 I have the top of the hour, so why don't we begin? Let me welcome you, let me welcome everybody to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you here today. We have two great guests on a crucial topic, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. We are talking about curriculum today, what we teach, and how higher education makes that possible. And we have two fantastic guests to talk about it. First of all, we have Dr. Amanda Lynn Smith. She is the CAO at Economic Partnerships. And she does an awful lot of work on that level of technology and that level of institution. We're also really grateful to welcome Maria Anderson, a favorite of our program, a guest several times, a wonderful interlocutor and a great inspirer, and also the founding CEO of Course Tune. So in order to begin, let me just bring these wonderful people up on stage. And I'll start off with Maria Anderson. Let's see if we can get her up. Hi, Brian. Hello. I am on my phone. Amanda and I are both having the exact same problem. We can't see any video in Shindig, and I tried in two different browsers. So Amanda is downloading the app on her phone, and I'll chat with you first. So this was on your laptop or desktop? Yeah, my laptop on both Firefox and Chrome. No video, none from you, none from us. So I'm rebooting, and I might get in that way, but. But I'm glad to see you right now. I appreciate your patience as always. No worries. I just heard the OS startup noise. Yeah, I'm starting it up to see if it works when I go back in, but yeah, it was really strange. Every time I tried to turn my camera on, it just didn't work, so. Very strange. Well, welcome. Thank you. I'm really glad to see you. And our congratulations in order for Course Tune's evolution. Yes, we had an acquisition back in August, academic partnerships acquired Course Tune, and we think it's a really excellent marriage of two companies that really care about good course design and reaching students and aligning with the workforce and just better student outcomes in general. So we're really happy about it, yeah. Congratulations. Thanks. I'm so glad to have been a fan of yours for a long time, I could say. I knew her then. Well, you know, I was the same person. My big celebration was to get another dog. What kind of dog? My second husky. So, yeah. What's the dog's name, no? The new one's named Lola. Well, does Lola get what Lola wants? Absolutely, she does, yes. Well, give her a hug from us. Listen, you know the drill, how we get people to introduce themselves in the program. We ask what you're working on for the next year. And I'm really curious, what does the next year look like for you, shaping Course Tune, doing the other thing? What are the ideas that are top of mind for you? Definitely shaping Course Tune and integrating two companies is not a small task, but we're hoping to really get a lot from this energy between the two of us. There's some products in development that are very much, we're very much on both of our minds going into the relationship, so there'll be some things that we develop over the next couple years. And just always, you know, always trying to improve Course Tune for our users and get them the types of problem solving they expect from us and continue to do that and just do it with a little bit more power behind us and we are functioning as a wholly unsubsidiary. So Course Tune is still Course Tune, wait, that's not changing. Excellent, excellent. Well, on behalf of your fans, I'm grateful to hear about it. Good luck. Now let me see if we can bring up your colleague. Let's see if we can bring him in the stage. Hey, there she is, she got it figured out. Hello there. And I am so sorry, I too am joining from my phone. We were having some issues on the laptop. It's very strange. And I, both of you, I appreciate your patience with this. You both look fantastic and you sound great. So don't mess with it, but afterwards I'm gonna look into this and see what the issue was. But thank you, welcome. Amanda, where are you coming to us from today? Thank you. So I am currently in Kentucky, technically based in Dallas, Texas, but out here for a bit and come into you from Academic Partnerships. I'm the Chief Academic Officer for the organization. Well, that's great. That's great. And it's one question that I ask people to introduce themselves with is what are you gonna be working on for the next year? What's gonna be top of mind for you at Academic Partnerships? Oh my goodness. Well, we have a lot of great work ahead of us. I think in relationship to this conversation today, there is a lot of attention on, you know, designing and developing the highest quality online program is making sure that programs are really well aligned to workforce outcomes over arching kind of program and institutional outcomes. And at Academic Partnerships, we're just continuously looking for ways to help facilitate those practices with faculty at the helm, really helping faculty at our partner universities, you know, develop sustainable practices. And again, this relationship, this partnership with Course Tune is going to be a really important piece of that coming into this next year. Oh, excellent, excellent. It sounds like both of you are pretty closely aligned and have an awful lot in common for working on this. Friends, if you're new to the forum, what happens from here on is I am simply the moderator and the emcee. The questions, the comments are almost entirely yours. This place is for you. So if you would like to put either of our guests again a question or if you'd like to share a comment or press them on some of the things they've said, just use the raise hand button to join us on stage or push the Q&A box to give us a question. I have one question to begin with just to get the ball rolling, which is looking back over the past two years, can you give us some sense of how you've seen the pandemic impacting overall higher education curricula and how we think about them and how we design them? I'm gonna let you go first, Amanda. Okay. You know, I think perhaps the silver lining from the pandemic is that faculty and institutions are thinking about online learning maybe a bit differently than they did prior. We've talked a lot about this idea that there's kind of new and emerging modalities since the pandemic. And I think the realization for many that virtual synchronous emergency teaching is very different as an example than online equivalency or hybrid or traditional online or online. Each of those modalities kind of attracts a different group of students and a different group of needs serves a different group of needs, if you will. And I think that again, the pandemic really just elevated this dialogue about best practices and kind of regardless of modality or variation in online learning is the most important to serving the student in a really high quality way and what types of tools and support, professional development, again, best practices, kind of need to be at the forefront. And again, I just go back to this synergy with course tune and the synergy that I think Maria and I both have in terms of kind of this like-mindedness of alignment is perhaps more important than really being able to demonstrate that faculty, what they intend to teach, the students can really hear what's going on for me that we're helping to kind of build bridges between kind of workforce and academia, the outcomes of these programs. And again, the pandemic raised awareness about a lot of these pieces in a way that perhaps we just, we hadn't really experienced before. Yeah, I think that everybody became a lot more, a lot more attention was suddenly on education than ever before from parents having to educate kids at home or manage that education at home too. Just the question about the value of the degree is the value the same if it's taught online versus in a classroom? Is the, what's the value of a designed online program versus a suddenly changed online program? So just the, it's been a conversation opener for higher ed. There is a lot more under discussion I think than there was before some really positive moves and some negative moves around just the public perception of what online is and means in education. It's for so many students, online is the option they can do. And we design and help faculty design, I wanna say we like me, I design, but we help faculty at course tune by providing the better tools to design and AP by helping faculty learn how to do better design and do that design. And it's just not, this is gonna be a hard one to get over for a lot of people who had really kind of rude introductions to online and didn't wanna be there. So that's one of the things I'm a little worried about is how we move past that. But I think for many students that there's just not any other option and hopefully they know to go to trusted school partners that have well-designed programs and certainly being able to demonstrate that the program has value through alignment to workplace skills you wanna have or that the program has value through alignment to professional standards put out by the industry or that the more attention we pay to the design the better the experience is gonna be for students. Yes. So there's a lot more public discussion about this. There's a lot more conversation about what makes good design. Have you seen the T-shirt Zoom you? No. Is that an epiphat or is that a university? Yes. It's not an expression of pride. And there's a lot of disdain for online education. This has come up in the forum as well. People have described running into faculty who when the pandemic began and the switch to online happened in a hurry they simply didn't have any idea what to do and either didn't use or didn't know about support. And so there are a lot of poor experiences as well as people who just really valorized the in-person one. But now there's a lot of discussion about this. Do you think the, Amanda I'm really struck by your emphasis on workplace alignment. How do you think what some are calling the great resignation impacts that? This idea that people are turning away from jobs and that employers, some employers are having a hard time hiring people because there's a kind of rethinking about the value of jobs and what makes a good job. Is that appearing when you're thinking about a curriculum right now? It is, it is. I think teachers as an example in many ways might be feeling some level of exhaustion rightfully so after the last couple of years kind of managing, like you said, the Zoom world and maybe thinking about what they want to do next and wanting to stay in education, stay in industry, but maybe pivot. Same thing in healthcare. We need our frontline nurses now more than ever. You might also have nurses that we're thinking about going back to school that are wanting to stay in healthcare but wanting to pivot a bit. And it's very much a dialogue that we're having in particular at AP and with our partners, finding those pathways and those opportunities for students to build off of the skills and competencies for workplace professionals to build off the skills and competencies that they have and perhaps go in slightly new directions. I think there's a lot of possibility and I think we all know quite well that they are changing and are going to continue to change. And I think being able to remain very nimble, especially in the education space and as facilitators in the education space to be able to help kind of education at all levels grapple with those kind of changing trajectories. I think there's one other thing that happened besides the pandemic in the last two years, which is also, I think a place where curriculum could be really, curriculum change could be really impactful and that is this battle for truth and information and disinformation and misinformation. And I think what we're seeing is that there are these crucial skills that do not seem to be coming out of education, whether it's K-12 or high-red or grad schools, there is this need to be able to think carefully about problems and solutions and find information and sort it and make sense of it and not just gravitate towards this idea of winning and losing, black and white. Like I was reflecting on this quite a bit last night because I'm doing a presentation on misinformation and how we can help in math courses to help students to understand how to better evaluate what they're seeing. And I think that too much of the time we see a factoid or a number or a tiny portion of data and there's so much of this mindset around I'm winning or I'm losing. And I was thinking about examples of this and so I'm gonna pick one that's not kind of a third rail. I think it's not a third rail, which is the infrastructure bill. I was thinking this morning about how little I actually know about the, and I read a lot, right? But I was thinking like, what information should I actually have to evaluate like what is needed in this country? Like I would need to know, and you guys can end the chat, like put some examples, but I kinda need to know like how many bridges in the US are about to collapse? What's there haven't been, you know, that haven't had repairs for a lot of years? What's the cost estimated to fix that? Before I say that like 1.7 or whatever it is trillion is too much to spend right now. What is the actual cost to fix these things? How much time will it take? How many years should that cost be spread over? What about roads? How will it affect rural areas versus urban areas differently? Will the money spend proportionally effect by population or by region, by geography? There's like so much actual mathiness in all of that. And it just occurred to me that, you know, people kind of just say I'm for it or against it based on probably what color of the party they have, right? But we know almost not like it's really a gray every decision we make at this level are gray areas and nobody's gonna win or lose by the time a solution is found, right? And it's these skills that have somehow fallen out of our education and you might say that's too much attention to details of standards and not enough attention to like bigger things. But I think that the actual problem is too much attention to content and not enough attention to skill. And when we look at course design, display in course tune one of the things that is very insightful for people when they first see their courses in course tune is they'll realize they have course objectives, skills that they're supposed to be teaching where they have no learning objectives, no assessments, no learning activities, right? It's just this thing you're supposed to amorphously get from the era of the classroom or something, right? And it's always this off-haugh moment. We see it over and over and over. It's always this off-haugh moment for the instructor where they kind of go, oh, that's why they don't have that skill, right? And so I think there's this like moment here with everything that's kind of flying around right now for us to really reflect in education about whether our curriculum is designed for skills right now or whether we've gotten too entrenched in, here's a textbook, learn the material. Like skills take practice. Skills are like learning to play the piano. I can't just hand you a textbook on the piano and then you know how to play the piano at the end of it, right? And so there's a lot here, I think. I'm just gonna dovetail off of what you're saying. Again, the visualization of those skills. So it's not just about identifying them and knowing what they are, but then being able to visualize clearly kind of where they fit in the constellation of the course and then the constellation of the program and how those competencies skills build on themselves over time. And I think, again, kind of going back to your first question, Brian, about kind of before and after the pandemic. If we have a kind of this renewed commitment to education regardless of circumstance, because that is one of the pieces, right? That the pandemic really highlighted and I access a high quality education regardless of circumstance. First and foremost, we have to be able to identify those skills and be able to then visualize how they exist or present themselves in a different modality from on campus to online. And your second question about workforce here too, we can't start to kind of re-engineer hybrid pathways into hybrid jobs and careers and trajectories if we can't foresee those competency as they exist and then be imagined and kind of reswivel how those competencies need to kind of be restructured to prepare that student example I gave, the teacher in the classroom who wants to stay in education but maybe wants to go into corporate training, right? Our internal design and the private space, right? Same thing in healthcare. You might have that nurse that now wants to go into informatics. Maybe he or she needs an MBA to go into more of a senior leadership type or along side with their bedside nursing, those informatic skills. Again, you have to be able to see the skills for being able to visualize and demonstrate them to be able to reswivel, reconstruct those pathways. And I think that's gonna be again, a real key focus for kind of where we're headed. This is a lot from the both of you. This is a ton of material. I have questions, but some of them have come up in the chat and also elsewhere, I wanna make sure that we don't miss these. Jirol says that making explicit what's traditionally that unstated is one of the challenges I've seen in working with faculty making this transition to teaching and designing online. I think that's a response to your point about goals and that aha moment. Jirol also earlier said, we need to catch up in higher ed. We need to teach much more than critical thinking or even media literacy, learning how to engage, evaluate information, digital context in light of things like AI generated information flows. So that's, by the way, the form we've hit information and digital literacy several times. We've got several shows just on that. And then James Pichello asks a very instrumental question. How much access to wifi and internet does the public of the US have is also important to know. What percentages throughout the US? This is important because it connects to education access too. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack on these big issues. And I'm afraid that if we don't teach students to start unpacking those issues themselves and start thinking for themselves, like what information would I actually want to have to evaluate what I think about something like this? Because as you start to think through all the possibilities of that, of all the things that go into a decision like this, you start to realize the gray areas and that they're gonna have to be trade-offs and that you may win in one area and lose in another area to get to a place where everybody gets something. I think it's been super interesting to watch all these redistricting examples that have been going on where the public can submit their redistricting examples. Like we think it should be, and there's all these rules about how it should be done and then all these gray areas around it. And to see people's arguments for one plan versus another plan is also super interesting. But gosh, I just feel like we have to now more than ever focus on skills. And allow for the reality that information is very easy to access now that we need to know when we have good information and what would we don't. Which is certainly something that librarians have been trying to teach for a long time but I think it's deeper than that. It's not just a source, it's knowing the whole body of what to think for yourself. To be curious about the world, I'm afraid you may have killed off curiosity and a lot of education unintentionally and we need to probably get it back. I wonder if that's a side-effect of testing but before I take over and start ranting, we have a question from Kate Nigliato and I wanna make sure that she gets her chance. This is a very practical question or a strategic question. For those of us who are designing hybrid programs, what online activities are best done synchronously online versus synchronously in person versus asynchronously? That's a bracing question, Kate. Who wants to handle it? I can start, Maria, if you can feel free to jump in. This is just coming from kind of, I think best practices, the research I think would highly encourage and Maria, you kind of just spoke to this, that hands-on experiential authentic learning that inspires curiosity, that inspires critical thinking and that very much can be done in an online setting and I would say synchronous in the sense of any chance online, even in asynchronous modality that you can encourage your students to connect with each time, maybe perhaps in a flexible format, right? They can set their schedule, they can decide when they can line up their calendars between kids and family and work and meet via Zoom, so perhaps work on real world type projects, right? Culminating projects, again, authentic learning. That's a wonderful way to create that synchronous feel and experience that face-to-face feel even in an asynchronous setting. And so then I think that second piece about synchronous kind of face-to-face, giving your students even in an online modality the option to have an experience internships to get involved in their community to connect with workforce, maybe senior leaders or executives or individuals that can help them with their career path in real time face-to-face boots on the ground, right? And when then you think about asynchronous, totally asynchronous strategies and asynchronous type activities, I think activities that the student can explore independently, you know, and those might be didactic, it might be research-based, it might there to be a kind of a culminating type project but something that is more independent or that offers itself very nicely to get that asynchronous modality. You can have discussion boards that are asynchronous, right? Again, the student is joining and participating on their own time, very much engaging others and their community. So just a couple of examples that come to mind. I'm sure, Maria, you've got more. Do you wanna jump in here? I was just gonna challenge slightly one of the statements because that's what I do, which is that the face-to-face synchronous. And I would argue that we should actually plan for every synchronous to be attendable by somebody who is either face-to-face or remote. And that you should design for that if it is at all possible so that you can not only easily switch if you have to, but so that a student who can't be there that day in class but is available at that time could attend the session and participate as well. And I've been designing courses like that for like the last five years and once you kind of switch over to that mindset that we should be able to do this whether we are in the room together or whether somebody is participating from afar. The only exception I would say to this is, a lot of them for like clinicals for nursing, there are things that need to be done physically together. Even in online programs, there are hours that are done in a clinical setting, right? So I'd say that's the only real exception is when you've got that. But even in very hands-on classes like math for elementary teacher, you do a ton of stuff with models and things. And when I started teaching it a few years ago again, I found a way for every student to have their own model kit. So even if they were at home, they had enough manipulatives to work through the examples and things like that. Boy, did that come in handy when the pandemic happened, right? Like that we didn't, there was no issue. Everybody had their own kit. Everybody could do their own work. It just wasn't a big problem. So I guess that's the one place I would kind of challenge it. I would design for synchronous, not face-to-face synchronous and online synchronous, but just synchronous. Well, what I love is then you really are starting to design for online equivalency. And again, this idea that I can access my education. Our students can access their education regardless of circumstance, right? We're ready to pivot. We're able to pivot quickly between modalities when designing kind of in that frame. Yeah, and I think the other thing that that's really what I would challenge everyone to think about is when I first started teaching online in 2007, maybe, I was a little skeptical about teaching things like calculus online, right? I was just like, I don't know. It's lots of graphs and so what I did was I said, well, I don't like to do anything badly. So I will just keep looking for activities and ways to teach until I feel like this online experience is completely asynchronous online experience is as good as what happens in the classroom. And that's what I did. And so I think that's the challenge is to just say, like, don't ever assume that there's a disparity there. If you think there still is, you just haven't, there's more to learn, there's more to find, there's more to develop, there's more to add, there's more to change, right? My remote sessions feel just as active and participatory as my face-to-face sessions do. But that's by design, right? And so I think it's really just a matter of continuing to learn, continuing to read, continuing to read blog posts, go to conferences, at least the conferences are all easier to attend than they used to be. Much easier. There's a response in the chat from Jen Obando. I totally agree with you, Maria, and also with you, Tom. Modality should go away, but the students choose what works for them in evolving fashion. However, we need the infrastructure to make that happen. Oh, yeah, totally. And I think one of the things I also heard when I was teaching online, I moved, much like Brian, I was in a house that was in a rural area and we did not have good phone lines and we did not have cable, so I had no good internet. And so designing online courses and teaching online courses from a house with bad internet was really a challenge. I learned what a lot of our students experience, which is that you sometimes drive to the McDonald's parking lot at night and piggyback on their internet, because that's the nearest place to you that has good internet, still on after hours. And sometimes you get up at 5 a.m. to drive into school to do some things before your day starts because you didn't have internet at home that night. And so I think that's a great point about infrastructure and one of the things that I do believe is in that bill is it's not just roads and bridges, it's also this digital infrastructure that we're missing that needs financial support to be put in place, so that rural areas get the same access to internet as urban areas and that urban areas with poor internet get upgraded too, right? I hope so, I very much hope so. Off topic, I suppose, but I believe I saw as I was running, literally running into campus that the new bill is down to about 1.7 trillion. So that means a lot has been cut out. Friends, I don't want to hog the mic here. You can obviously tell that Maria and Amanda are not only both very thoughtful and wise, but also very open to your questions. So please use the raised hand button. In fact, maybe it's even easier. I'm gonna put a little teal colored box on the screen. So if you just press that, you'll be sucked right into the screen. It's open mic night. If anybody like with our two great guests. And again, also use a Q and A box if you'd like to put in a more formal question. We've had a long running discussion in the chat about how to grow internet access, which I really appreciate. And there's a lot of good commentary on that. And we may circle back to that right now. But let me just ask another question. If I could, thinking about, while I'm waiting for everybody else to come up with their own. Thinking about our response to the pandemic. We saw growth in people taking classes in allied healthcare. That seems to have stalled out. The data that we got from the National Fearing House this week said that enrollment in allied healthcare classes actually ticked down a little bit this semester. I'm curious, does that do you think indicate that we don't have much of a curricular response to COVID or should we be expecting more of it? And the reason I'm asking, let me just make this even more complicated, is I'm looking ahead to climate change and the climate crisis and wondering what kind of curricular responses we'll have to that. So how do you see academia positioning our curricular response to these great crises? That's a great question. Brian and I have had this ongoing back and forth over email for several years now around how will education have to shift because of climate migration and climate crisis. And I think that there are rapidly gonna be a lot of bizarre new careers to deal with climate migration, clean up after weather events, rebuilding, relocating. And that a lot of those will involve a combination of trades and cognitive skills. And we're gonna need to be able to remix curriculum pretty fast to get at those careers and help our students to train to be relevant and in the world they're being very rudely shoved into you probably. We're gonna have to be really flexible about the ability to deliver that curriculum. Imagine retraining people who have just been relocated because they're climate change migrants, right? So they may be in temporary housing, they may not have good internet, like this is gonna all be stuff that we'll probably have to deal with in the next 10 years. I think many of you have already seen this just from fires and hurricanes and freak storms in the Northeast that have taken out the power and freak storms in Texas that have taken out the power, right? Like we're already adjusting to climate change, I think it's just gonna, we're gonna see more career change because of it too, I think. And a lot more embrace of remote work. I think, I mean, that's a result of the pandemic, right? Like a lot more companies are embracing remote work in a way they didn't before. And some of that is because of this great resignation thing where a lot of employees are like, you want me to go back into the office, why? Like why would I commute for three hours a day if I don't have to? I'm getting my job done, what is your problem, right? So think about how much your curriculum has actually, not your pedagogy, but how much has your curriculum actually been adapted for the reality that group work might take place remotely with the team now, not in person with the team? Are you training your students to learn how to do that? I mean, are you helping them to learn how to navigate as a new employee when everything is remote? You know, curriculum should be changing right now for this new world, not just the pedagogy. I think whether we're talking about climate change or public health, and we're seeing across the country, these kind of drops in enrollment, if you will, maybe while the student consumer tries to decide what's next for them, right? Or they're headed professionally and otherwise. And I think, again, this just speaks to thematically what we've been discussing here today, and that is the importance of being able to kind of identify and isolate these various types of skills, being able to help students kind of pivot and in relationship to really complicated questions like, like public health. Really, and to facilitate learning that, you know, elevates innovation and creativity and thinking outside the box and again, critical thought, these are gonna be, you know, they've always been incredibly important, but at a time where things are changing so rapidly, being able to kind of arm our future graduates with that ability to kind of address the changes that are before us, I think are, you know, again, it's just essential. So it's striking the right balance, I think, again, between these kind of core competencies and skills, and Maria, you spoke very kind of eloquently to that, as well as these larger abilities related to disruptive and innovative thinking. Thank you, Amanda. Thank you. David Furlow just chimed in by saying curriculum, pedagogy, and learning experience design all need continuous improvement. They do, and I think curriculum, unless you are in a field that mandates change, continuous change like cybersecurity, for example, like I think the standards for cybersecurity change like every six months or something. Every six days. Yes, that. I think curriculum can be very slow to move in fields that are non-trade fields, right? And I don't know, the whole world is changing and we have got to come along with it or companies are going to provide their own higher education to students because they're not getting it from us. So think of, you know, there's like a list of, what is it called? It's from the World Economic Forum and the Future Institute. There's like these impact, what are they called? It's not the high impact practices. What is it? Not the high impact learning practices. No, no, no, it's like the things that are impacting the world right now. There's like a list of like, these are things that will have a high impact on the world in the next like five years. High impact something, but it's not learning things. It's things like superstructured organizations like Amazon or Apple or Microsoft. These are superstructured organizations. Organizations with like 50 levels of management, you know? Like, do you teach that in your curriculum? If you teach students in business or retail or hospitality, are you teaching them how to navigate a superstructured organization? Because that's the reality that when they go into the workforce in some of those industries, you know, even if you're just teaching them, they do data analysis. If they're a data analyst for Amazon, they're one of like a thousand of them or 10,000 of them, right? So how do you navigate that organization? How do you get seen? Where, how do you have work-life balance? How do you have life happiness when you are a tiny cog in a freaking enormous machine, right? But there's like, if you put the two lists together between the Institute for the Future and the World Economic Forum, there's like maybe 30 of these economic impact factors. I think that's what they are. I'm gonna slide somewhere. And, you know, AI is one of them. Superstructured organizations is one of them. Climate change is one of them. There's like 27 others of them. And our curriculum should be starting to adjust to those. And I'm afraid that we're already quite far behind adjusting to the world we currently live in, let alone the world that's coming. Our curriculum has to start adjusting faster, whether you teach English or math or nursing. I think, I think the trades have always done a better job because, you know, there's a lot of very practical outcomes that are very bad if you don't update your curriculum. But I think the rest of us may find that there are other practical outcomes that are very bad if we don't update our curriculum. And that could be job losses. People are not caring about those degrees anymore. People are not seeing the value of those degrees. And I'm not saying that I don't see the value of them. But gosh, could we do a better job of designing the curriculum so that it's obvious to students what the value is and they can see the connection to the changes in the world and how it's going to help them? I think some of that too, Ryan might be, you know, it sounds very practical but it's also very difficult kind of in practice is to A, have very kind of collaborative centralized approaches. The more you can help to develop professional learning communities, bringing faculty side by side, educators side by side around the table to plan, you know, the curriculum and the learning. And then the other piece is teaming with Workforce. And maybe that's being able to really kind of leverage or stand up advisory boards and having some of those kind of corporate or private partners right at your side so that as things change in Workforce that the curriculum can be infused with, you know, kind of with those real world scenarios. I think the example is you gave Maria of, you know, matrixed organizations and navigating those organizations, especially now in this remote work life where we're also trying to find new definitions of work-life balance and work-life integration. And I think leveraging the lived experience again of the colleagues and individuals and leaders and executives, if you will, in these different forums to sit side by side with faculty instructors, teachers to design that curriculum, right? We're just that much further ahead and preparing our students for what's really awaiting them. I just, on a meta level, I just like how the two of you offered such complimentary closely aligned descriptions of ways of connecting academic curriculum to the business world. Not quite the same, but very close. We've got a question from our long-time friend, Tom Hames, who we're actually gonna put on the stage just because we're talking about disasters in Texas and I thought he might be able to speak to you. Welcome, Tom. Yes, it's a disaster in Texas speaking. Hello. By the way, just a quick reflection on what you all just said, though. You know, curriculum is a systemic device. It's in part designed to freeze things in place. And so it should come as no great shock that it's conservative in nature, that there is a lot of impulse to say, well, this is how we have to do it in order to maintain standards. That's why we have it, right? So that's something that always has to be, there's always gonna be that push and pull between curriculum and change. Because curriculum by its very nature is often anti-change. I mean, I have it otherwise. You might as well just free jazz your education at that point, right? But I did actually have a question going to harkening back to some earlier things y'all were talking about. And that is, of course, that second thing that curriculum is too rigid. But at what point do we allow curriculum slash pedagogy to drive the modality of instruction rather than the other way around? I mean, I think we spend far too much time going, well, we have to design online classes. Well, we have to design in-person classes. Well, we have, you know, instead of going, okay, well, we need to teach these things. We need to teach these skills, some of which are better taught online, some of which are better taught in-person, mix and match as necessary in order to teach. I mean, that's what we do. If you need to make a painting, you have to have paint, right? So that's the objective is to make the painting, right? I think that that is good program design, actually, because I think you start by saying, in a perfect world, here's how I would design a program. These classes would be online, these classes would be, you know, synchronous, let's just say synchronous, and that's your perfect world. And we now live in a world where synchronous can be some people in-person and some remote, which is great because that moves us closer to serving more students, right? And then if you have to deliver a fully online program because you have students who really, you know, have, need everything to be asynchronous, you know, you've got people in other countries taking the classes or something, then you can modify for that, right? But I think to answer your question, it is you start with your skills, all the skills that need to be learned, skills should be covered more than once, you know, in more than one course. Some courses can focus on certain clusters of skills that really could use a lot of synchronous support for fleshing out creativity and concepts and thinking on your feet and things like that, right? So you design first for that, and then if necessary, you can modify that plan to be fully online if you need it, right? But I think it's not just necessarily a course design, I think it actually comes in and more of a program, so that's how you cluster your skills together to teach them. Right. In the chat, Jen Obando just said, I think the registrar's office and Ruben's scheduling office would have a literal harder tactic to approach them with its flexible mode. But I can't- You know what? They're not the people who should be running our learning experiences. Yeah, and I think at many schools, they now have this. So like at Westminster, you know, if I'd ever proposed prior to the pandemic to have a class that was remote synchronous, they couldn't have offered it. But six months into the pandemic, they had added it to the registration system as a mode, right? So you can always have, like, and there were, and they had, you know, schools had modes where half the students came one day and half the students came another day and the rest could be synchronous if they wanted, right? Like, I mean, the registrar's offices have figured out how to add new modes to their registration systems now, right? These are not- And if your school doesn't know how to do it, some other school knows how to do it, right? I think this is where that shift is happening too, right? So I think, Tom, when you first came up on stage, you're asking about these different modalities. What do we teach online? What do we teach on campus? Or what do we teach face to face, right? And kind of going back, Maria, to something that you said earlier, and again, it's just such a great question that you asked, Tom. It's like, how do we start to think differently about these modalities so that, again, we're able to educate regardless of circumstance so that students coming to campus, yes, they have their learning designed, right? It's been designed for being on campus face to face. However, if there's another pandemic or a snowstorm or my faculty member gets sick or I have a emergency, I can access that content, that curriculum, that experience, that day in just as high quality way, but virtually. And that's kind of designing with two mindsets. And again, that's perhaps the shift, right? And something very kind of new to be thinking about as we're thinking about modality. Can I just feel like I leave a lot of tools on the table when I'm told I can only teach this way or I can only teach that way. And that I like to be able to modify the tools according to the needs of what I'm trying to teach. And one of the nice things about teaching synchronous online is I can play with that a lot. Yeah, go ahead, Maria. I guess my challenge to you would be, and this was something I learned quite early on, it was like a confrontation I had to have with myself and with modalities. So this is maybe your challenge to have this confrontation with yourself. Should you be designing for the right way to teach or should you be designing for the most students to learn? You think the latter, right? Well, I think you should be designing for the most students to learn. And certainly there's some methodology in there that is your favorite way to teach it. And is the best way for some of the students to teach it? But it's not the best way for all of the students to learn it. I would say that my modality is very much centered on individualized learning and students, the students driving the instruction. But when you do that, you have to be ready for the unexpected because the students don't necessarily work according to a script. And so the way you do that, the way you improvise there, the way you play a little jazz is with throwing different technologies at the problem and saying, okay, these guys need a little extra dose of this. Let's use this tool to do it. And I'm very flexible in terms of the tools I wanna use, but a lot of times those are constrained by, okay, you can't teach this way because of the system. This is not that kind of class, right? Or something like that. I'm like, well... Well, here's a tip that might help you. When I've taught online classes recently, I've had something every week called the learning activity. I don't define what it is. It's just a certain number of points and it happens every week. And I know which learning objectives I wanna cover in that activity, but I leave it completely open. Is it gonna be a discussion? Are we gonna have a remote session for those students who can come in person and record it for the rest? Are we going to do some digital activity online? Like it gives you some flexibility to have that kind of like, it doesn't all have to be pre-programmed ahead of time. You've left a space for it in the design of the curriculum. Right, and I do that actually with my synchronous stuff because I throw different, I mean, I say, okay, well, they're not getting this, so we're gonna need to do this kind of activity to reinforce the skill that they're lacking in. But I have to have the flexibility. I mean, that's a lot easier to do in a synchronous online because I can pull in a tool like Muro and say, okay, I wanna do this analysis exercise where I'm having them connect up stuff live in class. That's gonna be hard to do in a real classroom. I mean, it's harder just logistically to do that in a real classroom unless I already have the expectation that everybody's hooked up in the classroom somehow. Yeah, I have to find that. I'll show you my little secret about traditional classrooms, doing things that mimic online that Brian's been running all the time. She's gonna hold up an iPad. I have a stack of gold-fashioned lap whiteboards. And I can put them in a suitcase and drag them to class with me with a bunch of markers. And when I wanna do some activities that are like mimic that kind of like synchronous stuff that happens online without taking down the internet of the classroom or having to have everybody have computers, I will often just use whiteboards for brainstorming spaces, have people swap boards, write on each other's boards. Like it's really low tech and it does such a good job of mimicking some of these things. It's kind of crazy. On that note, I'm afraid I have to pause this. This has really, really been a pleasure watching. Well, just now watching the three of you, I'd like to have the three of you together again. And Tom, thank you so much for- Please don't do that to them. It's not very nice, Brian. You're such a nice person. And now you're- I feel in some ways, Tom, that the future transforms as part of your class. And I like that a lot. But let me start wrapping things up. Tom, thank you again. Amanda, Maria, this has been terrific. Thank you. Thank you for showing this. I'm so excited about the work that you're going to be doing together. Just really quickly, if we want to keep up with Maria, I know we can do that through the course tune website or through you on Twitter. Is that right? Yep. Very good. And Amanda, how do we keep up with you and your work? Obviously, you're going to be running past us at top speed on a horse. But what else can we do to keep up with you? Oh, did she freeze up? Oh, baby. Oh, it's just that dramatic moment. Yeah. Well, I would say, I would say look her up on LinkedIn and give her a follow there. She shares the stuff that we're up to there Oh, very good. Very good. Thank you again. Thank you both again. We'll follow up and good luck. Before we just quickly share where we're headed for the next few weeks. Remember, we've got topics like enrollment and the digital transformation and disability, eco-media literacy, libraries and careers. If you want to sign up for more, just go to forum thatfuturereducation.us. If you'd like to keep talking about these issues about curricular design, about what the curriculum is, how to respond to changes in the business world and so on, just use the hashtag FTTE over on Twitter or ping us at the blog, brianalexander.org. If you'd like to dive into the past and look at previous sessions, having to do with any of these topics, just head to our archive at tinyurl.com slash FTFarchive and please subscribe to us there. And in the meantime, that brings us to the end of our session. Thank you all for thinking with us together. I hope that you've got a lot of food for thought for your future curricular developments. In the meantime, above all, take care of yourselves. Be safe and we'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.