practices instead? Thanks, Leslie. Good question. Who wants to try? We'll have to kick this one off as well. 100% yes. And I think the secret weapon at Saddleback College is we have some STEM faculty in particular who are the big users of the proctoring solutions who have become very passionate about authentic assessments and project-based learning. And they are at the forefront of this transformation that's happening at our college where they are helping their faculty and colleagues to kind of think about how do I assess differently? For example, instead of a math teacher saying what is the answer to this equation? We have a faculty member now saying this is the answer to this equation. Tell me why. Tell me how we got there. It's a little bit harder to plagiarize that reply than it is if it's just a number or some kind of objective response to that. Or how can you use peer review in a statistics class? We don't normally think about peer review outside of the humanities or the social sciences. So helping our faculty to rethink how they assess their students is really useful. And then also sharing with faculty the various mechanisms out there, and I'm sure you've got other sessions on this, but there are dozens and dozens and dozens of websites currently that will help your students figure out a way to come up with that answer. So if you make it meaningful, if you talk to your students about the importance of academic honesty, if you let them know that you're aware of these sites and then you offer them experiences in the class that are portable, that are meaningful, that are authentic, it's going to really greatly reduce the need for plagiarism deterrence and proctoring solutions that are incredibly invasive. Also helping faculty to better understand that equity notions related to using these proctoring software. So a student who has young children who run into the camera to trigger the plagiarism or the feeding mechanism in that solution. If they live in a home with other people, sometimes we have students in the bathroom taking a test because that's the only privacy they can find. If some students of color have reported that solutions like proctoria don't pick up on their skin color if they're darker tone. So when faculty become aware of these outrageous elements related to equity, it's often from the faculty that will hear what's next. And then you're really right for that conversation around authentic assessments and project-based learning. Thank you, Maria. That's fantastic. Thank you. What a great answer. Jessica, Michael, did you want to add more to that? I would absolutely second all of that. And I'll also just add quickly that I think that it really is about having an initial conversation. I think we found that you have to unpack a little bit what happened when proctoring tools were first introduced and what that conversation was. Because we've discovered, I think that some instructors actually think that they have to do that, that they're required through accrediting bodies or licensure to do that. And sometimes that is the case, but not always. And so it's a little bit of going back and understanding where did their beliefs about these tools and how they should be used emerge and what are the fears that are driving that. And then it absolutely then can help with that next phase of the conversation level. What are your goals and what should students be able to do and what are the different ways we can assess that? Well, it's a real rethinking going back and revisiting that. Thank you, Jessica. Michael, what would you add to this? I think those are great answers. I don't really have much to add. The only thing I'll say is that while we all value faculty agency and faculty autonomy, there's also a line in terms of equity and prejudice and disadvantage in some students that where I think at some point we have to draw lines. And so I think I'm very much aligned with what Marina and Jessica are saying and also what a lot of our faculty are saying is that there comes a point when some of these tools are just not acceptable in an academic environment regardless of the goal of trying to prevent plagiarism or cheating. Very good, hard line indeed. Leslie, that's a great question. Thank you so much. So again, if you're new to the Future Transform or if you haven't used the software before that's an example of one of those Q&A box questions. So if you'd like to ask one of those just look at the bottom of the screen along that white strip, you'll see that question mark button, press that type, hit send, we're good to go. We had a couple of questions that came up based on some of your earlier comments. I just want to make sure that we had a chance to revisit those. One of them was a comment about preferring asynchronous over synchronous. I think that's was Lisa and I just wanted to float that out there. Where have you come down after almost two years of the pandemic? What's the right balance between synchronous and asynchronous online instruction? I mean, should we do more of synchronous because it's more lively and richer or should we do more asynchronous because it's better for schedules and bandwidth? What do you think about that now? You want me to kick this one off first? You're unfair, do it. So at Saddleback, prior to the pandemic, we had a huge portfolio for online education. It was part of our brand. We had the second number of largest enrollments in the state amongst the 114 community colleges. So we really had a robust online existence which was almost all asynchronous. When we talked about online education before the pandemic, everyone thought it's asynchronous. All of our training was focused on asynchronous methodology. It was really seen as the most flexible, the most equitable, the most supportive. But we also did have heavy kind of buy-in from humanities, social sciences and we didn't have a lot going on in terms of CTE and STEM presence in that online portfolio. Post-pandemic, a lot of people who kind of in an emergency had to get online, they really didn't have the time or the tools to do so asynchronously. And so they opted for synchronous Zoom sessions with their students. And that was a little bit problematic at first in terms of just the technology. But once people got the hang of that, I became a believer that it can really be a useful form of online education even though it wasn't much of our portfolio before. It definitely is now. I would say now departments are increasingly looking to offer a variety of methods. If I have 20 sections of English 1A, we're gonna try to offer some synchronous, some asynchronous, some hybrid, some fully on campus because we've realized that students have their preferences. Some students really need that one-on-one contact with their faculty members, with their students. My son is currently a student here at the college as well. He prefers synchronous courses and he prefers on-campus sessions. He's not a big fan of asynchronous. He really misses interacting with his buddies and seeing people, even if it's synchronous and there's no contact between the students in the class, he and his friends have already started a Discord chat on the side and they're talking about the professor and they're talking about the content. So it creates this sense of community that he really misses out on asynchronous. So I would say I was not a fan of asynchronous before but I'm a believer and I think that a good variety is going to best serve the students moving forward. Best of them what's good for the students. I'm glad to hear that you have a child involved. I do, I've got a couple of them. This is great, this has become a family show. That's great. Thank you Marina. Jessica, Michael, did you want to move to the balance? I promise we weren't told we had to speak in order. But it works, it's fine. I think as I'll take this opportunity just to draw in data-driven decision-making and just ask a question. Wouldn't it be nice if as an instructor, I'm an instructor myself of a class of about 200 students online, wouldn't it be nice if at the beginning of that class I could see a map and I could see where in the world, literally my students live and in what time zones and could that help me if I had that information to make some decisions about how I designed my course and how I deliver it and can I make decisions about whether synchronous sessions are required or optional? And so having that kind of data ahead in front of you about your audience, your student audience and what their needs might be, maybe I can also see that they are a non-traditional student but a student who has a family or is a military student and maybe deployed student, there's so many things that could impact what the needs are of students and so being able to see that in a dashboard or with some data, nice data analytics ahead of a course could be really helpful in making those decisions because I think there are use cases for both synchronous and asynchronous and careful, thoughtful decisions in that are really important. Thank you, thank you, Jessica. Great points both. I would say that I think we also have to look not just at hybrid courses, so to speak or different modes of instruction but think about the student lifecycle and the different paths that different students go through and I think that for a very large percentage of the students that come into the Cal State and I suspect in the community colleges, a high percentage of them are not ready to jump right into a full diet of asynchronous courses. They simply don't have the experience or the temperament to do. It takes a certain kind of self-discipline that a lot of us, I certainly didn't have at 17. And the structure of going and sitting with your peers or perhaps as an alternative being in a synchronous online session may make a lot of sense. And then I think for other types of learning, other students, other points in their career, graduate studies, professional education, different life experiences, different types of abilities, different locations, different access to, there's just so many different variables. I saw my colleague, Tom, make the point that it could depend on the learning objectives but I think to me it depends even more on the life experiences of the people and where they are in their learning journey which we all know is a lifelong journey and what makes sense for that individual at that time. And I hope we can get to a kind of flexible schema. And I also think that the idea that every instructor is gonna offer every class in every mode is not realistic. It's just the burden on the instructor is substantial to do that. And where it makes sense and where we can do it and we're an instructor has the technology savvy and the intestinal fortitude to do that good on them. That's great they can do that. But I don't think that's gonna be realistic for every course. I think that we're gonna need some specialization and there are people who really love to teach asynchronous courses. There are people who love to teach face to face courses. And by the way, I'm really fascinated to see the people who thought they hated teaching online and now saying, let's all find things not so bad. There's a lot of those too. So let's do the best we can to match the student and the instructor and the topic to the mode that makes sense. And then from a technology perspective, I wanna do the best I can to provide all those in as efficient and a smooth way to everybody who's involved. Is my voice a little soft maybe? I don't know, some people said they had trouble hearing me. It may be that you're just sounding too mellow but I love a little bit of what can I say? You gotta do it. But matching the student, the instructor, the class, I mean, and the learning objectives and we're all on this path, life path, life path, right? And what we need at 17 and what we need at 27, we need 37 might be very, very different. You're 77, yeah. Thank you. 77, I'm hoping I'll still be learning then. Oh, I know you will. That's too far off so. You've got a lot to do but this is very rich. Thank you, thank you all. Now we have a video question coming in from one of your colleagues, actually from awesome friend of the program, George Station at Cal State Monterey Bay. Let me see. He's where? It's kinda near you. Hello, George. Hi there, can you hear me okay? Beautiful, great. Okay, and I've got one, if I may, one follow up on a previous topic on the proctoring environments and then one, which was my original question, but by way of follow up, I'm wondering if there is actually a conversation between the higher eds systems and the accrediting bodies, the certifying bodies and so on about this need for harsh proctoring environments. I, just by background and another life, I was a proctor at Monterey Peninsula College, one of our community colleges, physically going in for California State teacher certification exams and C-Best and all of those ETS stuff. And I know those rules and that being able to transfer that to the online environment seems just untenable. So I'm wondering if any of your systems are actually having those conversations with the accrediting bodies. Well, I'll go ahead and jump in and go first, just for the heck of it, because it's, since George has colleagues. George, I don't know the answer to that. Allison Rinn probably would be the person who would be the point person for the CSU on that topic at that level, but my personal opinion is given the current state of technology that if you need to have a proctored exam, the best thing to do is have people go to a physical location and do a proctored exam. If that's what you really need. And I think we would both agree that should be required as rarely as possible. But if you're gonna test people's ability to do something and you feel that the only way to certify it is to be certain who the person is and whether they did their own individual work without help. If that's rich, you really have to test, then I think you should go to a test center. That's my personal opinion. I think that's the fairest. Now I realized there might be some people have special issues with that and there would have to be accommodations made because of different abilities. But I think for 90%, that's the best solutions. I just don't think that, in my opinion, that the technology is even gonna... I don't think technology does what it claims, in my opinion. And we know that there's evidence that it does harm. So you have a technology that doesn't, in my opinion, doesn't do the good that it claims and does actual harm. Why would you want to use it? Stress, this is not a CSU stand. This is my personal opinion. But, and within the CSU, it's gonna be the faculty who decide these questions as it should be. So, but I think there's still a place just... This was a problem in COVID, right? Having a physical test center was difficult or impossible at certain times. I think we're beyond that. We know what it takes to make a space safe enough for most purposes, for most people. And I think we should just go back to having test centers if there really is a need to do that. Yeah, and I would just add, I think there's a lot of myths and legends associated around online education and it affecting accreditation and articulation between community colleges and CSUs, or you see that there's a lot of sort of myths and legends around that is kind of what I've experienced. So our accrediting agency is ACCJC. There is no mention of proctoring anywhere in the standards or anywhere in the review. We have used it before and after the pandemic and it's not really come up. It's kind of assumed that this is a discipline specific decision that's made within departments and faculty who are the experts of their fields. There may be, with that, there is a caveat. There may be some specific professional requirements. So for example, real estate has a proctored exam that they give off-site, but that's not related to the class. The class actually doesn't use proctoring, but if somebody wants a professional license as a real estate agent, they would go and get a proctor test. So there are some CTE related requirements, but there is no requirement one way or the other that I'm aware of. Salify College also, and this is a pretty common practice at least in California colleges, we do not specify on our transcripts if a course is online or on campus. So a receiving CSU or a UC or a four-year has no idea if that student has taken all of their classes online with proctoring or without proctoring or on campus. We don't specify that anywhere in the transcript. So if they came up with that information, I have no idea. They just found one of us and talked to us. That's interesting. George, what a great question. Did you wanna follow up with that? Yeah, well, my other one is actually my original question and Brian, you've experienced this before. And Michael, we've had a conversation before in the world. So, you know, I change topics. So the other one has to do with maybe getting back to the equity question of what we provide our students by way of access in terms of equipment, in terms of hardware, in terms of wireless, in terms of broadband and hotspots and all that goes with all of that. I think that pandemic has demonstrated that we're all kind of equivalent participants. It really flattened the hierarchy. So not just students, but the staff, faculty, administrators, everyone was kind of in the same boat for a while, and I think maybe even to a certain degree today. And so my concern is that we still don't accept possibly in the IT usage of the term user, we're still not all seen as the same, even though the hierarchy was clearly visibly flattened. And Cal State has that C-Success program. My campus CSUMB is not yet one of those campuses. I know Michael, I think you said there were eight and that's a student program, but there doesn't seem to be anything for faculty, staff and administrators that reflects the same need that I know exists among my peers and our other colleagues. And I'm wondering if any of your systems have programs that specifically address everybody else who is not a student, but still needs to be as connected as any student does in today's environment. So that's my other question. Thanks. Who wants to take a run at that one? I can take a stab at that to start. We've had it at Ohio State, a program for four years now, a digital flagship and it's focused, it is focused as a student success initiative, but our research as we prepared that, that initiative that tips to launch that clearly pointed to the importance of instructors having the same access to the technology, the platform and the software that the students were receiving. So we started out with a cohort model because our funding didn't extend to instructors, but we did have a little bit that we could play with for people who were initial champions of technology enhanced learning and were willing partners to innovate and try some things. And so they engaged in training and received the technology alongside the training. And that was really critical in the research that we found to is not just providing the technology, but also the course design support, the pedagogy support in using technology to teach. And so we over time have shifted to some models where now we offer more on demand resources and we work directly with departments to help bring technology to instructors, the same technology that students receive. And I think we're around maybe 600 or so instructors who have the same technology as students at this point. And all of the feedback on that has been, been very positive to your point, George, about the importance of that. And during COVID, that was certainly evident as people had to make that, that quick switch. So just a little bit about what we have done so far, sort of in that vein. Thank you. Thank you. I would just say, George, I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead. George, I was gonna say, stay tuned. I saw Cal State LA just ordered 1,800 devices for instructors. So it went down 22 to go or? Yeah, so, you know, have your people call Cal State LA's people and ask them how that decision was made because I don't have, that's all I pretty much all I know, but, and then we also have to deal with the fact that there could be a tendency to, well, we'll get devices for all the part-time people, but the, I mean, the full-time people, but the part-time instructors will have to fend for themselves. And that's a whole other huge issue that George, you and I have talked about, but we, you know, our students don't divide their instructors up by whether they're full or part-time. Their teachers are their teachers and we need to make sure that every one of those teachers has the skills and the tools they need to be successful with their students or we're not, or we're gonna be letting our students down. Good sentiment, good sentiment. George? Yeah, I was just going to add that, I think in addition to faculty needing that access, which we've been fortunate to be able to do and giving laptops and loaners to our part-time and full-time faculty, there's always supply chain issues as well in the beginning, like try to find a laptop or Chromebook, it was rough, but I would also say classified staff need that support as well. So we have an amazing, amazing center. I'm so lucky to have it. It's called the Faculty Center at Saddleback and the entire focus of my three instructional technologists who are in that center is course design and instructional technology. They are there to work with faculty. So making sure they have the tools is really important too. And sometimes we forget about staff who are there to support. So for example, they need iPads so that they can see the Canvas view from the student and from the faculty side. And they need the laptop and they need an Apple because they need to see it, it changes a little bit. The Canvas app looks a little bit different depending on where you are. So I would say classified are on their management have to be on there as well. They need to know what's happening. When we get a student complaint about Canvas, deans need to know what that means, right? If a student is complaining that a faculty member hasn't been present in Canvas, that shouldn't just be a foreign language. Managers and deans are absolutely, I think, responsible for knowing it. So everybody needs a quality of access and I would really agree with the question about what about the rest of us? What about lecturers? What about staff? And we're really working on that. I know at Saddleback. Okay, great. Thanks to all of you for those perspectives. I think I really appreciate from each of you how you want to support the everyone else on campus, whoever the, you know, and off campus as, you know, magnified by the pandemic days. And I'm hoping that your messages get through to everyone else. And so that there are some system-wide solutions to that coming. Great, Brian, thank you so much. That really was fruitful and very helpful for me. And I can have that conversation back with our colleagues locally as well. My pleasure. Thank you. I'm glad to help the CSU system apparently. Friends, we have just about 11 minutes to go. And I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to have their two cents. I'm really enjoying this immensely. Jessica, you were asking about a dashboard for faculty to find student geography and their technology preferences. I tweeted this out. Donald Clark in Brighton in the UK says he built a tool like this. So I just asked him if it's around or anything else. I'll let you know if he responds. And during this very session, he raised $65 million in Series A funding to create all the tech tools for itself. If anyone could do it, it would be done. Can I explore that a little bit more? So kind of what I understood from what Jessica described is giving faculty the ability to understand the location of their students. And then based on that, determine the right ingredients, right? So I want to do some synchronous and asynchronous. We have a lot of faculty here interested in doing that at Saddleback. And I have mixed feelings about that. So I would love to hear Jessica or anyone else. And the reason is that it kind of creates some barriers for students in planning the rest of their schedules. So for example, we had some faculty in the beginning that said, well, my class is going to be synchronous, but I want to have the ability to have an occasional synchronous meeting Tuesdays at 12. And I might have like three of these in a semester, but I want the ability to have that. But what that does in the schedule is it creates a hold on the student's schedule and they can't take any other classes during that prime time 12 to 130 time period. And so it became a barrier for us not to establish this in advance. And so our faculty were really understanding about that. And we've come to an agreement that if you're gonna reserve a spot, you better meet every time that week rolls around. Like you better meet every Tuesday at noon because that student's not meeting anywhere else and you're requiring it as part of your class. It's not a when I feel like it kind of item. And we put that publicly in the course schedule so that students are aware of it at the point of enrollment. But then again, it's limiting for the faculty member too. And that kind of spontaneous spontaneity that we want to encourage. So any thoughts around how to balance those to competing needs? Yeah, I would say that what we've seen is that while I shared a link to how we explain instructional modalities to students, instructors are just as confused at certain times of what those instructional modalities mean for them and their teaching. And so what was happening is that students were, they were in classes where the instructor, maybe the course was indicated as an in-person course scheduled at a certain time or maybe it wasn't indicated as online without any synchronous sessions. But then the instructor was making decisions during the course to shift this way or shift that way. Primarily during the pandemic. And I think that was largely because students were, maybe it often for the first time for instructors all over the world, that has not always been the case at Ohio State. I think at other institutions, that is maybe more common. That was a newer thing for our instructors to have students that were all over the place. So we have this data. We have a tool called EAB, I think it's from the student as collaborative. We've rebranded it, but that data is all there. But you have to look it up student by student. So what would be nice is if, because it's there, it's like you can almost touch it. Like can we just pull that data together? So like myself as a class of 200 students, I can see something that would be more helpful for me in making some of those instructional decisions. But to your point, I completely agree. It can, this definition of what these different instructional modalities mean and how they're indicated in the course scheduling system is really critical for students to be able to make good choices and the choices they need to make to create the schedule that they need for themselves. So it's a little bit of a parallel. We should be helping to define what these mean and we should be maybe providing, if we can more data for good decision-making. That's a great exchange. Thank you, Marina for pressing on that and Jessica for unfolding it a bit further. Thank you. We have more questions coming in. And this is one from Garrett Monroe at Hiram College. And he wanted to ask about, wondering if we can chat about devices in ALMS. Is anyone jumping ship from a particular platform? Which are checking boxes for students and faculty given emerging trends anticipating the future? Good question, Garrett. I can talk a little bit about all California colleges in California. We are community colleges in California. We are all 114 of us using Canvas as the LMS. And I would say there is very little likelihood that we will jump ship to another. This was part of a major initiative a few years ago to get all the colleges on the same LMS and the state footed the bill for it to make that happen. And it was a lot of work and it took about three years to get everybody there. But we're all there. Saddleback was kind of a reluctant mover. We had Blackboard, our faculty tended to like Blackboard. But now that we're there, it's actually opened a lot of cool doors. So now that we're all in Canvas, I don't know how much you all know about the CVC, the California Virtual Campus. It's an initiative that's statewide. They're wanting to create a one-click enrollment for students to take classes at each other's colleges without going through the application process. So this is a huge deal. A student at Bakersfield College now who wants to take an online English 1A but their college doesn't offer any sections or it's all full can now go on the course exchange and within a few clicks enroll in a class at Saddleback and take that class and it will help him or her finish their degree on time and transfer on time. So it's an enormous equity tool, I think the course exchange. It's only made available because we're all on Canvas as an LMS and inside of Canvas, we create trust relationships. So that student never leaves Bakersfield's instance of Canvas, they're on that server. And when they log in, they'll see their classes from Bakersfield and then they'll see Saddlebacks on that same login. So that trust relationship is there. It's a beautiful, fantastic, easy way for the student to have access to our entire statewide portfolio of 114 colleges and the LMS is really a big player and why that will happen for students more widely and why I don't see it's changing anytime soon. Thank you, Marina. That's a really good story. Jessica? Sorry. Go ahead. I was just gonna follow up on that and Marina knows a lot about this but the Cal States are now, I think about 17 or 18 out of the 23 either are currently using Canvas or in the process of moving to Canvas. And there is discussion and there's been some incentives provided from the state to encourage all the Cal States and all the UCs to move to a single platform. And those discussions are underway about what it would take to make that happen. So I think there's a good possibility it could happen. You know, I'll just mention I have a lot of really good friends and people I really admire who were really deep thinkers about pedagogy and learning who really pushed back and rebel against the traditional LMS. And I'm, you know, incredibly aligned with them in a lot of ways. But then when I talk to students and look at what students want, it's like they don't want a maze of opportunity. They want to be told here's what you need to learn. Here's what you need to do to learn it. Here's the resources you have. And as one student once said to me, you know, I'd rather be spending my time learning the subject matter than trying to figure out where my assignments are. And so there's a tension there. And I'm super supportive of experimentation and people are looking at, you know, and they're very aware of the limitations of a tool like Canvas. But at the same time, what Maureen is describing from a student point of view of a student being able to go to one portal and get access to the entire, eventually the entire online resources of the California Community College is amazing. So I don't have an answer for that. That's just an inherent contradiction. And I think that we've got to create a niche and a place for experimentation and innovation. We can't always live on what works today. But I think from a student viewpoint, having that commonality and also for a faculty. I mean, because Maureen's faculty are my faculty. There's probably hundreds of people who teach at Saddleback who also teach at San Marcos and at Fortin and at Long Beach. The same people, we hire the same instructors in so many cases. So again, asking them to go between different platforms is an unnecessary burden on them. It's the digital aspect of being a freeway flyer. Yep. And of course, now a Zoom flyer, right? You don't even necessarily have to be in the same part of the state or in the same state. That's true. You have to be in the same cafe. We have time for one question from our campus technology guru. I wanna make sure she gets this question in because this is a very, very important one that we just hinted at. Rae asks, I'm curious what student services outside the classroom, whether it's advising, mental health, have there been benefits to taking those online that will carry on into the future? Again, my apologies. We're right kind of at the end of the hour. So I'll make sure you guys each get a chance to attack that. What do you think? I'll flash it on the screen again so you can see it. I would love to jump in on this one. I can maybe start a little bit on this one. We created a student support hub where we consolidated all of these services into a single location and it was very, very useful. We started that work before the pandemic. So student, and we didn't really want it to be a bunch of websites. So it's not a link to a lot of other links. It's really a place with little boxes where students can go in and chat live with a counselor, chat with a tutor. So it's a place to consolidate actionable support for students. And I think it's been very popular and helpful but there's still lots of work in terms of getting students to that hub and I'll post a link as well to our hub so people can take a look. Thank you, Marina. Thank you. Jessica, you were just saying. Again, I mentioned we developed actually pre-pandemic alongside students and subject matter experts a wellness app at Ohio State that is very similar. It brings resources to students but it comes along with some recommendations from subject matter experts about when certain information is presented to students based on what we know about some student behavior. And that's very helpful to help with the white noise of so many resources, which is often more of the challenge than not having enough resources for students is that ability to curate that. And we also worked with various student groups to gather feedback and just one example quickly is international students shared with us that they're more likely to seek out resources that they can access on their own versus resources in a group setting or more professional resources. And so we were very careful to make sure as we crafted the wellness app that we provided a multitude of opportunities in there to reach things on your own on your time. Good thinking, good thinking. Good lessons learned here. Michael, did you have any to add to that? I'll just mention one that really was accelerated by COVID and we've seen some really positive success with when it's done in a really in an intelligent way. And that's the use of chatbots for certain types of student services. We've seen evidence that it's very well received by the students, not as a replacement for every type of face-to-face service. Don't let anyone tell you that AI chatbots are intelligent. It doesn't do with intelligence. There's simply another resource and another interface to get information. And the fact that some questions can be answered 24 hours a day by a chatbot is very useful to a student. So chatbots with real human beings behind them can be very effective for a lot of services. And we've seen a growth in that and some real positive reaction from students. Again, when it's done in a smart way and it's integrated with human backup and people making sure that students don't fall through the cracks. That's a great answer. Those are a great fantastic question and three really, really helpful answers. We are friends out of time and this has been such a rich session. I really hate to pause it, but I wanna make sure everyone gets a chance to go back to their lives. Just really quickly, what's the best way to keep up with all of you and your individual work? And I'll just take this left to right on my screen. Marina, how do we keep up with you? Email me, you can come to my LinkedIn page. You can check out Saddleback online and on our homepage we've got what's going on. I've also put in a link to our student support hub. Very nice, thank you. Jessica, how can we keep up with you? Yeah, certainly email, feel free to reach out. And I also, I am on the Twitter and so you can find me at Jess Phillips underscore OH. Yep. Anybody? Very good, excellent. And Michael, how about yourself? I put my Twitter handle in the chat and that's the easiest, quickest way to find me, but if somebody wants to reach out to me at the CSU for anything, I'm not hard to find. Glad to talk to anybody. Excellent, excellent. Well, friends, thank you. Thank you so much for a fantastic conversation. I really, I'd like to have you come back to follow this up, perhaps in the spring as things develop and as things change. I would love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, good luck with your session at Campus Technology and really stay safe and we'll see you soon. Thank you, it was a pleasure. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Jessica and Marina. It's great to get to talk with all of you. Yes, indeed. But don't go away yet. Let me just point out where things are headed for the next few weeks. And let me also thank Campus Technology for partnering on this. It's been a really, really pleasure to work together. Looking ahead to our sessions, we have sessions coming up on enrollment, on disability, on eco-media, on digitization, on libraries. If you'd like to go continue these conversations about everything about asynchronous for synchronous to student services and more, we can just use the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me, Brian Alexander or at Shindig events or hit up my blog at BrianAlexander.org. If you'd like to go back into the past and look at our previous sessions, including some of these wonderful speakers, just go to tinyworld.com slash FTF archive and remember to subscribe. In the meantime, thank you all for very, very wonderful questions. In the chat, we found a lot of learning, a lot of resources. This has been terrific. I hope to see you all at Campus Technology and I hope above all for you all to stay safe. We'll see you next time and see you online. Bye-bye.