 August of 2019 the future transform met in an unusual way. We tended an experiment. We combined the usual weekly video discussion with a face-to-face live conference. So we went to Madison, Wisconsin where I was keynoting the DLT conference and we managed to arrange it so it happened at the same time as the usual Thursday afternoon slot. So we hybridized it. I gave a keynote through the Future Transform. So right before and right after the keynote itself we had online conversations and to it we added the conversation from the audience in Madison, Wisconsin. Overall I think it was a success. The vocal team on the ground did a lot of solid IT work to make it happen. We had some different media issues with sound overlapping which I think you'll see. But overall it was a really, really interesting project. The one thing I caution you about is that I positioned the camera exactly the wrong way during my talk. So during the question and answer before and after things look right. But during the talk itself I think you get to stare at my lapel or maybe just somewhat a part of my subject. Otherwise, this is the entire event. A couple of sound glitches edited out. But otherwise I think it's a really interesting experiment, especially for 2020 when we're thinking so much about how to combine video and in-person events. Enjoy. Well let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you all to the Future Transform. We have an unusual fun experiment right now where we are trying a new thing that has rarely been attempted. We are combining a live event, a conference in the city of Wisconsin, the city of Madison, along with this week's Future Trends Forum. So I'll introduce the forum and then explain how this is working. So to begin with let me welcome everybody. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Future Trends Forum's creator, chief host, and cat herder. And I'm really glad to see you folks here today. Let me introduce this week's session. Instead of a guest, we don't have a guest today. What we have as a guest is an entire conference. It's a distance teaching and learning conference in Madison, Wisconsin. It is right now being used. The conference is filled with several hundred people. And in fact I'll show them to you right now. Let me turn the screen around. So right now you should be able to see a whole crowd of people, including a wonderful technologist who's doing all kinds of heroic work to help, and hundreds of people here finishing up their lunch. This is the distance teaching and learning conference. And this is one where people have got together to compare notes and put their thoughts together and understand where online learning is headed. We have people from all over the United States, from all kinds of schools, everything from for-profit schools, community colleges, to research universities, liberal arts colleges, and they are all putting their heads together to figure out how to improve online learning. It's a really, really great crowd. And what I'm going to do today is something unusual. I'm going to ask you all to join this conversation. And the way we're going to do it is as follows. We're going to start off right now, all of us here, having a conversation about the major trends we see reshaping education and technology. No PowerPoint for this, no speech, just our thoughts to begin with, to rev up and think about this. And then in about 18 minutes I'm going to switch over and then take a podium and then start using all kinds of PowerPoint in order to work through my research on where education is headed. So you'll be able to, you'll really hear that and you'll really hear my voice describing this. You'll be able to hear the audience's reaction and that will give you a chance to see what you think of all this. Now as that goes, please feel free to click the raised hand button or type in something into the question mark or in the chat box so that you can participate and start asking questions and responses. So if you think that demographics is a major issue or if you think labor is something you need to spend more time on or that we really should pay more attention to podcasts, those are all things and many, many more that you can have. When my speech is done, then I'll step off the podium and I'll help bring your questions and thoughts into this Medicine and Wisconsin event. Is it clear? It's an unusual project. It's an unusual experiment. And we're trying this out right now to see how it goes. And I'm really grateful to all of you for participating. So to begin with, in order to start proceeding, let me ask all of you right now to think. It's August 2019. In the United States, this means that we're coming towards the end of summer and we're heading towards the fall semester. In fact it'll be the start of the new academic year 2019-2020. So let me ask each of you to think about which major trends you see having the biggest influence on reshaping education and technology. So it could be something from the field of technology per se. So perhaps you're interested in what's going on with the rise of 5G networks. It could be something from another domain completely, such as economics or policy. You would be interested in the reauthorization of higher education acting in the United States. You may be interested in some of the ways geopolitics plays out, such as the U.S. China Trade War, for example. Or it could be something within a higher education itself. So you're interested in changes in enrollment as you look ahead to the new student bodies this fall. So let me open the floor. What are you interested in in terms of these trends? Which trends seem most likely to have an impact? What is the most important trend for you? And when you pick one, either click the raise hand button because you want to join us on stage, or hit the question mark so you can type it out. Hey, Tom Riley, longtime friend of the program. Let me bring you up. Hello, Tom. Hello. I'm working primarily now on climate crisis. There is a high likelihood that we will have a very severe kick in the teeth relatively soon, such that we really have to reorganize everything. And education has got to be one of the leading areas. And so it's here. Charles Schindler says I'm picking up all the conference background of my mic. Let me see if this makes it better. Charles, let me know if this makes it easier to understand. And then we have a raised hand from David Stone. Let me bring David on the stage. David, I think you're muted. Can you hear me? Perfectly. Welcome, David. So I guess the point is I have a real quick, there are a lot of folks who are coming back into the higher education or just education space. A lot of companies are looking at education and training again, where they've kind of divested from that. And I think there's a lot of more people that are going to be at the table delivering education and also a willingness to support that and fund that maybe through federal means or other ways to encourage kind of some innovation on space. So I think there's some really interesting trends there. I see what you mean. That's very different from our typical focus. We used to say that more students are coming and often from unusual backgrounds. What you're saying about the flip side is that more and more entities are going to be competing with higher education, offering more. That's a really, really great point. And by the way, if anyone's not following Penn State, you absolutely should because Penn State does terrific work with distance learning as well as teaching our mind. Thank you so much, David. And we have another question that's come up. Let me bring this up. And this is from Giancarlo Bralto who says that redefining student success from a hyper focus and cognitive competencies towards a focus on cognitive plus non-cognitive, aka SEL skills and others, especially given the major shifts in the future of work. Giancarlo, this is a major major, I'm going to flash it back on the screen because this is a major, major topic. Because what you're describing is among other things, the shift towards emotional literacy. You're talking about the way that we add more and more demands on education, what I should provide, what you teach students, which raises all kinds of issues from support to pedagogy, to professional development, to infrastructure. And that's a major, major trend, a subtle one. And again, you're absolutely right to link that to the future of work and how work is changing. People in liberal arts know that there is strong demand for a lot of soft skills in the workforce. Employers want people to have the ability to communicate effectively, to work together, to work across cultural differences. And this is another part of the wide demands that we have on higher education. It's an excellent point. It's an excellent point. Thank you, Giancarlo. Now, we're going to start talking, or I'm going to start talking, in about seven minutes. And I want to make sure that you all get a chance to voice what you're thinking of and what you're concerned about. So let me ask a question to spin this in a different way. What are you most excited about of all the trends that you're hearing? What gives you the most hope and enthusiasm for education? Is there particular technology that excites you? Are there pedagogical trends, like Giancarlo talking about our new demands for what we expect from students? Is there an institutional, organizational transformation? What gives you the most optimism and hope? Which trends really, really give you that kind of optimism looking forward? That one thing you want to go back and say to your faculty and colleagues, to your administrators, to your peers, what is it that you've found upon a vision? Now, it's possible that if you can't think of anything, that's actually worth saying. If right now all the trends that you look at give you a lot of anxiety and a lot of dread, then please mention that. If it turns out that you can't go further, then mention that. That's an important thing to know this right, Tom. Eric, can we hear you? Perfectly, perfectly. What's your thought? What are you thinking about, Eric? I don't know. This doesn't give me great fear. I'm not sure this is a great innovation, but one of the things that I've found fascinating lately is universities that are built into all the way homes. I have a new form of university to meet you, and I see the housing aspect to this. I'm going to educate both you and kind of dovetail each of that. I'm going to do two more. As long as you pay attention to what's online and what kind of education you need, of course, I'm going to let you know a lot more in the first century, a couple of different directions and things to be looking at. Nice. Thank you, Eric. That's fantastic. Thank you so much. That's a really, really positive thing to think about, that kind of integration. One quick question. Young Carlo has one more to mention. Let me just bring this up on the screen. The governments and the workforce are focusing on the concept of lifelong learning. Good point. Now, I'm going to have to start talking, so I'm going to pause this right now, and you should be able to hear me. Thank you very much. Can you hear me yet? You can hear me now? That's good. Sometimes when I begin a presentation, I would like to do it with an unusual voice. In this case, I could do it as a voice of heavy metal. So I could start like this if you like. Can you all hear me okay? Very good. First, I'd like to thank the entire DTNL program committee and everybody who worked on it for bringing me here, but more importantly for bringing all of you here. Can we give them a round of applause? And then I'd like to add another round of applause for all the people who have worked on this. They're often in red shirts, which means that in Star Trek they'd already been dead by now, but people who have organized all the housing, all the terrific food, all the different events. I mean, that's a lot of work. Thank you all so much. I spent a lot of time at the University of Michigan and I'm told that that should give me challenges being here in Wisconsin. I don't think that's true. Last year, I was asked to go to Ohio State University and my second slide was an enormous blue field with a golden M on it. And I showed it and said, I have three degrees from this school, but I'm told that I think you have a football team. Is that true? Nothing like insulting your audience to get the blood going. It was just fantastic. But I'd also like to thank people in another way right now. You are in the middle of an experiment, a technological experiment that you might not know about. Right now, we are all sitting at tables. There are more than a hundred of you eating and thinking and listening wondering, is it possible that any human being could have this much hair? The answer is no. But at the same time, we have the future transform going on live. In fact, you can see this is a screenshot from the way it worked before. We have 31 people from around the world listening right now and offering questions in chat and other venues. We are combining these two events, crossing the streams, if you will. So it'd be really interesting to see how this plays out. Now, what we're going to be talking about for the next half hour are the major trends that are reshaping higher education. Why? My focus is the future of education. And the way I study that is by looking first at the major forces in the present. So not making stuff up, not speculating, you know, what's going to happen to higher education if, let's just say, the United States splits into civil war. No, I want to look at what's happening now and extend it into the future. So we're going to be talking in a few different domains to begin with, talking about the contexts in higher education, economics, demographics, and policy. And then we're going to dive into technology. As we go, I'd like you to think of a few things. First, are you seeing examples of any of these forces in your own work? Second, what happens if we hit fast forward and continue these trends five, 10, 15 years into the future? What happens to your college, your university, or institution under that transformation? So let's start with the biggest possible picture. Maybe not the universe. Although we did just have a near miss for an asteroid. Let's focus on the earth. As one of the future transform guests reminds us, the largest trend impacting human civilization right now is ongoing climate change. This map is one that still astonishes me. For hundreds of years, people sought to sail from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific across what is today Canada. Many, many people died. Fortunes were lost trying to do that because the Northwest Passage didn't exist. It does now. Enough climate change has occurred. Enough ice has melted that you can sail the ship from the Northern Atlantic into the Northern Pacific. Takes a few days. It's kind of picturesque, but the world has changed. It's important to think about this as it transforms everything about our lives. But it's also important to think about this in terms of education, because education is increasingly global. Education is increasingly transnational. Let me mention a few ways this works. First of all, country after country, region after country has been building up their higher education capacity. China, for example, has built more universities than any civilization in history before. At the same time, we have more students moving across international borders. Quick question. Per capita, which nation on earth right now gets the most international students? What would you think? I'll call on you if you don't answer. No. That's the next slide. Iceland is lovely, a fantastic country, but no. No, it's Canada. Canada is the world's best destination, most successful destination for international students. People joke that Canada is the world's best friend, and it certainly seems to be the case. Meanwhile, other countries are competing aggressively with us. You'll see some European schools send flyers to American high schools offering unusual value proposition. Come to Edinburgh, come to London, come to, you know, PISA, and we might not give you any tuition. It's weird how high school students find this appealing. Meanwhile, we see another form of this in terms of research. The United States produces more research than any other country in the world for now. China has almost caught up with us. Rapidly they become a researching powerhouse. Around the world, there is a common demand. There's a demand for more quantity in higher education, getting more and more students through more higher education, as well as quality, the desire to improve that teaching and learning. Meanwhile, the United States participates in this in a couple of ways. One is that we keep opening branch campuses abroad and other nations, but also until two years ago, we tried really hard to recruit as many international students as possible. Over the past two years, those numbers have dropped due in part to fear of the Trump administration and also due to fears of school shootings. Now, as a futurist, one of the most reliable tools in my toolkit is demographics. Once we have a population born, we can actually know quite a bit about how it's going to behave at the big level. A couple of changes are happening that impact your work really closely. First of all, across the world, every single country, we're becoming more and more urban. We're leaving rural areas and putting more and more people into cities. You may experience this yourself, but generally speaking, we're emptying out the countryside. For the first time in human history, the majority of humans live in cities. Related to that, we're also getting older. Proportionally, in absolute terms, we are making fewer and fewer babies. We're living longer and therefore have more and more senior citizens. Let me explain. I just realized that I'm talking about an aging population. They showed this panel. It's not what I meant. What I meant was the people on this panel earlier today spoke eloquently about the changing demographics of American learners and how the 18-year-old that goes away from home to go to college and live in a dorm and so forth is no longer the entire educational population that we have more and more adults, including more and more seniors. What's driving this? Here is a map of population growth on the planet. Look at this carefully. The blue countries are the ones that are producing more kids. The green ones, the yellow ones are not. All those countries are at risk of actually shrinking. So if you want to see the future of human demography, the places that are producing children are mostly sub-Saharan Africa plus Pakistan and also one little state in the U.S. Why is this happening? For terrific reasons. This is one of the great stories of human history. In the first place, we have better health care, better science, better technology, better public health. But second, you all help make this happen because the more education women get, the fewer children they have. This happens in almost every single society on record. So if you look at the left chart, the number of kids that we have per woman has dropped from five to below two. 2.1 is considered a replacement rate. That's basically every couple that will reproduce themselves. We're below that right now. Look at the right gong, the right chart. The median age in the past 70 years has shot up from 24 to 31. I just moved here, as Tom told you, or moved to DC from Vermont. Median age in Vermont is 46 and rising. This is a fascinating, fascinating issue and it's changing every society that we know of. So look, for example, at this map of American demographics. On the left, you can see that we used to be a very young country. You see the very bottom of that chart, all the kids, and then smaller numbers on them. On the right, well, I call this the refrigerator diagram in part. We have roughly equal numbers of adults, middle-aged people, teenagers, kids. For a country that prides itself on being youthful, that's not us anymore. It plays itself out geographically in some very, very interesting ways. Here again, blue means producing more kids. Orange, red means producing fewer kids. So take a gander through the Midwest, through Appalachia and through the Northeast. The Northeast, which by the way, per pound, has more higher education than any other place in the U.S. If you're wondering about closures, if you're wondering about layoffs and burgers in the Northeast of the Midwest, here's one reason. This also, if you want some humor from the situation, I enjoy the sight of elite liberal arts universities and colleges marketing themselves in Texas. It's comedy gold in all kinds of ways. In fact, you can see from Texas to the North Dakota, what the demographer Nathan Grant calls the alley of children, those are the places that are producing kids. And the racial breakdown changes as a result. So look at the very top left and you'll see that the white population of the U.S. is declining in relative terms. If you look at the bottom right, you'll see the black population is roughly stable, about 12.5% of the U.S. The interesting story is the top right where the Hispanic population, the second largest in the U.S., is just growing by leaps and bounds. On the bottom left, you can see the Asian population is also growing very rapidly. It's just not that large to start with, but very significant. Why does this affect you? Well, one is that our students change. We're approaching a time where the majority of students may be adults. We have more and more students for a first generation, which means, among other things, they cost more to support. We have students who increasingly have mental health challenges, increasingly have learning disabilities, and are politically active. A growing number of them are veterans. This is a shot from a wonderful session yesterday about how campuses can support people with military experience. Put all those together and we have a very, very different student body than what we used to expect. And this plays out directly in all kinds of ways. For example, academic achievement by race breaks down very, very strongly. Of all ethnicities in the United States, Asian Americans tend to have the highest chances of getting advanced degrees or undergraduate degrees. Hispanics have the lowest. This is a huge, huge gap in equity that we're working with now. Meanwhile, another way this plays out is by increasing political tension. For example, this is from the ADL. This is a chart of racist propaganda distributed on American campuses. And you can see that it's been shooting up, incident by incident, month by month. So the U.S. also wants to improve the quality of its undergraduate education and also wants to improve the quantity of students who are going through it. That plays out in some unusual ways. Around 2012, 2013, we reached the highest enrollment in undergraduate education America has ever seen. Every semester since then, total enrollment has gone down. We are right now about 8% smaller than we were in 2012, 2013. And you can see from this chart that it plays out differently across different sectors. The for-profits have really, really lost students. Many of them have closed. The community colleges on the far right have been losing students pretty steadily. Four-year publics have either been at best plateau or losing. So the enrollment has been shrinking. What classes we take have also changed, as well as our majors. So this is a massive chart. I'm just going to read to you the key parts of it. On the very top, you can see the fields that are gaining in numbers of majors. So exercise signs, computer science, nursing, health and medical, computer electrical engineering, detective pattern. Look at the bottom left. These are the ones that are losing majors. I'm talking about losing a third of their majors. History, religion, area studies, humanities, languages, English language, literature. As an English PhD, I can't look at this without weeping. But this trend is very deep. It's been happening for about a decade. It's likely to continue. So you want to think about your campus, depending on what kind of institution you are, and what degrees you provide, what faculty you hire. Meanwhile, our population and campus has changed in another way. Who works on campuses is different. So for the first time, since about 1910, the majority of faculty in the U.S. are part-timers. Tenure is a minority position and shrinking, continuing to. And if you look at the far left, the column there is non-teaching, non-faculty staff, which are the largest population on campus for the first time in American history. So who works on American campuses has changed. Now, I haven't gotten to the scary part. Anybody here have a background in economics? One person, hello. And he has a beard, so he is by nature wise. Economics is called the dismal science, and there are all kinds of great reasons for it, and let me show you one of them. One of the things that most of you have just lived through is a massive change in economic inequality in the U.S. So if you look at this chart, you can see on the left some peaks and then a plummet, and the middle third of it is really low. The vertical axis here is income inequality. And you can see over time, from roughly 1940 to about 1980, we were less unequal than about 1980 inequality revved up. And you can see how it shot up on the right. Irregardless of presidential administration, doesn't matter if it's recession or boom time, but we are more and more economically unequal. In fact, a Swiss bank refers to our time now as the new gilded age. They don't mean that as a criticism, they mean that as an investment opportunity, but it really describes us in many ways. But hang on one second, look at that middle third again. In that trough is when we redesigned American higher education for today. That's when the federal government played a role, that's when student loans came up, that's when community colleges boomed, state systems grew, baccalaureate institutions offered master's degrees, research universities sprout all over the place, that's when we redesigned American higher education. And if you want to understand one reason why higher ed is in a problem state right now, it's because we are out of time. We were built for a different era. One way that we respond to this financial situation is by privatizing public institutions. So now public institutions tend to get the majority of their income from something other than the state. In fact, some of the public universities I talked to get about 8% of their income from the state. Not to keep mentioning the University of Michigan, this is probably the last time, but here's a cute line from one of its great presidents. As university president, I used to explain that during this period, we'd evolved from a state supported, to a state assisted, to a state related, to a state located university. In fact, with Michigan campus is not located in Europe and Asia, we remain only a state molested institution, which is pretty funny to think about. But we responded another way. And this is some pretty subtle financial detail here. This is powerful stuff. Let me just explain for a second. Again, as an English professor talking about economics is still kind of wild from here. We've responded by changing what people actually pay. So we've been pushing tuition higher and higher and higher. I mean, I have a small prediction about when we get the first six-figure tuition, roughly five years. But not everybody pays that. It's like medical care or buying a used car. Here's the sticker price of what you actually pay is somewhere in between. That gap is called the discount rate. And the discount rate for American college universities has gone up and up and up. So if it's 52%, that means that the average student who goes to a campus that charges $50,000 for tuition actually only pays about $25,000. The economist, the magazine, calls this means testing for higher education. The wealthier students pay full price. They subvent and support the rest. Most economics journals think this is not sustainable. Here's the other way. $1.5 trillion is the amount of student debt. No other nation on earth has done this. Interesting. We haven't been an inspiration that way. Quick show of hands. How many of you are still paying off student loans? Okay, keep those hands up. If you didn't raise your hand, look around. If I asked this question 10 years ago, maybe half this many hands would go up. Thank you for raising your hands. This is quite innovation and quite a subject of dread. This is a game show where the winning prize is having your student loans paid off. And you can see that the prospective players are quite happy at this though. Because we don't allow discharging of student debt and bankruptcy, we now have the phenomenon of older people having more and more debt. This cartoon is pretty funny. Laugh if you can. And by the way, who holds most of this debt? Women. Every educational sector, every state, women hold more debt than men. All those slides I just showed you, all those trends, I wrapped together into the rubric of crunch time. As you can see, American academia is under enormous pressures. These are pounding on us, shaping us into something new. One of your tasks is to figure out how to respond. Some schools are already responding. I don't know if you saw this ad. You maybe have heard that the University of Alaska is enduring an incredibly brutal cut from its state government. They're talking about fusing three universities into one as a response. A few days after that appeared, the SUNY system published a Facebook ad. Worrying about the future of Alaska's universities? SUNY is accepting its students now. They took this down because it was considered a dirty pool. It's actually pretty smart to do. Competition between colleges and universities is only going to heat up, and this is going to look very polite. And it's not just us. You can see other institutions offering higher education in all kinds of different ways. But this is a technology conference. Why isn't he talking about technology? I think it's possible that if we do it right, we can use educational technology to help save higher education in the US. Let me show you some of the ways. When we talk about technology in general, we could spend weeks talking about all kinds of interesting developments. For example, we're getting closer and closer to fusion power, which is mind-blowing to think about. We're building more strong and powerful materials like graphene. We actually have the possibility of building a cable that can stretch from the earth's surface into earth's orbit. We have nanotechnology that proceeds at just incredible levels of building machines at the microscopic level. Through CRISPR technology, we can edit human and animal genes in ways that seem almost mythical. We already have some interesting bionic and cyborg developments, so that we now have sports groups going through science fiction ethical problems. What happens when a human being is part machine? How can they compete? And we already have been improving our ability to literally manipulate the human nervous system in brain, not to mention quantum computing, which could overturn almost everything we know about silicon-based computing. Let's put those aside for right now. Let's also just assume for the next five or 10 years a few things. Social media crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, open-source software data analytics, mobile computing, gaming, unification, virtualization, digitalization, digital story telling, always on media capture, always on surveillance hacking. That's normal ordinary stuff. We know about all that. It's all implicated. It's all stacked on top of each other. That's all short-term stuff. You know about it. Meanwhile, we continue to boost the processing speed of chips. We have more and more memory capacity. We make more and more data. We have more born digital content. We keep scanning the analog world in all kinds of ways. One way this plays out is that we're increasingly mobile. I mean, if you're looking at the web through a laptop or a desktop, you are now kind of obsolete. And you can see this from web design. If you look at a web page, instead of having three or four columns, increasingly it has one big blob of image. And the reason isn't because they site designers think you're a moron, usually. It's because you're likely to be viewing it on a tiny screen. Most people are using this to intersect with the world. Just one quick notice to remind you to think about how mobile-friendly your devices are and your software and your networks and your campuses. And also to remind you that in the United States, Blacks and Latinos are much more likely to spend more time on mobile devices than whites. Mobile is breaking down in some other interesting ways. So, for example, we have what you can think of as environmental computing. You think about Google Home. You think about Siri. You think about Alexa. We asked the great Phil Hill about the future of the learning management system. He said the next technology is going to be feeding the LMS into Alexa. So you can walk into your dorm room and say, Alexa, when's my next exam? And she says it started five minutes ago. That's actually pretty easy to program. We're also making more data and doing more stuff with it. There's some fantastic examples of people using data to really improve student lives and student outcomes. But we're also terrified of the problems of using data. I mean, the keynote that opened the speech by dear friend Robin DeRosa, beginning by showing you some of the many ways that data can be misused in the interest of racism, of inequality of all kinds of power and sheer incompetence. So we're trying to balance that right now. And a lot of sessions over the past day have been looking at this. We're also rapidly reaching the point where we're not going to talk about blended or flipped classrooms anymore, because we'll just do it. I mean, a classroom that isn't blended or flipped will have to have a name. You know, the unblended, the A flipped classroom, we don't know yet. But it's actually pretty hard to do that now. I mean, you have to wrap a room in a fairer day cage to get away with it. The learning management system of fully blown, mature technology continues to advance. Do we have any people here from Canvas? Hello, Canvas people. And again, a magnificent beard. I just have to say it. That really is. So how will the LMS world change? Well, one is by engaging more with open and open education. It'll come to in a minute. Another is by connecting more with the web, possibly allowing us to go back and forth at web links instead of one way. It may become social, rather than asocial. Or not. As online abuse, again, as Robert de Rosa mentioned, everything from gamer get on up grows more and more intense. It's possible that more and more students will deem it more prudent to have their online learning happening in a safe location like an LMS. We're also seeing a continued boost of images and particular video. And this is happening across every commercial sector in the world. In fact, I want you to think about a statement. Video is the new paper. We think about how much we use video. And we're doing a video conferencing right now. People watch Netflix, Apple TV. They watch, you know, Kulu. I mean, all kinds of consumption. We produce tons of video in all kinds of ways, some of which you might wish you've never seen before. Or since we use YouTube as a major publication platform, a video is increasingly expanding. And we have to keep an eye on that. Almost nothing is slowing it down. Meanwhile, virtual reality continues to grow in some very interesting ways. And again, if you haven't used VR, people will say the cliché is you can't be told about it. You have to experience it. It's completely true. And if you haven't been persuaded, please use the program tilt brush. Have you all used tilt brush already? A few people. If you haven't, it's a drawing program like Microsoft Paint, so you can just draw spaces. But it's in 3D. So you can draw a door, step through it, draw the other side of the door, spin it around, push it through your head. It's astonishing. It's really addictive. That's my big warning. Days can go by. But people use pedagogy. The pedagogy of VR is pretty obvious. It's basically visualization. We use it to visualize things that are difficult for students to understand visually. Meanwhile, we're building more and more augmented reality. This is a shot from a project some of my students did. They took the class over to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. And the Natural History Museum in its bone hall, its exhibit of wonderful skeletons, had AR content tacked on to almost every skeleton we could find. So you could walk around, for example, and see this ancient fish. And you could see it on your iPad moving back and forth. I mean, AR has some downsides, which we had to be careful of, of course. If this slide doesn't make sense to you, ask me afterwards. But AR has been growing rapidly. Now, that's a pretty conservative statement. What's more radical is when you think about fusing virtual reality, augmented reality, into what some call expanded reality, extended reality, or mixed reality. And this is when you can take digital content and intertwine it with the physical world around you. So if one of you is sitting there and you put on a mixed reality headset, you can see me waving at you from the front. And next to me, you may download a giant spider. Why? I don't know. But the spider may then walk across the room towards you, which would be frightening. And you all hear this person screaming and running away, and we can't tell why. You're going to be chased by imaginary spiders. Don't do that. But you could do more with mixed reality. I mean, for example, I'll come back to this in a second. There's a wonderful mad scientist at Worcester Polytech, who focuses on visualizing biological data. Tricky stuff, hard to visualize. So he has a wonderful project for proteins, where, as you can see from here, the proteins exist, displayed over what he's looking at. So this is him in his office. The protein is now over one of his desks, and he can spin it with his hands, zoom in, zoom out, command it with his voice, pinch it to shrink it, expand it. He now has this with the human brain. So he can sit there and see this brain moving across his desk. Other people can see and interact with it as well. Why does this matter? A, it's really cool. B, there are all kinds of pedagogical powers to it. And C, in 1968, Doug Engelbart gave the mother of all demos. If you haven't seen it, I strongly recommend it. It's a fantastic video. The great Engelbart introduces the mouse, the Windows interface, word processing, and the active hyperlink all at once. And he's doing this very calmly. And you can hear the audience just kind of shrieking with terror at times. What do you mean you click on it and it opens? What magic is this? It's fantastic. So the Windows interface, the keyboard, the mouse, right? We happy passed it. Because Dimitri Korkin uses this interface with his hands and his voice. We may have just upended a half century of computing so good to know. Magic Leap produces one of the great mixed reality headsets, and this is their map for where they'd like to see mixed reality happen. I call this map most of human civilization. There's other technologies too. We've been talking about open, so open education keeps growing, open access to the sky, the publishing keeps growing, open teaching is growing. In fact, there was a wonderful project from Columbia University where they just looked at all the syllabi they could find for higher education and crunched them together to find one of the most commonly taught books and articles in the U.S. Amazing thing to do. And you can't do that with syllabi that are not in the open. In fact, we're seeing textbook spending drop steadily. And when I showed this figure to different campuses, it's interesting because faculty say, I'm not sure if this is good. The students will say, what is wrong with that? Nothing is wrong with that. This is awesome. This is great. More or more or less, less, less, if you will. We already have Z degrees, degrees where you can achieve a degree with spending Z for zero money on materials. This is all open. At some point in the next few years, what we should tip in point where the majority of textbook spending will be in open. Meanwhile, the humanities, my field, the laggards, the last to figure out technologies exist. We get excited about cable TV. We have a digital enterprise, a digital humanities. I mean, I haven't seen people talking about it here this week, but this is a great enterprise or people using digital technologies to address humanities questions. Meanwhile, we use higher power machines to simulate the world. Way back at the beginning of this presentation, I mentioned climate change. Climate science is based in part on complex powerful simulations of the way the world works of integrating tons of different forces and data together. We're building more and more simulations. In fact, one of the things I'm waiting to see more of is political candidates publishing more simulations of how their tax policies will play out so that you as a voter can consider them. Meanwhile, we have a community of scholars that is largely online. Yes, we do this right now. We meet face to face every so often. We do have physical artifacts like books. That's the term. But we spend most of our time using social media, email, video conferencing, just to keep in touch with each other. There are other technologies to think about. I haven't heard anybody mentioning blockchain this week, but we already have now a durable use of blockchain to back student transcripts, which simply works right now. We also have 3D printing. So if you want to visualize 3D printing, over here is the 2D printer, the Xerox machine. Over here is a Star Trek replicator. We're right about here. We're pushing this way. The stuff that we're printing with 3D is astonishing. Architects are competing to see how big a building they can print. NASA has printers and orbits that can print new construction materials. We have, in the medical world, people printing all kinds of body parts. And worse of all, in Britain, they tried to print food. Don't think about that very hard. One Japanese company has an interesting process, combining 3D printing and big data, where you give them a sample of your biome, they analyze the kind of minerals that you have in your body, then they print you sushi accordingly. This may be horrifying. This may be medicinal. This is not science fiction. This is real. And these are my students rapidly printing out projects. We also sometimes use 3D printing as the anchor for maker spaces, which you're all familiar with, I'm sure. Put all these together, and you have this fascinating phenomenon of students as producers, students as makers, students creating works. You have to wonder when libraries will start publishing and supporting more student products and how we sustain them in prison even more time. Okay, that's a whole parcel of trends. Let me wrap this up. Where is this all going? Crunch time, right? I don't know if you saw this cover. Consumer Reports is the most boring magazine on earth. It has no imagination whatsoever. It is as dry as dust. I mean, you don't want to hear beautiful prose about toasters, right? This was their cover article. I kind of ruined my life going to college. Are we in a bubble? We have increasing anxieties about cost and about debt. Some of the grad schools have been suffering badly. MBA enrollment has ticked down. Law school enrollment is at 1970s levels. And we have both political parties squeezing higher red to reform if we wanted or not. In 2013, I referred to this as peak higher education, like peak car or peak sand that we reached the upper point. I published this and said, please talk me out of it, say this isn't happening. And people said, no, it's happening. We just don't want to talk about it. We've responded in some interesting ways. One is by cutting. So for example, I call this the queen sacrifice. In chess, if you give up your queen piece, it's your most powerful piece. It's a desperate measure you do to try and win the game. My analogy on campus is that tenured faculty are the queen pieces. They have governance. They have tenure. They have the center of the campus in a lot of ways. So I've been tracking campuses that fire tenured faculty, not staff, not adjuncts, but tenured faculty. There are a lot of ways of doing this. You can declare financial exigency. You could end the program. There are lots of ways of doing this. This keeps happening every month across the US. Meanwhile, there are closures and near closures and near death experiences. You think of Hampshire College, for example, which may or may not survive. Or here, a Connecticut school in a Vermont school decided to merge. We have more and more mergers as we have fewer and fewer students. So for you, how can you save the day? Well, here's one way. The number of students who are taking online classes keeps ticking up. It keeps growing. The number of students taking face-to-face classes is ticking down. So where does this end up? At some point, we may have parody where face-to-face students equal online students. We may also have the point where online students end up paying for face-to-face students, quantity and quality. You will also get to use all these technologies to help improve the quality of this experience, to improve retention, to improve student success. Title of this talk was about brilliant machines and brilliant technologies. I just gave you a whole list of them. I'm going to close with the scariest one, the most exciting one. So we talk about automation and we really aren't talking about it seriously yet. We haven't really thought about this very hard. I mean, the humble drone, which some of you may own and fly and have drone races with, has already changed photography. In Israeli security firm, by the way, just figure out how to use a drone to hack self-driving cars. They can project the wrong speed limit on a wall. The self-driving car sees that and reacts accordingly. They already projected it so fast that humans can't see it. Just a flicker. How important is automation? This is from the company that owns Google. In the long run, I think we will evolve in computing from a mobile first to an AI first world. So think about this in education. We're not mobile first yet, and we're heading that way, but we're not there yet, really. What does it mean to have a campus that's AI first, where your student information services are AI first, your LMS is AI first? It's already happening in the rest of society. Education is behind. We have robots being used in industry all over the place. We have robot cars. We have self-driving cars. We have robots being used at war. Spam bots make more content than humans, though. We have high-frequency trading, so if you don't like AI or don't care about it, your retirement funds, such as they are, are already partially constructed by software. Then we have machines being creative. Here's a photo of my son. He's a history major at the University of Vermont. He's disturbingly tall. I caught him sleeping. Why? Because I'm that kind of father. I took this photo and I fed it into some Google software called DeepDream. It started getting creative with it, creating more images and more designs. This was the computer I didn't do anything for, except hit again. Now let's add some more hardware. Let's add more robots. Three possibilities. One possibility is that you all get to enjoy your retirement starting at age 20. It's possible that we could automate a lot of jobs and not replace them. The history of technology is that we automate jobs, but then we make new ones. For example, the Northeast used to ship ice along the Atlantic down to the South. That's how the South did refrigeration. We admitted HVAC, got rid of the ice industry, but we grew a much bigger industry. Since 1990, this has not been happening. We have not been growing new jobs through technology. Technology actually employs relatively few people. It makes a lot of money, but it's pretty small as a labor force. It's possible we could have a future widespread unemployment. Second possibility, we actually get creative and make new jobs. AI ethicists, for example, is one that we badly need. Third possibility, this busts. The AI is a disaster that it flops and we don't use it for 10 years, and that takes over. This is my favorite possibility, and this is what I'd like you to think about. This is a Canadian instructional designer named Darcy Norman, and he's shaking hands with a robot. Think about political scientists. Teaching policy 101, you have to engage with students. You have to take them all to pedagogical work, but they also have to run software. If they're teaching elections, they have to crunch a ton of data. If they're teaching theory, they have to do a lot of data mining for all of that. Think about people in healthcare. Think about people in English, people in French who have to run software and do their work to analyze their student behavior. Increasingly, we are metaphorically cyborgs. In the classroom and in support, we are running software to help us out. Now, there's other possibilities to think about. We can replace some classes with apps. Right now, I'm taking German on Duolingo. It's about as good as, say, 12th grade German right now. Take that five years from now. See where it goes. We have computer-resistant creativity. But think about this. What's the job of your campus? If students are going to face widespread under-employment, do you have to change your entire curriculum so they can prepare themselves for a different world? Or do the humanities come back because your students will face downtime and they'll have the leisure to read 18th-century poetry? Think about this question. One of the reasons self-driving cars are taking off is because insurance companies like them. Why? At their worst, they are better drivers than you are. Americans kill about 30,000 people a year on the road and aim a lot more. Self-driving cars are better than them. Microsoft has a software unit that does auto transcription and they are now more precise than human transcribers. Well, if this keeps going, we get that feeling, you know, when a parent, when your child is taller than you and bigger than you and more terrifying than you. What happens when our machines exceed us? No other sector of society can think about this as well as us. Do you want Congress to think about this? Hollywood gives us some bad nightmares but a lot of stupidity. Your campus has philosophers, computer scientists, ethicists. This is the place for thinking about the 21st century. This is one of the great missions unfolding for American higher education. That's how we can handle crunch time with these brilliant machines. Now, I've been going on for some time and I haven't heard from you at all. What I would like to hear from you are which of these trends that you see as most powerful, the hardest to predict? And how do you respond to them? How do you make them work for your institution? Thank you. Now, I would go over and greet Tom, but I am tethered by this cable to the laptop, so I'm kind of stuck right now. We will come to you and say thank you very much for this keynote and for the gift. Oh, thank you so much. Open now or open later. Oh, I'll hide the chair. Do you want to say thank you very much? Brian, do you need a Superman about this? No. Okay, just a second. The experiment is, Brian has been broadcasting this year to his audience in the future and in his forum. And we have our usual Q&A and it's related to all of you. It's a email, you and anyone in your guidebook app. And you can also go to the guidebook website and ask questions and answers. But we're also going to bring Brian to feed up on the screen as well. Perfect. As well, you can make up questions and ideas. So we're kind of around problems. If I have a conference monitor back, I'll say what's going on. So can I read that one? Thank you, Brian. Oh, you're welcome. It is inspiring to think about how colleges and universities around the world are creating innovative ways to reach out to more and more people that help them to learn. I agree. That's one of the things that this room is doing. For always on learning, to teaching mobile devices, this is one of our missions to expand that quantity of higher education. Thank you. So anybody who is right now equipped with both a microphone and a camera, if you would like to join me up on stage, simply click the raised hand button and I can bring you up on stage. We also have the podium live, which is that teal colored box. So you can just click that if you're in a special hurry and you can join us. And we'll see if we can get one person's having technical issues. We'll see if you can come up. And while Eric Spielvogel is trying to get up, I'm going to publish a text question that just came in. So this is from young Carlo Brato, who asks, do blended students still outperform students taking the same class face to face or just online? If so, what will it take to improve the quality of online learning? This is a terrific question. So far, the research that we've seen has been that blended learning is the best pedagogical format that we've got. And that's one that is in some ways the most expensive to support in terms of money, but also time. Yet it is very, very effective. So one question is for wholly online learning, what are some of the methods that we can use to make that as good as blended learning? Now, in the past day and a half, the past two days, this group has been touching on many, many of those ways from using synchronous and asynchronous technologies to using experiential learning online to using simulations. I mean, this is a very, very important question, young Carlo. And I think we're working on this very hard. Can you say that first half again? That's a fantastic question. Different types of AI. I mean, so right now we have the ability to do a lot of data mining, a lot of data analysis, and some good prediction. There's a meteorologist I know who claims that within three weeks of the class beginning, he can predict with about 90% accuracy which students will pass or fail. Now, he's the prof who does this, and he's also a nerd. So you can imagine instructional technologists having this ability to add to a classroom, and how that changes intervention, how that changes advising. So I think we're already seeing that. But, you know, let's go a little bit further further ahead. If we can write software that instructional technologists can use for their work, specifically for helping design classes, imagine what kind of predictive analytics I can give, but also what kind of suggestions, what kind of creativity. I think we should wait for the first AI software for instructional technology to happen. Call it ID AI. Well, let's say we have another question that just came up, and this is from the excellent Tom Hames in Texas. He says, would you say we're still in the 1.0 phase of Alan Messis? How are today's Alan Messis fundamentally different from those of the 1990s? That's a pretty barbed question. In many ways, they share the similar morphology of the 1990s. I mean, we've seen year in and year out that the campus computing survey reveals the main use of the LMS is for faculty to push several documents and students. And so we were doing that in the late 1990s, and we're doing that now. We've atom-rated this. We've added numerous features. We've grown new platforms and new services. So I'd say we're not in 1.0. We're in 1.8 or 1.9. Is it possible that we tip over into 2.0? That's what we're looking for. How do I not get overwhelmed? A couple of ways, and they always involve exploiting people without paying them. One is that I do this work full-time year in and year out. It's a lot of work, and it's impossible for one person to do. So in all seriousness, there are hundreds of people who think with me about this around the world. People who share stories, articles, opinions. They share news and information, and I get to bounce ideas off of them. And that networking really is powerful. I get to see more. I get to be smarter. My work is sharper and more useful. And if it's not, they tell me really fast. So that's one way. A second, you know, I'm talking about the importance of adult learners, but I keep coming back to kids. I just want you to think about this. Imagine if when you were born, the first big event in your life was the 2008 financial crash. And all the promises of a boom economy that your parents and other adults know haven't been part of your life at all. And then you're told that the earth is heating up, that climate change is happening, and adults know it and are making it worse with their eyes open. There's actually an interesting movie called The Age of Stupid. It describes our time about this. And so you look at that. This generation also knows that they are less likely to make as much money as their parents. And it's remarkable they haven't started shooting us. And we hate them. We blame millennials for killing everything, right? For killing diamonds, for killing tourism, for killing fun. And what do they do? They go to work. They take our classes, they take on debt, and they work harder. They're creative. I don't think we deserve them. I look at these kids and think they are magnificent. And that keeps me from being overwhelmed. Good question. We have one from Penn State. Let me see if I... Okay. You need to unmute yourself. All right. So I think one of the things that's been interesting about this AI discussion is I think there's historically the kind of the data sets we've been working with in terms of looking at learning and kind of what we know about the world or human behavior has been around kind of what we see in a classroom or maybe the province of like one scientist or a group of scientists. Now that we have these tools and we can do these types of, you know, take a look at what's happening in the data and apply AI things to kind of look at these things. Do you think that the shift in terms of who gets to say what is valid knowledge is going to change away from kind of the faculty, disciplinary community, the faculty, you know, as the gatekeeper for what is knowledge, do you think there's going to be a shift? And that is as we've kind of become more sophisticated in our ways of understanding learning. There's a three-way arms race happening right now. And that's a great question. Is this another person from Penn State? How many Penn State people are here? This is fantastic. The arms race on one side is people using AI to make all kinds of stuff that isn't necessarily good. So you've all heard about deep fakes, for example, which are getting better and better. We have all kinds of ways to produce, to use AI to produce things that are unpleasant or scamming. So that's one leg of the race. The other is technological tracking with it. So everything from the idea of digital watermarks, again, to being able to use AI to detect false content. And the third is human digital literacy, where we're trying to teach people to be more and more effective in their ability to assess what is good, what is good quality, what is true. Robin mentioned Mike Caulfield, for example. I would mention the work of librarians and information literacy. But I think that competition is unspooling rapidly right now. There's an interesting short story by Carl Schroeder called Noon in the Anti-Library, where a bunch of maligned actors deploy AI to take down people in public by creating fake information or fake videos about them. And the response is to build an elaborate, blockchain-backed map of ground truth on the surface of the planet Earth. Sounds like wild science fiction for about six months, I think. So that's one possible solution. I mean, this is a great question that you ask. We have all kinds of challenges and possibilities. When it comes, if I can pick out one part of your question, though, when you mention faculty, I think faculty have lost a lot of power as the arbiters was true and real, in part because we have so many other arbiters. We have so much other media that we're kind of outflanked and outnumbered. But this is also a lowercase d-democratic problem. If we were democratizing information and if we were democratizing AI, how do we productively handle this the right way? That's a staggering question, a huge one. And again, one for academia to work on. Oh, thank you, David. And we have time for lightning round. How universities can stay relevant? Some won't. Some will make that a pride, a thing to be proud of, that they are retro. I'm expecting to see some universities proudly proclaim that there are no technology zones and that they will have, they'll be teaching things that you don't need an iPad for. Other universities will fail. And we've already been seeing this with campuses shutting down or being merged. And the situation out there is much worse than it sounds. In fact, I don't need for her this, the state of Massachusetts has a legal system now where if you are running a college or university and you think you're about to go out of business, you can inform the state, but you can now do it secretly because if you did it in public, that may actually kill your institution. And the state is so concerned about this, they have policies designed to try and keep colleges and universities afloat. How we can keep relevant? Think of the future, not the past. That's so hard. I mean, if you ask people their favorite music, it's usually what they listen to when they're 16. And if you ask a lot of academics about their favorite teaching experience, they often talk about what it was like to be an undergrad. And that's great. That's wonderful history. But we need to think about these changes. We need to think about how demography, technology, economics are pushing a new future and to grab onto that. I mean, academics are enormously imaginative and creative creatures. We have so much capability to imagine something new and then to implement it. We can do this, but we have to really be serious about it. One step would be to read a lot more science fiction. That's a great question. Thank you, Brian, for an inspiring keynote. Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Alexander. Thank you all. Thank you all for your attention. That's your great questions. Thank you. We are going to bring our team up to the stage. So, Wendy, Bridget, Randall. Testing, testing. And we're going to close out strong. Okay. Now, friends, after having listened to my long, long speech, you have some more questions and comments. So, let me bring a couple of these up. Kate Borowski asks, how much is lack of reliable internet access in rural areas, people, walls, potential students? This is enormously true, Kate. This is a major problem with a gap between rural and urban America continues to widen. We really need to address this. Thank you. Two questions from Charles Finley, who asked about the environmental emergency. Can reduce campus impact by scheduling only classes one day a week or three days? That's a brilliant question. That's a brilliant question. We may just see that kind of natural happening. We're going to have to really reschedule things just in case of this. I go a little bit further and say that while we do that, we're also going to have to think about using more distance learning and more robotics in order to keep all these things going at the same time. That's a really good question. I'd also add to this a little bit more. And Tom Bradley, which I'm in, no doubt with some more thoughts. We think about campuses that are in danger of being flooded. And let me bring up Tom Haymes, who has another question. Tom, are you there? Yeah, hold on. There we go. Can you hear me? Perfectly. All right. Now, I just had a follow up to my other question, which is what do you think LMS 2.0 looks like? That's sort of what I was trying to get you at. I phrased it a little bit badly. No, no, I think there's no phrase. I think what we could do is make LMS 2.0 a suite of tools that are available. And those areas are different parts. I don't know how many people would adopt that, but I think we're already seeing this in practice. If you think about Google Apps for Education, basically the kind of disintegrated LMS or what we can do now, couple together with WordPress, for example. But I think that may be the next step. And we may not even call it the LMS. We may just call it the LMS. Right. I mean, I'm already sort of doing a lot of that in a hybrid space in the sense that I'm using WordPress and Draw.io and things like that, rather than the LMS, because the tools that I need in order to do what I think I need to do in the classroom are simply not available in most LMSs. And the other thing would be a video conferencing solution like we're working with right now, to where you have that immediacy of contact. And again, most LMSs don't support synchronous learning in any way, because they assume asynchronous learning. I have a blog post coming up where I try to imagine what happens to everything by video. So, you know, the all video LMS, for example. Yeah, sure. Well, you'd want, yes, you want a package of tools, just like you were saying a minute ago. So, I'm going to need to wrap this up. Tom, thank you. It's always good to hear from you. Your questions are always both really sharp and very provocative. I just want to touch on a couple more comments of people that I don't want to lose anybody here. Let's see. We had a quick conference civil. Just excited about writing. There's two open pedagogy and more accessibility and giving more control on agency projects and deadlines. Fantastic civil. Agreed. Well, let me then wrap this up. Let me say first of all, thank you all for contributing to this very interesting experiment. I appreciate your patience and flexibility. This was everything that you added to it. Next week, we have an extravagantly cool guest. We have John Warner, who is not only a founding editor of McSweeney's Interintendency. He's a regular inside high-rate columnist, a great thinker about writing. He'll be talking to us about teaching writing and technology. Our book club is getting ready for its next vote, so I want to hear your science fiction ideas. We have our bookstore standing open for business. And if you want to keep these conversations going, please let us know. And I'd love to hear from you what you thought about today's experiment. In the meantime, thank you all so much for your patience and flexibility. It's been wonderful talking with you as ever. I wish you the best and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.