 And as we begin, I just want to thank participant member, friend and longtime supporter, Roxanne Riskin, for making these awesome Future Trends Forum face masks. Now welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm so glad to see you here today. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host and chief cat herder. I'll be your guide to our conversation about the future of higher education for the next hour. I'm just absolutely delighted to welcome Rhea Anderson. Rhea wears way too many hats for any one person. She is a futurist, so I view her as a colleague. She's also a professor who teaches a lot of classes in math and education and business. And on top of this, she's an entrepreneur. Most recently, the founding CEO of Course Tune, which is a fascinating, fascinating bit of hardware to help faculty really redesign their classes. It's unique and very powerful. So today, we're going to be talking about all kinds of technologies in education. And welcome, welcome, Rhea. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. It's always a good time when we have a conversation. I think so. I think so. And I know the audience thinks so as well. Friends, we have a whole bunch of stuff to talk about today, but I really want to make sure that you get to raise the topics that you'd like us to dive into. Before we go further, for the precious few people who are unfortunate enough not to already know you, Rhea, I give you a one sentence intro. To introduce yourself to those people, let me just ask, looking ahead for the next two semesters, what are you going to be working on the most? What's uppermost in your mind? I think what we're going to be working on most is how do we help teachers create high quality course designs for online remote environments? One of the big things is that a lot of classes don't have enough architecture underneath them to rapidly shift into other environments. When you move, and I think everybody's now recognizing the amount of work that goes into teaching an online class, there's the upfront work that goes into it, which is making lecture videos and creating assignments that are digital and the whole core structure in the LMS. And there's a ton of upfront work. I actually took a week off of work. I took my personal vacation to prep for the course I was teaching this fall. I took the full week to redevelop the online shelf for it. So that was of course all unpaid work, right? And I think there's now recognition about how difficult that is. And that's with the good plan underneath me and with all the resources underneath me that wasn't creating all of those resources. And so I think we're trying to come up with strategies to help people more rapidly do that, to really recognize the archetype of course they have and what a course with that archetype typically will look like in an online environment if it's well-designed. I'm really trying to help people move away from a one-size-fits-all model of what an online course is. I think too many schools will like make a shell and say, this is the format of online courses. You will have five quizzes. You will have one test. You will have, it's like that doesn't actually fit all of the different course archetypes that we have. And so if we can narrow down the number of archetypes to just maybe I'm working on five right now to see if that works, maybe we can direct people towards a kind of a, if you don't know what else to do, try this archetype to start with and then modify it from there. So maybe a five types of courses fit all instead of a one types fits all, which I think would be really beneficial to a lot of subjects that get pigeonholed into the wrong course design by somebody who's in charge. Well, I've got to ask really quickly and then we already have one question that's coming up. What's an example of an archetype? What's one of the class archetypes? Okay, so one example of a course archetype is what I would call information dense. This is a course that involves learning a ton of vocabulary or information, which requires a high degree of accuracy for recall. So think of things like an A plus certification class or a foreign language class where you learn typically about 500 vocabulary words per semester or anatomy and physiology where you learn 200, 500 words, right? So that's an archetype, a different archetype would be skill maturity. And this is something where you go into the class at some level and you are, it's a tenant that you come out of the class at a higher level. So something like creative writing, ceramics, even you could consider something like C programming, potentially, you know, you come in at one level, you're maturing an entire major skill during that class. And that has a different, a completely different pace to it. You could actually say that language falls into both information dense and skill maturity because you both have to find, you have to learn a ton of words and you have to develop a skill which is talking that language with other people. The conversation is the skill maturity, right? So sometimes courses fall into more than one archetype and, but sometimes they primarily just have one archetype. So anyways, we're gonna five of those, more to come on that. We'll try to make sure that CourseTune has good templates and things for the archetypes to help people move forward. Fantastic, fantastic. That sounds like CourseTune is continuing to develop in some really interesting ways and I'm really keen to learn more about those archetypes. Yeah. Friends, we have, the focus here is thinking about a bunch of different technologies and how they may impact or be used in teaching and learning, especially this wild academic semester. So massively shaped by the pandemic. We do have a whole bunch to think about. If I could just to begin with, let me ask you, thinking about the workhorse, the learning management system, where do you see that headed? I mean, do you see any changes in it or is it just that people are gonna be using it a heck of a lot more? I don't know if you heard my deep sigh there. Over I hear LMS, I hear a deep sigh. But yeah, I'm so sad. I'm so sad about the current state of the LMS. I think people are gonna be using it more, of course, because what else are they gonna do? I think there's so much that's not there that we need for the environment we teach in. And I see no hope on the horizon that any of the existing learning management systems really are going to do what we need to have happen. Like when I teach an online class, I am tracking so much information outside of the learning management system that I have no place to put in, right? I'm tracking, you know, who's gotten back to me about certain things, who's attended class, who's, who needs to be, who I've called, notes on those students. I mean, there's like, there's so many different things I need to add into the learning management system just to keep a remote class functioning well. And I'm doing that all, I would hold it up because if you'd see student names, you know, I'm doing that all on pieces of paper, you know, so I can make notes easily and keep track of those things. And you know, that's like almost a full-time job right now, because so many students have very high anxiety at turning things late and having trouble. But the thing that really disturbs me the most about it is that when you design good learning, you do that from the architecture of learning. You don't do that from the due dates in the name of the instructor. And LMSs are built around due dates, instructor names, like who's the instructor and what are the due dates? You never log into any learning management system and start with what are the learning objectives you plan to cover and what assignments will be connected to what learning objectives and what, like that's a complete and total afterthought plug-in and none of those actually work well because very few of the systems have the appropriate tools to hook them up. I was really hopeful about Brightspace because I saw learning objectives as an actual field in Brightspace and I taught in it the last year and so I was just fantastically excited that finally I was gonna be able to start with learning objectives and design up from there. But no, the instructors couldn't actually alter the learning objectives. It was turned off. And we at course tune couldn't write to them either. So I had the whole course design in course tune and I can usually push them through APIs. Oh, but those APIs weren't writable, right? So I'm just really sad that we are still in a world where we all know that we want good learning analytics which means we have to know what it is we are actually intending for students to learn in classes and there is no way to get that into the LMS in an appropriate way. And for those of you who have tried using some of the techniques they claim are there, I won't name names but places to put things like course outcomes for their course objectives they're useless, they're just like everybody who's tried to use them with the exception of maybe one person I've been on the internet has just given up after trying because it took so much more time to even grade things, right? So I kind of like want to just blow up the LMS and start with our backbone of learning architecture and then add the LMS back in on top of it. No. But I think I need somebody to give me $10 million to do that. So it's gonna be a little while, sorry. Well, if that's a really good idea though and it'd be really interesting to see what happened if you built an LMS based on course tune, not just the software but the attitude, the practice, the workflow, the architecture. Yeah. I mean, learning should be built around the learning architecture. Well, let me... It's not a big shocker but it is apparently in the tech world. Well, the LMS is, I'm just the emcee. I'm looking to see what I say about it right now. But you raised another question and this is a big one. And I want to mention, I want to ask you about this and that I really want to hear from everyone else. The, we're talking about data and going into 2020, the higher education was really split about the use of student data. If I can caricaturize, on the one hand, we had people who said, for example, that you cause would say, student data can be collected, used well, and that can in turn be used to really improve student outcomes and student experience, everything from advising to behavior in class and so on. And then the opposition, which was partly connected with criticism of Silicon Valley in general, said, no, this is awful. This is violating students' privacy. This is violating rights. There are all kinds of security problems and so on. I mean, a whole set of discussions and these two were many ways at loggerheads. Now we have a pandemic and the pandemic ramps this up because the public health requirements of handling a pandemic often involve even more collection of data, even more analysis of data and in many ways, more intrusive kinds of tracking student movements, tracking students' biological data. And we also have a pushback on that. And I'm just curious, where do you think COVID is gonna drive the whole data analytics question? Well, that's a loaded question. So I think COVID is, it's definitely causing a lot of schools to collect information that a year ago they would have been like, there's no way we can collect this, right? And it's even making it hard to schedule things. For example, I'm scheduling oral exams right now for my students and there was like 15 minute windows for them to take their exams. And then after they all signed up, I was like, oh no, I have eight students who need extra time and I did not figure out a way to account for that. So then I have to go find those eight students and whoever comes before and after them and try to like reschedule appointments. And I have to do it in a way that doesn't involve me telling anybody why I'm doing it, right? Because that would be giving away who that a student in front of them or behind them needs extra time. But just looking at the schedule, you can tell them who needs extra time, right? And there's almost no way for me to avoid that using easy to use tools. I can only do it if I use do everything manually, right? And so it's just this like, how much are we gonna put on faculty to navigate all of this on their own? I mean, at some point you have to have the help of data and you have to have the help of automation to get this kind of work done. If you want us to do it all manually, then we need to have less students in every class right now. And so, I don't know, that didn't really answer your question very well. I don't know where we come out of this. I think we come out of this where we always come out of this. Some schools will collect the data, some schools won't, some schools will think it's ethical, some schools won't, like that's what always happens. Why would it be any different? Well, what would be different would be the impetus of safety. We already have one or two students dead. Yeah. And the total infection is so far impossible to determine because from what I can tell, most universities and colleges are not sharing medical data. And there's no one who is harvesting this and it's very hard to tell, but I think the attitude towards data really changes when lives are online. And I mean, the students themselves but also there's the interactive. Yeah, I mean, I had a student who, I have a student who's COVID positive right now and they, I know because they told me the school never informed me. They just tell me if students are in quarantine, which is good. I mean, it's good to know which students are in quarantine. And I teach remote, so maybe I'm not being notified because of that. But, you know, that's, I would feel differently about that if I was going into school right now and I was not notified that I had a COVID positive student in my classes because I sure want to go get a test or something, right? Yes. But yeah, I have 24 students this semester and at one point I had six in quarantine. Wow. Yeah. Which class? This is a, it's like a pre-calculus type course. It's called functions modeling change. It's kind of like a modern take on classic pre-calculus. Oh, great. Great. Just if you don't know Maria, everybody, among other things, she is a very passionate, very creative, very committed teacher of mathematics. And we need a lot more of her. We also need a lot more Tom Hames because he just shut up and I want to bring him up on stage. Hello, Tom. Looks like Tom. Hey, how are you? Hey, how are you doing? I'm fine. Welcome back. Oh, thanks. Well, I have a question. Almost as much for Brian as I do for you because when you mentioned having fewer students per teacher, I very much agree with that. I think one of the models that we are missing here is how do we use the technology to leverage out the expertise to the students to get to that smaller thing? I actually got lucky by accident this semester. I'm kind of low on the totem pole when it comes to getting classes assigned. So I got assigned the LearnFlex classes which nobody else wanted them. But the idea behind the LearnFlex is it's based on HighFlex but half online, half in person kind of thing. But the reality is that well, what happened is midway through the semester which I was fully anticipating happening because I kind of like, can see the train wrecks coming down the track. They've moved everything online. So I basically have a synchronous online class now which I think is actually a very good modality. Fabulous, right? And the other advantage of LearnFlex is that they reduce the number of students per class that captive at 18. So you could have nine in person and nine in online in theory if you did it that way, which I can't figure out how to do it that way to be honest. But the problem we have at my institution is that the people who are teaching asynchronously distance ed, their cap is 32. And so this summer I had 64 students teaching asynchronously online. Now the good news is that at a community college the summer students tend to be transfer students and so they tend to be a little more independent and have their hoop in a group in a higher degree than the students during the regular semester. So it wasn't horrible, but I lost a few that way. But I'm able to give my students a lot of individualized attention. The biggest problem is losing connection when you're going remote or these hybrid modalities. But the question I kind of have and to make a long story short is, does anybody have any figures for if we really thought this through and said, okay, how many TA slash professors slash community college professors do we have out there versus how many students are we trying to teach? I know it varies considerably from institution to institution. But could we rethink around this to a much smaller group of students? I always am reflecting back to the open university model, which is massively distributed but centered around small tutorial groups of something like 10 to 20 local students. Why can't we do that? I mean, that makes a whole lot of sense and they've gotten a lot of people through that system. Any thoughts from either Brian, the doomsayer of education or... I'm looking for Maria's thoughts first. Or Maria. I actually think it can work. This old-fashioned idea of the quote, lecture and then the recitations, I think that had some value, it had some right ideas to it. Although I would say that now the modern version of the lecture would be like, oh, there are some videos made to do that. You know, when I teach my classes now, I have videos that they can watch, put up into small chunks of guided notes that have gaps in them, right? So the students want the full set of notes which is essentially their textbook. They have to watch the videos to get them. They can use those on exams, right? That's their incentive. But then in the sessions, we call them active learning sessions and the sessions we meet online, we spend the whole time doing problems and troubleshooting and breaking into groups if they need extra help and to talk about problems, right? So that's essentially, I am the resuscitation teacher and essentially the lecture person because it's my videos. But we have another faculty member who's doing the exact same thing as me. We actually use the exact same set of videos, the exact same, I make active learning slides so that the problems are kind of like go with the topics. And, you know, I think it can work really well. I think the biggest problem is if you lower the student-teacher ratio, no matter how you do it, unless you actually lower the number of, I don't even know that, that's right. No matter how you do it, you're gonna increase the cost. I mean, I'm not 100% sure about that, to be honest, because I mean, we have highly variable class sizes. I mean, the one, I wrote about this a number of months ago, this idea that the idea of sections needs to go away. You know, we need to think about students as individuals and professor and connecting them up in groups with professors. Sections are a legacy of physical spaces. And if you're in a hybrid or a digital environment, why do you need them? I mean, I can have a really small section and I'm not tying up any room, butts and seats, air conditioning, whatever else, all the infrastructure around that, toilet paper in the bathrooms, whatever. I don't wanna pause you on that though, because I do think you still need a section. Like I don't wanna have an active learning session that's more than a certain number of students. No, no, no, no. I'm not saying that's an excuse to have a massive section. I'm saying that your science, the problem I have is that some of my sections have 15 students and some of them have 32 students in them. I get paid the same amount, whichever one I'm teaching, but I have to teach differently. Yeah, that's ridiculous. And you know, you get paid the same whether those students have extra needs or not too, right? Absolutely, yeah. So I have- Or whether I have to create online material. I mean, I've created a ton of free online material this year. Yeah, so I have seven students right now who need extra support in a 24 person class. And that means that for every exam, I have to give them extra time for every oral exam. I have to give them extra time, which I'm totally happy to do, but just keep in mind, I'm not getting paid to do that, right? And I'm an agent, so I'm really not getting paid. Same here. Yeah, and so, you know, it is a little odd that we don't get paid per student because every one of those students requires extra support, especially right now, you know, my students were in quarantine. I texted them every day to make sure they were doing okay because this is not a population of students who is used to being completely alone in a room for two weeks, right? And I worry about their mental health and whether they're getting attention and whether somebody is keeping an eye on them closely enough, right? Yeah, so I just think, you know, we would all be well-served by having less students per online class if the instructors are taking care to reach out to students to make sure they need help. Of course, that's always part of the problem too because we have no way of really, instructors aren't evaluated on that. We have no way of really tracking that. I'm not sure we should, but you know, like, how do you create parity? And this is always the question in education between the instructor who is just making the sausage and the instructor who is caring for the group of students in their cohort, right? Right, yeah. They get paid. They do very similar things in my classes. I mean, we don't, I teach government, but in terms of our synchronous sessions, we're working, you know, we're working, they have a challenge that they're working on over the course of the semester and I'm helping them connect the content that they've gotten elsewhere with that challenge and they're really working sessions and do the concept mapping and stuff like that. So, but it requires a lot of back-end work because I have to create a bunch of stuff in the LMS, which by the way, I've kind of stepped outside the LMS too because I've essentially, I mean, I've been doing this web stuff for 20 years now and so I've created, I use the LMS as a web creation tool walked away from some of the eccentricities of it and said, you know what, just follow this page. Just go down here and you'll be fine. I have to say that in many cases, I just link out to Google Doc and put everything in the Google Doc, that's why I'm hanging up to make all the pages. Right, yeah, the problem with the Google Doc, of course, is it's a little bit flatter than I would like. I mean, I have a lot of three-dimensionality or two-dimensionality, three-dimensionality of my class where you have to dig deeper and stuff like that, so. So, Brian, can we fix this? Not if we don't have the money, but it might be that if we have the technology, we can do it. We also have more questions coming in. Yeah, I'll let you go. Thank you guys, bye Maria. By the way, both of you, Tom and Maria, you guys are both some of the most constant mapping fanatic friends I have, so. You two love each other. And you can do completely different disciplines and backgrounds, so that's great to say. Tom, thank you. Thank you. We have one question coming up about privacy and I'd like to ask all of you to think about which technologies you would like Maria to tackle. Which technologies are you seeing that are either emergent or established that you'd like to hear your thoughts on? So, this is a question from Myron Williams, longtime participant in the program, just a delight to see him. And Myron asked you about HIPAA, how does HIPAA law affect what colleges collect and disseminate? I think that came up when we were talking about I think so. And medical stuff. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not gonna speak to this one very closely, but I think that colleges are all interpreting HIPAA right now. The same way colleges interpret FERPA and the same way colleges interpret ADA, nobody really knows what is allowed, not allowed till somebody gets sued and it makes it through the court system and there's a decision about it. And we have a lot of lawyers who faculty consult with and who the administration consult with. It's a good question. Privacy laws, again, FERPA and HIPAA refer to the two bodies of law on the one hand for medical privacy and the other hand for educational privacy. So the two commanding was quite a bit of regulatory strength in trying to figure out what we can share and what we can't. You saw a little glimpse of that earlier when Rhea was going to hold up a list of content but didn't wanna show it to us because it would involve student names. We're just gonna straight up against that. Thank you, Myron, for raising this. And we will, by the way, have lawyers on tap for later sessions. So we'll probably start with a disclaimer that says I'm not a lawyer, although I'm not a lawyer. Ray Garcelon from ASU asks us, what about the, what do I think, what does Maria think of the advantages and disadvantages of Google Suite versus Microsoft Office 365? Assuming Microsoft Office 365 is turned on, I guess. Yeah, so I haven't just full disclosure. I haven't spent a lot of time using Office 365 but I will tell you that I do use Microsoft documents primarily for student materials because the accessibility for screen readers is much, much better on Word documents than on Google documents. If you've ever tried to put, so I teach a class that's very math intensive and reading the pages in the Google Doc for a screen reader, especially when there's other things involved like math equations, it's just crap. So I can't actually use Google Docs as the primary delivery method if something involves equations. It needs to be in Word so that if it needs to go out to a student who is blind, they can use a screen reader on it. So I would say based on that for delivery to students, especially if you have any kind of math in your documents, I would go with the Office side. Very interesting for math and accessibility. Yeah. Friends, at the end of the session, I'll show you some links, but we've had several sessions on accessibility, including one recently from Michael Johnson who raised this as a really good point. My joke about Microsoft Office being $20, it's just a bad joke because they had a network outage earlier this week. That's what that refers to. So which other technologies should we be considering? What are the technologies are you looking at either that you're considering applying for the first time or that you're using right now or seeming being used and you'd like us to say a bit more about them. Again, on the bottom of the screen, along that white strip, there's the raised hand. If you wanna join us on stage like Tom just did and see how easy that is, or click the question mark if you wanna type in a question like Ray just did as well. We're standing by, waiting for it. You know, there's been a lot of talk about proctoring services. Hmm, for proctoring, yes. Recently, and I think this is a really tough one. You know, we like to say that things are, in the US especially, we like to have black and white opinions about these issues. And I think that this is one that is firmly in a gray area and so firmly depends on the instructors and the policies of the school. I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong about using a proctoring service. If you've vetted the service, you know what kinds of things they ask for and the teachers have a policy to always go actually see what was happening and talk to the student prior to taking any action, right? I mean, there was a video going around the internet today of a student who's absolutely devastated because she receives a zero on an exam where she was just reading the questions out loud to herself which is a very common thing that students do when they are taking exams in private, right? And all that was required here was the teacher to reach out to her and say, you know, hey, I just noticed you were reading, you were talking during your exam. Can you just explain what was going on there? And she would have said, well, I was just reading the questions out loud to myself which is what I do. And that could have eliminated the whole problem, right? I personally prefer to trust the students that they will, you know, I let them, you know, and I'm not giving them exams with no notes and no resources. I'm giving them exams with access to their notes, access to a formula sheet and access to the technology that they normally use for their problem sets, right? And I'm trusting them to use only those materials and to sign an academic integrity statement that they write out at the end of their exams, right? And so far, I have not seen a single case of a student, you know, doing significantly different on the exam than they do on the problem sets. And I do add an oral exam one-on-one, me and them, to, you know, ensure the integrity of the class, isn't it? Right? That does require, again, time. It requires personal effort on the instructor's part. I think we could have completely eliminate proctoring if we had small oral exams in a lot of these classes but you can't have an 800 person section if you need to meet with every one of those students for 15 minutes, right? Every 20 minutes. So again, it goes to class size. You wanna eliminate some of these, you know, policies. You know, if we just did a little quick math here, let's say we had a class of 30 math students and each exam takes, there's four exams and each exam costs $40 to proctor. That's $4,800. $4,800. That students are paying for those exams, right? So why not just break the class into and hire an adjunct to teach half the students and, you know, now you have more time to give oral exams? Right? I mean, we do have options here. We just don't wanna acknowledge the cost, but that does shift the cost. The cost goes from the students paying $40 per proctoring session to the school paying that to have an instructor there, right? But I think that's, you know, we all have for, you know, more than a decade we've been worried about students and how they do in online classes. And if we take the time to really reach out to students to engage them and we need to get them into Zoom sessions to talk to them one-on-one when they need help and to do things like oral exams, we can bring up those numbers. But you can't expect somebody to do that on top of all of the other work unless you lower the class size. We're back to the labor question. Perfect labor question. We had a few quick questions that have to do with what you just said. One of them is Roger Taylor who wants to know how do you do these oral exams when you can? Oh, yeah. So there's a little body, a small body of research on kind of like how to do an oral exam. I might just share my oral exams a primer in the chat window. You can kind of use that to go to some of the research and how you can structure things like the rubrics to do that. But the key item here is that it's a scaffold. It's either one question that goes deep or it's a scaffolded list of questions that starts with basic background information and starts to poke at concepts going to more and more difficult concepts. But you always do it with a rubric so that you are being consistent in how you're asking the questions. You have to be very careful to not say like, you got it right, right? Until you get to the very end and you let students go back if they wanna go back to revisit an answer. But if you go to that document, there are some sets of research you can go to look at and you'll see that this one in particular looks at it as applied to STEM fields because that's where we traditionally have given tests and where we're having the most trouble right now with people worrying about integrity. But if you keep scrolling, there's several examples of like this hierarchy of opening questions, probing questions, compare and contrast and then answer scenarios. Or if you keep scrolling down to like page six, there's then the hierarchy, which is not mine. It was written by somebody else. That one is designed for like one question that goes deep instead. So if you were doing like an upper level physics class or kinetics or something, you might give the student one question and then they have to walk you through their process and you rate them on these different things. Their use of vocabulary, their solution, the organization of their work, et cetera. And I always like to use them. They have whiteboards like this and I have one board like this. So they can all show me if they need to show me something on their whiteboard. It works pretty well. It's like five dollars or something. Yeah, they're not expensive. And I actually just loan them to the students for the semester and collect them back at the end. So. Makes me think of the movie Arrival. I just, thank you. I really wonder if we should do a session on exams because it is this deep topic. It is a really deep topic. And oral exams are very new to the US. We're not used to giving these, but they are a really, really good alternative to the proctoring problem. And I'm not giving an oral exam on everything. I still give a written portion, but there's also an oral portion. I don't do it for every test. I do it like twice a semester. And that is there for me to ensure the integrity that it is the student. I think it is that they have the knowledge that I'm seeing in their problem sets and written exams. And I put a caveat in the syllabus that if I ever suspect that there is a disconnect happening there, that I reserve the right to do an oral exam for every exam, right, for that student. And that's how I would handle it. We had a financial question along this angle from Carly Brady who asks, we are paying for proctoring. Is it common to pass the cost onto the students? It depends on the school. Yeah, I think for online courses in particular, if the school has a testing center, they will typically say you can come to the testing center for free or you can pay to have it proctored at your convenience, right? And that's a common way I think that it's handled. But of course, right now, like our testing center isn't allowing you to schedule tests at it. So they're only handling tests for students with disability needs. So, you know, you would be basically forcing every student to do it right now. Good answer and good question, Carly. Thank you, thank you. And we had the, let's see. Moira, I just pasted that link into the chat. I think everyone should see it. Let me know if you can't see it in the chat. And speaking of links, by the way, on the bottom left or the left edge of the screen, you should see a couple of kind of orange and tan colored buttons. One goes to Marina's company, course two, and the one goes to her personal website, blog, resource center, info hub, personality profile called Busy New York Stroll. So if you want to look at that as well. Tina, thank you for the thumbs up for the... There is one other technology I want to talk about if we don't have any more questions. We did have... We have a couple more questions and one more about oral questions, excuse me, about online testing. Charles Findlay asks, aren't most online testing a ritual that is left over from the era that focus on recall rather than creativity and applied outcomes? Depends on the instructor. You know, I think the tests I give are all based on real world data and examples they haven't seen before where they have to analyze the data, make mathematical models, make predictions, things like that. It's not multiple choice. They turn them in using a scanning app on their phone at the end of the test. So, but I certainly think there are plenty of instructors who are still kind of basing it on this idea that it's the information that's important and not the analysis application, et cetera. And then we had a question from Anna Karina Cruz who asks about your course archetypes. Is there any information about that that's publicly available on a blog post or something? Not yet, but keep an eye, you know, follow me on LinkedIn or keep an eye on the course-tuned blog. I will be publishing something about them fairly soon. I'm going through a set of five workshops this fall, one on each archetype, to see if we've got them right first. So, stay tuned on that one. I wanna make sure we have enough vetting on it before I release it. It's similar to the ESOL, I mean, the ESOL lens was another thing that kind of went through this process where we, over a couple of years, I developed the lens, ran it through a bunch of workshops first to make sure I thought we had the wording right and everything else. And that came out of the same kind of process. So, if you need something to look at, go take a look at the ESOL lens. It's ESIL, if you just Google ESOL lens, I think you'll find it. That's an unfortunate acronym. Oh, man. Oh, why? I don't know. ESIL? ESIL, yeah. Oh, ESIL, I'm sorry, I thought you said ISL. Thank you. And Maria is very active on LinkedIn. She has good stuff on math education as well as technology and many other things. And those who want to follow this topic, thank you. If anyone wants to put forward any names of people I should invite, I've got a couple in mind, please, I'd be glad to hear them. We had a question from Matt Lasher who asked about math technology. For something as complex as math-based courses, what are you using for course delivery and effective assessment in mathematics where multiple choice and most the elements question types don't apply? All right. Well, we could do a whole session on how to do math and STEM courses, right? The short answer is that I don't do multiple choice questions because almost every multiple choice question can just be Googled or put into photo math to be answered. So like, what's the point exactly? Certainly there are packages produced by publishers to help students practice with concepts. And I think that's the appropriate place for those is to have students practice with concepts or to verify they are at least engaging with the concepts. But the students get very quickly frustrated with those platforms and very quickly just start to gain them. And I started to not like that very much. So I actually use handwritten problem sets for students or technology written problem sets for students where they write up their answers the old fashioned way by hand, turn them in and I regrade them by hand. But they are shorter problem sets than what you would typically use in a math system. So they might consist of five problems and they are very, very real world driven, data driven types of problem sets. They change every term. We use graphs we're seeing out in the real world for all of the problems and the problem sets and the tests, which is how graphs in the world got started. So if you haven't checked out graphs in the world there's the links for those. And yeah, that's what we do. It comes back down to like, what do you want of this class? Do you want students to actually be able to apply the concepts in other places? Or do you just want to make the sausage? Because that's what it comes down to. Some people love their sausage. Good question. Thank you, Matt. And again, Rhea, thank you for the answer. Yeah. So can we talk about the one more technology? We have another question that came in. Okay. And this is from the splendid Roxanne who I've already hailed. So let me see if I can bring her up on stage. Hello, Roxanne. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah. Perfectly. Hi. Thank you, Brian. Thank you for inviting me up, Maria. Yes, you mentioned earlier that you check in on your students on their physical health and their, I'm guessing mental well-being. Can you talk about that? And what do you want somehow we're going to help students in our hair head become healthier during this pandemic? So strategies that you use. So my best strategy is that when I notice students have missed work, you know, you can in most of the LMS as you can say, send an email to all the students who missed work, something like that, right? And I just say, you know, like, hey, I noticed you didn't turn up this assignment and then these are the key words here is everything okay. That's it. Right? It's a very open question. It allows them to reply back with whatever they're feeling. It's not asking them to take accountability for it or anything else. I just want to know if they're okay. And often they'll reply back with what's going on when they plan to turn on the assignment, et cetera. And sometimes what I get is I'm really not doing okay right now. I'm having a lot of trouble to which I reply. You want to talk? Here's my phone number. Can I call you? You know, like something like that, right? And at that point, if I think they need additional help I try to connect them with the right services on campus to get that help. You know, I have a list of students that kind of, you know, text throughout the week a little gift or something like, you know, the kitten like hanging, hanging there, you know, like, how are things going? You know, for my students in quarantine I found a bunch of gifts that were, you know, like Millhouse playing by himself on the playground, you know, would send them a gift each day and just say like, how are you doing? How's quarantine? You know, I think they're feeling so isolated from what they normally have that that friend group they normally have. I watched the happy documentary last night which is from 2012. And one of the things they emphasize in there is the need for social activity. Social activity and novel exercise is being two of the things that really help people to maintain a happiness level. And so can you imagine for an 18 or 19 year old in quarantine what that's doing to their happiness level if they're used to being very social, very around other people, you know, like, so I just figure I'll do what I can to make sure that, you know, somebody's checking in on them. I see them twice a week in class and so I'm just, you know, like making sure they're okay. But phrase is everything okay. That is like the key phrase right there because it's just an open deck. So making sure they're not only academically doing, staying on target and on task, but you're reaching them at an emotional level and there are things that with online learning we really haven't taken a, I think an assertive grasp to do in higher ed. We're really lacking in what can professors do to encourage social connections. Yeah. And, you know, often in online classes when you ask this question, you get back, you realize that this student was about to bail on the whole class. They were like, there's no way I can catch up. I fell a week behind. I'm just giving up, you know, like, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, back up. So you really might be in a role, you're in a role of a primary kind of like support person. You're providing psychological first aid to some students by being there and being present for students who may feel, even that having anxiety at their initial level coming in with the pandemic, even exacerbating things. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? So having the opportunity in providing just your physical presence and your voice presence and your email presence. Well, and there's actually one more benefit to doing this. So in that happy documentary, which was great. If you feel like me after the quiz and make debate, watch the happy documentary. It's on Amazon Prime. It's called happy. I don't know. It's a blue background with a smiley face. It's just called happy. And it's on Amazon Prime. Free on Amazon Prime. And one of the other things I talk about is into maintaining your happiness levels is doing something for other people. Random acts of kindness. Reaching out to people who are in need. That this actually increases your own happiness. So if you are feeling down in the dumps about this semester and like this is a complete slog, stop for a second and ask yourself if you have enough of this in your life. Are you doing those random acts of kindness? Are you reaching out compassionately to people? Because that might actually start to make you feel a lot better. I love that. I love that. I'm gonna add on another layer of physical movement and being able to take care of yourself and have self-compassion for yourself. Brian, you're willing to see us just being able to stretch. You're at your desk. You're at your computer screen. You're on your phone. Your head is in a very, very bad ergonomic position. Being down, it puts too much stress on your neck muscles. But being able to actively get out wherever you are in your room outside of your dorm or house safely and move around. Physical exercise is also important right now. There's this great article this week actually in the New York Times about like, likening the training of sled dogs to what we're going through right now and how you have to, well, I'll just let you read it. It was really good read, well worth it, but it helps to kind of like put in perspective. Like what am I doing? Like what you just said, Roxanne, like what am I doing to make sure that I am in peak performance? Like, I'm stressed, right? During time of stress. And sometimes that means we rest before we need it. And that was like one of the main points of the article. Rest before you need it. Stretch before you need it. And sleep, which is close call to sleep to bed. Thank you, Maria, you're wonderful. I enjoy everything you post. I usually follow you on Twitter, but I'll post out the happiness videos too. Yeah. Thanks, Brian, and stretch, everybody stretch. Roxanne, thank you for your excellent concern for our thoughtfulness and well-being. Thank you. Thank you. Maria, at last you get to speak to the technology. Time now. I wanted to actually put some eyes on AI because I think in the everything that's going on right now, we've kind of moved that one to the back burner. And that is speeding up faster and faster and faster as it approaches more workplaces. And as it approaches more workplaces, we're gonna see more jobs getting disrupted. We're gonna see new jobs being created, but there're gonna be jobs that require some skills. And I'm not sure we even have it on our radar anymore with everything else going on, right? But I do think we need to really pay attention to how we're going to make sure that we can quickly redesign programs, courses, certificates, associate degrees, whatever we need to do to be able to rapidly retrain people on the other side of, that's what's gonna happen on the other side of COVID. We are going to walk out of COVID. We're all gonna take a deep sigh of relief. And then AI is gonna smack us upside the head with the next crisis for education in particular. So just my biggest, you can see it on my Twitter feed is posted note at the top of it. If you don't know what's actually in your curriculum right now, if you don't know the learning down to the learning objective, what's being taught in classes, this is gonna be really hard. You have to know that stuff to be able to mix and match, slice and dice, you know, build new solutions, quickly get them accredited, know how things map to workplace skills and degrees and whatnot. Like, if you can't do that quickly, you're gonna be able to deliver good solutions to students. Do you think high red is in a good position to quickly educate learners. So just students, I'm not thinking about faculty and staff, but just students on AI. I mean, everything from the basics of computation to its ramifications for economics and society. No. But I think you could all do your part to become a little bit more educated. There's a fantastic little Coursera course called AI for Everyone. You can even get a certificate if you pay your $58 or whatever it is now. And you could easily do it over the break. And it is a really, really good overview to what AI is, what it does, the kinds of data it requires and how it might start affecting the workplace, right? It's taught by one of the foremost leaders in AI. And I did it, my husband did it. We both thought it was a fantastic introduction to what's going on. So if you are like, all I know is it's scary, this will help. Cindy, we just shared that in the chat there. Thank you for talking to everyone. And also, Brett Besson pointed out the Netflix documentary, Social Dilemma, but also Robert Taylor recommended Joseph Owens book, Robot Proof. I think you're absolutely right. This is something that I'm laser focused on and trying desperately to skill myself up on. And so it's just blotted out of the way by COVID. Yeah, it's going to be there on the other side. I think we may see it before that happens because among other things, one of the reasons people turn to AI is as a cost saving. So we're gonna have AI at chat box instead of staff on phones, that kind of thing. And so I think as the economic crisis pushes for that, we should do that. So if I could just make a quick plug here. I see this as a two for one. A course student, we help people to actually get at what's in their curriculum and how it maps and how it's structured that helps you with online. It helps you with remote learning, any kind of mix of learning we're gonna have and it will start to prepare you for that AI wave that's gonna hit us on the other side of this. So I think that the clients we work with are actually gonna be in a fairly good position to do some of this work on the other side. And you can be one of them too. I think that's right. Maria, my gosh, you are not one person but you're an army of geniuses. It's so great to have you back in the program. Thank you. Thank you. I love to talk to you, Brian. Well, people know there's two links there on the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to learn more about Carstune or about Maria in general, I always recommend following her just in every way possible including on LinkedIn and on Twitter. Maria, please keep doing the great work. We look forward to having you back as soon as possible. Great, till next time. Indeed, and I hope that's good. But don't go away, friends. Just pointing out a few next things coming up. First of all, for the next two months, again, some of the topics we have in mind range from faculty of color to AR, to work life balance, to accrediting and admissions. We also have ways of talking about this, speaking of social media, on social media. Again, Twitter seems to be your preference. Just use the hashtag FTTE. If you'd like to dive back into the past and look at our more than 220 recorded videos, just go to the hashtag tinyworld.com slash FTF archive. And if you'd like to just keep asking questions, come to next week. We have all kinds of great topics. And if you're new to the forum, you can tell that folks here are definitely very, very happy to chat with you. Matt, the spinny globe, I got that as a gift. So I'm not sure where to get it, but maybe it is a lovely thing. Above all, friends, thank you for the good questions today. Thank you for the good comments and the good resource sharing. Please, everybody, take care of yourselves. Be safe. We'll see you online and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.