 Hello everyone, I'm Jeff Elliott and I'm the Director of Product Management with Genzabar and as you can imagine in my role I spend a lot of time talking to many different users in higher ed from IT users to CIOs, Director of Academic Advising or you know the Director of Student Success and one of the common themes that always comes up during our discussions is what technologies do you think will be the most important for higher education over the next one to five years and I'm going to resist kind of shouting out the cloud because it's too high-level it's too nebulous and probably a little lazy on my part but I do only have a couple of minutes so I thought I'd share my brief thoughts on the five items related to technology that I think are really going to drive higher ed success and change over the next five years and the first one is within cloud native folks will want to make sure they're building their foundations all of their tools are built around particularly your database of course around advanced microservices and containerization those are very technical details within how your environment is set up but microservices will allow you to kind of develop that elastic scalability for example during a registration period think of it as a pie and if you try to eat one pie at one time that's really hard but if you slice it up into pieces the more granular the pieces the more easier it is to consume and that's exactly what your environment goes through when it's using different resources and it's really a great way to maximize the efficiency of your overall environment the second one is data integration with open API's I do believe we are seeing a bit of a pendulum swing away from an entire best-of-breed ecosystem but there are a lot of great tools out there and a lot of different price points that folks want to leverage and it will be so important to be able to pull all of them together in a tight seamless data integration it will not be enough to simply bring data into an environment you're going to want to work with that data across multiple tools and that type of data integration will be huge in allowing your folks to get access to data get data out of the system that sort of thing so really important there the third one is artificial intelligence I believe will become an extremely important partner and I use that term very specifically for you to provide services students think of in the form of a chatbot for example where 2 a.m. students have questions now maybe you're not able to set your chatbot up to answer the most detailed or personalized or specific questions but what a great partner what a great resource to have available as students turn more and more to their online tools to be able to have a partner in the form of a chatbot helping them answer those questions and drive them down to the right people to get those for the details or with artificial intelligence to leverage data in the form of data analytics to better understand your community your campus whether it's brick and mortar or virtual and leverage those big data moments to help make more effective decisions and being able to identify those moments leverage that data will help you stay true to your mission to what you're trying to do as an institution so really looking for our artificial intelligence to boom over the next few years the next one is security absolutely cannot talk about cloud or web without talking about security and it is becoming so important as we talk about moving folks to the cloud and moving to web based tools access to data via the web is crucial but it also represents a new horizon that's going to be really important for it folks and vendors to work together with each other to figure out how to best kind of work that out together the data protection is crucial but you also want to make sure you can allow that functionality so an academic advisor for instance will need to be able to work with student remotely from their home off hours potentially or from the quad on a different device these are all new moments in higher ed and it's something we push with our software is that extensibility of the role with student success you absolutely want to be able to meet the student where they are and allowing these different web based tools to be extensible is crucial but you've got to protect that data so data security is going to be a huge one as we move forward over the next few years and lastly of course something that is very near and dear to my heart it is not necessarily a technology but I believe folks will want to embrace technologies that help their institutions maintain student engagement and student empowerment that let's face it we might have lost a little touch with during everyone's COVID isolation the triage moment in higher ed when COVID hit was to get all of our classes online folks did a wonderful job with that they figured out all that stuff but what they were left with in a bit of a vacuum behind that was how do I engage my students outside the classroom but in a virtual way beyond the virtual classroom it's it's those students that gain as much in their experience in those organic connections those organic moments of running into a faculty member or working with each other or a staff member how will we leverage technology to make sure that institutions that do that and align it with policy and procedure to help drive student success will see the greatest gains in that success moment both inside and outside the classroom so that's kind of that next frontier and schools that find a way to leverage technology beyond their LMS to represent those organic interactions you know I was one of those students I will tell you I believe I gained as much learning and as much kind of growth outside the classroom as I did in and folks that are able to replicate that are really going to see tremendous gains I believe in student success and retention as well so I hope folks you enjoy these five thoughts and you take them back to your campus and you give them strong consideration I really do believe these are foundational moments for you to use to not just kind of think about but implement and grow and work together as a campus to really kind of come out in the next one to five years defining what success means to you and using technology to leverage that so I really appreciate it everybody have a wonderful rest of your day and we'll talk to you soon