 This is going to be a really exciting session. I'm going to have our speakers come sit with me here while I speak and just open up what we'll talk about. And then we'll also be engaging all of you. So get ready, folks. Get coffee, wake up a little. This should be a lot of fun. We are going to be hearing from three visionaries in education this morning who are helping to reshape the way we think about rights and responsibilities in an age when education is increasingly digital and technologically assisted. So to get started, I do want to prepare you to be part of this conversation. And we're going to do this using technology, using Poll Everywhere. Many of you may have been in sessions in the past where you have been polled using this text messaging technology. So I just want to take just a quick moment to ask you all to literally take out your phones and just get this set up so that we'll be able to use it as we get into the discussion later. So on this slide, you'll see how to just quickly get into the polling platform that we'll use. You first will just need to send a message to the number 22333. And in the body of your message, just type the word New America 2016. Doesn't have to be all in caps. You can just make sure you don't put spaces in between it. That'll throw off the system. But just New America 2016. And that will, you should get a message back saying that you are now in the session. So that's it for how we'll use the polling software. But I'll get back into that after we hear our speakers. For those of us who are joining online, you can also participate using any web browser and visiting www.pollev.com slash New America 2016. That's P-O-L-L-E-V.com, New America 2016. OK, so let me take a moment now to introduce our three speakers this morning. They're each going to talk for a very short time. I've given them a really tough task, which is to take just three minutes to basically introduce everything they've been doing in their lives and why they think it's important. And then we're going to sit down for a discussion. So what I'll do right now is just quickly, you'll see their bios in your program as well, quickly introduce them. They'll come up one after another. And then all four of us will sit down and have a conversation. So today we have with us Teresa Hardy directly to my left. She is the chief operating officer at Delaware State University. Teresa is at the forefront of efforts to serve students better using data. And in particular, Delaware State has created a special team of analysts that collect and use data to identify students who may need additional support to graduate on time. So she'll be telling us a lot more about that. After Teresa, we will hear from Vicky Katz, who is the associate professor and associate professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University and a senior fellow at the Joan Gantz CUNY Center at Sesame Workshop, which is also a group that we have done and partnered with in the education policy program on several projects. Vicky was the co-author of a recent paper, Opportunity for All, Question Mark, which uses qualitative studies in a national survey to better understand how and if low-income families are really able to gain access to information that they need to thrive and to learn. And then we will have David Wiley, who is the chief academic officer of Lumen Learning. That is an organization dedicated to the adoption of open educational resources. David also leads the open education group at Brigham Young University and is the education fellow at Creative Commons. He's known worldwide for new thinking around the need for open education. And I'll tell us a little bit more about what that means. So each of these speakers are going to help us tackle the big question that we're posing in this session, which is, what must be included in a next social contract for education in the digital age? And many of you have heard from a video this morning and from many of the discussions yesterday that it really is time to revisit this mutual agreement that keeps our society humming. It's supposed to keep government working. With respect to what we expect our institutions and our government to provide for us and what we expect of ourselves to provide for each other. And in education space, this is a really key question, because for more than 100 years, we have had a public education system that is based on the idea that children have a right to an education and that in exchange, our tax dollars and our efforts as parents and community members should help enable them to gain access to that public education. So throughout the 20th century, this is also, of course, expanded to higher education as well through provisions such as the GI Bill. So now, here we are, right? We're in 2016. And on top of a myriad number of questions around whether our education systems can even handle the expectations of the 21st century, we also have this influx of technology. So we're in this digital age where we're communicating, learning, and reaching where we're communicating, learning, and reaching our full potential has started to look very different. So it's really time to have a conversation about what we want to demand from our educational systems and to talk about upholding some tenets of fairness, ethics, equity, responsibility, and opportunity for all when digital technology comes into the picture. So just a small, small task. We're going to get started. Teresa, Vicki and David, as I said, will speak for three minutes. And I'll let Teresa take away. Thank you. Thank you. So hopefully, I'm going to stay with them for three minutes. It's been difficult practicing in the bathtub. That's what I'm going to do. So good morning. I'm Teresa Hardy from Delaware State University. And Delaware State is a HBCU land-growing institution. And we serve, our mission is to serve under representative minorities. Delaware is a little different in that we have about a diverse population. We have about 68% African-Americans, 11% white, probably 6%, 7% international, and the rest of others. So we were established in 1891. We just celebrated our 125th year last Sunday. And we're going to celebrate all year long to next May 15, 2017. And what I'm going to talk about is things that we are doing now to make sure we stay here for another 125 years and serve our student population. So I'm going to flip back and forth between a couple slides. What we've done at Delaware State is it is our job to make sure, if we agree, to admit students that they do indeed graduate. Gain for employment, do they get jobs, go to the military, whatever the case may be. So what we've done is develop what we call myDSU IDP. And that is every freshman that walks in the door at Delaware State University has a personal advisor. And that person is responsible for the success of that Delaware student. And in that personal advisor development plan, we have student profile. So I know where the student came from, which high school would they graduate, the GPA, SAT, all the information that a student has when they walk in the door. And then we develop predictive analytics around that so we can make sure that when a student walks in the door, we have the infrastructure that they need to be successful based on what we see in their data before they come in. And then once they get here, we track all the academic successes or failure. We know if they're first generation, how much debt they have, if they work in second jobs, all that stuff that may impact them completing their degree and what we say is for less years. Then each advisor has, it's a mandate that they see a student three times a semester, at the start of semester, mid semester and at the end. And they have to comment on what their conversations are with that particular students. And we use that data then to do a predictive analytic model on engagement. How many times do we really need to see a student to make sure that they are successful or if they got off the path, what was the interventions along the way? And then lastly, there was a couple of such tasks, but the student analytics tab is the best tab in the world. And that tab tells us early alerts. The student didn't come to class, they are making seeds on their last two tests. They are partying, they got a judicial problem. So it gives us all that information. And again, we throw that into a model that says, okay, we got to do some intervention what is that intervention and did we do it just in time? And after that, we have an advisor analytics analytics. And that's where we judge, did the advisors do what they said they would do? Did we hold up our end of the deal saying, if you admit it and you do these things, we will do these things. And again, all of this is around predicted analytics. So since I only had three slides, you see I put a whole lot of stuff on the slides, right? So not only do they have a my DSU IDP, but they also have a journey map. And this journey map, when a student walks in, here is your journey, okay? So we try to keep them on the journey if they make a shot, right? How do we get them back over there? So this summer, we are developing both of those things in apps because 98% of our students have telephones. They might not have app as their computers, but they do have telephones. And all of this will be just in time, every day, every minute, where I am in my career. So the graph over there to the left is one of my favorites because we're able to predict before they walk in the door, their likelihood of success. And you can see, we can predict, I think, 83% before they walk into the door. And then the beginning of the first semester, 97%, the likelihood that they're gonna be successful. And so you may not know I'm also a CFO, Seattle, all those COs, whatever. I'm sure some other letters they probably call me. But these last two are my favorites because I am responsible for the money. So what I do is translate all this retention graduation to dollars to make sure we're sustainable. So if you see, if we change nothing else but retention, we will increase our revenue probably about $3 million, fairly easy, without changing anything else. And if we have a student take 1.5 more credit hours, they would graduate 60%. We can increase our four-year graduation rate by 60%. And we've been doing that for the last three years. We have gone from 62 when I entered, when I started at Dell State, the retention was 62. It's gone up a thousand basis points. It is 72 now and our goal next year is 77. So again, we have developed plans for our students to be successful because it is personal for DSU. Good morning. This is when you know you're an academic, when you can analyze the significance of technology you don't know how to use. Well, thank you very much for having me. What I wanna talk about in my brief time today is to start with something that is no secret to anyone in this room, which is that access to the internet is increasingly being recognized as a necessity rather than as a luxury. And as more opportunities move online, not just for kids, but also for adults, it should be recognized as one of the things that gives people access to the world. Part of the reason we're concerned about this is because there's also growing recognition that social inequality and digital inequality are linked. The people who experience broader and more pervasive forms of social inequality related to housing, education, language proficiency, occupational opportunity, and so forth are also the ones who are most likely to be under connected to the internet. That creates fears that digital inequality might exacerbate these broader forms of social inequality but also provides hope and possible opportunities for mitigating these broader social inequalities with meaningful access to technology. In the education sphere particularly, the time to act is now. A new era began in September of 2014. Kids of color became the majority in American K through 12 schools, and approximately 60% of those kids are growing up in low income families. So there's a few aspects of the challenges to digital equity that I want to highlight today as we're thinking about the next social contract for US education, and they all have to do with what commitments we're willing to make about expanding what it means to have access. The first thing, and it comes out of our studies so clearly, is that thinking about access as having the internet or having a device is simply not enough. It's about the quality of your connection. It's about how consistent it is. It's about what you can do with it. So it's not just about hardware. It's not just about the internet. It's about whether you can pay for it. It's about whether you have the supports locally in your community to help you develop the skills that you can meaningfully access the things you want to do in your day, and those things matter tremendously. One thing I want to raise for our conversation is that there's a difference between mobile-only access and access on a laptop or a desktop. I'd like everybody in this room to consider the following, which is something that came out of our interviews over and over again. Imagine being in seventh grade and having to do research for a school project on the Hippocratic oath on a smartphone. You do all your research on mom's phone. Now you have to type it up on the smartphone and submit it. That is not equitable access compared with somebody who has access on a desktop or a laptop. So for our lower income families, for families of color who are disproportionately connected through mobile devices, that is not mission accomplished. That's just a first step, and we need to be clear about that. The second thing that I want to add just very, very quickly, is to think about filtering of content. There was a recent article in The Atlantic that highlighted how internet filtering is disproportionately affecting our lowest income students because if you only access the internet at school or through school-provided devices, you're subject to the filters that are consistent on school-related technology, and the same is true of libraries. Why is filtering a big deal for the next social contract for U.S. education? Because frankly, unless we commit to making the whole internet available to everyone, our efforts towards digital equity are fruitless. We either make the internet as broadly accessible to all learners as possible, or we will inevitably create a two-tiered system where the poor get a narrower set of resources and opportunities than the wealthy. No matter how good the intentions, a more limited internet is less internet, and that includes efforts like internet.org. We can look to the EU for guidance on this. Researchers there have focused on children and media and helped to shape a policy agenda for protecting children from harm, which is what filters are intended to do. But harm is a narrower conception of online threat than risk. Risk and opportunity are paired, and you can think of that every time you provide your email address to get discounts at a favorite store. You're sacrificing a little bit of privacy for an opportunity. You're managing risk and opportunity. We should be teaching all children, rich and poor, how to manage risk, not using filtering and other heavy-handed means to obviate all risk. Because doing that also restricts the many opportunities for the kids and parents who are affected by it. Thank you very much. Three minutes, all right. I wanna frame my remarks today with a quick story. Once upon a time, there's a beautiful valley where people lived. And the valley's full of flowers and grass and it was beautiful. People walked most of the places they went until one day a young man invented this amazing device called an automobile. People started driving these automobiles everywhere and it was incredible. They got from here to there, they went fast. But people started to notice that the automobiles were kind of tearing up the countryside. So the people came together and they said, what can we do? We don't wanna give up the benefits of this great new technology, but we don't wanna completely destroy the countryside here, so. Let's make a compromise where we'll create these things called roads. And we'll make a law that says whether you're a truck or a car or a motorcycle, whatever you are, all the things with engines that go must stay on the road. And if we do that, we can carve out some roads, which will be a bit of a sacrifice, but we can keep the rest of the valley looking very pristine. Well, a couple of decades later, a young woman had another idea for a device that she called an airplane. She was really excited about this, it was gonna get us even faster, it had different kinds of maybe lower impacts on the environment. She raised a bunch of money and got together and at her announcement, the police showed up. And the police wanted to remind her that even though they're really in favor of this great new device she had invented, to remember the law that says all the things with engines must go on the road. So she's welcome to drive her airplane anywhere she wanted to go, but flying it would be illegal. So what's the point of this little tale? The point is that the internet provides us with a set of amazing technical capabilities, things that we could never even dream of doing in the past. But long before the internet even was a gleam in an engineer's eye, there was some law that existed, copyright law. Copyright law that regulates things like copying, like creating derivative works, like distributing copies of works. And when you think about what the internet is, the internet is really a giant sharing machine. It's a machine for making copies, for making derivative works, for making remixes, making mashups, for distributing those around the world instantaneously. And so there's a very profound tension between what copyright enables legally and what the internet enables technically. And in our battle for equity and for quality education, we're kind of fighting with one hand tied behind our back as we are caught in this tension between what we could be capable of doing and what we're permitted to do. So the idea that I wanna talk about today and that we'll explore a little bit further on the panel is the idea of open educational resources. Open educational resources are essentially open source curriculum materials that are one completely free for anyone to use and access and come with a set of copyright permissions that make it legal for us to do all the things that the internet makes technically possible for us to do. Thank you. So thank you all very much. I know that my gears are turning within different questions. Hopefully in your minds, your gears are as well. So I will have some specific ones, but I want to take the pulse of the room and we're gonna move to our poll everywhere platform for a moment and then we'll set up some questions for each of you. So if we can get the first question up on the screen, this is a pretty basic one, honestly, but wanting to just understand where we all sit on this issue of whether we're worried or excited about what technology means in education. So we're already starting to get some answers in here for those of you who aren't sure what you have to do is basically text A, B, C or D to answer the question and we can start to see in real time how you all are feeling about this question and I think that it's one of these things as a parent of middle schoolers using technology every last minute of their lives, my answer on this would change depending on my heart rate as I'm watching my children. So now that they're not around me, maybe I'd probably put both more than worried, although that can change a lot. So okay, it looks like we've got settling in here to understanding that among our incredibly unscientific sample, we are now seeing that, you know, there obviously is a lot of reason to be excited and there's a lot of reason to be concerned. So I wanna dig in a little bit more and I'm gonna start with you, Teresa, as you're describing the way Delaware State is using data to identify students with this very laudable goal ensuring that they're graduating on time. You are essentially profiling your students, right? And so let's talk about this a little bit in terms of how do we get around this idea of what it means to use data to profile and where we need to make sure we go, what kind of bumpers need to be on the road as we're going down? So I think profiling was a word I used before and I got beat up at Delaware State, so we call it cohort now. Cohorting, cohorting. Put them in cohorts. And so how we do that is we do mask information because we're only looking at variables and so no one really knows a student but they know cohorting this type of student with these issues and SAT, GPA, whatever the case may be, that these are the infrastructures that we need to put in place. So very few people know behind the scenes about these students. These students don't know, they have no idea because we have common activities across the university and we also have activities, what we call that a unique to them to make sure that they are successful, so. Okay, okay. And are you putting in place specific kind of principles that you and your staff abide by as you're looking at the data so you ensure. Right, so we have data standards, we have a confidentialality that we have what we call so a data transformation team and that team makes every thirsty from three to midnight and what we do is talk about data midnight and we just kind of focus on our internal data. So we have a faculty member, we have a dean, we have institutional research, we have a data scientist and myself and that is the core team that is analyzing all this data. So we have that mass where that there's no issue. So I don't really worry about that. The only thing that probably worries me is that I wanna make sure because this data goes out to advisors that the advisors are confidential and they are coaching of each student and what they need to do to be successful. So just real quick then, if you were answering that poll, A, B, C, or D, where would you be? I probably would say I'm excited because to be honest, I don't know any other way to get the students but through some method of technology. To be honest. Okay, interesting. Yeah, so we'll go down the line here but after that we can kind of mix it up a little bit. Vicki, I know in the research that you've been doing with Victoria Rideout who's also a lead author on this report on digital opportunity and equity, you are defining what it means to be under connected based on the research that you've done nationally and that there are certain families that are more under connected than others. So take a moment to explain that in a little more depth for our audience. So since the internet became popularly available in the 90s, we've been governed by this idea that there's a digital divide, right? That there are people who have and people who have nots when it comes to the internet related technologies and that made sense for the first decade or more that the internet was available. It makes a lot less sense now that we're still using it. And the reason I say it makes less sense is because the vast majority of people who would be considered have nots. Lower income folks, young people, people of color and the combinations of those things have access. We did a nationally representative survey of parents with, but lower income parents with school age kids, 94% of them have an internet connection. 81% have a laptop or desktop. More than two thirds have a smartphone or tablet or both. They're not have nots. But when you ask questions that follow up from that about whether or not they feel that they have enough time on the device to do all the things they want to, whether their connection's been cut in the last year because they couldn't afford to pay for it or they hit the max on a data plan, a full third of, sorry, a full quarter of them are mobile only, right? They don't have connection on a desktop or a laptop. And over a third felt that their connections were too slow. So when you start to layer it against these issues related to quality and consistency of access, we're forwarding the idea that we should be thinking about whether people are more or less connected, whether they're under connected compared to where they would like to be. And I think that piece is important because rather than saying everybody needs to have certain things and being prescriptive about it, what do people want for themselves should be what guides us at least in part. And so the questions we ask them, we're really designed to get at how connected are you compared to how connected you would like to be. So we're forwarding this idea that we should be talking about who is more and less under connected because it also gives us multiple policy fronts that we can work with to try to address the issues why we have so many families who are under connected and that's more than half of the parents we spoke to said yes to at least one of those questions. And what's interesting too is that you're basically kind of laying out a spectrum of connectedness instead of a binary. Exactly right. Which does feel like much more like real life. So how would you answer the question? I'm both. You're worried. I'm both because I worry about efforts that put technology first and relationship second. I'm worried about putting technology into schools without carefully considering how to bring parents along in ways that support the efforts of those programs for kids. We interviewed parents in school districts in three states who felt like they'd been disengaged by having these initiatives come in too quickly and not enough programs to help parents learn alongside their kids. That they were now sometimes less able to help with homework than they had been when it was on paper. We shouldn't be forwarding technology at the expense of relationships. But there's tremendous opportunity. I think we need to put relationships first and use technology as tools for deepening those relationships. And I think we get a long way by thinking about what kids need to learn and developing curriculum to support that and then deciding which technology best support that curriculum instead of bringing in the tech and then saying now we have them, what do we do with them? Which is how most of the programs get designed. I think there's a lot of room to make great things happen but I think we need to think carefully about how we're doing it. So David, I can start with that. Are you excited, concerned or are you in the boat camp? And are you, tell me about being excited for a moment. So when it comes to the ability to share, remix, use new information, what have you been seeing over, and I know you've been watching what the internet meant to the sharing of information for decades now. What are you seeing that gives you that sense of excitement for students? So I think one of the things that's most exciting to me is the trend now around OER based degree programs, OER being open educational resources. So most of our work focuses on community colleges serving primarily at risk students where the cost of textbooks and other educational materials can be as much as half of their total expenditure can exceed the cost of tuition and fees in the programs that they're in. And OER based degree programs are programs in which the faculty teaching the general education courses and the required courses substitute expensive materials with openly licensed freely available materials. That means that there's day one access for every student whether their financial aid has come yet or not. Our research is showing that it significantly moves the needle on outcomes that we care about lowering the drop rate, lowering the withdrawal rate, increasing the see or better rate in terms of students' final grades. And that movement of these OER based degrees is starting to really gain steam there about 20 across the country now. There ought to be about 60 by this time next year. That's quite encouraging. Let me jump in on one thing you just mentioned there because I think there may be some who recognize the value of open resources for access but you were just pointing out that they're affecting students' outcomes, their ability to learn. Talk about that just for a minute more because I think that might be surprising to some people. Yeah well great research based materials which are unaffordable for some portion of students are also perfectly ineffective for those portions of students. And so you have some students who can never afford access and we've done survey work, there's been a bunch of survey work done in different places around the country asking students about the impact of the cost of educational materials is on them and you see that the overwhelming majority of them have gone at some point without access to the textbook because it was too expensive but almost a quarter of them regularly go without access to the required materials. So when you think as an instructor you come in the room and you look out and you think 20, 25% of the people who haven't read the assigned reading because they don't have the book. And then there's another portion that have to wait until the second or third week when their financial aid check comes to then go buy the book. And at that time if you're already under prepared you're so far behind there's no way to catch up. This issue of access really is tightly connected to issues of academic success. So let's go to our next question for everybody in the room here. And it's along the same themes but it's a way to maybe get a sense of where priorities should be in terms of these various issues about fairness and what kind of elements we need to be considering. So which is most important to you among these many issues we're talking about here? Data responsibility, data privacy responsibility, access to high speed internet in the first place, having access to educators who know how to use technology well, having open access to textbooks and educational materials or something else altogether maybe on your mind. And we'll see how things play out here as everyone's putting in their answers. And I should just quickly tell you if I didn't already that the system is pretty good on privacy honestly. We've vetted that and they're not using your phone numbers in any way other than for this poll. So just don't have to worry as you put in your answers here. So it's interesting actually to watch this in real time. This is shaking out. And I know that we have several folks here with an Open Technology Institute who are working really hard on these privacy issues and thinking about data and data responsibility in deep ways. In the education policy program, we have many of analysts that are working on what it means to be a good educator today and how to make sure they're prepared. So we're seeing a lot of that as well. Okay, so this may change as we're talking but we'll let these results sink in a little bit here. I wanted to just take a moment to then I guess get your take on these responses. As we're kind of seeing again what our very unscientific sample is thinking is of high importance right now. Do any of you have any responses to this just right now off the bat as you're seeing what's coming in? Anything surprising? The access to educators who make technology well is a piece I know Vicki that you've been looking at from a context of educators in a broad sense too, right? Not just teachers in classrooms but also recognizing that children are surrounded by people in their lives who are introducing them to technology in many ways. So you had said a moment ago that the relationship piece is really key to you. Do you wanna talk a little bit about even the ethnographic research that you've done in terms of what families are experiencing? Well, if we're thinking of educators in the narrower sense of teachers then there are some excellent national studies that have been done recently that show the teachers themselves are feeling a bit ambivalent about what the costs and benefits are and unsure of how to do things and that's especially true in early education where it's still in many spheres anathema to even talk about using technology. So they're really less likely to know how to use it or to feel good about using it or how to use it and so on. But my research looks primarily at kids as children and families because they spend far more time there than they do as students in schools. And so I'm interested in what happens at home especially in homes that we often know less about lower income and immigrant families. What's happening at home that might be supporting education in the classroom or perhaps is supporting it in ways that we are not recognizing or validating which I think is really important. So both in the interviews that we did and in the national survey, bless you. In both, we see that there's an incredible amount of intergenerational engagement around technology, parents teaching children how to learn about and engage with technology, fix problems, find content online, but also the reverse. The children in these families are playing roles in helping their parents to adopt technology and engage with it and learn how to use it in a way that they're not fearful about. That was especially true in the interviews that we did with 350 parents and kids in three school districts, open ended interviews with kids who are on free or reduced cost lunch and their Mexican heritage parents either immigrant or native born. But we saw the same thing in the survey where we could compare those families' experiences to those of English speaking, US born Hispanics, African Americans and whites. This is happening across the board. Three quarters of parents have helped their kids learn how to use technology, but over half have received help from their kids. And that's across all income levels below the median household income. It's across every education level and it's across all racial, ethnic and language backgrounds. It also affects how siblings learn with each other. In homes where parents are guiding their kids with technology more than the reverse, siblings are significantly more likely to help each other with homework, read with each other or to each other and to do arts and science projects together. All three of those are things that might involve technology, they often do, but they don't have to. But those are three activities that are validated and recognized by schools as relating to learning in the classroom. In homes where children are the ones guiding what happens with technology at home, those are families where kids are significantly more likely to be teaching each other how to go online, watching videos to learn together and watching TV to learn together. None of those are forms of learning that get validated in the classroom. They're more likely to be seen by teachers as a waste of time. So I think there's some interesting implications about what teachers validate and what kinds of learning might occur from the kinds of unstructured play that happens between siblings to learn in various ways. And it feels to me also that it's getting at this point that, and David, I'm really curious about your take on this, that the model of the 20th century, which was you learn from a textbook that is given to you in your homeroom class or in your science class, and then once you close that textbook, you are not learning, but that model's completely gone off the window, right? But given that, we're not necessarily then so reliant on the textbook. Does it mean that we, maybe this is a leading question, right? But that we have to make sure that those media that are not just textbooks are as available as possible to students. Yes. And I can say, Surprise! Let me ask it, maybe in a different way. Do you think today's educators and families recognize what is not available? Do they know that there are certain things that are just closed off to them or that they're gonna have to pay X number of dollars or license fees? Are they worried about copyright? I mean, I don't even know how many parents know or care. There's so many problems wrapped up in that question that you're asking, a lot of kids, a lot of at-risk kids who do manage to get to college have heard about tuition, know about tuition, have saved up for tuition, but textbooks have always been provided to them and they show up there and there's 100% increase in the cost that they were planning to bear and that's traumatic and tragic in a range of ways. And then there's also, you talked about the digital divide. I'm quite interested in the daily divide, the gap between our in-class experience and our real-world experience where kids are making memes and they're remixing this picture with this text, with this audio and they're involved in all this creative activity and then as soon as they get to school, either that's seen as a waste of time, it's not validated or you're told you can't use that image, that's a copyright violation. You know, their academia seems to be very good at kind of holding still while the world moves further and further forward and that gap between daily life and school life makes school feel very academic in the sense of like an academic exercise. And so how we make school feel more relevant which would cause me to actually care about school and engage in school and be involved in school I think is wrapped up in these issues as well. Is that an issue of equity that needs to be understood in this next social contract? It really does and I wanna get on to something that Teresa was saying too about data. There's this idea somehow that using data in education is some kind of fausty and packed that we make that I'll share my data with you in exchange for some service but the overtone is always what a stupid thing to do. You should never do that. We should be very, very concerned about privacy and we should be concerned about privacy but if you went to the doctor and walked into the doctor and said, Doc, my back hurts and the doctor said, tell me more about that and I said I'm not comfortable telling you what I was doing when I heard it or exactly where it hurts or how long it's been hurting or like if I was unwilling to provide any. How do you treat? So it's this idea that there has to be if we want better service, if we want better support, if we want better outcomes, we need better data and if you're not comfortable sharing data, that's okay but you have to understand that you can't get the same level of service if you're not willing to provide some information to the doctor about the nature of your injury and how long and where it hurts and how it happened and things like that. Can I take your analogy a step further? Please. That brings up issues about training the doctor. How do you train the doctor to ask the questions in a way that will elicit the information from you in a way that you're comfortable and if you're unlikely to talk to the doctor about it, is there a way to train the nurses as these intermediaries between the patient and the doctor so that you can gain in that kind of information? Today's educators are overburdened. They've got all kinds of things going on but a lot of them don't realize what parents are doing at home to support kids' education in ways that are intentional or unintentional or the roles that siblings are playing in younger siblings' education related to school and more broadly. How we train teachers to recognize and validate those strengths that are within families is a big part of making them feel like what happens outside of the classroom becomes part of the academic exercise and makes the academic exercise less academic. How do we make that a meaningful part of teacher training, not just a cultural competence add-on at the end which is what it usually also is for doctors? How do we make families more comfortable, engaging, if not with schools than with other trusted partners in the community who can help to translate their experience to educators in ways that make those relationships better than they are? And I know that your work you've done with families is with families of younger children but I'm curious then, Teresa, if the way that you're looking at data is something that the parents of your students know about, use themselves, or if you're at a point where the kids are, they're 19, 20, 25 years old, they've kind of moved on from that and it's about helping them see what their data means and how it affects their education. What we've done is a lot of, not saying that the parent side wouldn't be of value, we just haven't done that yet but what I would like to echo something that Dave said earlier, so when our students get here, they're ready for tuition, financial aid or whatever the case may be and we did not know till last year when we started looking at data, looking at midterm, looking at a couple of things, 40% of our students were making Cs at midterm, okay? So like, why 40% of our students are making Cs, freshmen, I'm talking about freshmen. And what happened, we did a survey and probably 90% of those students hadn't bought books yet. Really? Hadn't bought books. Hadn't bought books. And you probably couldn't answer the follow up, or ask the follow up, you know. Sure I can. But in the data, tell me, and was it affordability only? Were there other issues? So it was choices, was it access? It was choices. So some of the students said this book is not as important as this book. Can I go to the library and get the book? I need it for other things. First generation students, they need a little bit of money in their pockets and all that stuff. So from that data, what we did is say, okay, we gotta go down two paths because they gotta have their books, right? Or they have to have some means of getting their supporting information for the classrooms. So we went to the bookstore and said, we want a reduction of 40% in books, okay? If you can't do that, your contract is up next year so then we'll have to talk about that. But so they put together a freshman package which is 40% less, okay? And what we did was we went to the board and said, hey, we want to make this a fee. That will ensure that the students will get their books. But the other parallel path we did is we put a policy in place and says every freshman class, GNA has to be in the learning management system. Has to be. So then students don't get far behind in doing that. So now you have to flip everything. So for folks who may not know a learning management system, just quickly. That's like on Blackboard or you're logging in and you're seeing your sign-mess discussion, homework and all that stuff. So we have a union state and of course the union's like, oh, we don't have to do that. Yes, you do. At least for freshmen because that is the only way we know that they're picking up what they need to do. So you have to flip every one of your traditional classes in a learning management system. For the first year. So now we can now track this analytics around this to see what students are doing. And I don't know if any of the textbooks that were kind of part of that process of bringing the costs down were open or not. Or if this is a key part for Delaware State, but maybe David if you could describe a little bit of the Z degree, for example, and what that means for students when they come and don't have to be. Yeah, you know, how does that work? The impact is that you essentially give every student a $1,000 scholarship. Because that's the equivalent. Every student that comes in the door, you know, that's in that degree program gets a $1,000 scholarship because, now it's one they didn't know they needed in many cases. But that's what it amounts to effectively. That first year is so difficult because they're transitioning, college is so different. This idea of general education, like I thought when I got to college I was finally gonna take the classes I cared about, right? Like I wanted to be a business major, not be off taking this biology class or whatever it was. And we send this mixed signal that we think students don't pick up on, but they absolutely do. That says, you know, these general education courses are so important that we will not let you graduate if you don't take them. And they're so unimportant that the day they're over, just go sell your books back. You never need to think about that again. It's never gonna, you're never gonna need to refer to it again. And you know, we need a better model around that and a model that uses open educational resources where not only are they free the first day, but I never have to sell them back. I'm never tempted to give them back. I build up a collection of materials that I've marked up and I am familiar with and I can refer to them again later on. This function of building my own personal library is also really important. And not something that students are able to do now because that temptation to, do y'all know there are $400 textbooks now? Yes. Yes. Yes. And what would you guess the buyback price for those is? Right. Right? It's like a pizza, right? Essentially. Right, right. And obviously, and just because something's going online doesn't mean that it's any cheaper by any stretch, right? Not only is it not cheaper, but in fact, as it goes online, you see what many publishers are doing is they're investing in technology, not that makes it easier to share, easier to remix, easier to mash up, but technology that makes it harder to do any of those kind of internet native activities and they've been very successful at following up those technological measures with legislation that makes it illegal to circumvent those technological measures, even to make fair uses, to make other uses that would otherwise be legal, just the act of circumventing their controls to do something that would otherwise be legal is illegal. So the investment has been in more control, and I know I'm just soap boxing now, so I apologize, but it feels to me very much like an attack on the idea of personal property. We don't want anyone to own copies of things anymore because if you own a copy of a book, you might resell it, there might be secondary markets that develop, but if I can just lease you for six months and access code, I can perfectly control what you do, and at the end of the day, you've paid all your money and on January 1st, you have literally nothing to show for it. So just to play devil's advocate for a moment here from a publisher's point of view, is there not a real crunch financially to be creating print materials and having to kind of figure out all these digital platforms and doing it in ways that match, let's say, common core standards or that are aligned with what colleges are expecting and have you seen models that, where publishers are able to say, no, we can make this work financially, but in a more open way. So I feel like I'm talking too much. I think the only thing I'll say there is you can really feel the whole system kind of rattling as companies try to hold on to 20th century business models as the world moves forward. And will that transition be painful? Yes, and will we lose some of them? Yes, but we just need to bite the bullet and make that business model transition. Everybody knows the story about the ICE delivery man and how the ICE delivery man was put out of business by the refrigerator in the house eventually. There's that kind of transition coming and dragging it out isn't helping anybody. And those models are just forcing things underground. I teach at Rutgers University, which is the State University of New Jersey. Half of our students are first generation college goers and they face all these same issues and I've had conversations with students that I don't want you choosing between eating and reading and you're gonna read. And I'll figure out ways to do that. I have internal programs where kids will donate their books to me if I have to have a textbook like for research methods. If they don't need it at the end of the semester, donate it to me instead of getting the 20 bucks at the bookstore and I'll give it to another student the next semester who can't afford it. But I shouldn't be doing that. Or colleges that have food scholarships now, right? Yeah, and open the halls on the weekends to give food away that they haven't used during the week, we shouldn't be there. And this is making me think too, Teresa, that the data that you're collecting and looking at for each student can, not only are you able to kind of see what students' needs are and whether they're maybe hitting some of these barriers, but you also I suppose can then open up conversations about why that C in midterm, why are you struggling at this moment and that that can perhaps carry that conversation forward? Yes, so you know there's always layers and layers of data and so that was the first conversation is, well, they don't have books. Didn't know, honestly did not know that. So we did start a, went to the board of trustees said, hey, use your scholarship or book scholarships. You know, students have to have books. But the second thing, so we got that straight and we'll look at the yields because if they get their books, they were probably 80 or so percent end up with a B or A towards the end of semester. That's why it didn't make sense, right? So like, what are you doing? C or last year, but you end up making the B or A. But the other thing we started doing is segmenting the sections who we're teaching because it's just not all the students, so right? So when I look over here and you have the same class as you have here and 25% of the students are passing in this class, but 20, I mean, 75 are passing here, but 75 are failing here. Let's have another conversation. With that conversation, I just nicely hand over to academics because they're in a different world than I am. So I nicely hand that over to give them data about really we're here for student success. So this data is, there's outliers here, why? You know, why is the student struggle? Because next semester, they're gonna go take the same class and end up passing. But what happens is, they end up graduating with 148, 50 credit hours instead of the 120 that they're assigned, which adds on another year to their graduation. So I mean, we just kind of look at everything we can to try to start making informed decisions and strategies and interventions around those. So to close out and before we get to our last polling question, just really quick, if you could say what is one thing that right now gives you the most hope that we can build a better social contract for education and technology? For me, it's the IDP because that's, I can tell where a student is, what a student doing, have they been advised that, you know, that is my hope that at any time, if we say the retention drops off, I'll know exactly where, when, why, and how, and then we can make those decisions. So that is what I think is the answer to what we realized the individual for DSU. Great. For me, I think it's the groundswell around digital equity that's happening at the moment. We've got, you know, HUD working on Connect Home. We've got the president's announcement of Connect All, the changes to the FCC's lifeline policy. All these organizations and groups that are working locally to try to provide the kinds of supports families need to engage and manage, you know, their skills. I think where we still need help is recognizing what strengths these families already have and leveraging those strengths as partners for the kinds of changes they want to see for their families and their communities because we're so used to looking at these families by their deficits and income and education and so forth. Let's start focusing on their strengths and make them partners for this. But I'm hopeful about the groundswell and recognition that's happening at the moment at different levels related to really working towards digital equity. Yeah, and I think I'd say something similar. I think that the word is really getting out about the impact of the cost of educational materials. The word is getting out about the existence of open educational resources. There are literally over a billion of them by their last count available online. These OER degree programs are growing. The Department of Education is running a great campaign right now called with the hashtag go open. There's just lots of people joining forces and helping move this work forward and it looks like, you know, all the early indicators are that it's going very well and it looks like it has momentum to go quite a distance. Great, so the reasons for both excitement and concern. I can see, we're gonna put up our last question and as you're answering it, I'll tell you a little bit about where we're gonna go forward in the education policy program with these questions in this issue. But we wanted to just get a sense of actually, after some of what you've heard this morning, what you may have already known coming in, if there are certain things you want to do locally within your own community that help kind of push some of these issues around equity and responsibility. So we've gotta pay everything from talking to, say a school board member or your college to understanding better who really has access to the internet in your community and access to educational resources as well. We are excited about these issues. I think there is a groundswell within the learning technologies project over the next couple of months. We're gonna be continuing to explore this with blog posts snippets from the conversation today and we can continue the conversation as well on Twitter using its personal hashtag and we'll close out for now, but please join me in thanking our great panel.