 Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the Future Trans Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator, host and chief catherter. I'm delighted to welcome you all here today. We have a terrific guest talking about an essential subject and I'm really, really eager to start. But before we do that, let me just introduce the program. I'll explain a bit about what it's about and what it hopes to accomplish and where it comes from as well as where it's going. And then we'll bring our guest up. Now, I am absolutely delighted to welcome Calvin Bentley. Calvin is Assistant Vice President for Learning at the 6 Red Marbles Consultancy. He's had a great career all over the place with higher education, everything from teaching to administration. He's a really, really clever thinker. He has the best Twitter handle of all time. He's definitely someone that everyone should be paying attention to. And I'm just delighted, delighted to welcome him. Hello, Calvin. Hello, Brian and hello, everyone. Great to see you. Great to see all of us. I wish we were all kind of together at a conference somewhere and having these conversations in person. But just thankful to be here and blessed to have such an opportunity to talk with everyone today. So thank you. It's our pleasure. It's our pleasure. Listen, Calvin, when I ask people to introduce themselves, I try to avoid the usual academic, well, I was born in 1945. And what I ask people to do is to think ahead a bit and to think ahead in a way that illuminates you to the rest of us. So let me ask for the next year, thinking into 2021, what are the main topics that are uppermost in mind for you? And depending on what you're up to, what are the main projects you'll be working on? Yeah, no, that's a good question. Well, I mean, I think there will be a lot of different things that we're going to be focused on. I mean, I've been involved in online learning initiatives since 2001. And so it's been interesting just to see what the pandemic has exposed in terms of what's still needed to help all of us do our jobs better in terms of meeting the needs of our students. I think in 2021, though, things that I'm really hoping will have more traction will be things like competency-based education. I'm hoping that the new Department of Education Secretary will provide more of an impetus for us to do more pilots and experimentation around CBE. It's great to hear, for example, that jobs for the future and the competency-based education network are already partnering to offer schools an opportunity to work within a Collaboratory called the Equity Collaboratory. And for everyone, if I mention something that you'd like to learn more about, feel free to send me an email later today at Timelord33 at gmail. That's just a great, easy way to get a hold of me or hit me up on Twitter at Black Timelord. But my hope is that there will be more of that. I think really it's going to come down to not just the new Secretary, but potentially a reauthorization of higher education, maybe putting more impetus on schools doing this work by sweetening the pot with Title IV funds and maybe making it easier to get Title IV funding for competency-based education initiatives. But I think that's one big thing that I'm hoping will move forward. I'm hoping that also next year there will be a light shown on what schools are actually doing to better prepare themselves to flexibly offer instruction, whether it's face-to-face or online. And more lessons learned. And right now that's really hard information to get at unless you do a survey or a focus group. Then of course not everyone participates because we don't have a centralized way to collect that data across all school types. And so that's also something that I'm hoping inside higher ed, other publications, do interviewing more schools that are willing to kind of lift up the hood and actually show us soup to nuts what they're doing to from everything from faculty development to how data is being collected within different systems to track how faculty are doing, how students are doing with digital learning initiatives. I also hope things like accessibility continue to be top of mind for institutions because again we're building all this content given the pandemic and putting it online. We're offering remote instruction through web conferencing but to what extent are we really making sure that all of our courses are accessible. For example people who want to talk for two hours using Zoom. To my knowledge I don't think there's really an easy way. I don't think faculty are having someone do sign language for example while they talk. So that also worries me about ensuring the accessibility of the courses that we're creating. Other things too I think are just going to be things like learning analytics will continue to be important on access to online learning services like tutoring and of course procturing there's lots of debate and angst around surveillance technologies and I go both ways on it. I get it but at the same time there are many let's say many math faculty many stem faculty who love to give objective tests so they'll cut you if you say I'm going to make you know if you take away their multiple choice exams you're in for a lot of trouble and so in some ways I think some of that dialogue around anti surveillance points the finger wrong people it's not just about the tech it's really about again academic freedom right and academic freedom goes both ways it could be for good as well as for angst and challenging us in key ways. Let me pause there but those are some of the things that I'm thinking about and concerned about moving into 2021. Oh and one other thing I still think we need to tease apart what we're doing remote instruction versus online versus high flex we have to be much more transparent about what all those things mean and really getting faculty more time to be intentional about what they're going to do as a provider of digital instruction. Is that all? There's more but those are some of the things that I think about and it's not just because I've been drinking Coke Zero for the past 30 minutes so just lots of things going on right now You see you see why I had to invite because this is the top of mind this is literally right where he is all the time and I just furiously tweeted out a sketch of what you just said and already people are are pinging with questions and comments so I just and we already have a question that's just come in but let me just remind you all I have plenty of questions to ask but the key thing of the forum is for you to have the chance to ask your questions so just go to the bottom of the screen and either press that raised hand button or press the Q&A button to give us one and in fact here our first one we've got is from a longtime friend and the program a gentleman who suffers under any amount of abuse from me Tom Hames coming to us from Texas He has a great question Hello Tom Hey, how are you doing? Good, how are you? Fellow Texan Just down the road So my question was you know you said you wanted to get a lot more data from institutions to try to figure out what's really going on I wanted to you know I was wondering you know how do you process that data? What are the criteria? I mean what exactly are we measuring? I mean one of the things that I like to go on about is the fact that a lot of times we put these artificial distinctions and categories on things and when you were saying you know what is high flex, what is remote teaching what is this, what is I refuse to have stringent categories I call it teaching and then I use whatever tools to get the job done and if that is a high flex modality and that gets me to my students and that does what they need to get out of the process then that's great and if it's in person that's great too but that's actually two questions because I asked the first question and then you kind of went on to the second item but now the basic question I have though is that you know if you're going to collect all this data how are you going to make sense out of it? What kind of tools do you think we need? How do we set this definition? How do we set criteria as to what exactly success looks like? Because I mean this has been the perennial problem we talked about education. I mean I remember having this conversation ten years ago when I was on a task force in the New Media Consortium we were looking at learning analytics and you know at that point we sort of went the problem with learning analytics is that nobody really can define what learning is so what the heck are we supposed to measure if we can't really figure out what success looks like right? So you know the same things true if you look at this on a global educational scale all the way down to an individual. Are my students better at the end of the semester than they are at the beginning of the semester? I like to think they are but you know they learn and they get different things out of it for one thing one student may learn how to do his homework on time that's a win another student may be advancing into high levels of thinking about government and politics that he never even dreamed of and goes off in that direction. Also win but you know I'm just curious what you have. Yeah so I guess there's different ways to think about it I mean you know if I had venture capitalist money or if I had you know a type of grant one of the things I simply want to be able to do is work with schools and this is not a function of what I do or what I've been doing at Six Red Marbles it's it's been kind of an ongoing interest given that I've been in online learning now for almost 20 years I almost feel like we need a better way of just understanding the landscape right and to your point sometimes you can't always qualify it as a number maybe it's more qualitative data where we have a better sense across institutions of not just the number of let's say online sections or high flex sections but what how are schools defining these things for themselves right and what what is and what are the good practices across these institutions we get if we think about it we only get glimpses of that based on people going to conferences right hey I'm going to WCET I'm going to EDUCAUSE and we typically hear from the same people we don't get a chance to really see across a continuum of schools of how are they grappling with all of this and again it's not easy to do but I almost feel like there's a great opportunity for the right folks who are interested in this to somehow pull this information together in a centralized way so that we can almost have like a low distribution of information about schools about the types of programs they're offering how they're offering it what challenges they're experiencing and schools can maybe use that to get a better sense of you know who they may want to reach out to to get better guidance maybe there's some collaboration opportunities I know that the Hamilton project for those of you following that the Hamilton project just had a couple folks write a paper that talks about well it talks about how we can actually meet some of the needs of some of our folks who are laid off by giving them credits that they can then use at different institutions for upscaling and rescaling a part of this proposal at the Hamilton project is also to have like a nationwide research center where we can actually kind of track some of this work and so I almost feel like there needs to be a better way for us to understand the landscape of digital learning everything from programs and how courses are offered even the types of technologies that people are using challenges that they're experiencing just so that we have a better way to understand this evolving landscape because again right now the way that we go about doing it we get flashes of insights but it's not I would argue it's not comprehensive enough to really be helpful for schools to help them you know make better informed decisions about a path forward for them if they want to be providers of digital learning yeah no I mean if I in an ideal world I would have a huge database where we could you know pull together sets of you know data and evaluate it strength wise but also have a set of tools where different researchers like you or myself can dig in and go okay if we look at it this way we see this picture we look at it this that's what I think digital gives us in a way in terms of thinking about how you know that to me is the the only way we solve a lot of these problems is just by getting a better picture the transparency will save us yes if we can get it done in time before everything collapses right it's tough and of course it also involves getting leaders to sign up to sign on to this so I almost think about it in terms of like the university innovation alliance and how presidents are kind of working together to find ways to collaborate and share data in ways that help those institutions don't they engage in this work in ways that is not competitive right so trying to do it in a way where everyone feels comfortable kind of you know lifting up the hood and not feeling like you know the school is going to take this information and somehow steal all their students which I think is a part of the problem of why this type of idea hasn't really taken off and when you bring it up inside member organizations again member organizations will maybe be able to help you get some of that data but then not every school belongs to as a cause not every school belongs to OLC and that's not necessarily a strike against them it's just you know we need a better way to collect it across all institutions not just subsets right well that's a that's a from Tom that's a typically deep thoughtful question and thank you for it and thank you Kelvin for that meticulous answer I'm tweeting out different points I put a few of them in the text chat but you've already summoned a whole series of great projects and resources friends if you're new to the forum what we just did with Tom is a great example of beaming some up on stage so if you want to do that just press that raised hand button that's as easy as can be coming up now we have an example of a question from the question and answer box and this is from the splendid hardworking Sarah Sanguario and we just put this up on stage so you can see do you think that pushing for release time for our faculty would be something worth pushing for for administration yeah that's that's a that's a great question you know I've been an administrator you know I've been a director I've been a VP for academic affairs I've been a you know an associate VP for marketing what I've tried to do just on my own time I've been trying to I've never really asked for like you know a sabbatical like time away from the office what I've tried to seek out are you know certain leadership experiences you know like the American Council on Education has several if you want to aspire to be you know a campus president or something like that I point to an experience that I had at EDUCAUSE and if the powers that be from EDUCAUSE are here I hope you bring this experience back it was called the Breakthrough Models Academy and that was a great it was a great it's probably one of the best professional development experience I've ever had because for a week we were brought to Cambridge Massachusetts you know you had to apply you had to of course get your supervisor to sign off on it but it was a great way for you to work with teachers and you were and you had to kind of come up with like a cool innovative projects right so you so your team had to kind of work together craft this idea and really kind of define how it would serve the needs of students and I think we need more of that and maybe again that that's something that can happen more organically inside the institution where maybe administrators can get some type of time even during the summer to think about the next generation of the institution right so how do we future proof I hate to use that word but future proof the institution in several ways not just through digital learning maybe again it's looking at different elements of the institution and so I think that could be a great opportunity but for those of you who want to learn more about Breakthrough Models Academy again email me or if you google it you'll find some of the some of the examples of projects that came out of that that experience which I think lasted for a couple years before funding ran out but it really needs to be brought back and and again at your cause it's not the only organization that could do this it could easily be something that some of the other member orgs take up so but it was probably again one of the best opportunities because again it got us away from just sitting in a conference room and listening to someone talk really kind of got people together to collaborate on projects that potentially had the potential to be picked up and then scale across institutions for those who were interested in it I just tweeted at edu cause we'll see if they have a good answer to that but Sarah didn't follow up she said sorry my question is more about the actual front loading time for course design oh I'm sorry so for yeah for for course design you know I've worked I've worked at institutions where yeah I mean where faculty have received if they haven't received release time they have received like a stipend and I think that's kind of the ongoing challenge especially in community colleges where you're already teaching a five five load at Tarrant County College excuse me where I served as a VP for academic affairs for one of the campuses for two years it was scary I you know there were faculty who actually told me hey Kelvin secretly you know I'm teaching really a seven seven load right don't tell anybody I'm like oh my god that's crazy so and we had to kind of like rope certain faculty back in because again teaching that many courses is again the quality of instruction you know it's like you know some of the articles that you read in the Chronicle and others where you know you talk to an adjunct who's like teaching at multiple organizations you know multiple colleges and so really happening every day at one institution at community colleges so I think it's release time I think it's a stipend or some other incentive to do the work but again you know with the pandemic it'll be interesting just to see the schools who have been doing that cut back on that to make ends meet in 2021 that's a good question yeah we just saw one university where they were pretty frank and I want to say it's University Colorado I'm not sure that's right where they said yeah we're nudging about 60 ten-year faculty towards retirement and we're going to replace them with adjuncts and they were they were flat out about this they said that's going to do it because we have to save money in the chat box Jen Obando says that I feel like faculty aren't really motivated by stipends on anymore but they want course releases Sarah thank you for the great question you really struck a deep vein of thinking here I usually have to remind them to ask questions just filled up I mean it's incredible I'm just going to relay these to you Kate Montgomery from SMU asks a really really clever question what are your thoughts on particular institutional types that have not typically provided digital learning but have adopted in life COVID-19 do you anticipate continued use longer term yeah no that's a that's a great question I so I would hope so I mean I almost feel kind of like institutions have been literally stretched like rubber bands you know almost to the point where they're stretched out right and so it's hard for me to think that schools you know will just simply go back to business as usual because even with you know promising vaccines being available you know 2021 2022 it'll all be about you know again restructuring budgets right and still trying to provide flexibility to students in terms of how they begin or continue their education and then also schools just trying to figure out okay well how can we maybe adopt new models you know how can we maybe start with certain degree pathways make them on the community college side let's say more guided in terms of guided pathways or how can we do more competency based education experiences for students and so so I think the many schools will continue to be different in some ways my the asterix next to that is the difference I mean because I think some schools still really need to do due diligence to do kind of a post mortem I had to use that work in COVID but to really kind of just like be more reflective and say okay given the pandemic and given the changes we made what worked what didn't work so well what data are we missing to then decide okay what's the next chapter because you know so many in the spring for example so many faculty had to do remote instruction right well do we really want to encourage remote instruction or do we want to do more online courses asynchronous versus synchronous so and what are our what are our students telling us as well right so Titan partners for example has you know a couple research studies that have come out kind of sharing how students and faculty fared in the spring and also in the summer that are definitely worth a read but my hope is that we'll be able to do more to look at again what what needs to happen moving forward versus again just saying okay the pandemic is over until another hundred years let's go back to 100% residential instruction or let's just go back to just doing everything as we as we're normally doing snoo for example you know is even saying hey we're going to cut our residential tuition to $10,000 you know starting next year for incoming students and of course snoo has lots of additional monies coming in from the online operation to help with that calculus but I think some schools are going to have to say well jeez what are we going to do especially given that students are saying look like you know I kind of like maybe online instruction or the flexibility of it oh my god I'm woke in terms of the cost of what an education cost right paying $50,000 a year maybe I shouldn't be paying that maybe I want the $25,000 version if I take more online courses so schools are going to be forced because of competition and because of internal pressure from their own students to adopt some of the things that they have been doing which will include digital learning options. That's a great answer and Kate thank you for the really good question we have another question from Jane Wilde at Linfield University that builds directly on this I want to put this up on the screen what risks and opportunities have arisen during the pandemic that you encourage us to pay attention to? Yeah well so I think some of the risks include things like again saying hey I have zoom I really don't want to have to teach you know take the time to teach an online course so I'm simply going to do my hour or hour and a half lectures and then I'm going to post some you know questions so I'm going to you know tell students to read something I'm going to have them do assignments so I think a big risk is that digital learning is not really fully embraced in terms of its capabilities you know I think in some ways some people will kind of just say yeah I'll just kind of do what I've always done without really kind of unpacking what they've done and really rethinking how they could actually offer it in a way such that the affordances of digital learning are actually more fully achieved right I think we all kind of agree that that's a huge risk or at least I hope we can agree that that's a problem another risk is that we simply continue to be very siloed because right now another risk that I see is that we don't leverage we think about technology as an enabler I think it can enable us to do more around collaboration if we allow for it and that's why I think sharing of data sharing of good practices now more than ever is so important since so many more faculty are kind of coming to the table and saying yeah I teach online now because of the pandemic so I think in some ways we really need to figure out how can we make our silos leakier right, hashtag leaky silos I've used that before as just a way for us to think about how can we be much more collaborative than we typically are as higher as we've had I think opportunities again again collaboration sharing of data I think there's some opportunities to also bring in our students and really ask them what's working because in some ways especially in the spring we were slapping things together quickly and trying to meet the needs of our students and so there's a missed opportunity that I think that happens especially in a very solo teaching where students are not brought along as folks to kind of give us feedback along the way a lot of times of course we just ask students at the end what do you think when really we should be asking them that question every week that we offer the course or even when we're testing out new courses having them beta test the course and tell us okay what's unclear what additional instructional content is missing that might help me with this money point and so there's a great opportunity as we're building these new digital learning courses to really bring students in as the stakeholders that we're trying to help everyone else you can see why I'm trying to figure out now how to just bring Kelvin on every week first of all that was a great question it was a great vision of this and second I just did tweet out hashtag that's basically the code name of this project that I would love to be able to start in some ways again I just need some seed money I need people obviously to help schools to sign on and say you know what it's time for us to get more collaborative that's not threatening to anyone to our leaders but let's share what's working let's help students and their parents and other stakeholders let them know what we're doing inside the ivory tower and see that we are trying to be innovative and that we do struggle with it but that we are willing to fall fast and we're willing to share ideas to get better to meet your needs the more that we can do that I think that's where I think we'll be able to win more acceptance of higher education more so than maybe we've had ever I know that's a big thing to throw out there but I think that's the timing and our use of technology can really help us do that I think that's right and you just got retweeted by a call group that's a liberal arts consortium of colleges so that's a potential source to talk to I just want to reach back a bit to your earlier discussion about data analytics that you have with Tom because Mark Rush who's a wonderful professor at the Washington League just said I can't display it it's from the chat so I'll just read it out loud do existing data analytics really allow us to create a base standard again which we can test online versus hybrid etc yeah and you know I would argue it's you know I would argue that like any tool there's an opportunity to leverage some of that data I mean I think Matt's point is a or Mark's point is a very good one though because what type of data right like clicking through a learning management system is that really helpful for us to know that you know there's data that comes from you know students actually accessing an e-book but you know a student might you know read a few pages and then go to 7-11 and get a big gulp and come back right so a lot of that data can be very misleading in terms of engagement you know student to content engagement data so I think you're right I mean I think I think we have to maybe tool the learning analytics because for example I think about it in terms of what if we could do a better job of even linking students who go to or students who let's say haven't logged into the learning management system at all who are failing I mean I think some of that data can still be useful as part of early alerts tutoring there are companies like tutor.com for example that has a way for faculty to track which of their students are actually using tutoring and for how long and they can also access sessions to find out what muddy points they're really struggling with in the tutoring session which then in a structure can go oh I have this data now let me come up with supplemental instruction interventions right that might be helpful not just to this student but maybe to other students in the class who go to tutoring but are still struggling so I think we have to be kind of you know we have to be somewhat parsimonious we can't collect every bits of data right but there are certain things about the student experience that we can collect maybe again it's just again relying on survey data you know like you know we can go to a bathroom now they have like the green smiley face the yellow face the red face all this bathroom is terrible maybe we need that where students are actually telling us yeah this week's material is awesome you get a green smiley face versus you know someone who says oh my god like this course sucks this week especially because no one's participating or you know I don't have access to this ebook chapter I'm going to give you a red you know growly face or whatever so there's information about the experience that we can still collect that could still be useful but it's going to be more parsimonious model that helps us predict how we can do a better job of our courses that can predict again student success in our course. Back around 20 years ago I used a video conferencing platform it was very rudimentary but it had one interesting every person involved in the conversation was represented by a little 2x2 pixel box on the screen 100 people you just have this kind of ocean of these little blocks you do is you could toggle your box color to your mood at that moment so green meant this is cool you know yellow meant I'm not so sure red meant I disagree or stop and so if you had 500 people the presenter would just quickly look at the watch and color you know and see how they were going on a second by second basis but that's a memory of the distant past we have people here with great questions about the present and the future and I want to make sure we get them get their questions shared so this is one from a colleague of mine at Georgetown this is John Steitz or Steitz who asks is there any danger that schools will continue online post pandemic simply to generate revenue and climb out of the COVID financial hole watering down online teaching in the process well you know maybe you know I don't think that that's outside of the realm but I think in some ways it takes more it takes two to tango right so it's not just about the administration saying hey we're going to offer online it's what happens when you say okay we're going to allow faculty to teach online in stronger numbers but the faculty who are asked to do it are a either not prepared not motivated and or just burnt out you know from having to do it because they're working on so many other things in addition to trying to get these courses up and running and so I think there's a huge opportunity to almost do some type of efficacy review and do it in a non punitive way so this is not what I'm suggesting is not about evaluating faculty for promotion and tenure per se it's about okay as an institution how are we doing with online education in math or in psychology which is my discipline or in whatever area and what are our students telling us about what their experiences are like what types of instructional content seem to really be helpful to students across multiple sections of the same course what content seems not to be very useful have we done a good job even in terms of aligning our content in our courses regardless of modality with the learning objectives like are we telling students to read a 20 page journal just because we think it's awesome when really it has nothing to do with helping students master the learning objectives of the course so I think about Maria Anderson from course tune talking about aligning and quality matters too we've been told we need to do a better job of aligning all of this so I think in some ways it's the design of the course that will get us in trouble but it's also that facilitation right so how do we make sure that both regardless of the modality are in good shape and my hope is that moving forward we will somehow wean ourselves off of how we teach now and really get down to competencies and sub competencies and really show in a very clear way how everything in the course lines up with all of that in a very atomized way versus how we do things now where it's like okay as an intro to psychology person I just teach all the chapters and just assume you're going to get everything when really I need to be much more prescriptive and have measurable things in the course that I want you to show me that you know how to do you I can see how this connects to your interest in base education as well that's a great question and Calvin that's a wonderful answer thank you we have a question from Jen Obando at Steven's Institute of Technology which is kind of similar now what most institutions have been forced to adopt online courses or programs I wonder what they will need to do to set themselves apart from the rest of the pack what new bells and whistles do you anticipate yeah Jen excellent question you I think you you've really you've really posed a question that I think a lot of institutions are kind of struggling with or will struggle with if they actually my hope is that they will actually spend a time thinking through I mean I think I think in some ways the institutions that can somehow structure themselves to provide learning experiences and so what I'm thinking about is something that Marty Baker Stein who's the current provost and chief academic officer with western governor's university in a recent podcast she talks about how even western governors right they have 130,000 students they're huge they're mega university if you believe in that idea so even they are rethinking how they do things because they have you know their work is about undergraduate degrees graduate degrees and they're even starting to kind of unbundle some of that to say you know what maybe we need to offer certifications that then stack into or lead to degrees for those who want it or maybe there are you know a couple courses that we can set aside that maybe students may want that will help with their ongoing you know lifelong learning objectives because they don't want the entire degree so I think schools that offer flexible pathways for students in ways where all the courses are available all the time and I know that that's not very easy to do and will rely on you know adjunct faculty which again you know full-time faculty are like oh why do we have all these adjuncts but you know having hopefully the right balance between full-time and adjunct so that you never have a student going you know what I wish I could graduate this semester but this capstone course is only offered one time in the semester and oh by the way Dr. Smith is not sabbatical for a year so I'm going to have to wait even longer to graduate like I think students hit a lot of artificial bumps in the road and so I think if we can make sure that that's a smooth process for all students it really will help with you know with the current focus on diversity and equity and inclusion right so we tell students you know what regardless of who you are we're going to give you a frictionless access to us and we're going to provide it at a price point hopefully that is competitive with our peers now some like Harvard's you know the elites will be the elites but I'm worried about the state institutions right where you know someone you know someone might say well you know instead of going to my local state institution I'll just go to a cappella or to a western governor's or to a SNU and that's what the University of Mass system president set in an article maybe even a couple months ago a couple several months ago where he talked about how he was really worried about SNU stealing their lunch locally you know where all these students locally were going to SNU and not really going to UMass institutions is like well SNU does a great job of making frictionless access and also working with students to make sure that they finish and so it's going to be about price it's going to be about wraparound student services so not just having the online courses online but the wraparound services student success coaching access to online services like tutoring so that students have access to that and then I think other things that will be of a big hit will be mastery so giving students credit for prior learning experiences but also saying to students you know what maybe you don't need 10 weeks to finish my course or 16 weeks maybe you only need a third of that time so schools that provide those flexible entries and flexible exits outside of courses I think they will they will be much more interesting to students moving forward not just traditional students but much more the adult students who need that reskilling and upskilling that we hear about all the time. Hear that a lot I'm conscious of time we've got seven minutes and there is just a whole heap of courses that are piling in you've just triggered this group like mad there's two, oh gosh there's so many I'm going to save these and try and share them. I want to bring in one from Portland State Sally who's last time I always just struggle with Mudiyamu I believe asks this question what about the international market do you have a sense of how this affects the global market for students? Many U.S. institutions charge a higher tuition to students from abroad? Yeah, Sally that's a great question. My answer is I'll have to preface it as saying and being honest this thing that's probably more outside of my will house of knowledge because I don't think I've actually done a good job of tracking what's going on in terms of the international markets. What I would say is that my hope is that international students will be more energized given the change in administration and that will find ways to again bring back students we lost or maybe get additional students and I think to be competitive it'll be interesting just to see what schools are willing to do so maybe there could be a nice hybrid approach to save on costs where some of the courses again are more online and then maybe junior and senior level courses or later courses in a program we bring students on campus to have those experiences or maybe the model is something where we meet somewhere outside of the United States. Maybe we say that some of our international students say we're going to go to London and we're going to have some learning experiences there or we'll come to you because again schools like University of Maryland Global Campus already many other schools do this too where they send faculty to countries to teach and so hopefully we can find a way to make it affordable but yeah it'll definitely be something worth watching moving forward especially with Biden and Harris coming in in January. Thank you Sally and Sally thank you very much for being so kind to me as well as for asking a brilliant question thank you. Kelvin I'm struck with an embarrassment of riches with all these questions. I want to bring in one big one so you can use to wrap everything together in a huge bow and this is from one of Tom Hames' colleagues at Houston Community College Margie Ricks and this is a huge one. Margie asks what do you think the future of education will be in 10 years? Will we ever become mostly brick and mortar again and what kind of students will be teaching? Yeah that's a great question I think a lot of the students that will be teaching you know in the 10 years will be even they'll be I would say in some ways they will be more technology savvy than we give current K through 12 students credit for. I think sometimes we assume that our current students now are super savvy in terms of technologies and I would argue they're not. I mean I think they know what they know but I think in 10 years I think we'll see, my hope is that we'll see more students will have opportunities to take online courses hopefully again not because of a major disaster like a pandemic but because in K through 12 for example there will be more opportunities for personalized learning mastery of learning and so I think because of that there will be an expectation once they get to college right such that they're going to want more flexible more personalized learning experiences once they do college whatever college will be like for them I think in some ways we're not going to have I mean I think the brick and mortar ideal that we have for many schools will be very different and so maybe instead of like schools having the large footprint that they have now maybe there will actually be smaller versions that will be available within certain regions where students will again balance their time between these smaller satellites versus being on a main campus for the entire period of time but I think it will be very fluid I think students will float between being at home doing stuff at home coming to campus when needed but the whole residential it will be interesting to see what happens to the residential experience and I think that some students might say well I really want a redefinition of that maybe it's more study abroad I want upfront versus later maybe I actually want to have more micro internships earlier on so that I'm not on campus but maybe I'm actually my campus is working just outside of Google to do work for them or maybe I'm doing it remotely such that I don't really need to focus on being on campus so so that's what I think I see within the next 10 years at least that's a remarkably, remarkably elegant answer to a ginormous question and you have just covered an enormous amount of ground Kelvin somehow you've also taken us to the end of the hour oh I'm so sorry and I hope you know maybe we need to do like a part two after the years right and for those of you who ask questions and we didn't get a chance to address those feel free we can collect them but you can also just email me at timelord33 I'd love to just try to either schedule time to talk with you one-on-one or I could also just try to email you as well because I do want to address as many questions as possible that's really very kind of you friends if you haven't looked at the bottom left corner of the screen you should see two buttons that's a kind of yellow tan color but one of them is a link to Kelvin on Twitter he has the best handle Black Time Lord and there's also a link to his paperly report which is really really great so if you'd like to follow up with him you've got his email address Kelvin I'm so glad we could host you I'm really looking forward to bring you back as soon as possible my pleasure and just thanks so much for the opportunity it was great talking with you and everyone so everyone please be safe and enjoy the holidays and thanks again don't go away yet friends I just want to tell you what's coming up over the next few weeks just to remind you that we are coming up on the end of the year which means we have two sessions coming up one on work-life COVID balance and another one on how campuses grapple with COVID and racism looking ahead into 2021 we have a whole bunch of great topics coming up in just the first two months of that year now if you'd like to join our book club because we're reading an important novel on the future of climate change with a role for education just go to my blog and look at the book club there the book is ministry for the future and if you want to keep talking about all these subjects we've got all kinds of social media angles you can see here especially Twitter and Twitter has just been on fire for the past hour and if you'd like to go into the past and look at our previous conversations about the future of education including everything we've talked about so far from competency based education to pedagogy just go to tinyworld.com slash FTF archive now this has been a great conversation let me just echo our esteemed guests final words thank you all for your participation please be safe during this extraordinary time and I hope to see you online take care bye bye