 Let me welcome everybody to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host and chief cat herder. And I'm delighted to see all of you here today for a very, very important topic with a superb guest. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome David Scoby. David is like myself, former University of Michigan person. He is a wonderful scholar, a wonderful researcher. And he is also in charge of a terrific, new project called Bring The Theory of Practice. So if you haven't seen that, just go to that link there, bttop.org. And you can find out more. David is an Americanist and he is a deep, deep thinker. And from my money, one of the most creative and interesting thinkers in higher education. And he's also one who has managed to have an incredible, incredible degree of empathy. I'm absolutely delighted to have David here on the program. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. David, welcome. Well, I'm really, really glad that you could make it David. Where are you today? Are you in Ann Arbor? I'm in Ann Arbor at home. I commute to my work with Bring The Theory of Practice but I've been doing it here, sheltering in place at home in Ann Arbor for the last six weeks. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. For the few people who are unfortunate enough to not know Bring The Theory of Practice. Can you give us a quick sketch of what this wonderful group works on? Sure, I will do. We are a national higher ed initiative now more than 15 years old, although I've just served as director for the past two years and we are committed to innovation and creative change in undergraduate education, but change guided by what we think of as the foundational purposes of higher education, democratic engagement, active and integrative learning, the well-being of the whole student and a commitment to those purposes for all students. So I like to think of us as radical in both senses, foundational and committed to transformational change. And what started this? What's the home base of the TTOP? Are you a rogue entity or are you part of some other larger enterprise? A little bit of both. We have been hosted in partnership with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. We're actually about to move to a campus. This will be publicly announced next month but our swarm can get advanced notice that we'll be moving to Elon University, a place that we really admire because we want it to be on campus and have closer connections with. You're describing your surprise announcement about moving to Elon University. Congratulations. Thanks. And we're gonna still keep our mission of being kind of a rump caucus for change. Our commitment is to be a voice for the best values in higher education and a kind of center of community organizing for educational change. That's a wonderful thing to have. How many staff do you have? We only have, we've had three. We'll expand a little bit in Elon but we are really see ourselves as the hub of a community of practice. Over the years, we've worked with about 350 different campuses. So we see ourselves as a builder of a community for change and we work with colleagues in academic institutions from all sectors all over the country. Excellent, excellent. Well, if friends, if you don't, if this is your introduction to bring your theory to practice, if you look in the bottom of your screen here, let me just change the view a little bit. You should be able to see a little button on the bottom left that will let you click in and click to the bringing theory to practice webpage where you can learn an awful lot because they share a great deal of content on their site for which we thank you. So I have all kinds of questions to ask you and the theme for this week we're continuing our exploration of what the coronavirus pandemic means for higher education. And I'm curious if you could take a step back and look at the biggest picture, the kind of grand strategy of higher education, how, first of all, how has it changed us? And then I want to ask you about where you think it could go. Well, I thank you for that, Brian. I think I really like the way you pose the question, what does the pandemic mean for higher education? Because I think it's a mistake to say it by itself is changing higher education. I think as we look backwards, and I'm far from the first to say this, we can see that the pandemic is illuminating and amplifying some of the strengths and also some of the crises in higher education. Positive side, it's really remarkable that the national faculty and academic institutions made the switch to remote teaching as quickly and nimbly as it did. And although that remote teaching is not the perfect plan B, it's a sign of how creative and responsive and committed to students higher ed is. I think it puts the lie to the old canard that academics and academic institutions are incapable of responding to change. And the negative side, on the crisis side, it's exposed and amplified some of our important failures. We've had a lot of important reporting on the way it increases inequality and inequity between haves and have nots and the student bodies and among institutions. We know that it's making under-resourced institutions even more precarious. It's increased the problem of lack of completion and attainment. So the pandemic has taken problems we kind of knew we had and amplified them to crisis levels. And I think one of the implications of that is we shouldn't think of the crisis management that we now have to do and that institutions are doing really remarkably as laying the blueprint for change. When the house is burning, you need the skills of firefighters to put it out. And you may need people to help build temporary structures for the people who are burned out of their home, but that's different from what it takes to rebuild the house. We're gonna need to step back, I think, from the immediate solutions to crisis management and not say how is the pandemic changing us, but rather how do we respond with our values to the pandemic to guide the changes that it's exposing that we need. And just to give you one last teaser to that, although remote teaching and online teaching has been an important response. To my mind, this is not primarily about should higher education go remote. It's about what values and practices we want, no matter what the mix of face-to-face and remote learning that we do. Okay, there's so much to unpack in that great statement. Before I dive in, let me just invite everybody. Please share your questions or your thoughts. If you have examples of the kinds of values that David just suggested, if you have stories about your campus spinning to try and engage with us and looking ahead, if you have questions about each of these different points, starting now is the time when you can ask. So again, just either click that raised hand if you wanna join us up here on stage. Perhaps one of my cats will return to me just to join you as well. Or if you'd rather just type in the Q&A box, just type that and I'll flash your question up on stage. One quick question along the way from what you just brilliantly described. How is the coronavirus pandemic showing or illuminating our problems with degree completion? Are you thinking that this fall it's gonna be even harder for some students to return to campus and it'll accelerate our, what's the expression? Some college no degree problem? Yes, I mean, I think that's undoubtedly gonna be true. You know, we know how urgent and important improving college attainment and completion has been over the past 10, 20 years. The pandemic, the threats to campuses and to face to face learning are threats to the conditions that do the most to encourage completion, especially for underserved and historically underrepresented students. It makes it harder to have supportive communities, kind of three dimensional wrap around communities of learning and practice that we know enable all students to succeed. It makes it harder for students to gain access to so-called high impact practices that increase completion. So yes, it's gonna take a problem that we had and unless we are really intentional and creative, it's gonna make it harder for more and more students to complete, especially students who lack the resources for easy connectivity or for close ties to their college communities. I see, and the coronavirus is gonna make those resources even harder to obtain depending on things like multiple people competing for the same thin strand of bandwidth or people losing their jobs and being ill. We had a question from one awesome, awesome fellow who can participate today live, but I managed to tweet out a quick comment. Kelvin Bentley, who has the awesome, awesome handle of Black Time Lord says, I wonder if the weaknesses have been hidden in plain sight. So many schools continue to treat online education as a bolt-on to their approach to serving residential students, instead of innovating the entire model to better serve all students. I wonder what you, if you want to answer that. Go ahead, sorry, I interrupted you. No, no, if you'd like to respond to that, please. So I think it's absolutely true that these problems have hidden in plain sight. And I think the questioner's comment about being intentional and designing online learning the best is true, but I have a couple of different thoughts about that. One is that it's clear that as many people have said that remote instruction that we've had to do kind of so-called ZoomU is not online learning at its best, although it's improvisation under emergency at its best. That being said, I would say that even so far the median good online learning experience is nowhere near as good as the median good face-to-face learning experience. And that we, although there are real models of excellence, we haven't really fully figured out how to create the kinds of intimate relational supportive teaching and learning relationships that I think are the key to all different kinds of learning, not just so-called liberal arts learning. And that when we do that online, the online medium is great for all kinds of things for flexibility of time and space for certain kinds of collaboration. But what it is not good at is providing quality at scale any more than face-to-face can. So I think we need to be as creative as possible with online, but without the idea that mass screen-based learning can happen in a way that makes it much cheaper. Online can help us conquer time and space. It doesn't fundamentally change the investments we need to make in great education. Yeah, the financial or the personal investments. That's a great answer. And Kelvin said he can't join us this week, but we'll next time. And Kelvin, I'll share the recording with you so you can get a sense of that. Thank you for that superb answer. And friends, if you're new to the forum, you see, this is how we work. We're all about being able to have these kinds of conversations occur. We have another question that's come up from a great friend of the program from Tom Hems, who is coming to us from Texas. And he has in his blue room, and he has a question about quality and how to preserve quality with these incredible constraints. Tom. Hi, so, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, good. Well, you kind of already answered two thirds of my question just now as I was in the transporter beam, but the question of, I teach in a community college, and so the discrepancies that you see in terms of economics, we do teach that bottom 20% in many ways economically as well as learning skills. And so it's like the same, it's like doubling down because you get this distribution of less skilled learners as well as those who are struggling technologically on top of it. I've got students taking my class on a phone right now. And I'm trying to do things like web authoring and stuff like that. And they just, whoa. And so my question is, and you kind of circle around that, but I mean, how can we square this circle? I mean, what are some ideas for creating more richer environments that can scale both in-person and online on the fly? Because Brian put up a thing with his scenarios a couple of weeks ago, that toggle term, where we could be going online, going off, coming on depending on ebb and flow of the virus. And so how do we square that in terms of both maintaining that quality of education at the same time as reaching out those, maintaining the equality and the quality at the same time, given the constraints. Brian, should I take a stab at it? Absolutely. That's who it is. Let's be in the questions. It was for David. I could bug Brian otherwise. Please David, go ahead. Brian, can you hear me? You're frozen in my screen. I'm doing okay? You're doing fine. So I have a couple of thoughts about Tom's question and thank you for it. Let me start by saying I was, for several years, a dean at the new school of a division which had an adult bachelor's program that offered both online and face-to-face and hybrid degrees. And I really respect and watched the kind of gifted teachers who made online learning work. I don't think that you can do it on the fly to answer your question. It's gonna take a lot of ongoing skill building and creative experimentation with online platforms to make it work. I think the key, I've already stressed that I think really great online learning happens in small scale with small sections. I don't think their economies of scale to great online learning. It has to be very relational and very collaborative. And we have to be mindful that we know that students are skeptical of it. When they like online, it's for the ease and the flexibility of it. But pedagogically, nearly all the surveys and responses we get are that online is a less preferable, less rich mode of learning. And if we want students to kind of own their education, which is one of the absolute keys to great education, we need to acknowledge that and change it. We also know that low income students, students of color, first gen students, students with fewer resources, tend not to do as well in the online medium as other students and that we can't let whatever degree of online learning we need exacerbate the inequalities that are built into our system. So I think, again, we need to bring the point isn't, do we go to online or not, but whatever mix of teaching and learning we need to do, whatever modality we use, we need to bring our commitment to holistic and equitable and inclusive education. So how do we start building our way toward it so we don't have a train wreck in the fall? Well, again, I don't think the solution for the fall should be taken as the template for what education should look like three to four years from now. I don't think we know what this pandemic or next pandemic will bring and we shouldn't assume that the pandemic is the condition of higher education. Here I think the example of World War II and the GI Bill is really instructive. You know, in 1948, 49, hundreds of campuses had to quickly construct quonset huts for GIs to enter the college class. There was a lot of improvisation that succeeded really well, but it didn't mean that quonset huts were the new dorms for online and for the future higher ed. We're gonna need to build online quonset huts and it's not clear yet what we'll need to do in the longer run, we'll need to experiment with that. But my guess is that there will be a mix of more online, I hope the best online with hybrid and face to face classes and the deeper question is what practices and values cut across all of those and can we use this moment of change to do better than we have done around these issues? Yeah. Great question. Crisis can either breed innovation or retrenchment, hopefully it breeds innovation. Right. And Tom is someone who works in the innovation very, very well. And thank you, David, for the great answer. We have a couple of questions that build on this and these are test questions. So let me quickly flash them on the screen. There's one from our longtime friend, Mark Rush at Washington Lee University who says that education will never be cheap but online does make it more accessible. How can we overcome the damage done to online by the incessant criticism from so many educators in the last decade? So I think the first two sentences capture the reality perfectly. It's not gonna be cheap, it can make it more accessible. And I guess I would give a friendly pushback to the second part of Mark's question in the sense that I think that, yes, it's true that faculty are often resistant to online, although in my experience as a dean, less resistant when they're given the chance to do it creatively and collaboratively and when it's not seen as a kind of instrumental, cheaper version of their teaching. But I actually think the biggest barrier to overcome, which is one we need to respect is the resistance and skepticism of students. They report back to us that their experience is too often not a rich one. And I think we need to take their response, not either faculty cheerleaders or faculty skeptics as the thing we must have to meet. Well, thank you. That's a terrific answer and Mark, that's a great question. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of these text questions that you can enter. And a whole bunch of them have come in. And again, so please feel free to click either the raised hand or the question mark. This is a question from a near colleague of mine, John Steitz at Georgetown. And John asks, given the pandemic has created a deep financial crater in higher ed with some schools facing an existential crisis, how receptive will institutions be to constructive change? That's such a good question. And a tough one. I think, I guess I have two hopeful thoughts about it. One is that the sheer degree of precariousness that we're all dealing with will get institutions and staff and faculty colleagues out of a kind of kind of crouched in defensive resistance to trying new things. But the other is that we need to include student voice, faculty voice, include everyone in this kind of co-creation of a new system and emphasize the opportunity for creative change. I don't know anyone who doesn't believe that higher ed needs to invite creative change and to fight against negative change. Change is happening one way or another. And if we can get people to enlist in the possibility of their own creativity affecting the outcome, then maybe there will be an alternative to a kind of fight-or-flight reaction. Very democratic vision, a lowercase d, including everybody, students, staff, as well as faculty. Thank you. That's a, John, it's a great question. And David, that's the most heartening answer I've heard about it so far. We have a question aimed at me, actually, from Ken and Solonero, I wanna share this because it's a great observation. I can't ask if I'm familiar with Howard Reingold's virtual courses out of Stanford and the College of Learning Alliance. And the answer is yes. Howard's a longtime dear friend of mine, a fantastic writer, a great thinker, did brave stuff at Stanford and Berkeley, and definitely someone I wanna bring back on the program when we can. And the College of Learning Alliance is very, very useful. We have a question that asks us to look a little further ahead. This comes from Jessica Sullivan at NYU, and she asks, if we can envision what campus life from university will look like in the fall, especially for seniors. And I don't know, Jessica, if you mean academic seniors or people over 65. Could campus life support social distancing needs that may be as critical as life now without a vaccine? Brian, that's a great question. And I feel as if I am no more qualified to answer it than Jessica or you. I've been listening to institutional leaders like Christine Pax and a Brown University who just called in an influential op-ed for reopening Brown and other institutions and started to describe some of the nuts and bolts of how that could work. But honestly, I'm as much a kind of rank and file follower of that conversation than someone who has special insight in it. I guess I would just add two very personal comments. One is to reinforce what I just said about student voice. I think students need to be key co-creators of these solutions, both because they will have really important ideas and because they need to sign on to the regime of testing of social distancing of whatever it is. And the second is to know Jessica's comment about seniors. My youngest son is a 22 year old college senior in the next room as we speak who's had to lose his senior spring. And it's a very small heartbreak against the really large tragedies of the pandemic, but it's a heartbreak. And I think it's only increased my sense of the hunger that people have for physical community as part of their educational process. I hear that, I hear that. And I think this is a kind of, if I can get literary critical for a second, this is a moment of defamiliarization where what we expected or were accustomed to has now been thrown into sharp relief. And you can see it very, very clearly. Just as a side note, Mark responds that several of his students have expressed relief from the pressures of the ongoing social pressure cooker. So it's a flip side is this is kind of introvert's delight. And as a card carrying extrovert, I find this absolutely terrifying. Thank you, Mark. If I could, if I could come back to Jessica's great question and Jessica, if you wanna follow that up by my question about seniors, I can be pretty pedantic about these things, I'm afraid. I wonder if, to what extent we try to apply the liberal arts approach, liberal education approach to the overall spectrum of higher education that is, do we think about this intensive connection between instructor and student? Do we apply the interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary nature of inquiry? Do we manage to expand that across higher education? Does that become more desirable if we think that remote instruction is of a lower quality? If you're pitching that to me, I've got some thoughts about that. I am indeed. And anybody else wants to chime in, please feel free, you can tell we're not shy. So my vision of liberal education as opposed to liberal arts education is that it's integrated with practical skill building that in which students learn the kind of work they wanna do and represents a kind of teaching and learning that ought to be present in all institutions and all sectors with all schools and divisions and all courses of study. So you might think of me as kind of a sort of preacher for the integration of liberal learning and practical learning, learning by doing. I cut my teeth for the last 20 years on community engaged and community partnership work. So I'm a passionate believer in these values being part of what informs all really great education. And I would say that especially in the part of that that has to do with bringing your learning to the world and your world to learning, whether that's pre-professional or community based, rich relationships, peer relationships, mentoring relationships, all the things that represent the sinews of that kind of education are if anything even more important than the humanities seminar kind of money. Well, thank you. That's, I appreciate that glimpse into your thinking and your model of what this can look like and what liberal education can look like in that kind of integrated fashion. I have more questions but better than me, we have the audience was full of questions. We have one from Shandel Holden who is at Oral Roads, a post-doctoral fellow, and asks, to what degree do you think we can include broader community voices in the democratic vision of the evolution of higher education? How may we center both student voices as well as community needs? I couldn't agree more. I just wanna say, amen, testify. That is exactly right. And I think the question, Shannon's linking of student voice and community voice, if we believe that it's part of the mission of higher education to foster democratic civic and community life, which I do, I see that as a core purpose of our work, then the communities with which we work, not only for which we work, need to be part of that dialogue about what good education needs to be. And that has always been true, but I would say to bring it back to the pandemic, it's really important, in my view, to see the pandemic not as a standalone event, but as an episode in what's now going to be a period of recurring crisis. The Great Recession was part of that. This won't be the last pandemic. And of course, climate change is in some ways the largest scale crisis. And it's really important that we ask ourselves, what should education look like under conditions of crisis and educating students to be agents of solutions? And the communities that are affected by these different crises are absolutely key partners in answering that question. So we shouldn't just see this as one thing that's occurring, one off, but that higher education is engaged in grappling with a whole series of crises. That's a powerful vision and a kind of daunting one that puts us in a kind of perpetual emergency management mode. Well, let me say, I hope that's not the outcome because it seems to me, if what I've said has some truth to it as a look back and a look forward, it's really important for us to not simply reel from one reaction to emergency to the other, but to say what is our mission to bring research to bear, to bring undergraduate education to bear on an era of crisis in which we can expect this thing we're reacting to not to be the last one. How do we want students to be empowered to be agents of problem solving? How should it change our research agenda and our teaching agenda? And here again, I would go back to the World War II moment when not only did the GI Bill expand access to higher education, but the Truman Commission and the Commission on Research took that moment of crisis and risk and said, this is the opportunity where we, and the necessity of enlarging our vision of what a democratic and expert higher ed system can bring. We need a new moment like that. Maybe even a Marshall plan for Jen, if I can continue that. Oh, thank you. And Chandel, thank you very much for that fantastic question. True, true. We have more questions piling in and I wanna make sure that everyone gets a chance to look at them. We have one from Vasudeva Rao Arvind from Clarion, a professor there and asks, how do you think incoming freshman enrollment will be affected this fall, especially at regional and rural institutions where many students are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with learning online? That is a great question to which I don't know the answer. I imagine that Brian and many in this swarm who are both more immersed online teachers and maybe teach at rural institutions could answer that. But I think it's really key. The one thing I would say is we won't find solutions institution by institution atomistically that one of the things that we need to do is to pool expertise and resources across institutions and across sectors. So maybe one of the answers will be regional clusters that are working together to find solutions. Well, that's a good point. I really, really hope so. I really hope we can be the collaborative. In Canada, Alex Usher is working to produce a kind of inter-university, inter-provincial education resource, which sounds fantastic if you can get that going. And for everybody else, if you are at or if you are knowledgeable of rural institutions or regional institutions, please chime in. I'll be glad just to share your observations and reflections, either click the raised hand to join us on stage or type it in the chat and we'll bring that up. Jessica is absolutely on fire. Jessica Sullivan has even more questions and she draws us to the biggest sector of American higher education to ask, what will happen to community colleges as we discuss costs and access to affordable education? Are they in line for stimulus money and can we ask institutions of means to adopt a community college? Wow, great thinking. Yes, this may be in terms of sector, the most important question we've asked because community colleges are key to educating displaced and unemployed workers to being key institutions in communities that are facing economic crisis, but they're themselves the least resource, the most under-resourced sector. So we absolutely need to fight not only in the stimulus but in state budgets and in federal support for expanded support for community colleges. And I'm not sure I would use the word adoption because that implies a kind of parental relationship that isn't the best metaphor but partnering across sectors between the four-year sectors and community colleges maybe not simply in twinning relationships with a single public institution but with regional clusters, I think would be really, really important. And I know from my own learning that community colleges often have important solutions to teach the four-year sector, not just the other way around. Definitely. And that's, again, Jessica, that's a fantastic question and what a vision. And David, I really love the idea of the regional clusters as another response to this. We have more questions, one from SUNY speaking of regional institutions. And this is Carl S who asks to think, how do you feel about the difference between online education being provided in middle and upper school as opposed to how it is provided in higher education? And is it time to create synergy between them? So that's one of those questions in which I'm a kind of bystander watching and learning. I confess that I put so much emphasis in terms of teaching and learning good education on building thick communities of inquiry and communities of practice on the importance of peer relationships student to student as well as mentoring relationships. It can be done really effectively online but it's harder to do it. And my suspicion is that it's even harder for high school age students than for college students. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this but I don't look on online secondary education intuitively as a good solution to improving secondary education. I think the question of rural students is a different one because of the need to have spatial and geographic flexibility but in general, I start out skeptical about that. Well, that's a good answer. And Carl, thank you for this question. If you wanna follow up again, please feel free. You can flip your camera on. We'd be glad to have you on stage. Jessica Sullivan answers my question very generously by saying that seniors, she meant in terms of academic rank. She mentioned her own niece who'll be a senior at Loyola U Chicago. I'm sorry that her experience is not good, Jessica. Hope they can do better than that and they really should. We have friends, we're in the last eight or nine minutes which is crazy to think about since it feels to me like we just started getting in and we have more comments and questions that have come in. I do wanna share another one from Kenan Solanero who asks who gives rise to some other things to look at namely, EDX, McKill University Grook which I actually don't know. EDX is U Lab or the Pakemama Alliance. David, a lot of these are new to me actually. Kenan, if you want to join us on stage or just type in more information about them I'd love to learn more. Are these new to you or are these experiments that we should be paying attention to that you know of? I know a bit about EDX and EDX is U Lab but I don't know the other ones. I'm assuming a Grook is a first cousin to a MOOC but I'm not sure. Yes, yes. So Kenan, thank you for drawing our attention to those. It's really, really important to see. David, I have a question for myself while everybody else is turning away and throwing questions and popping these other. It seems like we're in a very tactical mode. People are wondering how best to teach with video. People are wondering about how the LMS works, how do you reach rural students and which bandwidth and these are all very vital operational questions but I'm wondering how you can help us all think in a more strategic way. I mean, Tom was inviting us to reimagine, to reconstruct and reconstruct higher education. How can we find the intellectual space to do that when so many face themselves, see themselves in a moment of existential crisis? That is a great question and I really appreciate the way you framed it. I think it's, right now we are in the middle of tactical and operational problem solving and that's necessary and it's totally honorable and we're gonna muddle through those folks who know about Winnicott's idea of the good enough mother as an important model in child psychology that we should not try to be the perfect parent, we should try to be the good enough parent. I think right now we have to be the good enough teachers in the face of this but at the same and I'm not sure, in fact, I tend to suspect that this is the wrong time to think we know what the long-term solutions will be. So in some of my conversations with people when they've said, next week, let's convene a redesign conversation. My reaction is this is actually a terrible time to make choices that will determine design change two years from now because we're still working through the operational crisis but I think we do need to create space for exactly these kinds of conversations. The op-ed pieces inside higher ed or the Chronicle that I've appreciated most, I'm thinking of one recently by, I think his name is Jeff Handstead, I don't know him but who is saying this is a really important opportunity for reorganizing curricula around helping students confront big wicked interdisciplinary problems. He didn't have a plan for how to do that but connecting the pandemic to the teaching of wicked problems gave me kind of intellectual space to be thinking about that. But I think we need a combination of slow and fast that simply being fast and nimble in response to the operational challenges should not crowd out being slower about the issues of what constitutes great teaching and learning in a period of crisis. And the same thing's happening in medicine. We need everyone's talking about how to shift to telehealth and their big operational questions involved in that. But those questions are different from what does it mean to be a great doctor or to answer a deep question about the development of new medications which will be then delivered through telehealth in new ways. We can't let the operational instrumental questions create so much noise that we don't have space to think about the values that we bring to it. We don't want to be data driven. We want to be values driven and informed by data. That's a great phrase. That's a great phrasing and a great distinction to make. Thank you. That's a lot to go on. She did ask a question that I can share on the screen which is about current federal policy. Is our government doing anything now like the previous GI bill for education? There'll be so many inconsistencies due to inequities. That is a great question and I have a quick answer to it. But before I do, let me invite anyone, Jessica and other people who have questions they wanted to ask to feel free to be in touch with me by email and continue these conversations. That's at scoby at bt2p.com.org. There's beginning to be a conversation to go back to Jessica's question. I posted about this in Facebook but there are many other people doing it. Talking about either extending GI bill benefits or creating new benefits for all frontline as so-called essential workers. And the best of these conversations that involves not only healthcare workers who deserve this but the grocery stockers, the sanitation people, the food delivery folks, everyone who has both the economic need but also is doing the civic work of enabling all of us to survive. And yesterday, I live here in Michigan, the governor just proposed a new policy of free tuition for all essential workers in all of those different categories. So I think we're at the beginning of a really important conversation that all of us can be and should be policy advocates for. Wow, that's a breathtaking vision. And that's another way that we can think about this in terms of the macro issues. I just really hope that we have the political and financial wherewithal to actually do that. But David, we can do this best, I think with your help and your guidance. Thank you so much for being such a fantastic, fantastic guest. And friends, you can see why I was so eager to have David on the program. I have all kinds of questions. Oh, but before I go further, William Emerson shared a link and they just put this up on the screen if you're able to see. This is Governor Whitmer in Michigan, her policy suggestion. So there's, you can copy and paste that and I'll share that actually out on Twitter to make sure everyone can see that. Thanks for sharing that. Really appreciate that and doing that so quickly. I put on the screen on the bottom left, you can see it, they bring theory to practice homepage so people can click there. And I presume they'll probably take down the site with a huge rush of people clicking at the same time. You mentioned that you would love to email people and hear from them. Can you repeat your email address so people can bug you? Sure, scoby s-c-o-b-a-n-boy-e-y at b-t-t-o-p.org. And sorry, go ahead, Brian. No, I was gonna, there you go. And I can say from experience that there's a, he's a wonderful correspondent who answers much more quickly than I do, I'm afraid. And in our discussion, Mercedes Inora from your organizations, people can sign up for our mailing list. It goes out every two weeks. And I think they can get that from the website, right? Yes, thank you Mercedes. We call that bi-weekly newsletter bringing it and we would love to have you be on our mailing list. We know how, Brian, I wanted to say you are such an important convener and thought partner. So your community, this community of thinkers, we wanna join our community of thinkers. Oh, I would love that. I think that's a consummation devoutly to be wished. Thank you. Thank you very much for the kind words and those kind words apply more to this great audience, formerly known as the audience of participants with their wonderful perspectives and great questions. We're at the end of the hour, so I need to regretfully and sadly bid you adieu. Please enjoy as much of an arbor for me as you can, David. But everybody don't leave yet because I've got news for the next week of events. First of all, if you'd like to continue exploring this topic, next tomorrow, actually, my partnership with the Chronicle Higher Education means we're gonna be doing a session on inclusive teaching in the online classroom. So you can find out more about that from that link. Just go to tinyyearall.com slash chronicle4-31. That's the date and you can learn more. I'll be glad to see you there. I'll be co-hosting and co-moderating that. Now, next week, we will continue our focus on what the pandemic means for higher education. I hope we can all bring our scoby-ized minds to this, thinking about how we can best rethink, deconstruct and reconstruct higher education in the middle of this epic crisis, but not the only crisis. If you'd like to continue talking about this, we have many, many venues for it. Twitter seems to be the most popular, so just use the hashtag FTE, or you can tweet at me. But also we have our groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and Slack. And if you'd like to go back in time and look at almost five years of programs, please look at our archive. We now have 191 recordings there. This may be unprecedented, and it's a lot of great, great conversation, starring most of you. In the meantime, please friends, thank you all first of all for these great thoughts and conversations. I really admire your ability, all of you to think collectively on this. And second, please stay safe. Don't infect anybody. You know the drill, wash your hands, wear a mask and take care of yourself. And otherwise, we'll see you next week and we'll see you online. Thanks, bye-bye.