 But now it's the top of the hour. So let's get things kicked off. Welcome, everybody. Greetings. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm the forum's host, creator, and chief cat herder, Brian Alexander, and I'm very glad you've made it all here today. We have a special guest who is going to give us an unusual glimpse into some bold re-organization for higher education. Now I'm just absolutely delighted to welcome this week's guest. Provost and Dean Eric Boynton, faculty member is the Provost and Dean of Boynt College at Appaloid, among other things. Eric has led a massive reinvention of that campus' entire academic year coming up in terms of its calendar and the ways that students interact with faculty and with their entire campus. So I'd really like to hear from him how that works, what he's learned from doing it, and what he hopes to do next. So welcome, Dean Boynton. Thank you, Brian. I appreciate being here, and then I look forward to the conversation. Me too. Me too. I'm really glad you could make time. I know that this is a crazy time for scheduling for the Chief Academic Officer of a college. So first of all, I introduce people in all kinds of ways, and by email and social media, I've linked to bios of you and everything else. But I find a great way to get people to know a future-transformed guest is to ask them what you're going to be spending most of your time on for the next year. What are the big projects or the big topics that are going to be devoting, you know, taking up most of your mind as you look ahead. Right. So it's a great question because it's difficult for me to pay attention to that kind of question when what's right in front of me is the demand, right, to attend to what's going to happen next week. And the ways in which the fall is going to unfold. But at the same time, we have to be attentive to the ways in which we're working presently to to attend to the challenges that are right on our face as a preparation for what's coming. And the one way to do to state it is that there's no silver lining to COVID. There's no happy occasion here for us to think differently. But there is a way in which the liberal arts experience, the the kind of education that that I was trained in as an undergraduate and the kind of education I went back to as soon as I got my PhD, the kind of institutions I've been in, I do think that there is a relevance for the small liberal arts education for the world that we currently are inheriting. And so there's a way in which this COVID moment brings to clarity the kind of work we're doing that positions us for the future. And that's broadly that's how I answer that question is that the work I'm engaged in now is not simply pouring water on parched earth. It's thinking about structure this place. Now and preparing it for a really interesting entry into the world as post COVID, I mean, let's say after vaccination, which is, of course, not a world that's without challenge or topsy-turvy, it will go upside down again. But the ways in which small liberal arts is meeting this challenge in creative ways. And that's not to say that taking this crisis as an opportunity, I think it's slightly different than that. It's the recognition that we have to meet the challenge and in meeting the challenge, we prepare for the future. Does that begin to answer your question? It begins to answer the question. And, you know, a few months ago, if I would have asked the typical provost or dean, they would have said something like grappling with accreditation, you know, rolling out a new core curriculum or, you know, launching a new writing center or something, but instead now you're at this kind of existential and forward looking moment at the same time. Well, I have so many questions to ask. And friends, please, I'm going to ask a few questions to get the ball rolling, but the forum is really, really here for you. I'd love to hear what you would like to ask. And I can promise you, Dean Boynton is very friendly. He doesn't have a beard, but you can trust him nonetheless. One question I want to ask you is one of the things that you've done over the summer, while all of higher education has been topsy turvy, you managed to reformat the hard drive of the campus. That is, you rebuilt the academic calendar. So instead of having semesters, you now have mods. Can you tell us what that means and then tell us how on earth you were able to do that in the middle of all this chaos? Right. So this is a situation where mods came to the fore. COVID was a catalyst for this idea, right? So I can tell you that I came into this job with this idea of demonstrating the relevance of small liberal arts to a broader part of the population. Demonstrated this is kind of education that people should invest in. And that activity was constantly forward looking, constantly on the offense. And in the moment of COVID, this is middle of March, I found myself in a complete defensive crouch. And in a stance that was traveling forward with such velocity. And at that moment, of course, COVID put the brakes on everything that we were thinking we were doing. And it was a moment in which a meeting with the president, Scott Bierman, and I told him that I felt as if I was in the fog of a war and I could not see to see the next possibility. And at that point we decided we'd table the situation in the middle of March that was taking place. And we decided to think about the fall. And I wanted to find ways to maximize flexibility and minimize disruption. And that's where the mods plan really came into fore. How is it that we can deliver a curriculum? In really interesting ways, in the face of this COVID moment, that demonstrates that we're an institution that's innovative and forward looking. And here's where I got this offensive posture back, is is there a way that the institution is doing its work that will mirror or reflect the kind of education as a parent and a student, you would expect to get it, Boyd. So the task was not simply to keep the doors open or find right ways to teach our students from an institutional level, but can we express or embody our educational mission in the way we're treating this challenge, which is mods. And so mods was a way to invigorate how it is we're going to attempt to teach students in the fall next year. And so it provides this maximal kind of flexibility. So there's a hinge point in the semester. I mean, all these kinds of reasons why we went about it. We could pivot away from campus to back to campus. It also does essentially two courses in each mod, which means it simplifies the schedule. And one of the aspects of that is that there's a lot of less passing time. And so it's a much safer campus as well. It also, and here's where mods both related to the COVID moment, but think about the future. Simplifies the schedule opens up the possibility of recognizing other kinds of activity that students could engage in during the day that could be included in their learning environment. So I want to question a little bit, but but how's it became about it. It was this idea of a small liberal arts institution finding a way to express its values in interesting enough in the way we deliver our curriculum. And I guess this is where it's not like this bright, shiny new thing. It's like brass tacks on the ground. How is it we're going to conduct ourselves as an expression of our mission? Well, let me let me press on that to ask a couple of explanatory things. And by the way, if you haven't seen it on the bottom left of your screen, just above the little white strip, you should see a kind of orange colored boy action plan links. So if you click on that, you will get a lot of different, you get a link to their explanatory site. And before I can say anything more, before I can even budge the awesome, awesome demographer and previous guest in the program, Nathan Graw has a question. Let me just flash this up on the screen. Because whenever Nathan says something, I want to make sure that I hear it and I make sure everybody else hears it. Nathan asked for two years in a row, Beloit adopted a substantial change in short order. What was key to your developing campus buy in for rapid change? Great question. Thanks, Nathan. And I know that that Nathan is close to Beloit because I do believe, is it, is it true? I've heard this rumor, Nathan, that Scott Bierman actually hired you at Carleton. I think that might be the case. Anyway, it just might be something I dreamt about. But yeah, the speed by which we went about this. So here's, here's, I think, the interesting stories that I was, I've only been at Beloit now a little more than a year. I was brought in, in order to think about the learning environment at a small of arts that would engage both what happens in and outside the classroom to, if you want to put it this way, weaponize the idea that students learn in every nook and cranny of the place as a way of expressing the value proposition of Beloit education. So a year ago, last summer, I came in and within two weeks, I was sitting in a three week period with 12 of the colleagues to think about innovations we're going to engage at Beloit. So two aspects of the Boyd Ashen plan, the new advising structure, which we're calling advanced mentoring program and career channels. Those two were built out a year ago last summer and we started to implement those over the past year. So that implementation process, Nathan, involved eventually nearly half the faculty. So we had not just a team that developed it over the summer, but then we launched implementation teams and implementation teams made up of both faculty and staff in order to bring the ideas we developed last summer to fruition over this year. So already there was kind of a massive effort across campus to get these things done. Goodwill was built in the ways in which I came in wanting to see something like this happen, but all the ideas were generated from the place and already percolating and I'll have to say that the Maud's idea, this is a slight tangent, but the Maud's idea was not my idea. It was an idea developed at Beloit five years prior, not implemented because the conditions were different at the time, but in the meeting in which we're talking about maximizing flexibility for the fall. I saw someone in the meeting and this comes from being in the classroom, right? When you're teaching something and you see light bulb go off in someone's head and immediately you go to that student, you ask, what is it that you just resonated with? I want to know. And the faculty member slash student in the audience said, you know what, I think that we developed something that was called the Maud's plan and he went back and found the document in the space of this meeting and all of a sudden Maud's was reborn in this meeting. So I think part of the speed is that people were ready. And there's an urgency, there's a recognition that the bones are extremely good at Beloit, but that we need to find a way to express it. And so people were energized and engaged in the fall semester. COVID hit, and I can tell you, COVID catalyzed those two ideas. So we had the AMP idea and the creative channels idea. If you look at the Boyd action plan, it's for granted by the Maud's idea and then on the other end is the pricing structure. And so there's a COVID moment that allows these two things to fold into a five kind of pointed star that made sense together. At the same time, we were already engaging with a marketing firm and so they had already come on board. And so it was just kind of this pulling together of all these efforts at this time and a bit of a risk and a willingness to be out there. I think we were already on our toes and COVID hit, we just kept leaning into it. And in the urgency, we're going to go with the Maud's plan. We needed to make sure that students signed up for it and not students signing up for a semester long course, blowing it up and then reestablishing a semester. And so then we had 10 days by which to establish the Maud structure before students looked at courses before they engaged in the Maud registration. Wow, 10 days. And so all those things in this very mix of coming together. So it's both really large kind of issues around the future of liberal arts, but at the same time, certain things are specific to Beloit. But at the same time, I think really narrowly define calendar issues that allow us to operate very quickly. I hope that begins then. I'm already talking too long on that question. That question is right in the sweet spot of what we're up to. It really is. Thank you, Nathan, for that really, really good question. And thank you, Eric, for a very detailed answer. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a text question. You can see how easy that is. So just hit that question mark button if you want to type in your own question. And I did have one follow-up question there from myself, which is tell us more about the advising plan. What did you change? Liberal arts colleges usually have a very close advising relationship. What did you do differently? So what we did is that we pulled the advising mentoring program out of a traditional classroom space. And so we have a model now, and this is the advanced mentoring program where it's actually, you know, so at Beloit, a normal course would be one unit. So four units is a normal load. This advising course is a quarter unit. And so it's not a full-blown content-driven course. So Beloit, like the other institution I was at prior to coming to Beloit, Allegheny, you know, we had first year semifinals. And first year seminars were content-light, process-rich. It's like a homeroom. You know, something to talk about in terms of content, but it's not quite a normal kind of course. And what we found in order to preserve the value of the curriculum in order to offer a full accompaniment of majors and minors and at the same time, allow a student to see their path through the institution. So advanced mentoring program and also career channels is a way of trying to make the institution less opaque. I mean, the kinds of students that we're bringing in, we need to be a student-ready campus, not ask admissions to find college-ready students. We needed techniques in order to bring students into the institution to show how the institution is going to fill their sales, filled with wind as they push towards their future. And so instead of putting them in a traditional class, we engaged them in this advanced mentoring program. So a professor has two sections of these advanced mentoring groups. Each one has about 10 students, so small, right? And these advanced mentoring program sessions, they run every other week. It involves peer mentoring, so peers come in, but it's also a student-to-student talk to each other in these kind of low-risk conversations about what it is they're doing at Boyd, how they see their career at Boyd and Folding, and where it is they're heading into the future. And so we've evacuated, in some sense, the content, and in the place we've talked about, how is it that you're going to find your way through this institution, and how is this institution going to help you meet your goals and aspirations? And so it's a different kind of advising relationship. I can tell you right now that it pulls the advising relationship out of the office and puts it in the groups. And this is one of the experiments I conducted at Allegheny before I left. The kind of conversations you would have in the group setting around advising is really different than the ones in which the student feels as if they have to come into your office as a professor and feels as if they have to have their act together before they utter a word to their advisor. This is a much more fluid. So it's a way of bringing the student into the learning environment. And then we build out certain activities that all the advisors are going to engage in. And these are cross-campus. And a lot of these activities are going to be about career readiness, about doing well in courses, but also around our values. So in the fall, a number of anti-racist kind of groups are being formed in which AMP will flow through these kinds of activities. And so in that last two years, and so it's an arc that persists for two years, the professor remains with these groups for two years, so the professor is a two-year commitment. And then these students become, you know, have a major advisor within their majors. And at that point, we can talk about this, but this is where a career channel kind of takes over. So AMP provides them the space to get to a major, but then the major is not the point of your education all the way. The major has to lead somewhere and career channels allows you to envision your future from there. Does that start getting at the question? It does. And it sounds like that's much deeper and richer innovation than I thought. But we have a whole bunch of questions that actually go back to the mods sequence. So I want to give folks to ask this. Here's one from John Henry Stites, also at Georgetown. Does an institution offering intensive short-duration mods need to have a large cadre of tenure track full-time faculty, or could it be done in a program where 95% of the faculty are agile? Interesting question. Jeez. Well, so here I don't have, I haven't asked myself that question because Boyd, of course, is largely populated by tenure track faculty. So small liberal arts away from major metropolitan area, you're just going to have most of your faculty going to be full-time tenure track. Or if they're not full-time tenure track, they've been with you for a long time and demonstrated really good work, right? So I wonder, so what the mods does do is it provides interesting flexibility for dropping courses in and out. And so one of the things that we see in the future if we continue with mods past this year is that there's interesting ways to link courses in each mod that if you have four courses across the semester becomes more difficult. So I can imagine that if you had the flexibility of hiring adjuncts, you could insert into the curriculum at different mod points courses that would resonate with maybe what's going on in the standard form. And then you could begin like over years, over a bit of time, you could emphasize the direction of the campus, right, and pull back and maybe put other directions through the use of adjunct faculty. That's my first, I love that. I love that kind of thinking. I like to do that kind of thinking, but like probably he's not going to have that luxury. We're going to be thinking about doing this with standard tenure track faculty members. But Brian, do you have, do you have any ideas there? I've got a couple. I mean, I say first, John Henry, thank you. That's a great question. And I would say that what you're describing in many ways, the almost unique to the elite liberal arts, small college, private college world, which has majority tenure track faculty, whereas the rest of the country does not mostly. But this is this interesting question of flexibility for the fall. And do you respond by really maximizing your full-time faculty and maybe repurposing them in different parts of the curriculum, or do you instead shift towards a fully adjunct compliment, which is much more, much more flexible. But there are, there are a whole bunch of questions that just followed up. And I want to get these all on the table because these folks are wonderful. We've interim dean Ronald Samuel Friedman at Purdue Fort Wayne. Oh, he asked a great question, but you already answered. So that's fine. And then Mark Berman at Santa College has a question about the mods that wondering, are they based on or similar to the Colorado College block system? Okay. So here's the inside story. So in that meeting I told you about with Scott Berman and I, when we were talking about, okay, what's going to maximize flexibility and minimize disruption? Our first in that, in that hour and a half meeting that stretched three hours, our first idea was a block schedule. I mean, then you'd have four hint or three hinges within the space of a semester. Right. And that's the idea I took initially to a faculty group. So the ASP, the academic strategic planning committee, which is the major committee on campus, I took this idea within a few days to that group. And frankly, the block plan was shut, was shot down by people in the room. I think it's, and I think it's true that there's a certain kind of student that gravitates towards those kinds of intense classroom experiences. And the faculty didn't think that Boyd students wanted to experience the curriculum as single courses like that. And so we landed on mods, which was this compromise, this recognition that it faces those courses up to seven and a half weeks. Right. So you have a little bit more time. You have two per versus one in the block plan. But I think there's their cousins, they're related. But what's interesting is that, and I'm just going to toot my own horn here for a second, is that there are 12 or 15 campuses that I know of, mainly small liberal arts that have gone with the mods plan. They have not gone with the block plan. And I think that's really interesting. I do think that Colorado and Cornell College, that there's a certain kind of student that they're polling from that want to come to a college like that. And the rest of us realize, you know what? That's not really what our current students have come to our space to experience. So we need to be careful, right? That we're curating a kind of experience that is going to resonate with the students we do have. So that's a great question. It is a good question. And this is, thank you for the really clear answer. Now, you said you'll give us the inside story. We have another question which asks for more. Well, you'll see where this is going. And this is from the University, Rachel Barlow, who directs assessment there. And she says, when faculty were resistant to the mods ideas we're developing, what were their biggest concerns and how did you talk about them? And you just mentioned one, that idea of the different student and mods versus blocks. But let's say more about that. What was the pushback and how that worked? So it's interesting because certain faculty I talked to, I would utter this idea of mods seven and a half week, splitting up the semester. And I wouldn't often argue. I would just describe what it looks like. And I'd just let it sit. And for certain faculty, it would be about 10 seconds and there'd be silence. And they would go, oh, right. Yes. I see where the other faculty, we had hour and a half long conversations before at the end. And this is true. I'm not blowing smoke here. I mean, everybody is ready for this. Everybody has bought into this. And we had to have that readiness because we were going to ask students to be advised by faculty to register for mods. And so we couldn't have faculty who advised students saying, you know, we got this cockamating idea of this idiot, provost guy, he's been here a number of months and he has this crazy idea and I hate it. So we couldn't have that and have a successful kind of advising period. So by and large, I mean, there's 100% of faculty on board. Some of the wrinkles were language faculty going, wait a minute, if I truncate that. Right. How is that going to work in my language? And then so what happened is that the chair of languages says, you know, here's an interesting model is that within the mods plan, because you have real flexibility. You have large chunks of time to teach your courses over a week, but you have real flexibility of how you're going to do that. So a language course can meet every single day of the week. And then they realize, oh, that's exactly what I always wanted. I wanted this kind of process oriented classes like languages or logic. For instance, you need to be at this thing every single day in order to really capture what's going on. And then a history professor says, you know what? No, no, no, no, you got to go read a book. Right. And then we're going to talk about it for hours and we're going to meet twice a week. Yeah. And so it's interesting that once you started working through, it's like, well, there's a flexibility built into the mods. It actually pays attention to the different ways that faculty are going to teach, rather than hemming them in certain kind of standard ways of thinking. And so that was a series of conversations we had with the faculty as a whole, but also we have disciplinary groups. They broke off in their disciplines and they talked about the ways in which mods could be mapped on other courses. And it required, I mean, don't, don't get me wrong. It required intense creativity and flexibility to rethink the fall. And this summer they're doing that work on top of thinking about how you're going to develop hybrid courses. One of the serendipities, one of the things that allows to go back to Nathan's questions for the speed is that we received a quarter million, a quarter million dollar Mellon grant right at the end of my summer. So I took this idea and we went and pitched it to Mellon. They said, it sounds like a good idea. Here's $200,000 for the next 18 months roll with it. Yeah, it was a planning role. So we then use that money to develop faculty. And so faculty then get stipends this summer to develop these courses. And the serendipity is that they were developing these courses around the career channels innovation. So how is it that I can link my courses to careers and think interesting about that? And what happens is that they're linking their courses around what it means to be in line with the strategic direction the campus is taking and mods and now hybrid. And then the building out of workshops of the summer has been rather intense and rich as well. And so that was the coming together of events in really serendipitous ways. That's fascinating. First of all, that's Rachel, thank you very much for that really, really good question. And second, Eric, thank you for your time. Brian, real quick. Is that in consultation with these other schools, the other schools, of course, after we did this, you know, I was talking to everybody in interviews. Everybody wanted to hear about this, but then I'm getting calls three a day of provost across the nation asking me that question. Like, oh, how'd you do that? And through those conversations, we actually sent out, I won't name names, but we sent out emissaries from our faculty to help other faculty at other small liberal institutions to deal with those kind of questions in their faculty. And it was labs, it was languages, it was history. It was those kinds of things. Yeah. That's very, very important. And that further answers the question that your faculty actually became paladins, evangelists of this. And I'm surprised that people don't call it the Boulay program or the, you know, the Boulay mob system. Oh, that ropes you in the wrong way. Yeah. Well, not calling it or calling it. Not not calling it. Yeah. Not giving the public approbation. Well, you got it. You've got it here. And that's, that's the first round of questions that folks have had. Friends, I've got a couple of just small questions I want to ask just to clarify a couple of points. But again, we'd love to hear from you. So we've been talking about the mods, we've been talking about the politics and institutional shift of having this happen. We're talking about Eric's vision for Boulay in this crisis. What else would you like to ask? Would you like to ask more, for example, about the the amps and the advising and mentoring? Would you like to ask more questions about the how mods are going to play out in terms of registration or in terms of advising or more curricular change? Again, just at the bottom of the screen, make sure you just either hit the raised hand if you want to join us on stage or click the question mark to type in a question. My really quick question is you've described very, very beautifully the role of faculty in this entire change process. But this is a small liberal arts college. What was the role of students in all of this? Right. So to be sure, the work had to happen very quickly. And so students were consulted after the plan had really developed in a robust way. And we went to students early on and talked to them about the mods, the look of the mods. And what actually catalyzed the students was, and this is actually the beginning of our relationship, right? Is that the campus, the campus newspaper, you know, small publication, a small institution, they interviewed me. And they interviewed me before really we had talked publicly about the institution of mods. And so I took the opportunity to talk about mods in the fall in that interview and that interview with the student who was a senior. And really knew her way around the place. And we talked about how mods was baked into DNA abloit and how it was an expression of the way in which students could engage in their coursework really interesting ways with their faculty. That interview that was then aired a few days later in the campus newspaper is essentially what introduced this idea to students. And then through Boyd's student government, there's co-presidents. We had a webinar or a non-stage kind of event in which we rolled the thing out to students. And there was some initial hesitation among students, but then people basically the same way the faculty said, oh, that's an interesting way to go about business in the fall. And then what happened is that we started getting really interesting press nationwide. And this is where my encounter with Brian is that Brian, for some, I don't know how, but you saw the campus article, right? So the campus article went viral in really interesting ways and they hit Twitter somehow and I'm not a big Twitter user, but then when I saw you tweet something about what you saw in the campus. About the mods plan, then I reached out to you. I knew you from other spaces and I said, thanks, Brian, for the shout out. And so that was actually the origins of our relationship too. So students were open to it and friendly to it, but I have to say there wasn't a lot of student input in the idea. But again, in the DNA of the place, it was not shocking when we came up with it. And in that regard, it did not hit flat footed or in a surprising kind of way. Well, I'm really glad. And I love the use of a student newspaper to introduce institutional change. I think that's fantastic. And I appreciate the question of time and speed. We have, so thank you. Thank you for that. A couple more questions have just popped in. We have Diane. People must mango your name all the time. So I'm going to try my best. This is Diane. My librarian at St. Mary's who asks about the career channels and how they intersect with the mods. Could you provide some examples of that? So, yeah, we're still thinking about how career channels links with mods because mods are relatively soon on the scene and we are developing career channels. But think of career channels as broad interdisciplinary streams. So we're in health and healing as one of the channels. Entrepreneurship is another channel. Sustainability is another channel. Sustainability is another channel. So the ways in which majors and courses and faculty and staff fit within this broad trajectory where a student can see that the kind of work they're engaged in both in and outside the classroom. This is a crucial idea. This is not just linking class ideas. This is a way in which a demonstration that avoid education, and this is a small liberal arts education I would maintain, is that you integrate what happens to you in the classroom. What happens outside the classroom? So sustainability, the kind of internship you get, or your travel abroad experience, or the work study you do on campus. And this is one of the really exciting things. Instead of thinking about work study as just a job I have in order to bring home some take home play, is the work study job I have is actually involved in these channels. And we built out those channels to include work study. This stream that then takes what it is you're engaged in academically and demonstrates the relevance of it as you begin to reach towards commencement. And I don't want to say graduation. I want to say commencement, the commencing of your life and the way in which Boyd College can be a launching pad to your future. And so we have these five channels that are built out. The ways in which mods would link in. And here's, okay, I need to say this because I need to say this publicly, is a decision to move to mods beyond next year is a faculty decision. There's no way mods is going to work unless faculty say, yes, we want to teach in this way. And so this is a year of experience. We're going to assess the heck out of it. We're going to figure out something we want to do. But let's say it persists in the future. Then I do think it provides some interesting flexibility in students lives to add in these extra kind of what we called in the past extracurricular. And I would call meat and potato experiences right at the beating heart of what your education is about that the experiences you have on and off campus relate to what happens in the classroom. That's the way in which I think mods provides flexibility for our channels idea. Our career channels idea. Does that begin the answer to the question? Well, I think that's up to you. Please, you know, give me a give us a ping on and respond and we're of course happy to bring you back up on stage to to talk further about that. What one wrinkle I want to add just to make sure I pay attention to our questions at the end of career channels and built into career channels are these professional networks. Staff, faculty, crucially alumni and friends of the college coming back in and populating networks of advising that then and within these channels right people who are out in the workforce working in sustainability like careers coming back into coming back in to advise our students before they graduate after they graduate to before they graduate as a way of integrating career readiness into the curriculum and not simply professors saying to the student. Okay, now it's time for you to go and counter the people in career center. But yeah, weaving that into the very heart of what what you're doing here at Boyle. That's wonderful and that's not easy to do necessarily in a liberal arts world. But before I go down that road, we have interim Dean Friedman has a different question that's related to this which is do you have professional advisors staff. And if so, what is their role? Yeah, so we don't I know the schools do have that and it's really interesting model. Small of arts, we just wouldn't have the capacity to build that out. Right now, every amp advisor for them for the fall is a faculty member and here's a situation in which we do have to ease into this somewhat. You know, I took the role of Provost at Boyle. The role everybody from academic side reports to me and everybody from student life reports to me and the attempt was to think about the integration of those two things. I hope you hear that in the way of talking about your channels right that kind of integration. The problem is is just still two sides and the Provost can't do the work of integration. You have to go way back into the ecosystem and begin to draw the the linkages right encourage channels is the way to draw those linkages amp as a way to draw those linkages. And so what I anticipate the next cohort of amp instructors will be staff. Because of course there's no content in these courses, you don't have to have a PhD. In fact, there are certain staff who would rock the mic on these amp courses is exactly the kinds of people you want your students in front of and be engaged in. And so there's a way in which amp expands how I can think about advising and mentoring across campus. That before they get to their major advisor, which will be a faculty member, I can expand the ways in which staff step into those roles and play a crucial role across campus and not not an extra cricketer kind of role. But right at the beating heart of our educational mission staff are involved in making sure students understand what's important about this education. Interesting. That's a really, really good question. And by the way, in the in the chat, it turns out that I accidentally connected Ronald Samuel Friedman to a 1970s, semi famous singer songwriter named Dean Friedman. Thank you, Joel Bloom for making that connection. I'm sure Ronald's going to get a lot of this from now on. My apologies. That's great. We have another question from Annie Epperson at University of Northern Colorado. She's a librarian, which means she's awesome. And she wants to know about assessment. How are you going to assess the full experiment? Right. So we do. Okay. So here's, here's where there are certain parts of my brain that are shoving out other things in order to make room for COVID related issues. I have had numerous conversations with the institutional research office about how they're going to do that and heads is involved and Nessie is involved. And there's they're built out processes by which to assess it. I'm afraid I need to phone a friend in order to answer that question in any kind of detailed way. There is a plan. I can't tell you what that plan is. I just don't. This is a capacity problem. My head, I must not smart enough or don't have enough Ram, right? Isn't that Ram? There's the counter space, right? There's a processing power. There's a bit in a Sherlock Holmes story where he talked about trying to forget something that he doesn't need anymore in order to make room for everything else. We're coming close to the end of the hour. And I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask their questions. And Annie, thank you. I'm glad you asked the question. This is from Bob London, who's the Alpha Phi Mega Executive Director. And he wants to know about applying this elsewhere. Do you think mods could work at other types of institutions such as large research based ones or community colleges? Yeah. I mean, again, this is like the other question about non-tenure track faculty teaching. I mean, yeah, this is what I love. I love to think about that. I have not had the time or the space to muse about the possibilities except for right now. So, yeah, I imagine that the possibilities are endless. And let's say, here's one interesting, here's one way to get at that. When we developed mods at Boyd, we actually didn't need to invent any kind of new curriculum device. They already existed within the curriculum. We actually had a way of, and I, Allegheny had it too, a way of carving up the semester into two blocks. And so I imagine a whole bunch of institutions already have the capacity to run mods. So what if you ran mods not every course, but what if you began to multiply? The occasions that students could take a course in a mod form. And instead of like, in other campuses like McAllister and Grinnell and other places like that, who have gone to the full mods plan for every course, what if you did like 10% of your courses like that? And then maybe it's 20% and then you start ramping it up and you go at this in a gradual kind of way and you see how students are experiencing it. And what we found at Boyd is that there are certain courses, certain experiences that need to be the full semester. If you have a major project, you can't squeeze it in the seven and a half. So we do have some educational occasions that cut across the whole semester even next year. But what if you did it differently and you kind of began gradually to build out mods? That might be an interesting kind of model at other kinds of places. I know Brian, does that resonate? It does. I'm just thinking about the different ways this could play out. And also Bob, I'm thinking about how some of these institutions that you're talking about are less unified than a small liberal arts college. And you think about multiple schools within them and multiple branches. I went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad and there was a small residential liberal arts college inside of it basically. Or Columbia University actually has Barnard College as a legally separate liberal arts college. You know, I wonder about like having those experiment or having a particular department or program say the sciences do that. It's a fascinating question Bob. It may be that right now we are fortunate to have caught Eric as he is launching the Mod Revolution nationwide. We have a follow-up question from Mark Berman who says that as an ex-administrator, I'm very happy to hear about involving staff in the AMP program with more direct contact with students. What training are you providing for them? That's a great question. So right now Mark, I mean, it's more like oh geez that person is already well suited. That person has already been working with students. So there's already an array of staff members at Beloit. And I guess this is the nature of small liberal arts is that as I told Brian one time at Beloit, we eat every part of the animal. There's a way in which staff have already kind of been doing this work. I mean, for decades at a place like Beloit, they're already kind of engaged in this work with the students. And so it's not a leap to begin to include staff. So there's like a 10 staff right now that I know could do the work with no training at all. And these are staff that would understand the curriculum. I think the training would come in. We need to get a little bit more familiar with the way the curriculum rolls. We need to get more familiar with the way in which faculty see the institution so that students don't get one sided versus the other. I was advised by a staff member, so I had this perspective on the institution versus the faculty perspective. But I think that's a great question. One of the ideas we have is that in future AMP iterations, we would bring people who want to be AMP advisors as an apprentice model, have them come into an AMP group and see someone who's been seasoned at this, how they do their work. And that might be an initial way of beginning to bone people up into AMP advisors. And in addition, maybe getting them to not memorize but be more familiar with curriculum or certain aspects, student experience that they just need to know. I'm thinking different staff, depending on their position, will have more or less access to the curriculum experience. I think that will be the registrar's office, which is where they live, as well as the people who are instructional technologists, or the library, the ones who are really student facing. Mark, that's a great question. Thank you very much for asking this. We are at the last couple of minutes of our hour. And so I guess I'd like to ask you to imagine, say, four years from now, where you've had your first undergraduate population has gone through a complete all-mod experience. They've been modded the entire time. What are they going to be like in 2024 or 2025? Yeah. So I do know, I think it was last week, that an article came out of disparaging the idea of agility. I don't know if you saw that one. And that's an overused word. Okay, fine. But there is a way in which Small Over Arts is preparing people to dodge and leave and move. And just be nimble about the situations that they find themselves, in order to meet challenges in interesting ways. I think mods is a way of pouring accelerant on that attitude of Small Over Arts. We're preparing people for meeting the challenges of what's to come. And in that regard, here's the experience of Small Over Arts. And this used to be a marketing ploy of Small Over Arts, which is that Small Over Arts, we're not preparing you for your first job or preparing you for your fifth job, which is a crappy marketing ploy, because what parent is going to pay that much money for some job 10 years, 20 years down the road. So we stopped saying that. But we also can't say we're going to prepare you for your first job. That's not our business. That's not what we're into. We're not training you to become an accountant. That's not what we do. So what are we doing? Well, I think this is a short experience coming from Small Over Arts. It was about, it was in graduate school, and I'm in graduate school. I went to University of Redlands, which is fine institution, but I find myself in my PhD program, running circles around undergraduates who went to Harvard. They couldn't keep up with me. It's like, why am I able to do all these things that these people who went to these really prestigious places can't do? And it's just all moment where you're like, oh, wait a minute. and the kind of engagement I had from my professors and from my in learning environment in my smaller arts that just put a fire in my belly, desired challenge, confidence that I could see things from a bunch of different perspectives that was just built into me. I want to bring that aha moment that usually happens five, 10 years out from your liberal arts degree and bring that aha moment back into those four years. So when people graduate, they graduate realizing what the heck just happened to them. Something transformative happened to them and they need to realize that now because they have to have the confidence to generate that into their future. That's a fantastic answer. What a vision for higher education. Thank you for sharing that vision and for Eric for spending the whole hour really giving us the inside look into how you help lead this transformation in your college. Thank you so much. If people want to keep up with you, if they want to keep up with what you're doing at Beloy, what's the best way? Yeah, so I wish I had like a, I had no time for like a blog post or you know or things like that and I hate to say it, but you know I'm a recovering philosopher. So like I don't really know how to tweet and I don't know what Instagram is and so I hate to say it, but the best way to reach me is email and I'm happy and I'm on email all the time. It's one of my lifelines and so if anybody wants to email me, I'm happy to reply and it says bointonee at beloy.edu and you can find me on the provost page. Yeah and I promise you he will respond in my experience. Once again, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. This is such an impressive drive. I appreciate it. Well thank you, but don't go away friends. I need to point out where we're headed to the next few weeks. Remember that we have all these topics coming up as we look at how higher education responds to the extraordinary events of 2020. If you'd like to keep talking about these, wondering what the difference is more between mods and blocks and semesters and how advising works and what is really this benefit of liberal education, we have all these great channels on Twitter which most of you like to hang out. It seems hashtag FTTE, but of course we have groups in LinkedIn and Facebook as well as Slack. And if you want to go back into the past and look at previous sessions, including with some of the questionnaires here today, just go to tinyurl.com slash ftfrkind or search for me on YouTube and you'll find those there. And in the meantime, thank you everybody for the really, really great questions. I think you really dove into this topic deeply. And as always, keep thinking about these issues, stay safe during this extraordinary time, and we'll see you online. Bye-bye.