 Well, everybody is coming on in, introducing themselves. Let me welcome everybody to the top of the hour and this week's Future Transform. My name is Brian Alexander, I'm the forum's host. I'm its cat herder, creator, and your guide to the next hour of conversation. I'm delighted to see you all here today because I'm especially excited about this week's dynamic and wonderful guest. Now, ever since we've been doing the Future Transform, so almost six years now, we've been focusing on teaching, on how to improve teaching, on what good teaching is. We've hit this from a variety of angles. Today, I'm especially excited to welcome one of the world's great thinkers, practitioners, and overall inspiring people on this subject. Jose Antonio Bolin has been many things. He's a terrific jazz musician, an accomplished scholar, a university president, a consultant, and just a general brilliant person to get in trouble with. He's really famous for his first book, the first title, Teaching Naked, as well as a sequel. And just now, he's come up with a new book on teaching change from Johns Hopkins University Press. And this is about how to change teaching as well as how to teach students how to change their minds and to think more clearly. Now, let me bring Jose Bolin up on stage so that he can join us and we can learn more. Greetings, sir. Hi, Brian, how are you? I can hear you just perfectly. How are you doing, sir? Things are good. I'm glad to be here. It's really an honor. Well, it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure to have you here. And I gather you're coming to us from your home office in Dallas, Texas. Yep, yep, we're living in Dallas now. It has great airports. We like it here. Oh, good. We have more than a few Texans among the crowd, so I'm glad to see you there. Listen, Jose, there's so many ways for me to talk about you and tell people about you, but I'd rather you tell them about yourself through a specific angle. Tell people what you're gonna be working on for the next year. What are the big projects or what are the big ideas that are top of mind? Yeah, so this book was going to, really I wanted this to be the nudge book. So I had been interested in this idea of nudges and things that we can do to help students do the work that only they can do. And so choice architecture. So things like when you send students a text, they opt in and rather than saying, would you like to get email from us saying, you're getting email from us unless you opt out. Things like when I send to Texas says, would you like help with financial aid? That's good, but it's much better to say, would you like help with financial aid? Click here, the student has to actually do something yes or no. So that work overlaps with a lot of the work I did for teaching change. I was thinking about how do I get, how do you get people to vote more, lose weight, stop smoking, floss more? Whoever thought there's a mobile health journals, but ended up the book was too long anyway, so we split it. So I was gonna do this as a separate sort of book on just the nudges and the kind of the big institutional things. And this book ended up being about, more about the classroom and about the psychology of teaching change. But then I got sidetracked because of course the last two years have happened. So I'm actually writing a short book on inclusive teaching because that's what I've been, other than the things I was asked to do in the last year, help faculty pivot online and talk about inclusive teaching. And so there are lots of people who are talking about the specific part of, how do you have difficult conversations? How do you talk about race? What's an anti-racist? But I wanted to talk about all good teaching is inclusive teaching. If you're not inclusive teacher, you're not a good teacher. So I wanted to talk to the math people and the STEM people and the people who say, well, I just teach content and say, well, no, but a better syllabus and more rubrics are going to help. I love this idea from John Powell called targeted universalism, which is that what you really wanna do is think about ways that I can do things that won't hurt anybody, but their greatest benefit is to people who either don't know the rules or have some other issue. So a great idea is ATM machines, right? The first ATM machines, more people made mistakes, they had smaller buttons, somebody made the buttons bigger, right? Nobody is harmed by that, but people who are visually impaired get the most benefit. So it's targeted, it's also called universal design, but I like the idea of targeted universalism because the targeted piece means I think about what should I do for first generation students that won't be obvious to them? That's obvious to me, because I live here and I need to make clear for them. And so that's actually what I'm gonna do the next year. And then I'll come back to nudges because the truth is, right? Fewer people deal with systems of things like, email reminders and lighting, dorm room lighting. It's just not as interesting to lots of people, but the truth is if you really wanted to improve student learning, right? I built these weird crazy dorms when I was at Goucher and we thought about, right, they're smaller rooms, they're double, they're narrower, right? The further you are from the bathroom is as a freshman, the first semester, the more likely you are to graduate on time. That's not just Goucher data, that's national data. You make more friends, right? Relationships, right? If you're next to the bathroom, you go back and forth, if you're in a single, right, you don't meet as many people. Quads actually are even better, but that's a harder sell. But things like blue light, right? So you should turn off all the blue light in all of your dorm rooms at 10 o'clock at night, especially if you have eight o'clock classes because they're not gonna get enough sleep and so when you don't get enough sleep, you think everybody's out to kill you. Literally, right? Think about it, you're waking in the middle of a night, you're in the savannah, you're in the jungle, you get woken up, you're, right? I don't have time to go friend or foe. No, the default is everybody's a foe. And so all sorts of things are related to sleep. So there's actually a lot about sleep in the nudge book. But anyway, you asked me what I was doing and that's not this book, but that's the next one. The next book, that's right, yeah. Oh, that's great, that's great. Oh, we're looking forward to seeing that. Well, you know, your head's always in the next space. It's like, you know, this book I wrote, that I finished six months ago. It's like, what's in that book? That's all I'm gonna tell you. Well, that's where it's a book. You can always go back to it. Friends, I'm gonna ask Jose, just a couple more questions, but the forum is here for your questions. The forum is here for you to share your thoughts and your requests. And Jose, as you can tell, will be glad to answer them. And like almost no other guest in the forum, I can say, he can riff on your questions. The one question to ask is, you have this great, great model in the first part of the book, first third of the book, where you talk about the importance of rethinking our memory in terms of organizing our memory and how we search and find things. You have this great metaphor, first, to have a closet, that our memory is this giant closet that we organize, and everybody organizes it differently. So you have these good tips for professors, instructors in general, on how to get students to surface their own categories. But then we also look into this closet, not with a broad view, but with this narrow view of flashlight, so you ask us to train ourselves to use that flashlight really well. I hope I'm not manning it so far, but can you just speak a little bit about that metaphor? It has blown away by it. I thought it was so elegant and powerful. Well, I wish I'd invented it, but it's borrowed from lots of other psychologists who do work on cognitive load and memory. And so, but yeah, you've got it right. The analogy for the brain, right? The brain is not a computer, right? In fact, we always use like new technologies. So the 18th century, they thought brains were like clocks or about machines or whatever. And so, the brain is really like a giant closet. And so when stuff comes in, you organize it. And so, my wife organizes shoes in one way. Here I hear closet is set up by function and color. Heels are over here. And my closet is organized. The tennis shoes are here, the soccer shoes. And it's like, I don't care what color they are. I guess I have black and brown. And in fact, one of my editors, somebody in the process said, well, but don't you have to wear white shoes for tennis? And I said, not anymore. And I said, but that tells me what's in your closet, right? That tells me that you organize things in a certain way and that's generational. So everybody has a different organization. So you've got to know, and if I'm talking to a chef about fish and I say, this new fish is like, Opaka-Paka. And they go, oh, yeah, I know what that's like. Or it's a little bit like halibut, it's like, no, it's kind of like turbo. It's like, I don't know what any of those things mean. I'm an expert and I'm speaking to you as a student and the novice is going, I don't have any of those signposts. So as a teacher, all of us do this, right? We start talking up here and realize, and the way I actually understood that, I realized this. So I had a video game I had designed for students to learn how to tell the difference between Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, et cetera. And so you click on, listen to the sample and who's playing the trumpet? And this poor kid comes, and so, there's several levels of this. And so you have to get to level nine to get an A, right? Cause they're like, they're 10 levels. So you keep playing the game all semester long. And this poor kid comes to me and says, Professor, what's a trumpet? Right, is that different than a banjo? And it's like, oh, of course, right? I just assume everybody knows the difference. And so it's like, so I created new levels. This is a clarinet. This is a banjo. This is a trumpet. And then this is the difference between trumpet and trombone. And once, until you can tell the difference between trumpet and trombone, don't even try to tell the difference between Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, right? So we always start as experts and we have, and it's also, memory is easy for us because we have all these connections where things are connected. And my favorite is that I remember the green album at the end of the row where they had that song I like on it. And Google is good at a lot of things. And iTunes and, but it's not good at that. It can't tell me, play the song that's on the green album at the end of the row. But that's actually how the brain works. And so on the one hand, all of our organization's little system is different. But we also don't have overhead lighting. We have this little flashlight. And so in music, my music students for years, what's the first word of pay attention, right? Pay, it costs something. So if you're asking people to pay attention, you have to realize that they're having to give up something else to do it. And so when we tell our students, I want you to pay attention to this. Well, the first thing is, is it worth it? And the human brain is designed to reject most stimuli, right? We are, there's just too much coming at us. In fact, I had an anthropologist tell me that if we actually process all the information that would come in, we'd need a brain the size of a house and our neck wouldn't support it. So we gave up that for mobility because being mobile is a little bit better for survival. So we have what, you know, Daniel Kahnem called system one a system two, right? We have a fast system that says, reject, reject, reject. And the best way to think about this is when you're reading email, you could read every word, but nobody does, right? But if it's an article about you, you read, right? All of a sudden your attention is engaged, you're, hi, this is an article about me, right? So you have a rational brain in there that can fully process all the information, but you don't use it most of the time. Most of the time you're in the store and it's like, 999, that's cheaper than 10. And it's like, you know that's not, but you do it. And so that's also one of the things I learned, right? Going to the grocery store is choice overload. You are not in a good mood. Do not try to study or work when you go to the grocery store because it's lots of little inconsequential choices. Your cognitive load is now depleted. Your emotional bandwidth is depleted. So you're now going to get more tense when you can't do a math problem, right? So those are the kinds of things that, I mean, understanding the big picture about how the human brain works allows us to start thinking about redesigning the process of education and redesigning our classrooms. So that we're considering, well, why would they be paying attention? What are they paying attention to? So I think that's the big picture of where to start. And I've focused in this book on how teaching change is really, really hard. And again, if you want to get people to vote more to lose weight, stop smoking, those are big changes. And so there's a lot of research on what works and what doesn't work. And the first thing, not a surprise to anybody, right? You want to change your behavior. You want to go to the gym more. You need friends who go to the gym more, right? You want students to study more, right? Actually roommate selection matters that if your roommate studies more, you will study more. And what's interesting is that your roommate affects your behavior, but only in the ways that you can see. So that if your roommate is having like, you know, lots of sexual partners that's not in the room, it doesn't change your behavior, right? But if you can see your roommate studying, you go, wow, that person, maybe I should be studying more. And so like anything else, you want to study more, get friends that study more. You want to study more, make an appointment with yourself, right? What's called the implementation effect, right? So not just how many hours a week are you going to study this week, but when and where? Put it into your phone so that you get a reminder that says at seven o'clock, you're supposed to be in the library. The data on this, there's a nine-fold increase. Nine-fold! Oh my God, what else do we do with a nine-fold increase in the people who actually study then now on Tuesday at seven o'clock? Because you said you were going to study three hours, but now, so part of the book is about, you know, those sorts of techniques, and part of the book is about, you know, things that we do in classroom to make discussion better, to create more resilience, that sort of stuff. Which is great. I mean, every chapter has stacks of tips and practices. But before I say anything more, there are questions coming in, and I want to make sure that people get to ask them. So Charles Finley asks, hang on one second, I'll try that again. Charles Finley asks, inclusive teaching, how do we nudge learners to help us see where we are not inclusive or overlooking them? Great, well, thanks, Charles. So the first thing is, you know, is a tone of syllabus matters, right? The way that you set up your e-communication policy and literally tone of voice. So for example, there's a study that says, instead of saying, students will, you know, your learning outcomes, just saying we will, changing a simple word, changes, oh, I'm more likely to ask for help now. So when you ask, when you do a pre-class survey, or you do a survey two or three weeks in, just the fact that you're doing it says that you care. And students are like, they're more likely to say stuff. And so a pre-class survey is good, but I got to give a Bonnie Stohovia credit for this, because, you know, we always, a lot of us do these pre-class surveys, but her question's a brilliant one. She started saying, tell me when you do your best work as a pre-class survey. Because I'm asking about you and we're all more willing to talk about ourselves. So rather than what do you know about my subject, what are the things that you write? How do you do your best work? How could I help you do your best work? That's a much more inviting question to students. You can then ask, what do you know about my subject? But for the most part, asking students, what's working, what's not working, and also having private conversations. So if you're face-to-face, that means, in the hallway, I stand at the doorway, both on the way in and the way out, or at least I used to before COVID made do, I got to give you six feet. But I would learn names on the way in and on the way out. Are there anything I can help you with? I get just the effort of doing that, and students are more likely to say, well, I'm confused about this. And if you really want to go a whole hog, really the best way to do this is to have children and send them to college and have them talk to you. Because I learned so much when my daughter went to college, and I'll tell only one story, was that she texts me one night, because of course she's not going to call, and says, dad, dad, why do some professors only assign the odd number of problems? It's like, well, maybe the answers to the even ones are in the back, or maybe they want to give you half as many, or they're rather trying to be nice. No, dad, tell me the truth, what's really going on? You think there's a conspiracy? And your dad's a college professor, and you've been in this world for your whole life, and you're confused about odd, it never occurred to me that somebody might see only do the odd number of problems and think we were scheming for something. It's like, what? So the truth is, we live here, and so the way to think about it for me is imagine how you feel when you go to the gym, and you have some fitness instructor with the big muscles in the tank top, and you're going, you like the gym too much, like you do push-ups for fun, right? You just think this is great, it's like, I want to go home, I need motivation. I'm not going to spend my whole life in here doing push-ups, but that's what students see when they look at us, right? They see somebody who loves the library or loves school so much, we never wanted to leave. We look like that big muscly guy at the gym who's a fitness instructor, and so we have to assume that we liked school and it worked for us, and it doesn't actually work for most people. They just want to graduate and get out of here, and so it's a mindset in my view. I hope that helps, Charles. Oh, it's a great question, Charles, and I love how your answer really just shows it and emphasizes us caring and what a big difference that makes. There are more questions coming in, one from Tom Hames, just down the road from New Jose near Houston, and Tom asks, how did pandemic teaching impact your view of teaching or not? Oh, so the pandemic, so, well, okay, so the easy answer is we've all learned that students like chat, right? And that, in fact, there was a study that just came out today, a Dana study, I think, that said students are more engaged in online learning than in face-to-face lectures, and that was not a great headline, because what they really found was that students asked more questions because the chat is easier, the bar is lower, I can say, wait, I don't understand. I use something called Go Soapbox, which has a confusion barometer, and students just have to click the confused, and so when that goes red, I say, oh, right, and so now in the face-to-face, I was looking around the room, right, good teachers, I always say good teachers teach to the middle, right? Video games teach to individuals because a video game can get, right, if it's too easy, it gets harder. If it's too hard, it gets easy, right? Video games adapt to each individual in ways that we just can't do. So a good teacher looks around and goes, okay, everybody looks confused, I'm gonna slow down. Everybody looks bored, right? We make adjustments, but online, the students can send us things they can chat, so one of the things, I'm still trying to forget the right platform, but I think going back into the face-to-face classroom, especially in larger classrooms, you've got to have a back channel. So on my website at teachingmaker.com under borrow, I've got a whole page full of different types of back channels, what works for this, what does that, word clouds, so those sorts of things are engaging. Again, we have new study today that says they are more engaging, so I think that's gonna stick. And so I think it also convinced a lot of us that we could do things we didn't think we could do, right? That we could change, that faculty development really matters, right? That faculty are hungry for this, and that given the opportunity, in this way as we were forced, we say, oh, actually, this is a better way to teach, or are there better things I can do in this environment? And so what we've noticed from students and faculty alike is that some people love it, some people hated it, some people never wanna go back to the physical, both teachers and students, and some students can't wait, but I think that expectations have been changed for good, right? The number one thing students say they want is the ability to watch asynchronously, right? They want everything that's live taped, taped, the old guy says. Yeah, right, so that they can write the convenience of being able to do it, and I don't think we're gonna get away from that. I absolutely think that students have tasted, right? They've tasted the Chick-fil-A and the McDonald's and the Burger King, and they've had the drive-thru. They're not gonna wanna get, I mean, I'm one of those people who's, I never go to the drive-thru, I don't understand, but I see these people lined up in the drive-thru, and I think I'm just gonna get out of my car and walk in. But right, the truth is there's a market for it, and so students are gonna want that convenience of, and so I think both individual faculty and institutions are gonna be under continued pressure to offer more modalities and simultaneous modalities, which by the way is the hardest and worst form of teaching. I'm totally opposed to High Flex because I can't do both face to face. I think that's the hardest environment. And so I think the better way to do it is to say, I have an hour for this and I have an hour for face to face, but I'm not gonna do them simultaneously. And in fact, one of the models that I proposed at the very beginning of the pandemic was that people who were teaching multiple sections not teach multiple sections of High Flex, right? You're teaching Monday, Wednesday, Friday, nine and 10. Do a giant Monday session where everybody is face to face and then tape it and that's the lecture. And then do online sections where you do either online or face to face and everybody is in one or the other. But I think there are ways to do 20 students in my face to face classroom and then 20 students an hour later online, but trying to do it all at once is a disaster. So I think that's gonna be a huge change and I've certainly changed my own teaching in response to all of those things. Breakout rooms, hey! And the new feature where students can choose, this is even, right? So Zoom made us in the first part of the pandemic, there are 10 big breakout rooms that I'm assigning you and you have to go. But that can then mix you up, that's cool. But under the new breakout rooms on Zoom, you can say, okay, so those of you who have had very little experience with fighter planes, you go over here. Those of you who love to talk about football go over here. And I can label the rooms and then students can join the room where people wanna use the analogy or metaphor that they wanna use. So we're gonna try to talk about this idea using one of these metaphors. And so all the soccer guys are over here and all the baseball people, right? And so that's, I can do that in a classroom. I have to have signs and people get to move around. But there are some things that I figure out, oh, this works better online and I've changed my teaching. And so now the question is, how do I bring those things back into the classroom when we go face to face? Or how do I say, you know what, we're gonna do hybrid, but it means we're gonna have a special session tonight that's only online. And I think we'll see more of that. We had a quick clarifying question from Denise Roy who asks, which version of high flex are you referring to? And I thought Denise, it was the combination of face to face and online in the same spot. Is that it? Yeah, so I mean, high flex was designed at San Francisco for very, very specific purposes and people were trained to do it. But the idea that a lot of campuses rolled, in fact, what I thought was hilarious, right? Everybody rolled out there, it's Oklahoma high flex, it's the Texas high flex. It's like, no, it's just high flex. And it's not even that, it's just, we're gonna offer students the choice of being in class or being online. And so we're gonna set up a camera in the classroom and you're gonna have three kids in the classroom and nine kids online and some monitors. And so that's the high flex that again was not well developed by most institutions. And for the most part, it made life harder. And I think less good. And I think there are, you can do a high flex model where like I said, you do Monday at nine, I do this, I do face to face and Monday at 10, I do online. And so both groups are getting things that are, and it's just easier to teach that way in my view. It's kind of like lecture and discussion sections. Yeah, although I think you could do the, if you're gonna do a lecture, then just take the whole thing and don't do any face to face. I agree, I agree. Take that sucker, put it online, watch it when you want. And then I can do discussion sections that are some discussions are face to face and some discussions are online. But in that case, it's like, I have sections and you can come to more than one, you can, whatever. There are ways to do that. Even if you're just teaching Monday, Wednesday, Friday, nine o'clock, you could still do that. Yeah, I agree completely. I forget who it was who said that watching a giant lecture is distance learning. Yeah, quick, well, friends, I have a couple more questions but we're here for you. We'd love to hear from your thoughts. In the chat, people are talking about different forms of high-flex, people are asking me questions, and I'd love to share them with you. In fact, as I said that Valerie Wheat has one that just published this. Valerie says, what advice do you have for engaging students in completely asynchronous courses? We have a lot of students who are very interested in self-paced learning, but we still want them to engage with others. Valerie's coming to us from Jefferson. I'll put this back up so you can go ahead and see it. I got it. Thanks, Valerie. So first is that I do think there is some advantage to having some synchronous. So for students who want the convenience of asynchronous, that's good. But I mean, I say, look, so we're gonna do, I'm gonna do an hour on Tuesday night, or I'm gonna do, I'm in one hour a week. But here's what I'm gonna do in that hour. And here's why it's different because we're gonna learn from each other. We're gonna like shit, like we're just doing right here. We're gonna have a chance to hear multiple voices at once. And that's different. And so I think there is some case to be made for convincing students that we should occasionally have some synchronous time as long as we use it well. In some ways, it's not unlike the model I talked about in teaching Naked that is if you're gonna have synchronous face-to-face classrooms and students who are gonna have to drive, pay for parking, you're gonna have air conditioning, you better do something more than I could have watched at home online in my underwear. So, but the other thing is that asynchronous does allow people to be more thoughtful in a way to think more slowly, to get research, to do things in advance. So I think there's a different type of discussion when it's asynchronous. So I do think it matters to say, you need to post three times a day, four times a week, whatever it is, you need to post in two different threads. At least one of those posts needs to have some other research you're bringing into the discussion. So I think for both face-to-face discussion and synchronous discussion and asynchronous, we assume that students know the rules and they don't. And so I think spending more time, what makes a good comment, right? One of my favorite discussion techniques is every comment has to begin with what I liked about the previous speaker was, dot, dot, dot, and, or there's a previous comment I wanna connect with and it's this, and make a connection. So right, connections are valued. So another way to do, to add that in face-to-face classrooms, I sometimes do inner circle and outer circle where the outer circle arrives, gives awards points to the inner circle based upon a rubric. So for the next 10 minutes, we're looking for divergent ideas, right? Not convergent. And we're gonna, you can award points to the most divergent ideas. You can do the same thing online. So asynchronous, so you've got one, so can you award points to each other? So now the engagement is double. It's what do I say? But also, oh, that's a good comment. And that then leads to a whole separate meta discussion about which comments are good, which are useful and why. So students are now engaged at multiple levels with that. The other thing about asynchronous is that, right? Asynchronous is easier for the world is happening all around us. So what is happening in the world that you wanna bring in right now? Because you're living out there now. And so I'm more encouraging of that asynchronously to have students say, what are the relevant problems? What are some applications? I like, I do a Twitter assignment where it's tweet twice a week with this hashtag, but apply what we learned in class to something that, so you have to provide a link or an example of something that happened outside of class and that everybody can see them and comment on them. And that's obviously an asynchronous exercise. So the Twitter assignment links the real world to the class real world, very nice. And it works both in class and it works out of class. You're watching the Super Bowl. What techniques did those advertisements show? That kind of, you know, you're, because then you're applying it, because again, the problem is that it's the same reason we don't offer, you know, Spanish class for five hours on Monday in a seminar and then you don't do it for the, right? We want a little bit every, forgetting is part of learning. So you wanna forget, learn, forget, learn. It's why highlighting is also a bad study technique, but quizzing and flashcards is good, but you don't, but cramming is bad, right? Because you wanna do a little bit at a time. And so, you know, tweeting at a student or getting them to do something at three o'clock in the morning, that's a little bit at a time. And it's like, oh, I have to remember. The metaphor for me is you gotta go back on the closet. The more times you go back in and out of the closet, the better. And if you just, you know, live in the closet in this space the whole time, you don't get the same benefit that you do from making the path, right? Where is that? Where is it? Oh, it's over here. And even if you make a mistake, right? It's feedback. It's immediate feedback. So my other favorite analogy is that the best teacher in the world is the tennis net. The coach is useful sometimes, but sometimes you just need more balls, right? It's like the tennis net provides immediate feedback that's non-judgmental, right? It's not a D minus or an A plus, it's just balls go over the net. Goes over, it doesn't go over. Let's try again. But if the ball's not going over, I got feedback that says you better correct. I better do something else. And so, man, if we could have classrooms that had tennis nets, I could say here's another buck, right? Try a few more balls and you're gonna get that immediate feedback. So, but that's right, non-judgmental and immediate feedback is what people need. And so the reason asynchronous is often less engaging is because I'm only the one here. So the more ways to get students to respond to each other quickly, right? And get feedback is why Facebook works, right? The dopamine hit, I got likes. So are there ways to build that into asynchronous environments that have things like likes for all of the negative of them? They are engaging. Do you? Okay, first of all, first of all, that's a terrific response, Valerie. That's a great question. If you'd like to follow up either close to another question or in fact, let me just do this. I just put up an open podium. So if you'd like to join us on stage, if you'd like to follow up with that, just click that teal color box. And whoa! And before I even say it, there is God who welcome. Hi, how are you? So I really feel like I'm thriving better teaching in the asynchronous online environment. But I'm running into an issue where my institution says if you're teaching online, you can't require students to do anything synchronously. So I do a one hour a week synchronous session like you're talking about, but I have to make it totally optional. And I find when I'm doing things that are really engaging that I have this group of students who are coming, but that gets kind of smaller and smaller as the semester goes on. And I'm still over here trying to do all my bells and whistles and just, and really make it an enriching experience for them. And the students who do come and attend are really expressing that they are finding value in that. I'm just really trying to think about how to get more of those students into the, because I have to make it completely optional because of institutional policies. Yeah, so let's not get into institutional policies. That's bad. But I mean, I can see there's an equity access potential. Okay, fine. And somebody had some good intentions, I'm gonna hope. So, I think from your point of view, so the choices are, do more of them so more people can go. But I mean, do the same thing more times in smaller groups, but don't do quite as many of them. Right, because if I do it every week, people this, that happens to everything, right? Well, I did that last week, I can skip this week, but if it's a rare occurrence, right? Scarcity is an influencer. So do it less often, but then repeat it a few times. The other is set up an exercise that students need to do with a group of three or a group of four, right? So here are the time slots, pick a time slot, come do this. But this won't work asynchronously and here's why. But you are gonna have to convince me that it won't work asynchronously because so much of the world is now asynchronous. You know, I do, I'm seeing this in companies too, right? The people have Zoom fatigue, they have meetings all day long, you know, my large corporate clients, they're having fewer meetings. They figured out that, you know, you don't get work done. And so I've taken to saying to people, just by the way, if you're a senior leader, meetings are your work. That is actually when you do the work. And so you need better meetings, not sitting behind yourself. If you're the president, you're sitting by the, by doing email by yourself all day long, you're probably not leading, right? So that means maybe I have more short meetings and I think differently about what I want to accomplish in those meetings. So, you know, I would think that's the approach. I wish, I don't have a really good answer to this. No, but I do like the idea of, kind of offering some more choices to them because a lot of what I do are things like set up a document that we can co-edit or here's a figure, I teach science. Here's a figure from your book. Let's annotate this figure and figure out what this visual representation is doing. So I could do that same exercise with different groups of people and repeat that. And I think that that might get to some of the issues around, I have this one time on Tuesday late afternoon and if people can't make it, then that's their only option. I think moving that around a little bit might be a really good solution. And shorter, right? Everything is getting shorter, movies are getting shorter, attention spans. So doing a 15 or 20 minute or 30 minute most, people are more likely to say, I can give up that time and do that and get them used to that. But I also think you have to convince people that this is something I cannot do asynchronously. And I think there are things that qualifies that, but it's making sure that you really only do those. And the analogy is also in the face-to-face classroom. If you want students to come, people say, oh, I videotape my lectures, nobody will come to class. Well, that's true if all your classes do is offer some other version of something I could do. But if my class is hilarious and active and people are running around and it's noisy and messy and all sorts, then I'm more likely to come. So I like paired assignments where I say, here is the assignment that you need to do. And then when you come to class, we're going to use it in some way. We're now going to, you're gonna create an algorithm for what's the best way to make this experiment. And then we're gonna come to class and we're gonna have three of them set up and we're gonna actually figure out which one works and make real-time adjustments. Oh, I'm excited about that. And if you don't come prepared, it'll be meaningless to you. So now the homework is more engaging and the class is more engaging. And so I think that same principle works for the synchronous asynchronous. Excellent. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Sure. Well, thank you for the great question. And again, friends, you can see that we're a pretty friendly environment. So if you'd like to follow up with more questions, either hit that Q&A box or join us on stage, just like Valerie just did sometimes late. And we have one question coming up from Alah Moore. Alah, I hope I got this correctly. So let me see what you think here. In the hammer and nail framework, how can higher ed address student under preparedness without continually creating more one credit courses? Interesting. So I use the hammer and nail framework in a very different way. I think of the hammers, I think of disciplines as tools, right? And the old, if physics is like a hammer and poetry is like a screwdriver. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so you want students to have a variety of things. So the remedial issue is a hard one. There's a great project in Maryland. The public institutions in Maryland did a math project where they got rid of all of the sort of one credit remedial courses and they got students into courses that counted. By the way, there's also data that says the process, the test that you give to put students in remedial or non remedial, that those students are, that those tests are biased by the way that we grade them and that looking at other measures, put more students into four credit courses and got them onto graduation earlier than if you just give them the placement test and say if you're above a 70 you're here and that there are other ways to place students into those courses. But the University of Maryland system figured out a way. So what they did was they said, what are you interested in doing? Are you interested in STEM and business, in philosophy, whatever? And so students, and what's your math background? So they asked them a series of questions and then they said, okay, so we have placed you into this class and this is a math class for business majors. This is a math class for psychology majors. And so rather than have to have all of these, here's calculus, here's all of that, they found that teaching the math that was discipline specific earlier on was both more motivating, but it also leveled the playing field a bit. And so they were dramatically able to reduce the numbers of remedial courses and get students into courses that counted toward their degree, but also got them on track toward a particular discipline. So it's a really fascinating study. It's just, it's only a couple of years old. So I expect to see other people doing similar kinds of things. But getting a sense of both of those studies point to getting a sense of what does the student want to do rather than, right, it's not a deficit, rather than a deficit, what did you not take in high school that you need to take? Because the truth is most people don't need calculus. There, I said it out loud, right? I mean, sure, lots of people do need calculus, but a lot of students don't in making that a hurdle and making, oh, you've got to get through calculus to be able to do everything on campus. That's not a good thing. And it's also the case that, right, a lot of students who could pass statistics or calculus, first generation students of color end up putting it off. Well, now that just made it worse because now they're forgetting more of their high school math and now they've taken other psychology courses and now they're a senior and that takes statistics and they're afraid and they've forgotten everything and that ends up being a disaster. So I kind of like meta majors. I think students should not be able to declare a major in the first two years, but they should declare a meta major at some point. One or the other. So a meta major is I want to be in STEM somehow. I want to be in business. I have a kind of a general area of interest that I want to be in. I'm also a big fan of first year courses that focus on topics like poverty or water or sustainability or something that introduce students to a variety of disciplines through a problem. But we tried a nudge experiment at Goucher which was students tell you in their application what they want to do, right? I'm interested in this. I was on the lacrosse team in high school though. I'm in the choir, et cetera, et cetera. And then we say to them, we know that choice overload is the thing, too many choices you don't, right? People get overwhelmed. You don't buy as much stuff you don't, right? Amazon figured this out because putting stuff in your cart is easy. Determining what to buy is hard. And so then you just save for later. No stress, right? So what's the first thing we do with students in college? Welcome to college. Here are 5,000 courses to choose from, right? So we said, okay, look, we know what you're interested in because you told us you wanted to be a psychology major and you took these courses in high school. Here's a schedule. You can change anything you want. It's not binding. You can change courses. But when you give students a default that's not blank, they do much better. It's the same for advising. When you're, if you have advisees, have them come to you with not five courses they want. Write down the 20 courses that you want and then bring them to me. Cause now, right, I can save stuff for later, but now I can say to you, oh, by the way, you should take English cause it's a first year course and you should take this and get it out of the way. You should take statistics now because you might want to be it, right? But if you say to students, pick five courses, that's a high stress activity. And it is, there are big consequences. Bring me a list of all your courses. So these are always, I think, to get into a mindset of how do I figure out where students need help? How do I figure out what they need? But it turns out when you put students into four credit courses, they are more likely to pass because those are courses they count. They're more engaging than those one credit or there's no credit courses or those. Those courses are a disaster for students. We think we're trying to help, but they have a high failure rate. And again, studies are that they put the same students into a four credit that counts toward graduation. They do better because they feel better about themselves. And they, right? And so happy level the playing field a bit. Most of that stuff is in the teaching change because there's a lot of that research is in there if you want citations. It's great. And I have to say thank you for that excellent, excellent question. And Jose, thank you for the really rich response. We have time for just another bit more. We had one question that came actually from a former Goucher student who said that they like Goucher because, among other things, they could take logic from us, which is interesting. But now we have a question from the excellent George Station coming to you from California State University. And he asks, much question. What about transparency ethics with students? In the new map, it's clear they're nudging in. Stanford, Perts, students don't know. You just nudge them. They bring that back up again. Sorry. Oh yeah. Yeah, let me just finish that part. In Stanford, Perts, students don't know. You just nudge them with a success video. What's your take? So Failor and Susteen, their other name for this was Libertarian paternalism for nudges because a good nudge doesn't force you to do one thing or another. So for example, the most famous nudge is the fly in the urinal, invented by one of the janitors at Shiphole Airport. Now, on the one hand, I haven't asked your consent. You just walk into the bathroom and there's a fly in the urinal and that means that men are 80% more likely to hit the target, which means there's less on the floor. There's fewer cleaning supplies used. So it's a nudge, right? There's a fly. It's like, oh, maybe I should aim for that. Sorry for the visual. So on the one hand, that is, I didn't ask your permission. So I think there are cases where you change the default. So your taxes, do you want to donate the $3 to this? For example, when you sign up for a new job, I work with a lot of companies. Before the George W. Bush signed the act in 2006 for the taxes, that a company, when you've got a new job, you had to say, I opt-in to retirement. I want a 401k. Now you can say, welcome to the new job. Your 401k is activated. You can opt out, but you have to come into HR and fill out the form. But they've just reversed it. You have to come into HR to fill out the opt-out rather than the opt-in. Students have to opt out of email rather than opt-in. So I totally agree that there are ethical questions here about what we're going to do. And we have to think very carefully about it. But I also think, if you really set up a way that it's not that hard to get people to opt out of things, there are lots of good things you can do. So I would prefer to have all students opt-in to getting reminders about assignments, so your Blackboard, Canvas, whatever you use. The default currently for most of those apps is off. Now when I put an app on my phone, I know that they often say the settings are here. You do want to opt-in. It often gives me a choice. So I would say to students, an hour before or a day before or 12 hours before your assignment is due, you get a reminder on your phone that says, hey, you haven't turned in your math yet. And it's going to be late in 10 hours. I would turn that on. I think that's libertarian paternalism. You can turn it off, but I've left it on. But at the most part, people are so afraid of that they leave the default off. And so I do think we're going to see more of this, but I also think we're going to have to have serious conversations about ethics. And my view is I want to be transparent with students. These are the nudges that exist. This is why they exist. Noom is a great example. What does Noom do? Reminders, but it also puts you into community of other people. One of the things I learned, the best way to lose weight is to tweet your weight every day. Oh, yeah. Exactly. It's accountability. It's painful, but it's accountability. You can see why it would work and why you wouldn't want to do it. Now, am I going to force you to do that? No. But I do think that we tend, especially in a higher education, to set the defaults to off because we don't want to annoy students. And I think we can set more of the defaults, not all of them, but we can set more of the defaults to on. And one of the ones that I think is a big one is like reminders for assignments in your LMS app. So yeah. Well, George, what a great caution. What a great question. And I love the way you tear apart all the different ways this can conceivably work. We have a pause here of questions. And I wanted to take the moderators privilege and ask one of mine. If people in higher education adopt all of your recommendations, if they follow the three R's of building up relationships, resiliency, and time for reflection, if we really take all the learning science seriously that you described, what does higher ed look like, say, five years later? How is it different? Well, I think higher ed becomes more relevant. It's going to help democracy. It's going to prepare students for an economy of where jobs are unknown. So I think it actually helps higher ed look more relevant and also probably raise the numbers that have never been worse for the people who think higher ed shouldn't be trusted, et cetera. So that's one thing. But I think higher ed becomes a lot more flexible, a lot more focused on lifelong learning, on micro-credentials, on people continuing to be part of the product. One of the things I still think of is that we price things wrong. We price things based upon but time. We're given the degree to the wrong part of the body. How much time you sat in your seat. The graduation requirements should be based upon when can you hold two ideas in your mind at once and without making up your mind? Or when have you reached a certain level of cognitive proficiency? And it will take some people longer than others. So I think more flexible time. Again, the only reason we count credits is because the AAUP and the government wanted to figure out a way to set up retirement plans in the 20s and 30s. And so they needed something they could count. And they could count classroom hours. And so we're still doing that. So that doesn't make any sense. We're counting the wrong things. So I think that assessment is going to have to get significantly better. We've got to assess the right things in the right way. But again, it's tennis net. If I had feedback about what students were learning and what was working and what wasn't working, I'd immediately stop doing the things that students are ignoring and aren't working and change my methods. So I do think that there's a great potential for both AI and technology to help us get quicker feedback about what's working for students and what's not working for students in the same way. Think about what happens when you go to the bathroom now in an airport and there's the green and the red and the yellow button. And it's like, how was your experience in our bathroom? Red, yellow, or green? And they get it right. We actually added those that got you to the Bursar's office. Or you went to the financial aid office. It's like, I want to know were you treated kindly and with respect? How was your experience with the Bursar today? Or with the library? Red, yellow, green? So imagine if students were walking out of class going red, yellow, green today. And it's like, wow, today was a red day. Today was not right. You said, wow, today wasn't a good day. I have a sense. I think today wasn't a good class. But imagine if I got instant feedback after class about what was the best part of class, what didn't work. And I got that all the time. I would be constantly changing my methods. And I think the same is going to be true for students. I think students need a tennis net to know am I studying the right way? I have a study smarter template on my website that's also in this new book. Which is, do you give students a chance to reflect about what study techniques work? Not just how long. Did you work in groups? Did you work by yourself? Did you do the harder problems? And then students self-reflect on what works and didn't work. But I think technology is going to give us a way to give students, again, a better tennis net to get instant feedback on, I'm re-reading the chapter and this is not helping you. Why are you re-reading the chapter and highlighting for the fourth time? Stop! Do something else, right? You can more efficiently use your time. So I think we're going to see a lot more learning science and a lot more faculty development because we're going to have to adapt more quickly. But I think the biggest changes we're going to see to higher ed in the next 10 years are going to be in the classroom. Flexibility, more feedback, more AI to help faculty and students do the things that we do better. And the pandemic has actually helped us start to see that in the workplace, too. Some of it is weird, frankly, and malicious, but people are getting better feedback about, oh, I spent four hours today doing email, I shouldn't have. That's useful information. Well, useful information is what you have just provided for the past hour at top speed and with great passion and verb. I hate to wrap things up with eggs. This is so excellent, but we are at the end of the hour. Before I kick you off, let me ask, what's the best way for people to keep up with you? Is it on Twitter? Should they sign up for your site or how? So I'm on LinkedIn, Jose Antonio Bowen. I'm on Twitter at Jose Bowen. I have a website, hosebowen.com, and I also teaching naked.com as its partner website. And I give away lots of tools. So again, there are templates, stuff from the book, references, I have actually a whole new section on inclusive teaching, you know, bibliography that I'm working on that I keep updating. So those are the best ways to keep up with things I'm doing and I see everybody in cyberspace. Well, that sounds great. Thank you again. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks, Brian. Looking forward to this book very much. But don't go away, friends. Let me just point out, we have reminders for the next couple of weeks. So looking ahead, we have sessions on everything from enrollment and eco-media, digitization, libraries, and neo-nationalism. Again, if you want to sign up for these ahead of time, just go to forum.futureofeducation.us. If you want to keep talking about these issues, everything from the importance of having a tennis net in every class to how nudges might work ethically and practically, just tweet out using FTTEs, the hashtag. Or you can tweet at me, at Brian Alexander or at Shindig events or head to the blog, BrianAlexander.org. If you'd like to dive into the past and look at our previous sessions on everything from lighting to assessment to how we change teaching, just go to tinyorl.com.fdfarchive. And above all, good luck implementing all of these ideas. Please take time to think about them and see how they can improve your teaching and your learning. It's been great talking with all of you. Your questions are terrific. We wish you all the best. Take care, be safe, and we'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.