 Let me welcome everybody to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host, and chief cat herder. And for the next hour, we're gonna have a conversation about the future of higher education. Before we do that, let me begin by introducing the forum, explaining where it comes from, how it works, what we hope to accomplish, who supports it, and then I'll introduce this week's awesome guest. So much of that is background. Right now, let's move to the foreground for today's discussion. I'm really delighted to welcome Phil Hill. Phil is an extraordinary fellow who he does, among other things, a widely regarded, very influential, deeply thoughtful blog. He's a consultant at MindWires, who speaks widely and works with clients all over the world. He's deeply knowledgeable about all kinds of aspects of higher education planning. When it comes to specialty technology, he is a very, very expert. He's the guy I go to when I want to learn about what's happening with the learning management system, what the impact of automation might be, and in fact, he's been a guest twice before in the program, and I just can't get enough of him. Welcome, Phil. Hello, welcome. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Well, we're really, really grateful that you could make it here. Are you at home right now? I am at home near Santa Cruz, California, and to back you up, yes, it's gorgeous and sunny here, but that means I have to close the shade so I don't get too much of the light of my glasses reflecting off of it in this new world of meeting. That's the kind of problem that Californians have to struggle with, you know? I know. It's just, the struggle is real, my friend. Yes, I'll survive. I hope so. To introduce you, I just quickly sketched out a couple of highlights, but what we do in the form is we ask people to look ahead to introduce themselves, and my question for you is, what are you gonna be doing for the next year? What's up and right in terms of your thinking, and what are you spending the most time working on? Well, it might be good to sort of introduce, juxtaposing what you're doing, Brian. So the way I, besides the difference in our looks, and in honor of Fred Willard for those Spinal Tap fans, I don't wanna get too close, so they think we're brothers. But in any case, a lot of the role I play is doing observations and spotting trends and helping people understand what those trends mean. And yeah, obviously there's overlap with what you do. You're very influential, but what I don't do is I'm not a futurist. I think that you lay out a lot more of the different scenarios. I'm much more explaining here the trends we're already seeing and what they mean to you. So we're advising companies, schools, even investors. But quite honestly, so we're gonna keep doing more of the same, but one thing I will say is, business is changing even on our side, and I know it is for you as well, Brian. I've seen your post writing about it. So I've been getting much more into podcast, and part of that is because need to find a way to still connect with people in more meaningful ways, especially given the fact that so much of consulting was being on-site and meeting with groups and talking in a casual format. So definitely we'll continue covering what's happening with the reaction to COVID, online and hybrid education, learning platforms, but just like schools are having to adapt, we're having to adapt as well. Well, I appreciate all of that. And of course, I appreciate that personally, since we have someone parallel past this way. Although I fear that between the two of us, one huge difference is that is hair. I think between us is like one normal person's hair amount, but I'm really glad to hear that you're podcasting. What's the name of the podcast so we can find it? So while we have two podcasts up, one is COVID transitions, and it's on all the different services, and it's essentially covering once a week a discussion with Jeanette Wiseman and Kevin Kelly, the three of us discuss various issues as the reaction to COVID. So getting into hybrid education, getting a number of topics. We have a separate podcast, which is just poet readings, poet for Phil on EdTech. And that's more of a universal design for learning idea of if you read the blog, but you'd prefer to have it read to you in audio as opposed to having to go on a browser or read it through RSS. So we have a podcast to serve that as well. Very nice. And friends as well, if you, in addition to those two podcasts, so you can get more Phil Hillishness, look on the bottom to the left, you should see a couple of buttons that will link both to his blog as well as to the section of his blog devoted to the pandemic. And again, this is a blog that I urge all my students to, or just every human interested in higher education. I thought about getting my in-laws to come on the show so they could have a better idea of what I actually do for a living. Invite them, invite them. And we'll have the recording afterwards so you can show that to them. My wife felt that me sharing the YouTube after the fact would be a safer approach. I have a few questions I'd like to ask, but the goal here is to surface your questions in your comments. Already, we have one that's come in from Keele Doomsch. And let me just flash this on the screen. Again, if you can't do video, just hit that question mark button and it'll look like this. Do you think colleges will be able to effectively monetize online education the long term, especially if and when it becomes untethered from credentialing? Well, obviously there are two separate, two interdependent questions there. Yes, I do think that higher education will monetize online in the long term. I mean, that's already been happening at the master's degree level in particular that it's already a force of monetizing online. And that's really what's led to the rise of the OPM market. But not just that, it's, I mean, let's be honest that schools a lot of times when they're looking to go online, the reason they're looking to do it pre-pandemic is because monetizing the master's level in particular has proved effective strategy not for everybody but for quite a few schools. Moving forward, I like the fact that you added the long term because in the short term, one of the issues that's gonna happen is there's such downward pressure on tuition. And I think that we're gonna see a lot of in the short term at least student choices to go to lower price programs. Which you could argue is harming monetization, if you will. But I think given the long term perspective, that's gonna be a force for change that will provide greater stability for higher education in the long term. The issue that I guess I'm, that complicates it, I don't see online becoming completely untethered from credentials. I see that credentials can change, that you can break down and not just have everything about the degree, but I do not, and I know that LinkedIn learning and that you have other efforts that are doing online education that are untethered from official institutional degrees and certificates. But I don't think that's gonna be the majority case. I think it's gonna be a partial untethering. And yes, I still think there's opportunities for schools to take advantage of it, but I just do not see a complete untethering that's gonna happen. Understood, understood. Keel, this is a great question. And this is, Keel has some really visionary attitudes about where higher education might be headed in terms of credentialing. So he's someone to, somebody to look out for on this. And again, friends, if you'd like to ask a question, either just hit the question mark box or hit the raised hand button. And as I said that, we have another question that just came in from our friend in Houston. Tom Hames says, the problems that lower cost institutions are often subsidized in public funds. Community colleges are growing in enrollment right now and facing budget cuts. How do you square this? Well, as if you can square this. I live in California, as we mentioned, and you could look at it as a case that, if you look at the budgets that's coming out for this year, I think there's a projected $54 billion budget deficit over the next year. The Cal State System and the University California System are taking an effective 15% cut, as we know it right now. Because they had planned to go up about 5%, now they're going down about 10%. The community colleges are not taking nearly as much of a cut as those other two systems. So you could argue that states understand that community colleges, the enrollment's likely to go up and they're very important in this day and age. Having said that, the community college system is facing huge budget problems themselves. So just because they're not taking as much of a state-funded cut as the University of California, they're under tremendous financial pressure. So that's the unfortunate part of what we're facing. It would be great if the funding said, this is where students are going and we need to actually increase funding. But I doubt that's gonna be the majority case. It's more of a who's gonna take less painful cuts than the others. And the states are gonna vary dramatically on how they fund the more affordable community college systems in particular. And I think we're gonna see a lot of disparities state by state on how well they can serve students moving forward because of the challenge that you bring up. So there's no easy answer. It's a painful answer. Well, that's a very honest answer. And thank you for unfolding it. And Tom, thank you for the, as usual, very... I just wanna bring that really quickly and ask Phil, is there, to what extent do you think we will see a shuffling in academic staff this fall and spring as institutions scrambled to survive budget cuts? That is, to what extent are we gonna see departments shrunken, merged or closed and other departments expanded to respond to perceived changes in student demand? Well, this is speculation because I don't pretend to know the answers on this. I definitely think you're gonna see reorganizations that will have to be part of dealing with the finances. But I'm hoping that what's happening is people realize that you have to support online and hybrid. You're gonna, it's increasing the demand on staff who can support this at a pedagogical level. And you can even argue, well, strong argument for the fact that colleges and universities are getting distilled down to the teaching and learning mission. There was so much other stuff that was on top of it. The student life, sports and a lot of school, so much else and teaching and learning quite honestly was a small part of a lot of the college experience at many places. Well, this spring and likely for most of the fall for a lot of school, even if you're hybrid, so much of the campus experience is gonna be into teaching and learning. So what I think is gonna happen, I think that people are gonna remain being tremendously overworked and stressed out. The best news of it is I think people will realize how important these people are and how important this staff is. I unfortunately don't predict that the staffing levels and funding are going to be part of that appreciation in the fall. But on the good side, I think from a strategic level, it'll really elevate the understanding of how important the staff level is, particularly those who support teaching and learning and the faculty who are doing the direct teaching. So it didn't 100% directly answer the question fully, but I think that's the best I can do. Well, that's okay. I appreciate the effort. I wanted to follow up on that a little bit more, but questions are just piling in and I would really like to hear from all of these folks. So Ophelia Mangan at Columbia has a question. She asks, what would you say to students who presume that online education is inherently inferior to in-person learning experiences? And what would you say to faculty who have the same presumption? What I would say to students, I mean, we have to acknowledge and be honest with the fact that first of all, we know and there's so many studies and we had a blog post that Stephanie Moore from the University of Virginia and I wrote together called Planning for Resilience, Not Resistance. We called out that there's a lot of data backing up the fact that online can be as effective or even more effective than face to face when properly done and when properly supported. So let's start out with that proposition. It can be better and if you're a student and you're getting a crappy experience, it's not that the online modality requires that it be a crappy experience. You need to have talented teachers, you need to have a school supporting you and it could be even better. We know courses where you have more engagement online than you would face to face. Having said that, I think that we need to be very careful about the distinction of emergency remote teaching and online teaching. Because I've seen this discussion, it's been successful in terms of saying, hey, what we're doing this spring, particularly just throw everything on Zoom, that's not the same thing as carefully designed online. But for so many students, particularly students who never intended to take an online course, it doesn't matter. You can call it whatever you want, they're not getting the experience they want. So there's a certain element that these semantics don't actually, it could be getting in the way of us understanding what students want. So part of the answer is not just telling students, it could be better. It's also acknowledging in so many cases, yes, what you're getting is crappy. And your school should be doing a better job of changing that. And if it's not, you should be looking around. That's part of what I would say. Very, very good. It's a great question, and a really, really good answer. And I have a lawnmower outside, so we're doing the real-time window shutting. That's okay, it's very exciting. And again, we have a whole bunch of questions that have been coming in. And those of you who have your mic and camera ready to go, please click the raised hand so we can be on stage. We have a quick comment from a longtime friend, Mark Rush, who says, no question that live online can be more engaging than a hundred person lecture hall in person. Yes. Quite true, quite true. I completely agree. Let's see, questions are coming in, and I wanna make sure that we get a chance to address all of them. And here's one from Mark Lentini, a Highline College. Since we're in the middle of a national conversation on race, how do you see this shift impacting students of color, whether because of economic disparities or interactions between online learning tech? Well, this gets back to that same distinction about carefully supported and designed online learning can address those issues. What I have seen in consulting, so this is sort of outside of COVID, if you will, is the support for students of color and which is most often associated with economic disparities, but as important, first generation students. I don't have a family history of going to college. The biggest factors I see in those cases are support outside the classroom. And part of that's encouragement that, hey, you can do this. Don't worry that you got a bad grade, you can do it. Checking in saying, are you spending the time? So the academic support mission that's not necessarily tied to the course content is typically the most important element of supporting students from an economic or race perspective. But we also have to acknowledge that in the rush to go online this spring, that has not scaled to the same degree that throwing together synchronous classes has scaled. So I think that we're going to have at least a temporary harm to students from an equity perspective. They're suffering also accessibility. Students who are looking, need to have accessibility issues addressed. So in the short term, it's harming it. It is widening disparities. Schools are trying to deal with it partially by going with pass, no pass type of systems, but that doesn't address learning. So it is a real problem right now. Moving forward, what I would hope is that to re, I wouldn't say the problem's ever been solved, but to re-engage on doing this properly, schools need to put a lot of money into academic support, including peer support. And as I said, what I've seen as the biggest issue is the outside the classroom support, just the advising type of nature. That's gonna be part of that grand distillation you described as campuses narrow, many of them narrow their function more and more towards teaching. It has to include that teaching support, counseling, advising, and all of this. Yeah, actually, it's a great question, but it raises one other topic that we haven't gotten into yet, but I'm seeing it more online. All schools are not equal, even if you say for the category of schools that are open access oriented schools, and take a classic one, Southern New Hampshire University, guess what? They're not having budget cuts, they're not cutting their support for students, they're increasing their support for students. In the meantime, you've got community colleges all over the place and state, regional state universities that are not addressing this problem adequately. And one of the risk is that you're gonna have a lot of the shift of students going towards schools that are already set up to have full support and that are going to continue investing in that support. So I think enrollment's gonna go up at community colleges, but I think there's also going to be a shift, even more students looking at the large private universities such as Southern New Hampshire that have invested in support and are going to continue investing in support. That's a, I really like where you went with that. We have a few questions that came up that actually connect with that pretty closely. Loyal Friskney has a question here, he's from Kentucky at CP, says as you look forward to the next few years, do you believe the traditional funding model will change for public universities? Yes, I do. One of the things about COVID to take a step back, I don't believe that the global pandemic by and large is creating new trends. I think that a bigger impact is it's taking pre-existing trends and it's accelerating them greatly. Some dramatically, something that would have taken a decade is now taking six months. So if you look at funding models, yes, I think it will have a big impact, but specifically by taking existing trends towards outcomes based funding, not just purely based on total enrollment, but total number of graduates and a lot of funding getting shifted into non-degree programs and certificates and industry partnerships in particular. Those are all pre-existing trends. And so what I think is gonna happen is that they will accelerate from a funding model. So to a degree, part of what you'll see is I'm somewhat of an incrementalist, even if things go dramatically different, it's gonna be just acceleration of incremental changes. I don't think that we're gonna end up in a whole new world with a completely different type of funding. I just think that the shift that's happening is gonna be a lot faster now. Acceleration. Yes. Related to this, Justin Kirk's, who had the honor of teaching back in the 20th century, who is now the high school assistant principal, Little Rock Christian Academy, he asks, what does the, how does tuition look like for fully online versus in-person or hybrid models this fall? Well, what, this fall? I mean, I think that's a time-based question. So, and this is another trend. So let's go back two years ago. The answer is, is that surprisingly, and I'm speaking more higher education than K-12, but that tuition for online programs quite often was greater than face-to-face programs. And because it would be full tuition plus additional fees. So it was a cash generating business and people were increasing pricing. I wrote a post almost a year ago about two U's earnings call where they essentially said the whole market has changed and it, the number, you can't just keep expanding online versus face-to-face. There's greater competition and there's greater demand for lower price education. And even in the OPM market that served master's degrees, there's a huge downward pressure and a greater amount of competition. So I wrote a post called The Day the OPM Market Change. So I think we already had a trend saying we've got to find lower price degrees. And I also see that there's a large shift of fully online and undergraduate. Now you enter COVID, these trends, I think are going to accelerate dramatically. And I think we're already seeing it. You're seeing lots of lawsuits. Give me back my tuition because I'm not getting what I signed up for. I'm getting less of an education and an experience. I don't know how many of those lawsuits are gonna be successful from a legal perspective, but I think schools are under tremendous pressure to lower their tuition. And Inside Higher Education just had an article that came out recently that several schools are lowering their tuition and seeing greater commitments for fall enrollment. So moving forward, you're gonna see that shift from a revenue generating online is even more expensive and to an online is gonna reduce the total tuition. And one way I would liken it to is the University of Florida online. When that program came out, it was legislated that their costs were 75% of the face-to-face cost. You still get the same degree, same diploma. You can even shift from online to face-to-face, but when you're doing online, you pay less. I think we'll see a lot more of that type of program and that type of pricing. So I do think it'll be lower. Hybrid, that's tricky. I don't see that being a huge change in tuition other than the general shift of students towards more academic or access-oriented schools and fewer students willing to pay high tuition just because the school has a good name. But I think online, the shift is gonna be very much towards lower cost. Speaking of which, we have a question from Neeta Huntsman at EDX and she asks, recreating an entire face-to-face college curriculum for online seems inefficient and exhausting. How can those pool resources? Are system schools doing so? And by system school, them inferring students like SUNY or CSU, state systems. Sure, I'll start with a, I'm in California, been advising the online education initiative since its inception and that is a system level pooling of resources for the community college system. There's been not the same level, but California State University has done the affordable, the course redesign initiative, although that got cut pretty dramatically. I think you're hitting on a huge topic. Collaboration between institutions has to be a key part of how we deal with the constraints of we need to change, but we have an economic crisis. So I think you will see more system level programs similar to what's happening in California with the online education initiative and similar to other areas. I think it's got to be a mandatory part of it. And I do know some people from private conversation saying that might be the biggest change that we see. Five years from now, we'll say, wow, look how much true academic collaboration is happening now that wasn't happening before. So I think you bring up a huge point. Well, I hope you're right. As a fan of inter-institutional collaboration, I hope you're right. That's a great question. If you want to follow up, please, please do. And related down the block conceptually from EDX, we have Denise Ognier from Coursera. So let me just bring them up on stage. Hello, you can make sure your camera's on. There you are. Hello, Brian. Thank you as usual for the family. Hello, Mr. Hill. Hello, what do we get our next plenty the younger? You know, having great conversations face to face and having, being able to enjoy a beer in a public place, two things I'm very much looking forward to resuming. Yes. So I know a lot of great resources and repositories were put online and circulated and publicized, especially during remote emergency teaching. As we look for more thoughtful online planning for the fall and the more resilient teaching that you mentioned, do you have any favorite places that you direct folks to for great examples and exemplars for online learning design? It'd be a little bit difficult for me to answer that off the top of my head, but I will say that one of the things that we did, just like a number of organizations did, is with the California, we helped them put together a list of resources and a list of places that have content. So maybe after the fact, I'll find a link. Kevin Kelly, who works with me, I think he's been more of our specialists knowing these different areas. But one of the, let me take your question just a little bit differently. It's been wonderful how much sharing there's been and there's been quality online content and even tips and trades, but one of the problems that we have right now is a glut of information. Like I get an email from University Business Daily and their headline is 140 links for free resources. But that's not really helping when people have, they can't wade through 140 different places right now. So there's lots of, what we're missing right now is curation in a local context. What we're missing is not necessarily here's the best set of resources. It's that missing middle service level to say for your type of school, here are the three to four areas you should look at. Oh, you're a research university, very different perspective, you should look here. And so I realize I'm not directly answering your question, but I think that there's tons, there's hundreds of places for this. What's missing is that application knowledge that can just distill it down to say, hey, for you three to four places, this is where you should be looking. No, that's super helpful, thank you. Yeah, good to see you. I should, very good. And take care. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's how easy the video questions are. In fact, we have another one from a long time friend of both the program and myself, George Station at Cal State. So let me bring George up. Hello, George. Hi, how are you doing? Hi, Phil. Hey, how are you doing? Long time, no see, at least when we were both moving here. So, yeah, so Phil, I've got a couple of questions. One, I wonder if you could expand a little on what you were saying earlier about access. Whenever somebody looks at access from through more than one lens, I just want to ask them this. Because you mentioned both the kind of traditional digital divide issues a little bit, but also the aspect of access in terms of classic accessibility, ADA and so on, that we have to look at a little differently if everybody's online. At least I hope people are looking at it differently. So question is, what is your sense of optimism or pessimism with whether senior administrators and executives, system execs, however you want to look at that, your sense of optimism or pessimism as to whether they're actually getting it that now that it's for everybody, they really need to look hard at both of those types of accessibility issues. Are they getting it? Are they not getting it? Sure. Before I answer that, I'll just point out that there's some favoritism. So far, anybody who's asking a video question, I've sat down and had a beer with them in the past. I don't know how that's happening, I'm just calling it out. Or it might be a statement about me. So as far as my gut feel, George, I think short-term pessimistic, long-term optimistic. I do not see a change in thinking at the senior administration level currently and I sort of see them skipping over the importance of it, partially because I'm just trying to stay alive or I'm trying to help my school stay alive. I'm just trying to figure out where the massive cuts are and I'm already gonna be reducing students. This is another part of it. So in the immediate reaction, I think, I'm pessimistic. And the Department of Education has relaxed the rules, particularly around the ADA-style accessibility. I think they've extended that relaxation of the rules through the end of the year and I think that makes it easier to ignore the issues. So quite honestly, I'd say from an ADA accessibility, I'm pessimistic with what's happening today. But I think that two years from now, three years from now, I think it's sort of like academic support staff, it's gonna be something where you have to acknowledge the importance of it and some of that will come from schools who do a good job versus not doing a good job. So long-term, I'm optimistic. I'm sort of in the middle when it comes to the equity-based issues short-term and I do think there's a lot of recognition that students who need the most support to have the access to a quality education are going to naturally be more of the lower income and they're more hurt by what's happening economically. So I do see recognition of that, the ADA-style accessibility, I actually don't think is going well right now, but I think it'll have to turn around within a year or two years. That's my gut feel. Okay, yeah, thanks. And before I go to the next question, let me comment, I feel that that's going to leave a lot of students behind where people are gonna have to put a brief face on it and suggest they're not leaving students behind when they really are and I'm not feeling great about that aspect of it. So anyway, watch this space, I guess. Oh, so I'm at a Cal State campus as you know that, but for the sake of the question. And so I wanna say that we are kind of decentralized, at least from my faculty perspective, as far as having that system vision you were talking about a few minutes ago. I think the Cal State campuses are not collaborating as much as they could across campuses except individual campuses where people know each other, network and so on. Not sure as a system that's happening, but my opinion as faculty. But also new question, LMS, let's get into LMS territory. Okay, so Instructure was doing layoffs and you've written about that. Now I seem to have a dog in the hunt because not because the Moodle CEO keeps putting his foot in his mouth, but because Moodle is getting some pushback locally on my own campus for a host of other reasons. We're looking at maybe it's time for Canvas. And so with everybody that's on that Canvas bandwagon and Instructure doing layoffs is Canvas the way to go. I don't want you to recommend or not recommend a brand name, but just what is your perspective on how that kind of LMS fight is going and should we keep our minds open about that or are you looking optimistic or pessimistic there? That's my second question. Sure, and by the way, so I'll mention some of these things. I will say just full disclosure so that people understand we do an LMS service where we advise schools on a market analysis basis on exactly this type of question and where it's going. So some of my answers gonna come from that market analysis service that we do. So first of all, what's happening that's important is the LMS itself, particularly for the scalability which quite often is based on cloud hosting and the intuitive design. So we're increasing the importance that the LMS can just work and that faculty can quickly adopt it. That quite naturally is more of a problem for Moodle and it has been historically a huge strength of both Canvas but also D2L Brightspace has made huge improvements in this area lately. Blackboard has a mixed record they're going that way but they had their problems. But my point is there's a big shift that's happening in so many areas particularly North America but also Northern Europe away from open source solutions where you have tons of options and towards more of a commercial cloud based thing. And I see that continuing. So I see that as a major trend. I see that the importance of the LMS is gonna continue rising which I know a lot of people wish that weren't so but there has to be a way for a school to have this is our virtual home. This is our virtual learning environment as they say in the UK. So, but now talking about the layoffs let's just be very direct. There's a lot of risks that Instructure just added on itself by cutting so deeply with a mind towards increasing profitability. And so any school you should be asking really tough questions of them to make sure they're gonna be able to support you moving forward in the same way they've supported schools in the past. They've added huge amount of risk. So let's acknowledge that. But I'd say the general trend is going to increase towards cloud hosted LMSs that have a simpler design and quite often de-emphasize the huge wealth of features that a lot of people have wanted in the past. It's just because there's so many teachers having to use it who don't want to have to think about it. They need it to just work. So I don't know if that directly answered your question. It's getting at it because we're in the midst of our summer professional development that is leading to our new fall virtual online because CSU is gonna be mostly virtually online because the chancellor said so, et cetera, right? And that message has kind of come down with a little bit of on-campus face to face for that's being sorted out this summer moving target. So, but right now that means we're also in this, oh gosh, do we have to do, are we keeping an LMS? Are we getting a new LMS? I'll disclose my campus is actually sorting that out now. And it's like, okay, Moodle or commercial side, because we've been on Moodle for years. And that's one of our questions and it's in the midst of all this summer activity. And so, yes, you did kind of get at that. And I'll mull that over, go to my Zoom this afternoon with our academic technologists and see what they have to say about this morning's conversation. So, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was just saying just be aware that's part of what we help schools work with. So, if you don't mind me doing a commercial vlog, we can help out there. Okay, and Brian, I'll leave the floor and let you get back to next guest, whatever you need to do. Thank you so much for the conversation. Feel good to see you. Good to see you, George. George, thanks for the great questions and please take care. Friends, we're approaching the top of the hour. And so I wanna make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask their questions. And so, I may have to bunch a few of these up together. But let's see, we have, speaking of doing online only, we also have the great option that I don't think we've mentioned so far today, but Sarah Sangregorio from Montclair State brings up. I sent your blog to my faculty, you introduced them to the idea of HiFlex. Thank you. How feasible is HiFlex to implement by the fall with budget issues and personnel challenges? And HiFlex, and by the way, I see that that's something that you're covering, Brian, and you're gonna cover in more detail. So attend future FTTE sessions. HiFlex just as a quick summary, it's hybrid, but it's specifically that allows the flexibility for parallel tracks, if you will. Students can choose to do learning activities face-to-face or online and they can even shift back and forth. So it's a flexible form of hybrid. It is resource intensive. It does increase the burden on doing it properly or doing it in a well-supported manner. So it is definitely a matter of invest in the short term for a long-term payoff. Now, the question is how realistic is it to do in the summer geared towards a fall usage of it? I think it's something where it would be unrealistic to think, oh, we've got it nailed and we have a new pedagogical approach and we don't have to adapt it during the fall. I think that it's very feasible in terms of making some of the bigger changes towards HiFlex and helping faculty understand, hey, here's a way to implement this for online, this for face-to-face. And keep in mind, it's not just online versus face-to-face as you need to allow options for synchronous versus asynchronous, particularly for students who, okay, I can attend the, well, it's what you do, Brian, right? Okay, I can attend the live Future Transform or I can now do YouTube for the Future Transform. But the thing that faculty need to understand is, and I'm using you as an example, Brian, all right, if I do YouTube, that's great to watch but I was not able to ask questions. I couldn't engage people. I couldn't do real-time chat. So one of the biggest things to do for HiFlex is help faculty and course designers and support realize, here's how to put these elements in and go down the road towards implementing it, but make sure that for each channel, if you will, you have adequate support. And one that often gets overlooked is the asynchronous options versus synchronous and that that changes the appropriate way to increase engagement and support. They can be done, but it's not the same way. You have to be creative. It's sub-stack-style discussions or there are different ways to do it. So that's where it's gonna be difficult, but I guess my short answer is to do it well enough over the summer so that it improves your school's prospects for the fall? Absolutely, but you should plan on an entire term of continuous improvements as part of that as well because it does increase the resources needed. And as Sarah said, while we have budget issues and personnel challenges. Yeah, I know it's a perfect storm. We had a curricular question that came from Arthur Friedrich and wants to know, there's been much news of schools starting new programs. Is this the best time to be doing that? Well, I guess this is pretty judgmental or subjective. I think that it's a good time to do it if it represents schools being creative and how to meet students where they are in this new world. So if it's a new program that's not meant for expansion and growth and something we've never done before, but it's a, let's say it's a new program that combines two different disciplines but they leverage each other for collaborative support and they introduce it with credentials that aren't necessarily fully part of a degree. So basically you're making it easier to support and easier for students to get some credential that's of value to them, but without the huge commitment they may have had before. If it's that type of let's be creative to meet students where they are, I think it's a very good time for it. If it's a new program in the, we're expanding what we're doing in our grand mission. No, it's not a good time. So that's the distinction I would place between those two. I appreciate that. We have three questions that build in complexity. One really, really important one from Kathy Pittman at Hillsborough Community College. And Kathy asks, what are your thoughts in the ongoing conversations about legal protections for institutions from negligence lawsuits? Are you trying to immunize colleges and universities against pandemic related lawsuits? I feel like I'm getting sucked into saying something dangerous here, particularly if you say this will build in complexity. I think it's an important part of the fall. I think that liability protection, not blanket, no restrictions whatsoever, but I think it's a crucial part, almost as important as probably overstating it. It's number two to funding and towards what schools can do in the fall. So I think it's a huge issue. I think it will fully address the level as opposed to a patchwork of state level liability protection. I think. Phil, we're getting a little garbled sound right now. Can you, is anybody else experiencing this on the fully online when they had wanted to go hybrid? So hugely important issue. Personally, I am a fan of doing that, even at the risk of, I know there's people are concerned while it's gonna reward schools for being irresponsible. I don't think this is a black and white issue. I think we need to shift along the spectrum towards greater liability protection at least for the next year so that schools have more freedom to make programs work. Very good. Phil, we're getting a... We had, that was a good answer. And in the recording, you'll hear me saying, Phil, you have an issue. So... Wow. You're not the first person to say that. Probably not the last, but there are a lot of, thank you. That's a really good response actually to a very tricky question. And to what I'm sure we're gonna see a lot about and we may get some, we may get some class action lawsuits that come out of this, but let's build up on this a little bit further. Pamela Benjamin at Trails, hello, Pam asks, will the shift to online learning in the learner's need for flexibility time, micro-conditioning, mean that colleges will be the exclusive domain of the elite and community colleges will thrive? I'm not sure I 100% understand that question. It almost sounds like that there will be a sort of a two levels of education of a very elite and then the community colleges are access oriented and will have a hollowing out of the middle. That's how I'm interpreting your question. That's actually, at least in the short term from an enrollment perspective, I would say that's pretty accurate, something to look for. If you're a school that's not fully access oriented and you have higher tuition, but you're not elite top of the list type of name recognition, you either better have an approach for lower tuition cost and creative programs, like take a Bloit College where they're breaking into these two course credits with shorter terms to add flexibility. You better be doing that or I think Pace University is reducing their tuition or and if you don't do that, then you'll be part of what I think was just described. The middle schools are gonna have to be very aggressive in their strategy or they will get hurt pretty badly from a revenue and enrollment, which affects everything else. So the natural enrollment trends, I think will back up what she asked towards the access oriented and towards the elite and the stress will be in the middle. Well, I admire how you parse the question into a very, very clear answer and thank you Pamela for just a great large scale question. Friends, we're at the very end of the hour. We have time for me to ask one kind of pushing ahead a bit towards the future question. When it's roughly the first of September, what proportion of campuses do you think are gonna be mostly open for mostly face-to-face instruction versus what proportion do you think are going to be mostly online? I think it will be 68% hybrid. I guess if you're saying mostly face-to-face, then I would back off and say it's gonna be, just to pick a number, I'll pick 31% there. If you're saying some face-to-face, so it's hybrid, but you might have a lot fewer students that, you know, like what Stanford just announced. Mostly online classes, but a lot of face-to-face classes, but a strong mix that I'm going with the higher random number I generated. But if you say mostly face-to-face, I'd say somewhere down around a third is my pure guess and it will be interesting to see how that comes out. And I'm talking in US higher education, not talking about other countries at this point. My question was, Ian, that nations that have significant pandemic threat, or not threat, but significant pandemic reality. Yeah, well, I mean, we have it at least regionally in the US, but if you look at other countries, other countries tend to make more national decisions on this type of education policy than the US does. So you get much more of a binary type of choice. And so I think other countries, you're gonna get that two ends of the curve again. Some going almost all online, some going mostly face-to-face. So I think outside of the US, there's a much greater chance that it's an all or nothing type of decision. And it depends on which region you're asking about. But given the conversations I see, I think there's gonna be a greater number of colleges with face-to-face options than what I tend to read about online. Well, I'm afraid this is the all or nothing moment of the program because we are at the top of the hour. Somehow we've just raced through a tremendous amount of ideas and conversation. Hurry, Phil, thank you so much for being just a fountain of knowledge, wisdom and foresight in this. I really, really appreciate it. Well, thanks both, Brian. I always enjoy speaking with you in this forum, but also thanks to your audience. You guys asked as before, you got a great audience with great questions. So thank you for everyone. Indeed, wonderful, wonderful folks here. I'm really glad to hear it. Phil, is your blog the best way to keep up with you or your podcast or are you on Twitter or all of it? I would say the blog PhilOnEdTech.com because that way if we're doing something in the podcast I'll mention it. So PhilOnEdTech.com is the best way from a business it's MindWires.com. So if you're actually looking for support for schools or companies, MindWires.com, general writing, podcasting, PhilOnEdTech.com. Fantastic. Thanks again, Phil, for being a great cast and please enjoy your lovely California afternoon and we'll follow up because we will have more questions for you. Okay, thank you. And friends, we've had a couple of more questions that came up, a couple more topics that came up in the chat that are very, very important. One was about how to do open education resources, a topic that we've been following very closely. And another was how to do all kinds of hands-on work online this fall. These are two topics that I hope we can return to in the next few weeks. Speaking of the next few weeks for the next two months we're covering a wide range of topics. Everything from a special session on Hiflex to student experience, demographics, how to improve teaching and all of this what does it mean to be doing this kind of work during COVID-19? So if you'd like to learn more about those just go to tinyurl.com slash forum summer. If you'd like to keep talking about these issues, Facebook, I'm sorry, Twitter is where we normally have these kinds of conversations just use the hashtag F-T-T-E. You can tweet at me at Brian Alexander but we also have groups on Facebook, on LinkedIn and in Slack. We also have our huge archive which is now completely caught up. So if you'd like to look back at previous programs just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. There's about 206 recordings right now and in the meantime please everybody stay safe, be well in this really, really extraordinary time and we'll see you online. Take care, bye-bye.