 Let me welcome everybody to the Future Trends Forum. I'm very glad to see you all here today in order to explore a vital and extraordinary subject. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, coast and chief cat herder and I'll be your guide for the next hour of conversation. But before we begin that conversation, let me introduce the forum and explain a little bit about how it works, where it came from and share a little bit of news about how we work. So first of all, the forum has been going on for almost five years now. We've been doing every week a video conference discussion. Again, when I say discussion, I mean that. These are conversations. We don't have presentations. What I'm doing here with these slides is just for a minute to just introduce the program. Otherwise, it's entirely face-to-face and face-to-voice conversation. That's the goal here, that's how we work. Now, we've been doing this for a while and we've been doing it with the helpless and generous supporters who I'd like to thank before we proceed. First of all, I'd like to thank NizerNet from New York State, a great nonprofit that helps that state's colleges and universities get online and do great things with each other via broadband. We're really excited about their work and delighted that they could sponsor us. We're also grateful to Schindig because as you can see, they make the technology we're using right now. So if you're new to Schindig or if you haven't been here for a while, let me just show you a couple of the key points. First of all, where I am and where the slide is, again, just for a minute, is called the stage. And we call it the stage because everybody involved in this conversation can see and hear everything that goes on on stage. You can join us here and I'll show you how to do that. Now, right below us, you can see around you about 20 people at a time. We call this the participant swarm and you can see that on either side of your screen, you should have a button like a chevron. If you click that button, that lets you hop into different rooms. We divide the entire space into individual rooms of about 20. Right now we have 124 people, so that's a good number of rooms. Now, if you'd like to participate, how can you have these conversations, these discussions I was just talking about? Well, there are two major ways. If you look at the bottom of your screen, you'll see a few different buttons. The two ones I want you to pay attention to are raised hand button and question mark. If your video camera is working and your mic is working and you're in a place where you can talk out loud, click the raised hand button when you want to join us on stage. I'll see you and then with two button presses, I'll bring you up on stage so we can have a conversation. It's really easy to do. Now, if your microphone doesn't work, if your camera doesn't work or you're not in a place where you can talk, that's okay, click the question mark button. That lets you type in a question or a mark and then I can relate that to the whole crowd once the time is right. In fact, I'll flash it on the screen for everyone to read and then I'll read it out loud so everyone can hear it. So either way, click the raised hand or click the question mark and that feeds your comments and questions right in. Now, if you're on Twitter, just make sure you use the hashtag F-T-T-E and people often tweet out from inside or they tweet out to tweet at us if they can't make it but they still want to follow on Twitter. So those are the main ways you can participate. We'd love to hear from you. This entire program is like Soylent Green. It's made out of people, it's made out of you and we would just love to hear your thoughts and ideas. We're grateful to Shindig for making available the technology that powers it all. We're also grateful to our supporters on Patreon and we just show them so you can see all these great people. Patreon is a crowdfunding site where you can collaboratively fund any kind of creative ongoing work. In this case, it's our work in trying to grapple the future of education. People kick in as little as a dollar a month just to keep the lights on, the machine's humming and you can see these people here can contribute $10 or more a month. These are great people like Corey S, Lisa Prichard, Francine Hibiscus, Laura Armour, Trent Batson, Chris Johnson, Paul Hanley. We're really grateful to them for their support and you can join them. Just go to patreon.com slash bryanalexander. Now, this week and for the past few weeks we've been in an extraordinary situation. We've been dealing with a pandemic that's affected the globe. You can see here from the latest data that the number of human beings infected is reported to be 1.5 million in rising. We're approaching a death toll of nearly 100,000. This is obviously an extraordinary event that's reshaping the world in all kinds of ways. It's especially impacting a higher education which is why I wanna talk about it today. Now, in order to do that, I asked everybody last week, I set out a survey asking some directions about what you would like to see in the future trends for moving ahead. And these are the major topics that people want us to focus on. Planning for the next year, equity and student access, teaching online and technology issues. And we'll be touching on it. The first one is the theme for today and we'll keep following up on that. Now, I wanna share a couple other findings from the survey which again, I'm really grateful to the folks who responded to it. One of them was we asked, what kind of format would you like for our coronavirus future transforms sessions? And the leading answer was a panel of experts which is what we're doing today and we're gonna follow up on that with more and more panels. We also asked, okay, after a month of focusing on COVID-19, should we keep that laser-like focus going on? And a slim majority said, yes, keep focusing on the pandemic and what it means for our education. And coming into a very, very close second though was the opinion that we should alternate between COVID-19 news and other topics. So I'm gonna mesh that and try and do something like every four weeks one week of something other than COVID and we'll keep going with that. We also asked people how you would like to discuss these issues between sessions and Twitter really took the lead. That was the main way people wanted to have these conversations. So we can focus on that again, using the hashtag FTETE. So that's it for the survey. Thank you so much for your opinions and thoughts. They really, as you can tell, they're shaping our programming. So please let us know more. We're glad to hear from all of them. If you'd like to see some resources on the COVID-19 crisis and higher education, just go to tinyyearworld.com slash COVID-edu. You can find some there. So today, our goal is to zero in on the academic year 2020, 2020, 2021. We wanna think about what it means to be teaching during or right after the pandemic this time next year. So we're going beyond the summer session. We're going beyond spring 2020. We're looking ahead at the full year. What does it mean to have students return to campus after a pandemic? Or what does it mean to have no students on campus because we're still on lockdown? Or what happens if during the fall semester we oscillate between having some people on campus, no people on campus, lots of people on campus? What changes with our technology? What changes with our education? How does this impact research and student life? Now to discuss this, we have a whole set of great, great people. And I wanna just bring them up one at a time on stage because they're all just awesome folks. And I'm gonna start off with a dear friend and a great supporter of the program, Robin DeRosa, who is coming to us from Plymouth State University. Robin, greetings. Hi Brian, hi everybody. Oh, I'm so glad to see you. Where are you today, by the way? I am in my home in central New Hampshire near the university where I teach, which is Plymouth State University. Okay, and I should ask, as a kind of New England question, what's the weather like? It is gray, gloomy and sleeting, which is a reflection of my soul. Oh, no, no. At the moment. Oh my gosh. Well, that also sounds like spring, doesn't it? It does, yeah. Okay, okay. Well, Robin, I would love to talk with you and ask you all kinds of questions. And I want to start off with one just really quickly. Describe the impact of this pandemic on Plymouth State University. How, where are you all now? How have you reacted? Honestly, I'm going to have to say it's, it's personally, socially and institutionally traumatizing at this point. So we are a very rural campus, a public college and in one of the lowest funded states in the nation. And so we were already having a sort of budget trouble and I'll talk about that in a minute. But in some ways our rural location means that the virus itself hasn't hit us quite as hard as some of the more urban parts of the country. So we don't have a lot of students or faculty yet who are ill, although we're just starting to hear about people's family members, especially in the southern part of the state that borders on Massachusetts. But what happened to our students in particular and to a lot of their family members is that immediately when the state went on some version of lockdown, we can quibble about all the different terms but they did shut down most non-essential businesses. And that meant that almost overnight, many of my students and many of their family members lost their jobs. And what we found, which really shocked me was the scope of it really shocked me was people who had been living paycheck to paycheck and doing fine were suddenly within a week, Brian, just thrust into not just poverty but a real sense of what will happen to me tomorrow. Like where will I be living? How will I be eating? How will I pay if I get sick and I need medical attention? And so overnight as a faculty member, that was what I was hearing from students and it was kind of far from my mind to figure out how to get them dealing with remote learning, which is a whole other issue up here. We have lots of people. As you remember, Brian from your time in Vermont where rural broadband is not super accessible to a lot of people, but also people can't afford wireless outside of the packages they may have had when they were living on campus. So when campus shut and they went home, they were pretty disconnected from us. But honestly, that was so secondary to the fact that many of them didn't even know where they were gonna go home to. They had, for example, elderly or ill family members at home and they didn't know if they should be traveling back there. They couldn't afford to get back. They didn't have cars to get back. And just suddenly, especially with food and security, we just had massive problems of that scale. That was what I spent pretty much my first two weeks on. It also affected some of our faculty members as well who didn't have reliable internet access and had issues dealing with their families. So I've been trying to pay attention to online learning pivots, but really for a lot of us, this has been a real foregrounding of the basic needs issues that our students and even contingent faculty deal with on a day-to-day basis. And that's what we've been focusing on a lot. I imagine this sounds like a natural disaster, like a terrible storm or a flood. Yeah, I mean, we were lucky to get a grant from Sarah Golder-Grabbs Fast Fund. And in one day, students applied and we dispersed $8,000 in emergency need. It was gone as soon as it was out there and it was just the beginning of the need. So I think one of the questions that a lot of us are dealing with is, what role do basic needs play in academia? How much of academic issue are these concerns and what should faculty and staff who normally maybe don't spend the better part of their day working on these things? What do we need to be doing now to make sure that our communities are taken care of and that we're prepared if this is gonna be ongoing? Wow, this is a story that needs to be told and I'm glad you could tell it here, Robin. And knowing your fierce energy, your commitment to justice and to learning, I'm so glad you're there helping them. Yeah, and I just maybe want to say one more thing too, which is that I know people are here like watching me right now. That's what I've been doing the last few days. I've been signing up for every webinar with every hopeful answer on how we're gonna navigate this and have been depressed at the end of all of them because there aren't answers. And I think what I just keep coming back to is the sense that we have a public health crisis and we need a healthy public response. And some of that needs to come from those of us who do public education. And the response isn't gonna be an answer. It's going to be thinking about the public good the same way we think about social distancing. You stay home not just for yourself but for those in your community who are vulnerable. I think if we can just all adopt the mindset that we're not going to fix this or solve this or come up with some remote learning panacea, what we really need to do is to think about our communities and about particularly if you're not affected or 10 students in your class are not affected and they're learning and everything's great. Focus on the two or three who are off the map. Focus on the four or five who are struggling to get their assignments in because it's those margins that make a public. The people with all the privilege in the world they're going to make it through this. God willing their health holds out. But we need to find a way to not let this pandemic augment the sorting effects of higher ed because otherwise we're just gonna leave behind whole institution's worth of people who deserve to learn. I do. That's a powerful, powerful, I was gonna say almost a prayer. It's a powerful sentiment especially thinking of the public good and thinking of the most marginalized among us. Well, I want you to hold that thought for a second and everybody else start thinking of questions for Robin. But I need to bring up on stage another member of our panel. This is the absolutely splendid journalist, Goldie Blumenstik from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Hello, Goldie. Hey, Brian, how are you? Good. Nice to meet you. I can see you. Have you met Robin before? No, I haven't. Oh, you absolutely should know each other. You're too smart. Goldie, are you in DC right now? I am sitting in my apartment right now. Oh, great. I'm not from my office, but nowhere near it. I mean, in many ways, nowhere near it. We've all got, we went remotely at the Chronicle in the second week of March. She's very, very smart. Goldie, I have all kinds of questions for you. And I know everybody else is and let me just tell everybody else before I start interrogating you. This is the time to start clicking the raised hand button or to click the question mark. What Robin has just been describing, which you've just been recommending and what Goldie is about to say is they're gonna give rise to all kinds of questions and comments from them. So please start thinking about that and start pressing those buttons. Goldie, looking ahead, thinking about fall semester, what are you seeing from American higher education? What kind of visions are we floating for what fall might look like? What kind of planning are we doing? You know, the biggest question, the biggest thing right at everyone's facing right now is the absolute uncertainty. I don't know any more than anybody else knows right now, but talking as I'm reading all the medical stuff and members of my family are on the front lines of this as well. I find it really hard to believe that fall is gonna start like a normal fall. I can't imagine students coming back together in the numbers that students come back to campuses in. I can't imagine sports teams playing in stadiums. I mean, I would love to be wrong, and like I said, I don't know. My information now is no better than anybody else's, but it's based on what I'm seeing. I feel it's very optimistic for people to be saying that it's probably unrealistic to think about a natural, normal fall. Do you think we were on the way for praise that? Do you see colleges and universities trying to plan for a fall that's entirely online, a continuation of where we are now? Or do you see them planning to start welcoming students back? I mean, honestly, what now they're thinking to their, I think they're only starting to turn to thinking about the future, maybe this week or next week. The last month has been like, as Robin just described all concerning with just getting themselves distributed, getting their students distributed, getting these remote learning structures up and running. The people I spoke to this week for the newsletter that I do were starting to worry a lot more about enrollment now, but they're still trying to sort of figure out what this year looks like before they start to next year. And they don't have a lot of leeway on that, frankly, but there's so much, you know, state colleges don't know what a budget's gonna look like. So it's very hard to think about what their fall's gonna look like. I think most boards generally vote their tuition and they know their class right around, you know, they set their tuition in March, they vote their class, they admit a class in May. I mean, I don't think colleges are gonna know what their freshman class is until, you know, till that count comes in at the end of September when you have to tell the end department how many students you have. So, you know, I've seen some people talking about, you know, starting this semester, maybe in six week bites instead of having a full fall semester, maybe half semester compressed courses and then the second half of the semester. That's so, I know there are a few schools that do that already, that's probably a logical way to think about the semester and can't make long-term plans. So maybe you make incremental plans and you even plan that. So it's almost like a block or a quarter system? Yeah, I mean, the schools that, I mean, the quarter system is what allow places like University of Washington and some of those other places to sort of make that quick pivot that they did. I mean, not everybody's sort of set up to completely convert their courses that way in a few weeks, but I can sort of see some version of that happening right off the bat because nobody wants to keep doing this the way they're doing it, right? They wanna be able to return campus as much normalcy as they can, as soon as they can. So maybe to do that is to try to do it in increments and not, I'm selling this from a colleague of mine who stole it from somebody else, but talking in general about how you turned on the economy, they said it wasn't a switch, it was a dial and that's probably gonna be true for colleges as well. Okay, so if we were at 10 in February, we might say we're at one right now, we're gonna be dialed up to three and then maybe four or five in the fall. Yeah, I don't know what, I don't know what it, luckily I don't have to be the one to turn the dial. But you are one of the best observers of just where the dial is. I think just the logic of this is, I mean, we're thinking about it as a company too, what, you know, are we gonna be having events in the fall or are we gonna be having virtual events in the fall, you know? Yeah. I mean, I feel like the high rate has been so responsible, I'm sorry, that's the today's spammer calling me. Oh, good, side of life. You have to turn it on and turn them off. We're all getting spammers like crazy, right? And who knew? I feel like higher ed was the most responsible and very early on in sort of moving and sort of almost setting the rhythm for the country. I remember going home to New Jersey to see my family for a couple of days right after all of higher ed started to shut down and that had not really seeped into the rest of the consciousness yet. So I do think colleges will be among the most responsible parties and how they sort of reopen the economy. You know, I think they, because they have the science on their side because they have the liability on their side, they'll probably be able to make these decisions in a comprehensive way. I think that might be good for the whole country to be looking a little bit more closely at higher ed how it makes these decisions. Though I guess the NBA was a little ahead of the NCAA in this case. Well, this is fantastic. You've touched on a whole series of, you've got different incremental changes to the great uncertainty, to the leadership role that higher education could play. And a whole series of questions have just come on in. And I wanna relay these to the two of you, Rob and Goldie. Then we have a third panelist I wanna bring up in a minute. But first, this is a question from Frank Anastasio. Frank, let's see. Greetings, sir. Your mic is on or your mic is muted. There we go. Hi, Frank Anastasio. Thank you. I was interested in your last comment, Goldie, regarding the reaction of the university, the higher ed institutions. How much of that do you think was associated with the timing occurring around spring break in many cases? It certainly helped a ton. I mean, I wasn't paying that closely attention to it right from the start there. But after I went back and I talked to a bunch of colleges who had made that online pivot, I realized what everyone had done was basically played with that two weeks of spring break. They either expanded spring break, they moved it up, they moved it back. Having that in that, I think saved the semester for most places because they had that break coming up. Okay, and if you don't mind, I have another question that's a little more general. You know, I think, first of all, I'm a senior IT consultant. I've done work in higher ed. And I thought that in most cases, the, you know, again, the reaction, clearing the campuses, moving to the remote model of delivering classes and content was great. But having worked for a learning company before, one of the things that, you know, I thought came to the fore was the lack of instructional design, content design kinds of resources to help the teaching staff, faculty, develop the right kind of materials for remote... Give them a break. Give these people a break. They were doing it in like two weeks. Oh, I understand, I understand. But, you know, they're at least the CIOs that I talked to as part of my practice feel like that, as we look to the future, that would, that's an area that we need to beef up. You know, I might just say one thing I hope, again, this is part of like, let's generate a public response to a public health crisis. I'd like to see us fund our teaching and learning centers and our instructional design and internal academic tech teams to develop the kinds of infrastructure that we need to do this work effectively, which is two parts, right? It's the academic technology, but it's also that faculty development to help our people work. And I'd like to see us go there, as opposed to the OPM ed tech solutionism of sort of purchasing something off the shelf that can somehow save you. I think the best thing we can do is organically integrate this kind of learning with the missions that we already have for teaching and learning at our institutions. And that demands faculty and staff working together to create those systems. And I'll just say, where I am, that's my job. And I have effectively one person who works for me. So we had a heavy lift in making this shift. And I think better funding there would be really important. Thank you. Thank you. That's a great question, Frank. Thank you very much. You know, I've been very careful to call this as remote learning and not distance education or online education because I think everybody knows what we're doing right now is in most cases very makeshift. There's even a new consortium over the organizations that are really involved with quality issues and online learning who want to make sure that one of them called it duct tape education. This duct tape version of, that's Bob Hansen from Upsia. This duct tape version of what's happening now is not actually online education. You're absolutely right. There needs to be much more of instructional designers and intentionality when we're developing these kinds of courses, but let's just be real, you know, in two weeks you're not going to get that. No, it's remarkable what we've done. If you're, by the way, if you're new to the forum, what you just saw was the video question. So if you'd like to do that, just press the raise hand button. We also have people pressing the question mark and I want to share a couple of those questions right now and give Robin Golds a chance to pounce on them. Eric Mystery asks, how does a different fall start impact schools, particularly those that depend on revenue from housing, food, fees, et cetera? Great question, Eric. They're in trouble? Next question, I mean, that's, that's... I mean, they, I mean, our school is facing $13 million spring shortfall, our tiny public institution, $13 million spring shortfall, you know, just from the prorating of the room and board once it's left. So that's a huge issue. And when you're not serving food, you're, that's the money that you're not spending. You may be employing the workers still, but you know, the housing costs are still there. Those bonds need to be paid off either way, right? Oh, that's unfortunately a great question. And thank you both for the really concise and spot on answers. We have another question coming in from Van Davis at WSBP, Van. Hi, your mic is muted, you know, seriously muted now. I can see you and I think you can hear us, but we can't hear you. Tell you what, why don't you type in a question and I'll bring it up on stage. Thanks, Van. We have a whole bunch of questions coming in. I wanna make sure we get a chance to address these. This is one that's come in from, whoops, sorry, just this one. This is from Tom Hames, long time friend of the program. And he asks, how do we prepare for an unnatural fall while maintaining quality? I mean, I might start by saying the modality, whether online, face to face, hybrid, blended, high flex, whatever you're looking at. That's not the only consideration for what makes quality. So I'm just encouraging institutions to think about their mission and their pedagogical approach in general. What is that? And that's the thing that we wanna preserve in quality. So there's more questions than just how do I create a good engaging video? How do I make good online assessments? How do I transition from face to face to Zoom? Those are all great things and we should talk about them. But also important is, what are the pedagogical models I've been using so far? What do they think, what do they count as important in the connection between learners and teachers? And how can I bring those into an online environment? So I think we spend a little bit too much time looking at how the content translates into a new modality and not quite enough time thinking about what are the ways we wanna connect with learners? What, I think a lot of our quality models, personalized learning competency-based models. But that's not the pedagogy that a lot of our residential institutions have. So how do we build project-based, inquiry-based, collaborative spaces, start with those basic questions and I think that's a kind of quality that I really care about beyond just the kinds of assessments we've used to decide whether someone's ready because do they know enough technology to get themselves online? That's a great answer. That's exactly right. What worries me is the other constraints that are out there that are gonna make that even harder. I can, real-world experience is the thing that we always talk about. Try to integrate what your classroom experience is, take it to a real-world experience, take it back to your job and what if we're still on social distancing in the fall and you can't go do real field work by not, or doing some of this other stuff. I mean, I agree with you 100% that there's a lot that can be modified even beyond the tech. I was struck by some of you may know Phil Hill who does a newsletter and he wrote this analysis this week and he talked about right off the bat it seems like a lot of the transitions have been, just people who don't art from me with teaching online have just tried to recreate their class in the Zoom. And obviously that's the makeshift thing that you do right now to make it ready. I mean, no professor's gonna have it easy in the fall they have to do this because they have to think about what the constraints are for their students right now too. Not least of which is if everyone's still working from home and this is the thing that really, I've heard this from Bill Moses from Kresge when I interviewed the philanthropists for the Edge newsletter a couple of weeks ago. He talked about just thinking and not just the broadband access let's say you have broadband at home and let's say you have a laptop and you're the adult student well suddenly you're the adult student who has to compete with your child for the laptop time and what worked initially to just get you get everybody staying in school is now not gonna work just because of the circumstances. That's a great answer. And between the two of you a question of constraints which are manifold and then this pedagogical idea to recreate or to create what actually works best pedagogically. These are brilliant. Within these constraints, right? Yeah, innovation or constraint. We have more questions just piling in and now we have Jill Yashikawa from Creative Marbles. Hello Jill. Hello, thank you for having me. One of my questions. So we work with students K through 12 and all the way through college. And so Rosa when you were talking about the connections between professors and students that has been the most impactful that we have been hearing from our students is that when teachers are human and say, hey, we're all trying to figure this out together. Let's try and work on this because what we know as educators is that it's the connection not necessarily just the content. It's the trust that a student has with their teacher to be able to know that that person has their best interest in mind but also is human and imperfect. And I think that's what makes a difference because what we're doing is we're balancing on the goodwill of students right now. We have evicted them from campus. We have disrupted their education what they expected they were going to get. And now we've told them to go home and be back in their childhood bedrooms with their parents and they're not getting the college experience that they want. And when families are, when professors are real in that way, then students can have a greater trust because here's my question. So what is that goodwill? How do we keep developing that trust? So they'll come back in the fall or they'll continue to endure a disruption. And then for our seniors who are now in the midst of choosing, and I'm in California so I have students choosing colleges all over the country and their families are confirmed. Why would I send my kid to New York City when that there's a huge outbreak there and I can't even go see the campus? How do we help these, everybody have trust so that we have an institution enrollment because as you've both mentioned there is going to be financial difficulty coming back especially for state funded institutions that those states may have economic uncertainty themselves and tuition may have to raise. So that's really my question is what do we do now so that we preserve that goodwill instead of just banking on that it's going to be back when things get back to normal? Thank you, Jo. It's a great question. I mean, the one thing I've been thinking a lot about what makes for resilient campus and sort of came up with the conclusion that it's the same thing that makes for resilient college graduate which is dealing with complexity, dealing with ambiguity, especially dealing with ambiguity. I think in some cases this is kind of goes against what colleges like to do lately especially at this time of the year colleges kind of like to put the bravado out and they're the best and everyone should come put their deposits down with them but I think it's really incumbent on college leaders to be very forthright and do a lot of communicating with their various constituencies about what they know, famous defense secretary, the known unknowns and the knowns and they just need to be clear about what they have and don't have in hand. And I think the schools that are being straightforward about the reward, well, people recognize that and appreciate it and the schools that are trying to be as their way through it are going to pay the price for it at some point. I mean, if you can't tell somebody whether it's safe to come to New York City in the fall you should be able to sort of say that or just say, here's what we're trying to do right now. I mean, and just go into this with the same kind of the goodwill that Rahm was talking about right from the start. I mean, these are not, you know, places these are places that are trying to do something in the public good. I think they just have to be really communicate honestly and directly and from, you know probably from the top. And I think institutions will be served best by seeking frameworks rather than solutions. So one of the things I've been trying to work out in my own institution is kind of a framework for. So I was thinking about sort of three organizing idea of equity access and connection. Focus on a framework that matches your demographic and your institutional mission and make sure everybody's literate in that framework and then speak from and through that framework. But that I think allows us to be a process that unfolds with students and families as partners rather than as something that we present to them is don't worry, we've got it all figured out. We're doing ABC solution. So if we think of it as a process and we tell them we're not, we're not flying by the seat of our pants. We have a framework, it's based on something that we've been generating for years because we understand our students and we understand teaching and learning. And now we've adapted that framework for this situation and here's how that looks. But that's different than saying we know exactly what's gonna happen, right? It just says we understand our values. And like for us at Plymouth, I'm really thinking based on our history as a teachers college and serving some underserved populations, our values are really around equity access and collaboration community. What is it for your institution? I think that's a really important word values because I'm thinking about it like, I talked to a lot of residential college leaders this week and but what is the value of the residential college experience? Yeah, it's physically being there but there's something that's achieved from that residential experience and maybe there's a way to replicate that in some way if you're not in the physical space. Especially because we don't see this as a permanent thing which like, thank you for several linings, right? So the idea- There will be a vaccine, it will be safer to be in groups at some point. It just- Exactly. When we want it to- It's an emergency. It's not forever. But honestly, I think, I'm not looking for a silver lining in this because there really isn't one but I don't trust the people who say that there is one frankly. But there is some flex, there are some questions about the model in general about picking up all these people, moving them all to one place. And then there probably should have been a little bit more flexibility in the model all along a little bit more notions of that sort of a more porous approach. That's the right word. Maybe it's not. And might just- So I think that thinking was already being accelerated as technology has advanced and as concerns about our impact on the climate have entered our consciousness. This might accept that a little bit at some point. And I'm not saying that that's in any way welcome news right now, but- No, that's a connection we're gonna cycle back to. Jill, thank you so much for a great question. And we'd love to hear more from you later on or from Creative Marbles. Thank you, Goldie and Robin. You're being a fantastic guest. I love these answers. This is a, and of course Twitter loves them as well which is great to see. But we have another panelist I wanna bring up from across the Atlantic. I wanna bring Neil Mosley from Cardiff University. Hello, Neil. Oh, Neil. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Fabulous, nice to be here. Great, thank you so much for coming. I appreciate it because it's late at night there. Yeah, you've got me out of childcare duty so it's not a problem at all. I've been reading my little boys some stories usually so okay, you've kind of avoided me and that. Yeah, it's great to be here. It's really interesting hearing from a US perspective because I think one of the things of all of this is that it's so much the same here, really. We're in lockdown, all essential businesses closed. University just massively trying to grapple with all of this and I kind of agree with what a lot of people were saying. I think the biggest danger for us is I think to try to view this as business as usual but remote and I think it's a weird situation because you can be in your home at this stage with it not spread as much as it may be will and you can feel as if sometimes like it is business as usual. It's a kind of weird thing but I think it's one of those things for all of us. We have to kind of really think about each day resetting and saying, actually, this is not business as usual but just remotely and I think I worry a little bit I think from my perspective, I work much closer with faculty and students and I worry that we're not being flexible enough. I worry about our capacity to cope with 2021 because of all the kind of mass efforts that are going into dealing with a move to remote teaching and how we deal with assessment and if we're not wise and flexible and compassionate on the assessment side of things then we could get into all manner of difficulty around student kind of buy-in and student feeling towards us as an institution. So irrespective of that, my concern is our capacity to kind of plan and deal effectively with 2021 but I think it's incumbent on all of us to really just reset each day and because the danger is for me, there's so much things going around that I'm passionate about in online education and design and all that kind of stuff that it's so easy to kind of get hooked into that and to start to kind of tag that onto the, maybe the agenda or the thing that you were thinking anyway about higher ed and not step back and say, actually, this is much bigger than my agenda and it's about people and I think it challenges higher ed to think about the things that we knew were problems already. Homogenizing our students, I think is a big one for me and thinking, I think in the UK we do have this kind of picture of a classic undergraduate student and it's usually someone who's pretty sort of middle class, pretty wealthy, pretty in probably in a position, I think Robin picked on this to be kind of most sheltered maybe from some of the things that are going on and I think we just have to challenge ourselves in the way that we approach dealing with it but also the way that we think about students as a huge variety and a huge variety of different circumstances and yeah, I mean, in respect to what 2021 looks like, I mean, I'd love to know what the answer is so if anyone's got one, that'd be great. Hey, Brian. One thing, when I was talking to people about what makes a resilient university and kind of the signs of that, people talk, I heard somebody say something pretty smart about, I think it was somebody from Tulane University who talked about you have to do disaster planning and sort of scenario planning and when I thought it was so interesting the way he phrased it was, you don't just make a disaster plan once and then that's your disaster plan, you make that disaster plan and then you continue to adjust that plan for various scenarios along the way so you don't, you know and that's kind of what the situation is everyone's in right now, you have to make a plan and then three weeks later adjust it and it's part of the adaptable, I think that's one of the things that will help us all, help all institutions keep going, it's an interesting... Yeah, I like the framework idea because I think, again, the focus can be too much a little bit on how we're gonna teach and for me, it's kind of what's the experience gonna look like for students that study with us in 2021 and like holistically because it's such a broad, complex kind of problem that we're facing, this is... Yeah, you set goals and you set values and then you figure out at the time, goals and values can be sort of fixed and they can still be north stars but then, you know, when you adjust to circumstances and that's where some of that, you know incremental thinking might apply. True. And I really think one of the things that's been most helpful to me is that my staff is very small in our teaching and learning center and we're actually outnumbered by the students who work in our teaching and learning center and they've all been very desperate to keep their hours because they've lost most of their other jobs so they're still working for us remotely and I think because I spend so much time hearing their stories, I just think when we're making these disaster plans and retooling them all the time instead of doing what you were talking about before where we really try to hide our vulnerabilities from our students and their families and the people who pay and choose us as consumers, we need to involve them as people who help us make those plans because unless we're listening to the stories that are coming from these, I mean, we used to have a diverse demographic. It's almost diversified even more now that they're learning from so many different kinds of places that I think involving students as partners and the planning and actually family members as well will be really helpful to us. The bigger our communication line is with our students and the more they're actually asked to help redesign the curriculum honestly for the new modalities, they have much better information than we do about how they're able to connect, how they're able to participate and how they best learn under these conditions. So hiding from them, the challenges is actually gonna really shoot us in the foot, I think, in the collective institutional. These are great, great thoughts. And we have a whole ton of questions that have come in and the key off of some of the things you've just been saying in the past couple of minutes. And I wanna bring a couple of these up but I'm also a little conscious of time because we're such an embarrassment of riches in all of you. This is from Christian Eschelman, who has a great question, which is Robin and I think this applies to everybody. What changes in structure and communications can help our faculty embrace uncertainty and emerging decision-making? Also embrace a need for greater flexibility in our models? Well, I mean, the cool thing and Kristen works a lot on this kind of stuff as well. I mean, the cool thing is a lot of us have been really interested in emergence design and also in involving students in participation in the emergent design of curriculum for a long time. But now many more faculty have come to the table suddenly with an interest in being more flexible and listening more to students. So to a certain degree there's a, we have this learning community going on a Plymouth that had, I think 70 or so participants is very robust. And what we found is that the faculty who were in that learning community, which was focused on three things, integrated learning, project-based learning, and open education. And of course, open education is very much about using technology in ways that empower learners to be in a driver's seat of their educations. Faculty who are in that learning community just, they were great. When this hit, they knew how to communicate with their students, they knew how to talk with their students. And lots of other faculty saw, I think, the ways that those leaders were rallying. So I would say you have an in right now to a certain degree with a larger community than you might have before. But I think one of the key ways to do that is to build safe places for faculty where they can come together with students as best you can to talk about emergent learning. And so we've been doing that for a year, really served us well, but if you don't have, and I know Kristen does, but for those who don't have teaching and learning centers that focus, particularly on things like open education or project-based or inquiry-based learning and thinking about technology that serves pedagogy rather than letting your IT department drive the conversion, put that with your teaching and learning folks. And if you don't have teaching and learning folks, advocate to get them. So I know like Josh Eiler is here somewhere, I think I saw it little bobbing head. People have done great work sort of talking about Jesse Stammel I saw in there. We have Martha Burdus with me and the collab at Plymouth. These are folks who have really helped people realize that a teaching and learning center is not a place where you're going to get evaluated in your teaching or you're going to learn to teach better. It's a community of practice for, because nobody is gonna be able to just change their mindset in a week and a half. So you need to offer faculty development that's about that kind of mindset training, right? So instead of everything focusing on content delivery and that's the problem we've seen with this pivot to remote learning, right? All the conversations about how to get my content delivered in a new package, but it's the modality, right? It's the way you connect. It's the way you build the channels that matters. And that's actually pedagogy, not content. So if you don't have those pedagogy conversations somewhere in your institution, all you're gonna do is move content online. And you know what up? There's a lot of institutions who moved their content online a long time ago and they do it better and they do it faster, they do it cheaper. That's not what most of our small colleges are all about. It's not the connection. Thank you, Robin. And thank you, Kristen, for a great question. And along the way, you've given a bunch of shout outs to a bunch of fantastic forum participants and guests. Thank you. Speaking of which, we have another question from Canada and this is from Steven Downs, who says, when we say think about the public good and focus on the margins, are we thinking of people within the higher education community or does this extend beyond that community? How? And I think this touches on things that every one of you have said when Goldie, when you were talking about the porous institution and Neil, we were talking about trying to rethink who the students are and where they're coming from. And of course, Robin, the source of all of this. What do you think about that? I'll put the question back up so we can think about it. I mean, I would say that the fault lines that have been exposed during the pandemic show us, number one, who the most vulnerable people in our institutions are, but then they also can really highlight who the people who aren't even being served at all. So I would like to see this be a bit of a wake up call. I think these questions are related to questions about free college, about all those kinds of things that we talk about outside of it. I do personally believe that there's a role for publicly funded institutions, formal institutions, like a government response that says an investment in education pays off for the community, work by people like Phillip Trostle, say an economist from Maine who writes about the benefits to regions, right, when you invest in public higher ed. All those things are related totally to the public health crisis, I think, and to questions of Medicare for all. So I'm thinking about, yes, there's vulnerable people in our communities right now, but because of the way higher ed is still a bastion for the privileged because it's out of reach. People like Sarah Goldrick-Rabb's research, we know it's out of reach for so many people. To me, this virus just brought that front and center when I saw how many of my own students are already gone. They were precarious in the institution and now they're gone. In the last two weeks, they're gone, right? So you really see that line between who can participate and who cannot participate right now in higher ed. I read the Near Times editorial today, that new series at the Times editorial page is gonna start about talking about just kind of like what does this, it wasn't prompted only by the pandemic but it's sort of been heightened also by the pandemic, like what does our society of need right now? And I was trying to think about the higher ed piece of that was and it to me was at some level more than that debate about pre-college is just sort of a narrow way of thinking about it. I just began to think, I haven't quite figured it out yet though. Where, I mean, I still like to think of higher ed as a public good, but I think there's been a lot of examples in American higher education at least where it's not seen as a public good. It's not just a private good conversation but it's just really seen as this thing that costs you a lot of money to go to and the research isn't obviously benefiting the people and the way students are graduating isn't necessarily benefiting the public. I feel like there is probably a role for some big reset on higher ed and its role in society and that's probably a public perception problem but also probably something that higher ed's gonna have to try to undertake in the middle of trying to deal with everything else right now. Good point. Yeah, I don't know whether we have the same perception in the UK as the US for higher ed but I think this gives us an opportunity around civic mission and what we offer to our society because I think ultimately, a lot of universities in the UK who are not in great financial shape are gonna need some help to get through this and the governments and the bodies who may seek to come in and help might quite rightly ask for more from universities in terms of public good and what they can do alongside that. We have a university hospital so our students are really kind of getting involved in helping with the crisis but I think absolutely it gives university opportunities and people have talked about the perception of universities and how they deal with that and I think that elevating some of the good things that we do already and looking at extending those things maybe in response to help from government I think is gonna be important. Two great writers that I love on us are Tressie McMillan-Cottam, her book Lower Ed I think does, it works on this really well as in a totally different way Kathleen Fitzpatrick's book, Generous Thinking. Both of those are about who can and is able to and should privilege and benefit from public higher ed so they're great writers on this. They are and great books, great folks and two great future transform guests that we've had. Friends we are running really low on time and I wanted to quickly share a couple of comments that came up rather than questions. Naomi Toffness says duct tape education is leading behind students with different abilities and exclamation point is hers and that's quite right. We have Hollis Robbins points out that athletics and sports basically can't really continue next year and this is a problem for some institutions that have been structured around sports and on a lighter although perhaps more painful note Mark Rush notes that his son says a closer access to his dad jokes enhances his critical thinking ability. That may count as a human rights violation, I'm not sure but thank you, thank you for that Mark. We have a whole series of other questions friends that I'm afraid that we are really out of time. I do want to bring up one more of these notes just to think about this is a really, really good one from Brian Mulligan. Are we a little too focused on goals, quality of the experience when the president is worried about income and costs? And I want to put that out there because that's almost a divide that has come up in the course of our conversation. On the one hand, these views of our ethics and our practice versus the financial clobbering that is just starting to hit us. Brian that's a good point. I don't want to let people go though without a couple of last thoughts from all of you. First of all, first of all, looking ahead to 2021 what is the most likely configuration of higher education that you see? And give everyone a shot at this and Neil, you get to go first because I brought you on last. Great, yeah, I mean, I think we're gonna have to reduce the amount of programs that we run. I think that's inevitable. I don't really, I know that people are talking, I've talked about emergency remote teaching and I've said basically for September time we're gonna need something a lot more polished. I don't think we're gonna be in that place. So I think whatever contingency is gonna continue on the same basis. I think just to echo what other people said, institutions being transparent and having the mentality of that we're all in this together I think is gonna help. But I think there's gonna be some reduction, I think in terms of what we, the volume of what we do. I for one hope that there's gonna be some partnership between universities to deal with this as well and working together a bit more. But yeah, I haven't got a crystal ball on this sadly. With this Brian. We don't need Brian to run this show. I mean, do you wanna go ahead, please? Yeah, I mean, I had- Did my screen just go black for a second? Yeah. It does have one time. It's like a ritual I have to go through. Neil, thank you for that. Boys, I'm only Goldie. What are the two main factors that you can see in higher ed in 2021? Smaller enrollments across the board. Yeah. And a lot of economic upheaval at every level for students, for institutions and for the professors with that. I mean, I actually would love to know what people are thinking. I put this call out before, I mean, I do that weekly newsletter and my email is goldieatchronical.com. So write to me. And if you have some thoughts about topics I should be exploring more. I mean, I'm not the answer woman. I like to ask, I'm a reporter as I'm still asking everybody else but I'd love to hear from folks about what they're hearing and what topics they think are important for me to explore in that newsletter. It's a great newsletter. And Goldie is a great writer. Thank you, Goldie. And Robin, what are two features of 2021 that you anticipate? I anticipate nothing but I hope for public funding of the public good in both health and education. And I also hope for us to be guided by a framework focused on adaptability, connection and equity. I feel like if we keep those three things in mind we'll build a strong system but it won't be free and we can't do it from the red. Good point of being public. Thank you. Quickest question for Goldie. We know about your newsletter. Neil, what's the best way to find you online? Best way to find me online is Twitter. So Neil, mostly five. On Twitter, very good. Thank you. And Robin, is Twitter the best way to find you now? Yes, at actual ham. It's the best handle online, I think. And thank you so much. Thank you to all three guests. You guys are fantastic and I wanna bring you all right back because you have so much good stuff to talk about. And my thanks to everybody who participated in this conversation. We have a stack of questions. I'm gonna archive them and share them later because they are very, very rich. Thank you all for everyone who came up on stage and joined us too. And a shout out to everyone on Twitter. It looks like Twitter has been burning up with the hashtag FTTE. Thank you for tweeting out. Before you go, I wanna mention two upcoming events. One is that tomorrow I'm working with a Chronicle of Higher Education to do a live video event on faculty work-life balance during the crisis. So head to tinyurl.com slash Chronicle 4-10 and you can sign up for that. Again, that's tomorrow from three to 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Next week, next Thursday, the forum is gonna dive into education online during the pandemic and we're gonna focus on two different parts of that. One is teaching and one is libraries. We have great guests who are expert in both of those fields with a lot of great news. Now if you wanna keep talking about all this stuff, as you can see from our opening poll, Twitter seems to be our leading goal. So just use hashtag FTTE and keep this rolling. And of course, if you wanna join us in our Facebook, LinkedIn or Slack groups, please just join us or ping me and I'm glad to see you there. In the meantime, we have our archive going back years and years of previous sessions touching everything from equity to mobile education to open education resources. And if you wanna stay in touch, please do. We'd be glad to hear from you. Thank you all for all of your thoughts. Please stay safe, keep thinking ahead and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.