 Welcome to this week's Future Trends Forum. I'm Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host, Chief Cat Harder, and I'm welcoming you to today's session which is a community exploration of the rest of 2023. What we're thinking about, what we're concerned about, what we're hoping for, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Now today's topic is all of us and all of us together looking at what comes next. So the usual forum format is to have one or several guests who are expert in one particular piece of the puzzle of higher education's future. But every so often we break out to have a melting of the minds. We put our minds together and think about where we are headed. And that means both the collective we, where academia as a whole, all of our colleges and universities, all of our scholarly publishers, and all of our libraries, where we're all headed for the rest of the year, but also for us individually, where you see your program, your department, your work headed. This is not a programmatic event, so we don't have a specific agenda without it to tick down. Instead, I have a few ideas I'm going to hurl at you, then I want to open the floor so that all of you can share your thoughts and your ideas. So let me get rid of that slide and let me just welcome all of you. Let's see, Tom, if you're, if Shindig doesn't want to let you use the camera, try refreshing the page for a start. That often takes care of that problem. And Doyle, I hope that Kentucky is nice and bright and shiny. And John, 80 degrees, 80 degrees in medicine? Bask in that, Bask in that. Giselle, I'm guessing it's more than 80 degrees there. And Melanie, hello, hello, and hello, Ellen, you two aren't too far away from each other. And Sarah, hi, yeah, I'm not too far from you. I'm just, I'm just in town for literally a few hours for a couple of meetings, hearing back, not enough time to visit, I'm afraid, but I'm really glad to see you. Tom, check with Wesson. There's usually a couple of quick fixes we can do for cameras. So just, just to begin with, a few things that I'm looking forward to or anticipating, because I don't necessarily mean I'm excited about or happy about, but these are things that I'm thinking about. One of them is the Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court has a few major cases on its docket, and they may rule in ways that have a lot of importance. One has to do with the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness. And I'm really curious to see which way they go. My, I'm not a lawyer, but my, everything I've read, my instinct is that they will shut it down or stop it or weaken it in some way. I think either way, our good friend Don Charlis, he thinks that ruling either way will increase public skepticism about higher ed. So if we have the loan forgiveness shut down, then that means that people will be more afraid of student loans. And if it's actually accepted, the skepticism about the plan will increase. A second ruling has to do, I just forgot the name of the case, has to do with affirmative action in college admissions. And again, a lot of legal press that have been reading suggests that the Supreme Court will rule to end preferential admissions in higher education. We know for history that recent history that ending such programs tends to immediately depress black and Latino enrollment. So that is definitely a major risk for this moving forward. So those are two, two of the Supreme Courts that I'm looking at right now. So to the Supreme Court decisions that may come up. Don Charlis also reminds us that we should be paying attention to the enrollment cliff. So so if you know that I've been tracking the decline in American higher education enrollment, which started in 2012 and is trickled down, poured down in COVID and continues to trickle down now, supposedly after COVID. So I'm very concerned about high school graduation rates, how many people come out of this, how many apply, and to what extent adult learners enroll in higher education. So I'm very, very interested to see what data we get about fall enrollment numbers. Now, Kiel, Doomsch, our good friend, pointed this out to a Chronicle of Higher Education article, and I'm just going to share this here in the chat. Now, it's behind a paywall. So I'm not going to have a, if you don't have access to it, you might not be able to read it right now. But I just want to hit a couple of the major highlights of it, just to share, because I think it's pretty powerful. The piece here is concerning it's a criticism of where higher education is right now, based on a few different angles and a few different issues. And here, let me just bring this up so everyone can see it. The title is Higher Education's Grim and a Soulless Future, which is a great title, a kind of death battle title. So you can imagine, you know, someone saying that Higher Education's Grim and Soulless at Techify Future. But first of all, Firstenburg, who's a historian, starts off by taking a look at Temple University and finding that the crisis there, if you didn't follow it, this was a new president who published a book on his vision for higher education, which is a very professional vision. And he tried to break a grad student union strike, including doing the unusual method of removing strikers' tuition and medical support during the strike. This backfired, the university settled, and the president resigned, which is pretty drastic and unusual. And Professor Firstenburg argues that what we're seeing is a whole kind of neo-corporate, neoliberal plan for higher education, which emphasizes reducing human capital, reducing compensation, squeezing the number of people who actually work there. Technology plays a role in reducing costs, and first of all, charges of replacing human interaction and degrading the overall experience. So I'd be happy to say more about that if we get a chance, but I want to make sure that everyone gets to see that. Keele says it's a free subscription law. Keele, is that right? I thought Inside Higher Red had the free subscription law and that Chronicle charged you. But if not, well that's good news. And then in the chat, Elena, I'm sorry, I'm trying to read your name Elena. I believe it's Olmali. Elena Olmali mentions chat GPT. So this is in many ways one of the great, great challenges. In fact, this just came up in a meeting I had this morning. People that are doing, are very concerned about large language models, both for chat, text generation and for image generation. They're very concerned about what they might mean in numerous directions. We've had a series of forum sessions on this and I'm happy to say more about that. But I'm also happier to hear more from you. So let's see. Those are a few things that I'm thinking about and these are a few things that are uppermost in my mind right now. Which of these would you like to discuss or are there other topics that you'd like to bring up? So please just fling us a note in the chat box or click the Q&A box if you'd like or click your hand so that you can join me on stage. I'd be glad to host you. I'm going to try and bring up Tom. We might be having a camera issue so let me see if I can get him. Hey, there's the blue room. Did a complete restart. Can you hear me? Yeah, perfectly. Everything's fine. All right. And you're talking for your hot guard so it looks good. The last thing I heard before I restarted my computer was technology degrades the human experience. Yeah, have you read this piece? No, I have not. And I'll have to take a look at it but I'm sorry that that's alarmist technopanic talking there. I mean, look, we have any human experience right now through the mediation of technology that is enriching because I'm talking to people across the country or the world. I don't know who's here from outside the U.S. at this point but it's happened and talking to you and seeing your lovely beard. And so I think the problem with a lot of the way we think about these things is it's not technology, it's badly designed and badly implemented technology that degrades the experience. I mean, I think we can create technology experiences that augment what we're doing in the in-person environments that completely changes what we can do. You know this and the idea that suddenly everything is closing down. Well, in certain aspects, yeah, education is absolutely going to have to adapt. And there was a question that I threw out to you earlier today in a different format which is, you know, what is really being threatened by AI here and all of these changes? Is it learning and teaching or is it administration? Is it the logistics of mass education that we have put into place since the 1940s, 50s, GI Bill, whatever? Those things, I mean, we have to, you know, all of us grew up in that system and so that's the environment, the world that we know of grades, transcripts, all the other semester credit hours and so on and so forth. If you go back further than that though, you will see that's not the world of education that existed by and large before World War II. So, you know, it's a matter of perspective, it's a blip. You know, the blip may have been the world we grew up in on a lot of different levels including climate change and consumerism and all the other things that went with that. And I think, yes, we're on the cusp of a change. The smoke from which we've seen for 20 years now and generally refuse to acknowledge, AI is just the latest nail in that coffin, so to speak. But who are we burying here? Are we burying learning and knowledge? I mean, this is a human thing that goes back since we came down from the trees. We've lost the ability to tap into that, into that desire, that knowledge and that's what's under threat. You know, if we're talking about an industrial model that basically spews out students like widgets and makes them pay for the experience, as Kyle will gladly, I'm sure, second that. Yeah, okay, we're cruising for a bruising. And we also miss, I mean the demographic shift, I've been saying this for over a decade now, that means we need to attract different customers. Yeah, they're less 18 to 24 year olds. That should not be our only market. And no matter where the institution is, I mean we don't want to stop. The idea that we stop learning after we get out of college is ludicrous. We learn a lot more after we get out of college and for the rest of our lives. And when you stop learning, then you're in real trouble. Let me pause you there just for a second because this is great and this is me nodding along with you. Yes, yes, yes. And you've got a lot of support here in the chat and you know, so kill seconds here. Just really quickly, just to summarize this, and I can give you a couple good quotes if you would like. The main charge here, I think, is first saying that universities think, university administrations thinking in a very market corporate terms are turning to educational technology in order to save money and also to measure things which are difficult to measure, namely certain skills. Take a look at the whole piece. I can't, I don't want to read the whole thing, but the saving money part, that's part where I think the degree of experience is basically swapping out technology for people. And I agree completely with what you say. I mean, first of all, we're connecting through technology and also humans do connect with technology, but the another part is that the author sees this as allied to for-profit entities. I just quoted him, sorry, so that's the profit motive is there. I mean, this is overall an attack on, or sorry, a critique of higher education as being too neoliberal. The point about skills is interesting. Francois argues that it's actually hard to measure skills and the skills that employers are looking for are often the soft skills which are harder to measure. And in fact, what employers are really looking for is the liberal arts graduate, which schools like Temple were apparently turning against. And there's more to it, but I definitely agree with you, Rhett. So yeah, real quick on the measurement thing, over a decade ago, I was on a task force with our good friend Reuben and others at the New Media Consortium to figure out learning analytics. And after about a year's worth of work, we basically came to the conclusion that the technology was not the issue. We could build the technology. It's the fact that we don't know the right questions to ask. We don't understand what learning is. So what are we measuring? I mean, how are you going to measure something you don't really understand? And I would say that that's a big problem with traditional learning analytics, which measure maybe more adept at measuring content skills. But it's an even bigger problem when it comes to soft skills because you nurture those. You don't learn them. You provide avenues for people to maximize their soft skills. And that's a conversation. That's not something you can necessarily, I mean, you can test for it and see where they are at the other end. But can you come up with a test that gets you there? I don't think so. I think that really is a conversation. Interesting. Interesting. I think this is right. Tom, if you can stick around there just for a minute. I'd like to bring up on the point of skills our friend Giselle LaRose who should be in the wonderful city of New Orleans today. And Giselle in the chat shared a link to a Burning Glass study about skills measurement. And Giselle is, of course, also a big fan of online conversations like this one. Welcome, Giselle. Hi. How are you? Good. It's really good to see you again. How's everything down there in the Big Easy? Good. Good. I'm glad Tom stayed in the in the mix because I'd like to see my purpose in being here was to listen to the audience. But I'll be glad to add to what Tom said already to stimulate the conversation. Very good. Tell us a bit more about the skills measurement that you're this is this is an article that I think needs to go far and wide. Primarily the they looked at I think I'm going to cite the number right 224 million job postings. And really dove into the magnitude of change that needs to occur from educational providers and businesses. But predominantly educational providers need to rethink you know are they offering the curriculums that the future job market is demanding. And I think their findings are pretty impressive. So I'd love to hear you know to to to pony piggyback on your original question Brian like what are we doing to get ready for spring and fall. How many institutions are making a strategic move to expand their continuing education departments? Why continuing education now? Why is that in particular? Because to build on what what Mark just said is that we need to reach the adult learner and those adult learners aren't going to go back for a degree program. They're not going to make the $60,000 commitment for a second degree but they are going to look to upskill and reskill. So how widespread you know we can talk about it but I want to know is there action are you seeing action on your campus for curriculum mapping with business needs first and foremost and then are you seeing you know curriculum restructuring to meet the needs of things like computer coding uh UX designer cyber security specialist um the one that I like to repeat that really really engages as an audience is having a job as a nurtured meat farmer whatever that is a meat farmer wow who knows but let me let me uh turn it over to the audience to first say are you seeing this trend on your campus is it just talk is it it's not hyper hyperbole is definitely not hyperbole right and we in a higher education can talk about a lot of things but is there action to match the talk that's a great question a great point uh Chazelle thank you in in the chat rocks rocks sound gives a counter evidence I'm afraid she says private university in Connecticut has eliminated its lifelong learning program um no reason wow that's really sad rock sound which which school is that if you could tell us there's only one private university um I want to I want to want to clarify a real quick point that Giselle made though um one of the other problems in this conversation is that employers don't necessarily know what skills they need they go and I mean what's that you know they may say okay I need a programmer but what's the difference between a good programmer and a great programmer you know a good programmer is someone who has mastered I like want to let's just say let me stick with programming here for a moment because I think one of our biggest mistakes when it comes to coding is that we treat it like it's a technical skill when it's actually a foreign language skill and so a great a good programmer is someone who understands the dictionary a great programmer is someone who can sing the language and and that a lot of times gets missed in this conversation because it's like these two blind people reaching out to each other higher education on one side and employers on the other going well we're not getting what we want and we don't know what to give you tell us and we don't know you know and this this goes on and on and that's and that's a challenge I mean I think the only real solution of that is to bring the employers and I know some institutions have actually done this uh that um uh which you bring the workplace into the environment into the teaching environment in a very direct way and then you you you see who sinks and swims and you try to figure that out now you can do that also as a research study as well and again I know that's been done but um the thing is a lot of times this stuff is squishy and and there's no no one size fits all and that's a real problem and that's where that this is why I teach adaptability and flexibility first and foremost in my classes I say you you don't know what's coming at you you know you don't know what AR is AI is going to do to your job in 10 years but you need to be the one who's running the AI rather than the one who gets fired by the AI and um that's the theme in my book as well I mean that's you know you cannot if you're if you're going to be the slave to the technology you're you're fighting a losing battle if you're the master of the technology when I say master that doesn't mean you have to be a superstar programmer you have to understand what's going on and how to use the technology there's different pieces to that you can be a superstar programmer but that's not required uh but the idea that you are a master of of putting together your your work environment or your personal environment when it comes to technology and finding the best pieces and constantly and knowing when to walk away from stuff because it's wrong it's badly that's hard so uh and so that's and that's what makes a good employee too because they also can look at systems just like they look at technology and say okay this system makes a lot of sense we'll use it or this system doesn't work so well we need to make changes to it and then and then develop a new way of solving the problem and being adaptable I don't I don't see in the chat any other volunteers of answers to your question Giselle which which may just be evidence however Elena O'Malley did want to join us from Emberson so let me just bring her up on stage so she can join us hello Elena how are you doing good how are you doing oh great now that you're here welcome aboard hey welcome everybody I just wanted to ask have you already have you all already talked about robot proof I'm reading it now oh wow not today and uh the author is just down the street from you isn't it yeah yeah yeah no and I've only gotten a little bit a little way into it so I was I was wondering if anyone else had it uh had gotten all the way through it I have I have I think it's a very interesting book and and without doing violence to its erudition I'd say the idea you know of trying to have colleges and universities focus on what robots can't do well I think is a very powerful promotion you know and so you know creativity empathy emotional emotional intelligence it's uh it's very good stuff yeah well and and also a little bit to that point is um you know what's what's going on with the future of community colleges yeah because we a lot of times when we talk about higher ed we're we're just not talking about community I know I am because I teach at one I know I know you are um but I I think a lot of times you know because you know community colleges you know I hear a lot about the struggles that they're having um you know I I hear about enrollment problems and yet at the same time I also hear this great like community colleges will solve all of our problems so well we know enrollment has been dropping and and it would be even lower still if it weren't for the huge expansion of dual enrollment between community colleges and high schools uh and that's that's very widespread um and we know that uh I mean it varies depending on region depending on college but that community college enrollment is it's much lower that's one detail um the other thing is the uh Biden administration pushed for a free tuition for community colleges plan and that didn't go through uh he said recently he wanted to try it again but that doesn't seem to have any traction right now um Tom and Giselle what are you hearing from community college or what would you like to add I think it's really interesting that the dual dual credit uh enrollment is is what what's driving it I mean as I've said I said a few minutes ago it's the 18 to 24 year olds everybody's got a problem with that and community colleges appeal to the people who are least or most likely to make a choice about college i.e. I'm going to college I'm not going to college um and because the difference between the income that they have now versus the income that they potentially have by getting a college degree to them at least does not seem to be that huge and so um if they see a pathway forward without college then they're more likely to say I'm not doing this or because of financial and all sorts of other factors so that's why we saw the huge drops during the disproportionate drops during the pandemic because those students were much more likely to be impacted by that and likely to say eh I don't see the worth to it um the interesting thing I'm seeing I think one way to interpret the dual credit surge is that instead of instead of expanding upward into the broader community the post college community community colleges have discovered that the market the easier market to exploit is the pre-college community and there are an awful lot of school districts who are scrambling to have enough teachers in the k-12 world to just cover the regular curriculum and now you can get community colleges to come in and teach the half of the regular curriculum that makes a lot of economic sense on both sides does and so I mean I'm speculating here I will say I'm not sure that's what you know and we may not know the answer to that yet but that just seems like a logical uh it's it's a lot harder I had a vice chancellor tell me years ago he says he's right you know the it's a lot cheaper to retain existing students than to try to recruit new ones and I think you could extend that into it's a lot cheaper to mine an existing well of students because we've already always had we've had dual credit for decades now it's just really exploded it's a lot easier to mine that source than to try to prospect whole new territories of 40 year olds who are uh you know who need different types of services that you're not really sure of offering dual credit you're teaching the same course that you would normally teach with some fiddling because there's some realistic logistical issues but by and large you're teaching the same course you've always taught so it's it's not that big a shift but trying to come up with a curriculum that appeals to the 45 year old or the 50 year old or the 60 year old is a whole different ball game and and it's harder and those people don't necessarily gravitate toward college when they need to learn something yeah no true there's some way on our locations chisel where you gonna add to that oh there's so much that could be said here I mean it's it's so it's a growing opportunity the lines between the silos are blurring and anyone on this call if if you've been living your life entire professional life inside of a four-year institution I strongly encourage you to go to your local community college and just hang out um it's where the biggest opportunities are going to emerge and if we could only see you know four-year leaders look at what is happening in the high school dual enrollment to community college and build similar bridges between community college and four-year and maybe it's not to a four-year degree program but maybe it's to a four-year quality microcredential that that that makes that that continuum the pathway the career pathway a little bit clearer for an individual someone who may have a counting background but not a CPA you know where where are they going to make that bridge um I saw in the chat a little earlier someone mentioned uh Christy's book on uh the 60-year curriculum please don't take that out of context it's not that any one university is going to manage everything that adults need from 18 to 60 right what he's saying is that we're living longer and we're working six decades of our lives and that both community high schools community colleges and four-year institutions need to start thinking about lifetime learning and and where are the bridges and the pathways between between those silos so I'll stop there to get comments back no nicely said nicely said just let me while people are are ruminating let me bring up a few of the chat comments about this uh which are kind of all over the place uh Charles Finley uh who I think is in Boston said that the Boston new mayor Mayor Wu has a free tuition plan for community colleges uh saris angregorio mentions that going to community college helped her husband when he flamed out of his four-year institution as a sophomore I credit the community college for getting him back on track yeah graduate of this BA thank you Sarah uh and shelby uh rosengarten who represents ccs said uh I know a lot of DE students choose it over AP because they will get the credit rather than gamble on an exam with passing score that's fascinating I haven't heard that that's really interesting uh and then mark wilson gives a a more critical view saying the educators use community colleges as resume builders administrators hire adjuncts as a downward spiral uh so that's a kind of mixed view from the audience right now of of where this could be going uh tom we've got a question from shelby uh who wants to know when you when you mentioned um liberal arts and and connections between hcc and ut was that a direct admin bridge program or will this I answered it in the chat but um no I mean it's all one program so they actually I was part of the team that helped put that together about a decade ago but they actually we actually mapped out the curriculum so that uh it's not a two plus two it's a four-year degree essentially where uh you're knocking out um you take you take it's not like you take all the hcc classes at the beginning and then all the ut tyler classes at the end you you're taking some of the ut tyler classes a little earlier and also because there's a progression to get through an engineering degree at a reasonable amount of time uh and so then you're still taking you leave some of the hcc classes behind you but you take them still as a junior and senior because they're all here I mean the whole program is housed here you know it's it's a ut tyler program but the classes are 100 percent in houston so thank you thank you well and I'm wondering if that is a growth area because I mean I know emerson at one point tried um I don't know sort of how well we we held it up but we were trying to convert you know community college into to folks who would come here although we have a pretty specific focus which is not for everyone so we have different models that uh that are not quite as integrated as the ut tyler program but we also have the same kind of partnerships with a nm and um texas a nm and the university of houston uh which are uh articulated models more where it's more of a two plus two but um the um uh and then you do have to I think you do still have to get admitted to the u of h or a nm program at at that point midway through so it yeah you can come up with a different agreement with different partners and you know mix and match but I think we need to start thinking about how we blend all this stuff yeah because I mean I am seeing it as a growth pattern right so a high school student gets out of high school with a community college degree and then as you said cost is a huge issue tuition like well you can get a four year degree you know two more years half the price um but building that more formally yeah we've had some great experiences as well with early college which is a fully blended where you graduate as a senior in high school with an associates degree as well wow actually I think that's the absolute best model because those students are 100% built into the program and they're working through high school at that level the problem with dual credit is that um you're blending two different cultures especially when you're teaching at the high school level and that creates friction because high school has a certain pace to it college has a certain pace to it and uh that's the number one complaint I hear from my my fellow faculty who teach in in in in in uh in the actual institution all right in the actual high school you know you got the bell you got announcements and bells and pep rallies and all this other stuff and and that really gets in the way of of focusing on the learning whereas an early college scenario those students go to a different campus it's nothing but dual credit and I'm wondering about the ties with the homeschool market because you know the the the teenager I know going to community college is homeschooling and doing that so it's completely left behind the the high school environment altogether you know it's homeschooling and and finds community college much better for that kind of pacing I will admit my older siblings ditched high school altogether to go to community college so to me this is like really obvious thing that you know it obviously doesn't work for everybody but there there is a population that it absolutely makes sense for my daughter did the same thing actually she hated high school and she wanted to save money on the first few years of college and and as is her want she did what she wanted but definitely community colleges do have to adapt significantly right when you do have 60 year olds in your classroom and 14 year olds right that that creates a very different environment to work with and you know that the faculty really have to sort of think through what they're doing and how they how they approach things but mark made a mark in the mark Wilson in the chat made a very important point there and he said that the seniors need resources not programs and I think the problem there is that no we don't want to think about this as plopping them into a seat and getting a two-year degree at 60 or whatever this is again we've got the degrees credit hours all of this grades and everything else that goes with that those are all part of the industrialization of education and if they become meaningless which frankly they're well on the way to doing that in some areas then that's where we're getting this pushback you know is that's that's different from learning stuff right we need a structure to learn stuff but that's a different kind of structure necessarily than plopping everybody into a 16 week class or a five week class or whatever you know all of the different little boxes that we've built for people to to fall into when they learn the reality is that learning doesn't work that way period uh you don't learn on a schedule you don't learn English at nine o'clock in history at 10 o'clock your brain isn't built to do that I don't have a history time in an English time or a math time or whatever although mornings are generally better for me but everybody works a little differently as far as that's concerned but the I mean the biggest problem I run into with community college students is that the 16 week semester doesn't work for them it's either too long or too short it's too long because things happen I'm Dean dad had the some really great comments on this on the show he did oh god it's a couple years back now where he was talking about these you know five-week programs where you take a lot fewer classes but you they're much more intensive over their short period of time well like a law program yeah the success rates on those are much higher because there's less less that can go wrong in five weeks than in 16 and and you're only risking one or maybe two classes in that scenario if something does go wrong as opposed to a 16 week semester you may be risking five classes and having to flush all that down the toilet and start over so that's one but the other thing is they're students who just need more time to process the stuff that I'd like to work for a long like to work with for longer than 16 weeks because to get their brains wrapped around the college level stuff because of the deficiencies that they come into class with just takes that much longer not everybody moves at the same speed here so how you know we don't have there's a certain amount of flex you can build within the box that is the 16 week semester once you get outside that box I got to turn my grades in I'm sorry you're out of luck yeah right in in the in the chat she'll be adds when she's had senior auditors so I presume this means senior citizens not academic seniors they are there for the content they've always wanted the time to learn they really enjoy the time to learn about literature culture history interact with other students but just just listening to where where you're all going there's this is I think that moment in the form when we get very radical we had this happened that moment occurred when you put me on stage oh no no there's a different word for that but but we had we had comments from two people in the chat who john holenbeck there's a degree granting institution cannot provide lifelong learning yeah I was going to jump on that one go go go ahead go ahead you know sometimes I wonder whether or not we get caught up in linguistics you know life this article I would love Brian if you would redo this after everyone's read burning glasses article right because the context is subtle it's not your seniors coming in for enrichment that's actually not what the article refers to it refers to all the trends show that most adults you know starting at age 25 in their lifetime could have as many as 12 jobs when I graduated from college it was a no notice which jobs okay that's not the case today there isn't loyalty in employment there is a career ladder right and so what what is based the message you know for those of you in a in a four-year university environment is you know how can you prepare because the point I think Tom made a little earlier as well is that even businesses don't know what they need so they're hiring people and finding out well that's not really the skills I need so they have to the two groups have to come together to say oh okay so what I used to think was public relations is now content marketing you know and those terms are changing faster than we can possibly imagine Tom you're shaking your head yeah please build on it technology morphs I mean it's it's it's morph everything it's the great melting pot right in the modern melting pot maybe and that it's everything no one works in a specific job anymore no one I mean there there are some people who still work on an assembly line they're part of that machine that is the factory you know but there's less and less of those because those are the kind of jobs that are easily automated and so as a result we all have to riff around the edges of our jobs you know pretty much no matter what we're doing you know even as let's say you're a pure researcher you're still having to practice communication skills to get funding for your pure research right so you're having and you're having to interact with you know networks of people and use technologies that enable you to do this sort of stuff teachers oh god you know you're doing everything you have to you know you have to be a one man band or one woman band if you're a teacher you know and so I mean it's it's it's and especially now I teach like this all the time I mean I teach in zoom I haven't I haven't been in a real classroom since 2020 since the pandemic care and mainly because you know I'm pretty good at riffing the technology and so my chair says oh yeah well we need these and that's what the students are demanding too by the way so I mean all of these things lead to a much more fluid environment and that's both wonderful because it gives us the ability to explore in you know you're not going to be a window installer on the Ford assembly plant for the rest of your life yeah you have the opportunity to be whatever you grow into because I can bet you a lot of those window installers would have loved to been a lion tamer sorry Monty Python reference but that's exactly the joke right I mean he's an accountant who wants to be a lion tamer and so now we have the ability to all be lion tamers we can tame virtual lions and not get ripped from arm to arm and so on and so forth but I mean but what do the lion tamers want to do they want to be accountants because no they want to be actors right Christopher Walken was a lion tamer no way that's what they want to do oh no I'm not going to be able to unsee that image what are you doing I'm really an actor but but Brian one one real drop of spice to add to this conversation I'm going to ask maybe even John to take my place on the stage John the the question I would beg is then degree institutions need to start examining what are the changes that are you know in front of us and are they prepared and that's where my first point was how many of your continuing education departments are at least building micro credentials and bootcamps etc so that they can really do test the waters because until you know what your community educational needs are you know you build it and they will come if you build you know a new program in cyber security and all of a sudden you don't you can't even fit everyone you can't take all the candidates that tells you something whereas if you build a program in you know uh arts and literature and you'll only get three people that tells you something it does it does throw in on the other end because okay so we talk a lot about what do employers want and how higher ed needs to pay attention to that but one of the things employers need to pay attention to is some shifts in thinking of their future employees my sister has what she calls this is the generation of that's a you problem um because you know there's a lot of things where some of the younger folks not that generalize but to say there's some trends in they're saying oh you want us to have the skills fine pay us train us we're not going to put in the investment and then maybe you'll give us a reward for it you train us you pay for us to go to school and then we'll give you what you need interesting that's a you problem she she has some teenage songs i like the sound of this um and thank you thank you elena and by the way elena thank you for being on stage today i really appreciate this chazelle you summoned the spirit of john hollandbeck and low low he appears uh you can't say hollandbeck hollandbeck that's right gotta say in front of a mirror i mean this is this is the this is the uh here let me uh let me arrange things a bit you can take me off if you want brian i'm glad to have you here chazelle here and take it john welcome and uh congratulations on the north country summer i appreciate i'm really glad to see that oh yeah but it's only until this weekend and then we were actually forecast to have snow until last night when they changed it to cold rain that sounds that sounds right so enjoy it so john what do you what do you think um i mean you you you you're talking about abolishing the institutions because they can't function for life longer i think um but tell us more i'm a i'm a bitter retired academic now so i can tell you what i feel like i actually have a blog called the edging kermudge and that's great but no i i think that i mean first of all on the subject that we're talking about my answer to what's what's going to change in academia in six months or a year is nothing nothing will change and what's going on with these technologies like chat gbt and everything else are peripheral the real things that are going wrong in education it always goes wrong are things like external assessment teachers being in the dual role of being the provider of knowledge and the judge of whether you've acquired the knowledge which is a point eric mr makes the link i made so i mean and the problems are huge and completely on a different scale than what we're comfortable talking about so i think that what's happening is that companies and this i could see that what i was teaching in san francisco in the late 90s cisco was offering a network administration degree and the graduates would would make like three times what i was making as a professor and they're offering those to high school kids it was training and you know the only thing that keeps us as an institution viable and the higher education viable is the mythology surrounding the college degree we say you'll make a million dollars more right i was a dean of education in new mexico and we try to give that to a poor person sitting on land that's been in his family for 400 years no it just doesn't fly nobody's going to make a million dollars out there let alone a million dollars more so i think you know we're just in so many we're so balled up in a lot of practices and everything else is that i just it won't change it can't change and i really do think we need a new way a new kind of institution john i can give you a statistic that you could chew on and move in a different direction is some are not going to change some are going to change and some are going to disappear okay so it's not going to all of a sudden be you know a completely new restructured entity but here's a statistic i want to leave with the audience if you haven't looked at the work that credential engine is doing it's worth your while they they have compiled over one million credentials in the skills-based economy and they have also identified that those credentials are being offered by 59 000 educational providers think about that number brian give me because it's a moving number i think we only have 6 000 institutions of higher education in this country including graduate schools community colleges and four year correct yeah closer to four so that's a very small percentage of 59 000 providers so so it means adults are getting trained outside of the walls of a university and that's alarming 15 thousand that's a that's a huge huge difference wow wow in uh in in the chat uh keel says we need a new set of institutions high school has turned into a scattered and aimless warm-up act for college i mean it sounds like on the one hand we're describing some kind of sclerosis where higher education cannot change and john if i'm paraphrasing you are reacting back to you i mean that we're we're locked in place by all kinds of forces and i think she's all your question before how many how many campuses represented here in this conversation are actually expanding their adult learning and the answer is none in fact we had one which cancelled it um and that's an interesting example of this on the other hand we seem to be in a consensus here that uh that we think that the current ecosystem of education from k through 12 through higher ed in grad school is not really fit for the purpose of lifelong learning or a 60-year curriculum that kind of leaves us an interesting endpoint where we have to think on the one hand what happens to this ecosystem but then how do we design something new how do we get to kill his new set of institutions so that we can actually support people in lifelong learning i would start with making performance the judge not credential not a third party person but what can you do i was a professional trombone player in my first life it's what came out of the end of the horn it's what sounded like nobody cared about your education yeah i've seen that in so many technology jobs there they don't care who you are they care what you can do that's right and that's an instructional design thing what are people able to do at the end of this learning experience right right and and that's i mean i'm i'm i'm very much a big fan of tangible work product right my students create a public website as as a tangible evidence of what they how that how that how effectively they can communicate use visual information uh put all that stuff together and everything in the course is oriented toward building that website and i teach government okay so it's all the course i mean the students identify a challenge a problem in society that they want to see fixed they then look for solutions that have been tried out and do they work and then they look and ask the answer the the final part of it is how do i tell someone how to navigate through either the american or the texas political system depending on which course it is and that's how they actually use the knowledge and this shows a bunch of different levels one i teach a basic government class i'm not expecting to teach politicians here i'm trying to teach citizens and that's my number one priority and understanding how you fit into this system and how you can affect change in this system is essential to a good democratic citizen a little d democratic citizen um i want to be careful about that um but uh but the thing is this this website is theirs and i tell them at the end of the day if you do this right this website's going to matter so much more to you than the fact that you got to be in a government class because you can show this to an employer and say i know how to communicate complex information to people who don't necessarily understand it i can put together i have the technical skills but more importantly have the narrative skills in order to make myself understood to my cusp your customers to my fellow employees etc etc now that's only one piece of the puzzle but that's the best i can do given a 16 week semester in teaching government but it's something that goes well beyond the realities of the class i can't expect them to play trombone i'm a trumpet player john by the way if they managed to get a constitutional amendment passed see but this is texas we don't have popular but i mean real briefly you went to the exact point though but they can get done in the limits of 16 weeks in the context of the subject you're supposed to teach life is not that way that's right right not a set of semesters right and i get frustrated that's where i get to this whole thing of the semesters either too long or too short some people can do it quicker some people really need more time so i i i have to just kind of gesture in this direction first of all i i hate to pause this conversation because this has been delightful i i just love seeing you all here and and and having you all and watching this conversation just continue let me pull a couple of points from the chat which seem to line up with this uh our sarah segregorio says she was an actor who fell into instructional design training she got an ms so she get past the ai resume checkers but she had those tech and design skills already so there we've got the combination of actually being able to do stuff and the credentialing it right um mark wilson gives us a fantastic phrase nondisposable products of learning really really good and then brian mulligan who has a great name while there's a typo in it um uh says perhaps we need an institution that only measures competence that might free up other organizations to innovate in many other ways to develop those competencies competition generates innovation better than essential planning um what a what a great cusp of a design moment to to end on um thank thank you all uh for for coming in um and alana thank you for being on stage uh and with all these wild people um uh john thank you for coming here and and taking time out of your glorious day uh tom thank you for taking a break um and joining us your blue room and and giselle not only thank you for representing new warlands but thank you for your very very powerful facilitation and conversation skills i'm gonna i'm gonna wrap things up here let me kick people off the stage so that they can relax and uh let me then just bring up the last slide which tells you where things are headed next um i i really i really enjoyed that i i think that was just great in terms of a kind of free flowing organic conversation which ended up in a really really great place thank you to everybody for for making that happen um looking ahead on the forum we have a session coming up in ed tech and labor at a whole bunch more just go to forum the future of education that us and you can and see more there if you want to keep talking about this how are we going to redesign the entire education system for actual purpose for life long learning just use the hashtag f tte wherever you are or at me on twitter or i bested on be glad to keep talking if you want to go back into our past including our sessions on micro credentials our sessions on life long learning on design thinking and so on just go to tinyurl.com slash fdf archive and above all thanks all for thinking together this has been a real treat i hope you're all doing well spring up here in the northern hemisphere i hope this has given you some food for thought as you look ahead to the rest of 2023 and above all i hope all of you staying well take care and we'll see you next time online bye bye