 Let's begin. Welcome, everybody. I'm so glad to see you all here today. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Welcome to 2023, a year whose name sounds like science fiction and definitely the future. I'm Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host, and chief catherter, and I'm really glad to welcome you to an hour of conversation. Welcome to the science fictional year of 2023. And I wanted to kick off the forum this year by asking all of us to think about what topics, what ideas, what forces, what trends, what issues, what challenges are likely to have the biggest impact on higher education. But another way, how are colleges and universities going to change over the next 12 months? And I'd like to do this collectively. I'd like to do this with as much input, as many ideas from all of you as possible. That's how the forum works. But I've been asked by a few people to kick it off with some ideas myself. Before I do that, before I do that, I want to try a little exercise. I'd like you all to go to the chat box, and I want you to try this kind of popcorn exercise. I'd like you all just to type in, but don't hit return yet, just to type in the one thing that is uppermost in your mind that may have an impact on higher education. And that thing could be anywhere. That could be a specific technology. It could be economics. It could be something you're working on. It could be a change you see in policy. It could be something happening in the world at large. Just type in a word or a few words describing that. And then I'm going to ask everybody to hit enter at the same time. This is sometimes called popcorn or the chat waterfall method. So, all right, everyone who has an idea, type in a word or a few words, and now go hit enter. Let's see what comes up. Wow. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Look at all of this. A lot of AI. Diversity, equity and inclusion. Karen, what is the extended mind? If you just say a bit more about that. Mega universities, recession, staffing and hiring. Joe, if you want to say a bit more about that, that'd be great. XR enrollment challenges, students deciding not to attend colleges, experiential learning. Paul Krupp mentions the general feeling of malaise and dissatisfaction the general public feels towards higher ed at this historical moment. Yeah, divisive concepts, small liberal arts colleges and in person AI balance, knowledge management. Thank you, Krista, for sharing that. Wow, micro credential. This is fantastic. There's a lot going on here. Martin, can you say a bit more about the new leadership there? And Karen points out a new book. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Wow, some themes are really consistent here. We're seeing a lot about AI, especially I'm guessing in Waco Chat GPT. We're seeing concern about public attitudes and general attitudes towards higher education, including enrollment. We're seeing concerns about staffing and finance. Oh, Kate, innovative graduate curricula. Oh, if you can share an example of that, that would be great. They would be great. At least I'm not thinking about the House of Representatives right now. That's too much to cram it, but we just mentioned that. Wow. See, this is why I love the forum. And this is why I love having conversations because we have so much information here. So many ideas. Matthew Plerot weighs in with labor shortage leading to overcrowded classes. Oh, S-E-I, thank you. Or S-E-L. Thanks, Lisa. And Doug Holland, thank you for bringing climate change solutions. That's a big topic for me personally, Doug, and we have more coming up with that. Wow. You all are brilliant. Okay, unless anybody has any objections, let me know in the chat. I'm going to export this and add this to my next blog post because this is a terrific, terrific core sample about what we're thinking about. Kate Montgomery mentions human-centered graduate liberal studies education fused with professional organizational programming. Good. That's a very big move. Brigine Urbe, Artur Reade, mentions increased pressure to focus on the value of college and post-graduation outcomes. Yes, yes. And Pam Mack, hey, Pam, mentions information in federal course program study rules and shares a nice link. Thank you. Excellent. And Ted, thanks for the point about staffing. Fantastic. Great. Okay. Oh, there's a lot to dig in there. And I think unless anybody has any objections, please feel free to download that chat link. I can't think really of a better overview of where higher education, where we're headed, and also what we're thinking about that. Let me, I want to hear more about that. And I want to just add a few more thoughts to the mix based on what I've been researching. And I want to do this without any slides. I want to do this without any special effects. I just want to quickly note some ideas and topics. And I'm inspired by the great Cliff Lynch and his work at the Coalition for Network Information, who does something similar. But I'm also grateful to the supporters on Patreon, who gave a lot of ideas as well as supporters elsewhere on social media. So just really quick and please, please, I'm going to be quick here. I would love to hear your thoughts as this goes. First, I want to touch on changes in the world, trends in the overall world that are starting to impact higher education. And so to begin with, one of them is geopolitics. We have the continuing Russian war in Ukraine, which has all kinds of spillover effects. We have issues, for example, in the global economy. As a result, we have challenges to energy politics, energy support. And we've already seen impacts on, you know, for example, European universities and cultural institutions, which are changing their hours and their times and what they're offering, even changing their calendars. I think a larger scale, we are deepening US-China tensions. I've been tracking this for a decade now. And this has already started to appear in terms of governments intervening in higher education, including a series of high-profile prosecutions of Chinese scientists in the US. We should expect to see more of this, and that may shape, among other things, international education, as both Beijing and Washington try to get different nations involved in supporting their cause in this big geopolitical division. So watch for how that can go. Also, in the global level, we have continuing debates about how to do international higher education. That is, do we increase it? Do we have demand for more of it? And international higher education includes both movement of students across international boundaries, as well as how we conduct international education and how we do international research. There's also resistance where we have, or competing modes, where people have ideas of making higher education more local, more locally centered in curricula, in culture, politics. A third one, and this is a huge one, is the continuing demographic transition, where we're seeing basically a continued extension of life spans, with one exception, and we're seeing a decrease in the production of children. This has already started to impact higher education in some areas, and this is a deep, powerful trend that I see nothing really chewing it up. The one exception I mentioned is that in the United States, we've had declines in life expectancy for various reasons, including COVID and including deaths of despair. And we've also seen some degree of life expectancy challenges due to COVID worldwide, although the data on that is pretty hard to get. Again, these are world issues. Another thing to think about in terms of demographics is how we have racial and ethnic changes in some areas. For example, in Europe, increasing amounts of African Middle Eastern students and immigrants, the expanding Latino population in the U.S., as well as the declining white population. Macroeconomics here have a lot of piss, obviously, a lot to say, but one of them has to do with the continued challenges to global economic growth. We're seeing this in some of the big powerhouses, notably the U.S., China, and Europe. We're also seeing problems of inflation, ricocheting up, unevenly different places, and also rising interest in competing economic models such as no growth or degrowth, the circular economy, or the donut economy. And all of these start to impact higher ed. We've talked about, as well, in the U.S., we have a major Supreme Court case involving the consideration of race and admissions. And depending on how that turns out, depending on their ruling, that may have powerful impacts on enrollment as well as student life and student support. We also, in the U.S., have continued struggles over the financing of higher ed. I will say more about that in a bit, but specifically including student loans, what happens with repayment, which has been deferred again and again, what happens with forgiveness, which is now held up in court. So those are a couple of economic issues, as well. I'm still talking about the outside world, and you can't talk about higher ed without doing that. I want to mention two more issues. In some countries, including the U.S., we have challenges of domestic unrest. And this can play out in terms of official national politics. This can play out in terms of violence. This can play out as well as in terms of increasing skepticism about expertise and about higher education in general. And perhaps on an equal level, maybe even more significant in how this goes, is developments in technology. A lot of you mentioned AI. Generative AI is finally taking off. And we're seeing a lot of interesting responses to chat GPT and generative visual art in recent months. Just yesterday, we saw that New York City's public schools K-12 just blocked chat GPT from all of them. We'll see how that works. We're also seeing the internet continue to fragment. That is more and more platforms, more silos, more local things, sometimes driven by business. Sometimes by governments. We're also seeing Bitcoin continue to be challenged. The Bitcoin values drop and we have more scandals and more implosions of services. And top of that, there's the two other fields, which is social media, which continues to be widely used if widely disliked, but maybe more regulated coming up. And we also see extended reality, virtual reality, augmented reality continue to grow. That's a whole slew of forces and trends. I want to talk about changes within higher education, but I'd like to hear from you all right now. What are some of your thoughts, some of your responses to those huge changes in the world around higher education? Please use the chat box, of course, but you can also just click the Q&A box. In fact, we have one observation right now from the excellent hard-working Glenn McGee, and I want to put this up. It has to do with international education as well as how we structure higher ed, which is the, here I go. Global credential inflation is driving international students like Chinese coming to the U.S. So credential inflation, and Glenn will be happy to talk about this, is just the increasing demand for and the increasing production of higher education credentials. And this, Glenn, if I understand this correctly, you see this driving American colleges and universities reaching out from more international students, especially China, or perhaps you see credential inflation occurring in China as well. Lisa Durf asks, how do schools and universities expect us to teach intelligent use of those tools if they're blocked? That's a great question. That's a great question. We've been talking about this for a few weeks in the forum, and I've got a few blog posts coming up on this. But right now, blocking chat GPT access to that and other tools is one option that some will explore, just banning that straight up. And that, of course, has all kinds of limitations and flaws. We also talked about different ways of teaching with chat GPT. I'll get to that in a couple of minutes. Doug Holden, Doug, and I hope I'm not mangling your last name, mentions integrated AI. The sky is infinite. I don't know what that is. I'd like to check that out. I'd like to find more about what that means. Thank you. And Pam mentions that Clemson University applications keep going up. The overall translate number of students have very different effects on different universities. Absolutely. I will talk about that in just a couple of minutes. Yeah, definitely. And then I believe that's Lorraine Barba mentions policing student behavior that ever contributes to learning the big, heavy sigh. Doesn't look like we have a lot of fans of blocking chat GPT here. Yes. Lisa mentions Mastodon. I'm sorry, I didn't get a chance to mention that because I wanted to talk about social media a bit more. But we have the interesting dual threat that we experienced for the past year where Facebook experienced declining numbers and Twitter experienced chaos with the Elon Musk takeover. And among other things, this has led to interest and creation of alternative social media platforms. The Mastodon Federated Universe of instances has been one that's been growing. And we'll talk a little bit about that as we go. Okay, I think we grab a bunch of and let me just let me add that we bring this into some of our quite some of the higher education changes that are occurring within our institutions. So, and this Pam, I'll start off with you. We have the, for the past 10 years, we've seen overall enrollment decline in American higher education. That is the total number of students enrolled in American colleges and universities has gone down about 1% a year until the pandemic and the decline raised up 3 or 4%. We're also, and as Pam mentions, this is uneven. Harvard is not suffering from declining applications, for example, the common application makes it easier to apply. But we've also seen some institutions really get clotted by this. And again, the total enrollment decline is very important since higher America and many other countries are committed to increasing access to higher education. If that is still our cultural commitment, then we are actually as a whole doing the reverse. We're decreasing human access to higher education, especially if you think about this in national terms, since we have so many international students. Also within enrollment, we're seeing changes within what classes people take a long running trend is STEM classes, especially life sciences and computer science have been seeing continuing growth, more or less across the board. Although some cases that backfires, we're seeing the arts in humanities decline and continue to decline pretty steadily. We're also seeing more enrollment in online classes and more online programs. We saw that growing for the past generation, but COVID looks like they gave us a net boost in that trend. In addition, within higher ed, we're seeing more interest in new pedagogies. And that might be new, depending on your value of new, that might be blended learning, hybrid learning, but also COVID showed us high flex at scale. But also a new commitment to teaching and learning where people are really interested in improving how we teach and learn. I think partly this may be a response to enrollment challenges, but also just a sense of care. We want to do a better job for our students. Speaking of which, we're also seeing continued work in diversity, equity and inclusion, usually abbreviate DEI in the U.S. And this is occurring particularly along the lines of minoritized or marginalized populations. And this has led to changes, of course, in everything from the physical campus to tenure promotion, hiring and review to curricula to pedagogy. And that seems likely to continue. We're also seeing a trickle of institutional closures and mergers, very, very small numbers, but significant. And we may see more of that going ahead, especially as the federal government isn't giving a lot of money to hire red in a new way. We're also seeing staff cuts, program cuts, which I've called queen sacrifices, and we'll probably see more of that as enrollment patterns continue. We're seeing increasing labor activism among a wide range of populations, including graduate students, student workers, adjunct faculty and some staff. It's still small, the proportion of the overall whole, but it's growing historically. And on top of this, we're also seeing, as some people have pointed out, continued production in some fields. That is open education, open access and scholarly publication, the whole open world. We continue to produce more stuff that continues to grow by all data being able to find. And we're also seeing more and more growth of microcredentials, you know, either both being offered and being used. Let me just pause here right now, because that's a whole ton of stuff. I want to hear more from each of you about where you think those changes within higher education are going and what kind of impact they might have. Glenn McGee added, in response to my question, that stratification is happening based on degrees. Yes, this is a good point. And Glenn, if you want to share that dissertation, that would be great. And here we've got a point from Ed Finn. And Ed points out, to the demographic changes in enrollment question, I think we'll see more demand and pushback regarding online and in-person learning. Do you see this as a point of contention? Absolutely. Higher online education is one of the most contentious topics within higher education and to degree outside of higher education. It's been growing. All the data we have shows that more and more students are taking more classes, taking more programs, degrees, more campuses are offering them, and other non-capacities are offering them. But at the same time, there's a lot of skepticism, sometimes inherited from a generation of developing online learning. Sometimes the skepticism comes from the COVID experience where people associate COVID with online learning and therefore with pain and trauma, decreasing educational outcomes and so on. I think part of it is associated as well with increasing criticism and skepticism of Silicon Valley and technology as a whole, what the British media sometimes call the tech lash. And also, I think that it's just a classic institutional transformation question, how you take institutions that are based primarily in face-to-face experience and move more and more of their operations online. It's not a new problem we've been dealing with since the 80s, maybe the 70s, depending on where you look. But I think that will likely continue to be contentious. On the other side, of course, there are all the pluses and all the reasons why people want online education, starting with convenience and access for adult learners, which is really, really huge. Plus, we have increasing emphasis on improving higher education online and making the quality better and better. And on top of that, I think we may see more institutions where the online function ends up supporting the face-to-face. It's a great point. I'm really glad you mentioned that. Again, if you're new to the Future Transform, by the way, what Ed did was he just went to the bottom of the screen along that white strip, hit the Q&A box. So please, please add some more of your questions and answers. I would love to hear and share them all. Hope Wendell mentions, they're surprised to hear an uptick of students applying or only colleges and universities in Europe since the price tag is more reasonable. I'm expecting to see more and more of that, honestly, and it hasn't been happening in the numbers, but it seems in many ways like a very exciting alternative for a lot of Americans. You know, the chance to go to another country, if you really want to get away from home, but also if you want to learn about another society, experience it, and above all, to get a degree without a whole lot of debt. I mean, that's kind of the idea here, so we should see more and more of that. In fact, Joanne Martin mentions that she went to grad school in Europe. Where'd you go, Joanne? I'd love to hear that. And then Mary Nunn. Oh, this is really, really important. Mary, I'm so glad you said this. Let me just bring this up on the screen here. Mary mentions redefining academic freedom in regards to the intersection, institutional success, faculty performance, accountability, and assured governance. This is huge. So friends, I just want to, Mary, thank you so much for mentioning this. I want to keep this up here a little bit longer. We have talked about academic freedom on the forum several times. We have a series of really, really great sessions, which I recommend to you. So there are two key parts here. One is academic freedom as a whole. And that's a question of how we think about that and how we redefine it. And that always changes. There's always been ways of rethinking that. And we've been seeing that all over the U.S. in different ways. We've been thinking about, for example, Florida's government, which is trying to, in other states, trying to shape what faculty teach in terms of so-called divisive concepts, especially around diversity, equity, and inclusion. We've also seen this most recently with one college where a faculty member was basically fired for teaching images that some students in the administration found inappropriate. There's a whole series of questions about how does faculty academic freedom, play out in terms of employment status, in terms of academic field, where does the freedom live in terms of scholarship versus teaching versus extramural conversation. But all of that gets added to the question of institutional success, faculty performance, accountability, and shared governance. So how does the institution try to improve all of these things while the same time preserving academic freedom? Mary, that's a terrific question. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Also, right now, I want to make sure that people feel they can, if they want, they can join me on stage. So what I'm going to do here is set up a podium. And if any one of you wants to just pop on stage and join me, just click this teal colored podium box and you should be there. And by the way, I'm not doing this by myself. I'm joined as I have been for months by the brilliant Wesson Radomsky, their former student at Georgetown University. And Wesson is there to help all of you in case you have any technical problems or any technological challenges. We also have a question from Christa Morrison. And let me just bring this up on stage too. I'm so glad to see it. Christa says, the changes in how and where we work will also give you an impact. Yes. Is there indication of how 2021 work changes and choices change the way we teach and learn? Christa, I'm so glad you mentioned this. This is a huge, huge issue because we had obviously a lot of fields, not all of them, saw the big push to work from home or work remotely during the early stages of the pandemic. And there's been a struggle back and forth since then to try to rejigger this. You have companies like Apple, which have been pushing very hard for more and more workers working on site physically. And you have the opposite. You have enterprises where they would prefer to have students. I'm sorry, we're hard to have workers working wherever they're most comfortable and where they see themselves as most productive. I've seen different stats about this. I've heard up to 30% of jobs now have worked from home as something which is not crazy, but actually mainstream available. This changes our society and economy in all kinds of ways. And you think, for example, about the greater pressure placed on people who have to work in person, you think about, say, retail workers or frontline medical staff. It changes how we become more digitized, more remote if we're working from home or working otherwise remotely. But also for teaching and learning, it may serve as a kind of boost for online learning because it gets more and more people, more comfortable, more familiar with working remotely, with living, thinking, and learning online. So it may push that as well. That's a terrific topic. That's a terrific topic. I'm glad you mentioned that. And then Mary mentions that she'd like to have more discussion on this issue. Mary, me too. In fact, if you want to join us to say a bit more about this, click the teal colored podium. I'd love to have you up on stage. Hey, it looks like there's Mary. Hello. Hello. Hi, Mary. Hi. Hold on two seconds. Let me change my settings here. Sure. No problem. We can hear you just fine. All right. Great. We can see you. Hi. What's an expecting to come up on your podium? I feel so honored. Oh, it's a pleasure. Always glad to have you. Where are you coming from this morning for this afternoon? It is afternoon. I am in Phoenix, Arizona. So, yes. So I am actually very interested in this. I'm a training development consultant for a community college here in Phoenix, Arizona. And I was tenured faculty and I left it to become essentially the position that I'm in right now. And one of the issues that I'm seeing within institutions is with academic freedom is that in our particular institution, faculty perceive anybody looking at their course and helping them be better teachers as a means of violating academic freedom. So, we have this huge argument district-wide. There's ten colleges in my district. And the argument is that quality matters is essentially a way of micromanaging faculty's content and not necessarily looking at the quality of education that they're delivering. And my background is in adult literacy and critical thinking, ironically. And linguistics. And so, for me, I really struggle. And also, I came from K-12 many moons ago. And, you know, I really struggle. And as a faculty member, I really also struggled with this. And now in my position, I'm also struggling with this is that how as an institution are we supposed to be successful? And if we do have students that are paying for the service called their education and their degree, there has to be some kind of accountability on the faculty side. And I know this is probably going to get me in a lot of hot water because it's a very taboo issue. But, you know, there has to be some kind of, you know, accountability. There has to be, and, you know, when you have groups that are writing in their policy, that they cannot be held accountable for their behavior or for their teaching and for their success and all these different things, then what's happening with that institution? So, you know, and what's happening with that institutional success? And so, you know, one of our, I don't want to say competitors, but, you know, U of A and NAU University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University, they are making a lot of money and I hate to bring it back to money, but there's also a sense of quality control that happens within course design. So, when you're talking about the course design and not the content, there's that I guess that conflict of what determines academic or the conflict around what determines academic freedom. So, how as institutions and I know that my district is not the only district that's having this discussion. It is a national discussion, but how do we look at what our role is as educators and the service that we are providing, but also realize that yes, we are the subject matter experts but we also have an obligation to deliver our subject content in a way that is consumable by the people that are paying for it. So, how do we as educators move more towards that area of why we're teaching and what we're here for, or instead of just going on this path of I am the subject matter expert, therefore I know everything. And fulfilling that old stereotype of faculty and professors being disconnected from their population of who they teach. This is a wonderful topic and I'm so glad you're here and please don't feel nervous. This is a welcoming environment and we have disagreement of all kinds. I'm sure we do. I'm just putting in the chat a link to a book about that I think is a good contribution to this. It's from a great scholar and academic leader, the late Bill Bowen, Collocus of Authority and it was him exploring what happens to faculty governance institution. It's an exquisitely delicate book, very, very careful about these issues, so I wanted to recommend that. We have a couple, just the chat had a few different responses. One person mentioned that quality control is a product control, it's a business concept. Someone else pointed out or argued that academic freedom shouldn't include the freedom to teach badly. And then Karen Costa has always thoughtfully ways in by saying, this is a pickle. I try to consider the middle path. There are faculty development and support models that strike a balance between academic freedom and accountability. Karen, I'd love to see more of that kind of, more examples of that where that's done well. Lisa Durf says, we're hired to do a job. We don't have to deliver a quality of a certain level. That's my question. If you have faculty that are writing policy that say that they can't be held accountable for the quality of what they're delivering, then why are they in an industry, and I hate to use the word industry, but education is an industry. Why are we in an industry where we are providing a service? We don't go to a restaurant and expect crappy service. So why, we're playing with this. And why wouldn't we want to give the best version of ourselves? Let me ask one quick question, Mary. And then I want to add somebody else to our video screen to follow up on this. Do you see anything particular happening in this area in the next 12 months? Is anything coming up which might inflect that that we should be looking out for? Man, that is a tough question. I don't think there's anything on the immediate horizon, but I think that COVID definitely in the pandemic and how technology and e-learning have essentially revolutionized learning in general. I think that either we get on the boat and we really start reimagining what education higher education looks like instead of holding on to these old visions of what education. So I think that if there's something tangible, I can't say that because I wish I was a fortune teller, but I'm not. But I really feel like this is something that the way technology is morphing so quickly at this point in time. We as institutions need to really recognize that otherwise higher education will become obsolete and people will be going more towards certificate programs and badging and things like that. And there is a lot to be said about the importance of humanities and social sciences and things of that nature because they can be done really well online. We need to really start looking at how can they be done online. Well said. Thank you. That's a really thoughtful answer to my annoying question. That was a lot. I mean, I hope I was somewhere on target. You're terrific and you're an expert and grappling with the future is what we do. That's why I love you. You're very kind. This is a great community. We had a couple of quick responses in chat. Matthew Plourde points out that we have people who a lot of the teaching is done by people who are adjuncts or in the Canadian setting sessionals. That's an important part where it comes to faculty governance since those populations have very little of it. And we're also being joined by Doug Hohulin. Doug, am I butchering your name terribly? That's good. It's Brian's with no Hohulin. Thank you. I appreciate that. Welcome. I'm glad to see you. How are you doing? I am doing well. I've been working with a couple of universities. KU School of Nursing has won a prize for education using XR technology and devices and also working with the University of Central Missouri. I'm also part of this organization and they have different committees for university education both at undergraduate and then graduate level. I saw some of the things around XR. I saw artificial intelligence exploring those two together. Actually I think there's going to be a combination of those two. My one comment that's why I decided to join the panel is I worked at Motorola and Nokia for 33 years when I first started working with Motorola, a cell phone cost $3,000, had 30 minute battery life and cost $3 a minute phone call and now everyone has a cell phone in their pocket and they interact with the internet with their cell phone like 56% of the time. So it just totally transforms how we live, work, learn and play from an educational perspective just like the computer transformed education in the 90s and to the 2000s, 2010s and you had the tablets. The question is what will this new immersive devices mean? One of them is on climate change solutions that people don't have to travel as much. You have distance learning. That's one thing we're exploring and my final comment is that right now this technology is clunky. I mean you weigh a pound on putting your head. After about 30 minutes people are really tired of it. Don't spend more than 10 minutes on this technology. But over the next five years you'll literally be putting on a pair of glasses and you'll have this immersive experience. So I think the next five years are going to be an exciting ride to see where this technology goes and what it does to the brick and mortar aspect of the universities as well as distance learning and just learning in general. I agree. And you mentioned this is a five year horizon for XR. Are you looking forward to any particular developments over the next year? Yeah, so you know there's like Apple's supposed to come out with a device. So right now devices are heavy. I mean there are devices that are more monitors like here. It still has a wire on it but it's 8.8 grams. So this is something you can wear basically just like a pair of glasses all day. But with a one pound device it's heavy. You can get motion sickness because the quality of the eyesight is not as good. So Qualcomm's coming out with a new chip at the end of this year that will help reduce the size and weight adds artificial intelligence to it. And I see that the combination of devices and artificial intelligence together to help guide the student. In fact I put into the chat we got a $50,000 prize from Cable Labs on what is the future of education and looking at how would you have AI assistance for the student to give them guidance. I'm a big believer that students shouldn't just regurgitate whatever they, okay teacher wants me to give them X and I just find here I repeat the solution and give them the answer. And I don't vet anything. That's bad. But using the tools to understand how to solve the problem is very valuable. And so that I think is where education needs to be focus is using any tool that's available to maximize a goal. And the goal is to learn and to become lifelong learners, right? And so okay I learned how to do X today but I know the process of learning so that if I need to learn Y tomorrow I know how to do that. And learning how to learn is so critical I think in education. Agreed, agreed. Doug can I keep you up here on the stage for a minute more? Yeah and for everybody if you're looking at XR again XR is that synthesis of augmented reality and virtual reality. Let me just recommend the Digital Bodies crew. My name is Gorgeva and I'm Ray Craig, previous guest in the program who run a wonderful website on this. They are still for me the go-to people for XR in higher education. We also have the very very patient Krista Morrison who had a hand up and I want to make sure she can join us. Hi. Hi Krista. Hi Brian, hi everyone. Yes. You can hear me well? Perfectly. Yeah just to sort of give my background. So my background is basically media and I'm very much focused on what did we learn in media organizations in terms of how do we create content, how do we distribute content, how can we do things better now with generative AI and etc. But then also I've been teaching and I've been supporting educators in the teaching learning center and now I'm in the central IT department at university helping people adopt cloud technologies. And if I really spend a lot of time over my break trying to process where we are with this massive advancement of creating a full course syllabus in two seconds by asking chat GPT to do it and it's doing a great job and I just have to review it. So for me I think we are basically at the end of era of human writers. We don't need that anymore. We now need people who can edit, review and build upon. But having said this, what I think we have as an opportunity is to focus on knowledge management strategies and I've shared a few lines with you and it's basically drawn from a Gardner report about a knowledge management framework that they suggest we use. But really if you look at that the previous, was it Mary also talked about or the previous speaker talked about how do we evaluate. It's about governance. If we have people and they work with knowledge and that's what we all do. We acknowledge institutions. In fact we live in the knowledge era. But if you look at what we are made up of, we have people. We have knowledge. We are now creating knowledge so fast. We can do so much more with knowledge now in collaboration with AI and we have to learn how do we do things now that we don't have to rely on our own abilities and limitations anymore. I think that the answer is how do we manage the solutions we find. The new ideas we find. How do we connect people and the ideas and the existing science and knowledge and the new data insights. How do we manage and connect all of this. For example at my university we support people in terms of technology. We support people in the teaching and learning center. Then we have the library. We have so many different places. But if we can have one place where the people the knowledge that they are working with can be all connected and we have the places, we have this plan and this map in our minds of yes, they are getting together in a community of practice. They are getting in small groups doing this. They are using teams for this. They are using that for that. Oh they are sharing everything on their SharePoint website. That's where we can all see the public knowledge. That's where we can discover who has built up some subject matter expertise in XYZ. So it's really about you know building that knowledge framework where people can find each other and the knowledge and the content that we have. Krista, that's a fantastic vision. Are you seeing anybody that we should be paying attention to who is doing that combination of a structured knowledge map ontology plus social connection? I have such limited experience in terms of what I call these experience platforms. Because up until now in education we have learning management systems and then we have all our other systems. If I look at media companies and stuff, what happened over the last 10 years in media companies is the number of dashboards we have that give us data insight in real time. So many people are now reading this article on Twitter or on your website or whatever to respond to things. We can see what is trending where, oh that person is trending because that person gets a lot of views on YouTube or whatever. We have those systems in place that can connect people to see where are the hotspots, where is the new things happening. We don't have that in our organizations yet. But with my limited experience I can see that Microsoft 365 is aiming to go in that direction where we have this experience platforms with I think with the idea of the six Viva apps where they want to connect content and people and make it more discoverable. Given that Microsoft is a big investor of the open AI, which of course they are going to have to implement some of the chat GPT and all the other generative AI more rapidly now within their own. Word MS Word they already announced that now in January they are going to roll out the feature where we can summarize any Word document. That was before chat GPT got so much interest and is learning so fast because of the millions of people providing their data for free there now. I don't know, there is definitely going to be new platforms for us. I think it's going to be about knowledge management. Thank you. That's a great vision. Thank you, Krista. Welcome. The one comment I would add is the chat GPT4 is coming out in the next couple months. In fact that AI document I put in the link gives a summary of where we are with generative AI today and the different AI platforms available today and where technology is going. I heard one place that it could be a factor of 90, which though I doubt that, but even if it's a factor of 10 improvement in chat GPT3, question is what will chat GPT4 in 5 and 6. Google is doing a lot of work and there's a lot of investment in this space. Today it may be clunky just like devices are clunky, but if you think of where the first cell phone was in 80s to where it is today the next 10 years is going to just be incredible for AI. In fact there's some technology it's called GANs, a generative network. Right now if you put in an essay it will tell you not only is it plagiarized but it is written by an AI. Well if you get a better AI it will rewrite it so that it will spoof the other AI. So it's kind of like this adversary network going back and forth. It's kind of the arms race. It's like the students are trying to use this tool to spoof the teachers, but then if they get a better tool then it will take out the teachers for a while. So anyway it's going to be an interesting ride and I'm a big believer is what we want at the end of the day is to have students that can use tools to solve problems and to know how to solve problems that they just don't follow robotically. That they don't become more like the robots. We want them to be the overlords of the robots directing the tools but not just following the tools information and regurgitating that information. Personally I think that's something when you're teaching students how to use these tools it's like if all you're doing is regurgitating this you're just wasting my time as a teacher. You're wasting my time or you're wasting your time. Monkey can regurgitate the tool. I don't know. We're almost out of time. Please go ahead Christa she can be quick. Because I see it's a lot of interest in AI those of you who are not aware of the conference and learning and education that happened beginning of December I highly recommend you watch those sessions they are available on YouTube on the Grail YouTube channel. It's G-R-A-I-L-E-A-I it's on my LinkedIn I've shared it there as well. I'll put it in chat as well. Thank you that's a great link. Let me raise one more topic to close out with and I'm going to raise this topic with a question for all of you and I'd like you to consider it and think about it and then if you could say a bit either in a chat or in a Q&A. The climate crisis is continuing to ratchet up and it's going to be having lots of impacts on higher education and higher education can respond in different ways. My analysis is that over the next 12 months we will see this continue to increase in different ways. What I'd like to put before you and we'll have sessions on this but let me put before you an idea think about your own institution your college your university or your publishing house or your library or your museum and I'd like you to imagine it's July 2023 and a huge climate disaster strikes not your institution but elsewhere and I'd like to pick Miami, Florida for this the disaster includes a whole series of storm surges waves and floods which effectively flood the area for weeks but also we get an incredibly high spike in wet bulb temperature that's a combination of temperature and humidity. What I'd like you to think about and I just want to hear your thoughts is at your institution assuming you're at Florida and if you're in Florida please go ahead I'd like to hear it but if you're in Canada, if you're in France, if you're in California or wherever how do you think your institution would respond to that Miami climate disaster? Do you think you would offer to physically host academic climate refugees or non-academic climate refugees? Would you offer some for academic assistance such as offering online classes or would you do something else? How might that play out? Take a minute and think about this. Doug suggests another pandemic. This is something that I write about. How might your institution respond? In the chat Lisa Durf says that she hopes that they would open the door to students online. That's too far for face-to-face assistance. Carl Aho says another pandemic or more the same pandemic so that we might respond in that way. If I understand you correctly Carl Heather Churchill says I would hope there would be a response similar to after Katrina. I was a student that was welcomed by many different universities, opened their doors to students not sure about faculty and staff though. Mathieu Plour says in Quebec our institution would release a statement and support of the people impacted and that would be the end of it. So we have a few different models What do you think about that? It might not be climate change that occurs as the great problem in 2023. It might be something else such as another pandemic or iteration of COVID. It might be some other challenge or some other disaster. But I want you to think about this and to keep that in mind and also keep in mind the possibility that we have a lot of ways that we can respond to help academics and the population at large. Now it is the end of the hour and we have covered in a great collective way a whole bunch of ideas a whole bunch of trends and topics about where higher education is headed over the next 12 months. I'm just exhilarated by all the ideas all the content that you've all shared all the thinking that we've done together. If you want to keep talking about this after I close this session out please head to some social media locations. My blog for example www.myhander.org. Mia Macedon you can see my handle on Twitter and LinkedIn using the hashtag FTTE and of course my handle there as well as the Shindig handle. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions at a bunch of these topics including A.I. including governance just go to tinyourl.com slash FTF archive. If you want to keep looking at other issues we have a whole series of them coming up for the next two months just go to form that future of education that U.S. and you can see a whole bunch of them. And if you are working on something this spring that you'd like to share with us and you want me to share with everybody else please email me I'd be delighted to do that. Once again thank you for thinking about the rest of the year with us together. It's a delightful experience a thoughtful one with a lot of great ideas I hope all of you have a fantastic 2023 and I'm just honored to be able to do it in company with all of you. Until next time take care be safe and well and we'll see you next time online. Bye bye.