 I decree this is the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to this week's Future Transform. I'm really glad to see you all here. I'm really excited about this week's topic and especially this week's guest. Before I introduce her, let's talk about the forum, where it comes from, what it does, what it hopes to accomplish, and then we'll introduce the topic and our guest. To begin with, the Future Transform is a conversation-based venue where we explore the future of higher education. We started five years ago and we've been working every week since. We have a whole battery of nearly 240 recordings on YouTube, if you'd like to look into it. One of the great things about the forum, I think, is that the population here, both in terms of guests as well as all of you, is so diverse in many, many ways. Not only are we diverse demographically, but also geographically, in terms of institutional positions. You'll see university presidents, college students, IT people, faculty, government folks, non-profit, startup funders, journalists, all kinds of folks. Basically, anybody who is interested in place some role in or adjacent to higher education can be here. Now, a couple of background notes. First of all, obviously we are still in the middle of the pandemic. Some nations are being hit harder than others, notably those in the European Union, as well as Great Britain, Brazil, and the United States. And this has impacted higher education as we've been exploring for a year. And that will come up definitely during our hour today. We're also in the United States and some other countries also involved in a rethinking and reckoning about race and racism. And that too will come up in this week's session. Now, looking ahead a little bit, we have some sessions coming up for the next two months. And I'd like to just touch on these for you a little. We have a session on reinventing the liberal arts college. We get to meet a rising educational technology star. We have a session on supporting equity on campus. And we have our five-year anniversary coming up at last. If you'd like to learn more about the sessions or if you'd like to sign up for them, just go to tinyurl.com slash forum 2021. I want to thank our sponsors before we go a little bit further. One of them I'd like to thank is NizerNet from New York State. That's a terrific nonprofit that helps at state colleges and universities get online with a fast broadband and do great professional work together. We love their work and we're grateful to them for their support. We're also grateful to Shindig because as you can see, Shindig makes available the technology we're using right now. So if you're new to the technology or if you haven't used it for a while, let me just quickly show you how to participate. Where I am right now and where this slide is just for a minute is called the stage. This is where our guest will be and this is where you can be too. We call it the stage because it's the metaphor of a stage in an auditorium. Everybody can see and hear everything that goes on the stage. Now, if you look right below us on the bottom half of the screen, you'll see a whole bunch of different people who are logged in with you. For example, my group, I can see Stephen Crawford. I can see Bonnie Powers and a bunch of other folks. And that's the roughly 20 or so people who've logged in around the same time you did. It forms a kind of room and you can chat with them. In fact, if you want to have a private chat with one of them, you can just double-click on their icon. If they want to talk with you, your two icons will snap together like Legos. You can have your own private audio-visual bubble. If you don't like the people logged in with you, if you want to jump into other rooms and see who else is there, on either side of the screen, you should see a pair of chevrons. You can click those and hop between rooms. Now, I said this is all about conversation so far I'm talking to you as showing you slides. You may say, Brian, how do we actually converse? Let me show you the powerful ways. Look in the bottom of the screen. You'll see a white strip running along it with a few different buttons on it. On the leftmost edge, you'll see a number and that's the number of people involved in this conversation and right now it's 89. If you click on that, up will pop a couple of windows, one of which is a chat box and you can say hello to everybody here. So we can see hello from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, hello from Columbia, South Carolina, Salem, Mass, Los Angeles, Central Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia area, Honolulu, Buffalo, New York, all kinds of folks. The chat box is a great place to share informal thoughts and references to things that come up. It's a pretty useful tool, but next to it along that white strip are the two powerful tools. You'll see one of them is a question mark and one of them is a raised hand. The question mark is a Q&A box. Press that up, pops a box into which you can type your question. And when the time is right, I'll flash that question on the screen so everyone can see it and I'll read it out loud so everyone can hear it. People love using that. That's just a really reliable tool. And next to it is that hands up button. Press that button and that tells us that you wanna join us up in stage. So the time is right, I'll press another button and you'll be here right next to me and our guest. You can have a face-to-face conversation. So that question mark and that raised hand are the main ways you can participate. If that's not enough, if you're on Twitter, just use the hashtag F-T-T-E and you'll find a bunch of people there tweeting into us. If they can't make it to the program, we're tweeting out from within the program. We already have Laura Gibbs asking a couple of questions right now. So just use the hashtag F-T-T-E or tweet right at me, Brian Alexander. Those are the main ways you can participate and we're really grateful to Schindig for making the technology available for us to use. We're also grateful to our supporters on Patreon. Patreon is a crowdfunding site which lets you collaboratively fund the project. In this case, it's our project of exploring the future of higher education. So some people contribute as little as a dollar a month just for us to keep the lights on and the machine's running and those in this slide here contribute $10 or more a month and we're really grateful to them for all of their support and you can join them. Just go to patreon.com slash Brian Alexander. All right, now all of that, whoa, I have a sideways picture. I don't know how that happened so we'll have to bring her up on stage the right way. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome this week's guest. We have a very, very important topic and we have a very, very important activist in that area. Lee Scalarapusett is here to talk to us about the role of academic staff. So who are academic staff, you might ask, depends on where you are but Lee has a new column inside higher ed talking about this. She says, quote, staff is a fuzzy term in academia. You can include janitorial and cafeteria workers, groundskeepers, administrative assistants, IT experts, academic advisors, student services staffers, faculty developers, HR specialists and more. Staff tend to be the most diverse labor sector of any college or university both in terms of what we do and who we are. And we have Lee here today to talk about that with all of you. What happened to academic staff during this past year of crisis and where might they be headed? Let me welcome Lee Scalarapusett, my colleague at Georgetown University. And Lee's also brought your dog, Ziggy. Hello puppy. There's Ziggy. All right. He's a little old man, sweater too. Well, I'm very, very glad to see him. I'm glad he's warm. Yes. Oh yeah. Part Chihuahua and the Chihuahuas get cold all the time. Yeah, they're not designed for this. No, you're not designed for that even with your little bit of terrier in you. Can we make a Bernie Tender's meme with Ziggy? Well, I was gonna say it's definitely an old man. It's a Bernie sweater. I'll tell you that. Very, very nice. Very nice. Lee, thank you so much for coming. You know, I have so many ways to introduce you. So many stories about you I can tell. But the way I'd like you to introduce yourself is if you could tell people what you're gonna be working on for the next year. So if the rest of 2021, what's gonna be taking up most of your time and most of your mind? Oh, that's a really good question. Professionally, I'm my day job. I'm a learning design specialist at Georgetown University for the Center of New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, also known as candles. I always have to try to remember what the acronym is because nobody actually remembers what it stands for. We just use candles. And so I work at the intersection of technology and pedagogy and 2021 so far looks a lot like how 2020 ended, which is a lot of time supporting faculty who are teaching remotely or in a handful of hybrid courses where some students are in the classroom and some students are still participating remotely. So that has been my life for now almost a year. So it started, we were actually a little ahead of it and saw it coming. And so since end of February, actually, we had Georgetown, this sounds, of course, really fancy because it's Georgetown, they have a villa in Italy where we have study abroad students. And so it hit Italy first and infected our students and faculty there. And they were all sent home and there were classes that needed to be done. And so we were asked to step in and assist with that. And then it became increasingly clear that the same thing was gonna happen soon here in the US. And so we were put into overdrive, so to speak. And so that's been our lives for the past, you know, almost a year, as I said, and at least going forward to through spring 2021, that's what it's gonna be like and who knows what the summer is gonna bring in terms of what we're gonna be preparing for for the fall. I think that that's one of the hardest things right now for us in terms of faculty support and pedagogical support is just the unknowns. And I think that's the same for all staff. We don't know, we don't know what we're preparing for. You know, we usually have things planned out a year in advance, eight months in advance. We have a typical cycle that we follow through much like faculty do. And right now we just don't know, right? There's no real opportunities to plan for the fall or what we're gonna do over the summer because it's like, are we gonna be in person? Are we still gonna be remote? Like what's gonna DC gonna shut down? Which also makes a little bit more complicated for us as well because we're, Georgetown is in the district of Columbia in Washington DC. And so we are also beholden to what's going on in the capital, which could also get, as you know, as we all know right now, very complicated and complex. So that's what my work life is a lot of. And on the side, I write about staff issues. I write about affective labor. I write about online teaching and learning. So I'm gonna keep doing that. Hopefully there's a book coming out that I edited on affective labor and staff roles coming out from Kansas. Was hoped to be out by now, but of course COVID put all the peer reviewers in their burnout spaces. So the cycle is going a little bit slower but we're excited and hoping that it'll come out this year. Well, I'm really looking forward to it. Please let us know. So if you'd like to read some of Lee's writing, by the way, and she's written a lot and it's great stuff, both for Chronicle of Higher Ed, Inside of Higher Ed, as well as on Twitter and her blog. The bottom of the screen, the left edge, you should see it kind of, I'm not sure what color that is, it's a kind of yellow tan mustard color, I think, but you'll see that as a button. You just press that and I'll take you to our homepage, which has a bunch of writing and links to more still. By the way, in the chat box, Sarah Sangogorio just chimed in with a yes and uncertainty for faculty and sports folks is so hard. And I may need to check in some time with you because my summer gaming seminar, I'm still trying to figure out how that's going to play out if I forget bad pun. Let us do, but yes, you know where to find me. If you're new to the forum, 95% of the questions and comments come from all of you. The floor is open for you to ask questions. So again, remember in the bottom of the screen along that white strip, there's that raised hand button if you wanna join us up here next to Lee, myself and of course Ziggy, but if you'd rather just type in a question, just go to that question mark button and type in one. I have one to ask for you in particular. But before I can do that, people are fast. This is great. We had a question from David Hul who came in here early from National University just to ask you this question. So let me bring it up. Nice. And then the role of faculty to support powerable candles, I think work to help empower faculty to address the issue of radicalization and extremism. Oh, that's an excellent question. So we actually have a number of programs already in place at Candles. So we have the Angleheart Fellowship which is about diversity and inclusion in the classrooms. And so we have forums and spaces and speakers who have long been coming to Candles. This is a long established endowed program who come in to talk about these things. We're actually Candles with the MCEF which I don't even remember what it stands for at the moment. We're actually having a forum this afternoon, this evening where we're bringing in specialists, Georgetown on-campus specialists about riots and political violence who are gonna come and talk to the faculty about the events that happened in DC and these sorts of extremism. So we have long been, we're a really interesting shop so to speak because we combine both the academic technology side and the traditional faculty development work together in one unit. So we do online learning, we do academic technology and we do traditional faculty development as we typically understand it. And so we're particularly well placed to be able to offer the kind of programming and workshops and teaching circles, discussion groups that address those kinds of issues, how to talk about them in the classroom, how to talk about it with your students and those kinds of things. We're trying to, we're a domain school and so one of the other things that we are trying to build as well is digital fluency using the Domain's program. And so we're hoping to launch a program for faculty on being able to incorporate that into their teaching as a faculty cohort for fall 2021. Yes, that's what September is, right? Fall 2021. So far, let me just jump in. Lee's referring to the domain of one's own movement. Early on in 2016, we hosted one of its founders, the awesome Reverend Jim and Lee is a great hero of mine on Georgetown's campus because she powers so much of those. That's having students make their own domain and stuff it full of good digital things and her class is excellent. David, thank you for that excellent question. Let's keep an eye on that. We have more questions piling in though so I wanna make sure they get a chance to come up. We have the long-term participant, Eric Mistry, who asks, what can staff do to make changes, especially in governance structure where they have little officially sanctioned power of voice? He's particularly thinking and advocating for basic tech literacy. Oh, that's a shared governance is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I truly believe in shared governance, but I think that there should be ways to empower staff to have more of a say in that shared governance. And most campuses have a sort of staff forum or staff session, but very rarely does it have to do with the actual governance of the university. Usually it is about very specific staff employee issues and not larger academic or structural issues. So I think one of the things that needs to happen is we need to rethink the concept of shared governance and to be more inclusive with the shared governance and have staff representation in these meetings. Now, how to go about doing that? It depends on your institution, right? Public versus private, large R1 versus regional versus community colleges, any university that I've been to they always seem to have slightly different governance structures. Even on the faculty side. And whether or not you're in a unionized environment or not or you're even able to unionize. So there's lots of these factors, these really complex factors that come into play. What I would love to see is more collaboration working together with the administration, working together with both the faculty governance side and also the staff, it wouldn't even say governance but whatever the staff representation group is on your campus, I would love to see them collaborate more. I would love to see them get together a lot more in the same room and have conversations about these things. If you are, if you do know the person who is the chair or coordinator or whatever the official title is of the person who is the head of the staff committee, I would reach out to them, get in touch with them, see what they're doing, see what mechanisms are available to you and to them, get involved with it. Usually that's elected position and usually not a lot of people run for them. So run for these positions, get involved in there and advocate, learn as much as you can about the structure and governance of your institution and then see where pressure can be applied to get these kinds of changes. Who are your friends on campus? Who are the people who are willing to work with you on the issues that are important to you as staff? Because you won't be the only one who's concerned about these things and that's the other challenge of being staff is often we're very, very siloed, right? Even more so than the faculty where we candles, we tend to work with candles and we work with faculty, we work a little bit with IT, right? On the academic technology science support side but I don't work with anybody from student services. I don't work with anyone from financial affairs or the student employment office or any of these other places where we may share these same concerns around let's say digital fluency, right? But where are the opportunities for us to work together towards that end to get together to pool our resources to move things along institutionally, right? So go out there and find out who your friends are and find out where the other things. And again, it's another thing to do. It's hard to do in the pandemic. It's not like we don't all have enough work to do but those are the ways that we're gonna need to make changes is getting more staff together, getting more staff together with faculty and being able to apply pressure to the administration for things to change. Well, that's really well said. That's really well said. Thank you for the great question. Yeah. That was a small seminar of an answer. Thank you. Victor Velegas, Victor Fribio has pronounced that adds, it's about networking and you need to be proactive. Amanda Burbage, excuse me, says in my experience, staff view themselves as vulnerable too. So it's a risk to speak out, allies are important. Christine Moore adds, sending from principles of academic freedom, there are yawning divides between staff being able to be recognized as full participants. This is a great, great topic. It's clearly struck a nerve and we have some follow-up questions that I want to bring up. Let's see, this is one from our awesome friend, Vanessa Vale, coming to us from the American Southwest. And Vanessa asks, how would you compare affective labor to what the National Nurses United refers to as care work? For what's worth, NNU includes teachers as well as tutors, aids and assistants as care workers. So I think that there are intersections between that and affective labor comes from the emotional labor and the managed heart, Horthschild's really famous book on it and she studied flight attendants, right? And the idea of managing your own emotions in order to instill an emotion in the person that you're dealing with, right? And so it's very much about emotional control. There is care work that goes into that, definitely. Part of my job as a faculty developer is care work with faculty. And even as you move up the ranks, care work with administrators. And so there is care work involved in that for sure. And there's intersections, but there's, and I've always argued this and people get very uncomfortable when I say it, but I'm gonna say it. There's a certain intimacy that needs to be developed in order to have a productive, collaboration with a faculty member. What we're doing is extremely intimate. We're asking them to examine their teaching practices, to examine their pedagogy, to make themselves vulnerable by asking for help, to make themselves vulnerable, particularly on the academic technology side, to try new things, to take risks that could fail spectacularly. And so there's a lot of intimacy in that and there's a lot of emotional and affective labor that goes into it. And it is a degree of care work. And it's complicated care work because as people pointed out in the comments, there is a asymmetrical power dynamic, between faculty and staff. Where we are, that the faculty often view themselves as above staff. Then if you go by institutional hierarchy and academic hierarchy, that's the case. And so that there's that particular amount of affective labor and care work that goes into it, is how do I maneuver these complicated relationship structures and systems in place in order to have a productive relationship with this faculty member in order to improve their teaching. So all of that is rolled into this work. Student services staff, much more care work probably. I mean, I don't know if you read it, but Chronicle did a piece called team no sleep, hashtag team no sleep, focusing on the stresses that student services professionals are facing right now, given the pandemic. And it's a lot of care work, right? It's a lot of caring for these students and being the support mechanism and the infrastructure in place to help these students, not just succeeding college, but sometimes just survive, right? That's a lot of care work that is going. So there's definitely, definitely intersections in that. And I think in a lot of cases, we're saying the same things using slightly different language based on our audience for that language. I don't know if in academia, care work would be as accepted a term for academics where affective labor, they're like, oh yeah, affective labor, I get that. So I think it's a, there are intersections, there's definitely things that are different about it, but it's also semantics and knowing who your audience is. That's a great answer. And Vanessa, as always, a very, very deep probe and question, thank you. Speaking of questions, we have a whole bunch coming in right now, which is fantastic. And hello to those who've just come in. Glad to see all of you, like Greta Jenkins, Rick Rio, Ryan Thivet, Michael Fried, George Station, Clarissa Goodhouse, Neroxan, that's so good to see all of you. Let me just bring these up. I'm trying to group them so that they fit certain themes. One of them comes from Mathieu Pleurde at Université de Laval. So we get our Quebec angle for you. Thank you. Thank you, Mathieu. When will we hit the tipping point where enough faculty will have had enough digital skills to change the convo from click here to turn on the audio to how to enhance the student learning experience? It depends on your institutional culture, I think. Previously, I was at, before going to Georgetown, I was at University of Mary Washington, which was the home and the, you know, where Jim Groom used to work and founded with Marta Burtis and Tim and all of those wonderful people at DTLT who founded Domain of One Zone and instituted Domain of One Zone. And before that, they had done the UMW blogs. It was the first multi-site for education using WordPress for that reason at UMW. And so culturally at UMW, they were already ahead of the curve, right? They were going through that transformation for that. They in fact, incorporated digital fluency into their strategic plan. And now it's completely incorporated into the curriculum as one of the Gen Ed requirements that students have to take digitally fluent courses, which also means that the faculty, and the faculty, I was already at Georgetown, but faculty didn't balk at all. Faculty were like, yes, this is important and we should totally do that. And so the faculty were ready and asking questions. Are there still click here to turn it on? Always, right? But there was a plurality of faculty who were like, no, we know technology can be used to enhance learning. And we wanna start really working at it and doing it. But it was embedded in the culture that took 20 years, not to sound pessimistic, but it was probably in the early 2000, 15 years. It was in the early 2000s that they started doing the blog multi-site. And it was 2015 that they put out the new strategic plan. And it was 2019, maybe 2018 when they created the new Gen Ed requirement for digital fluency. So I don't know, there's a tremendous opportunity I was saying about COVID is that at least at our institution, and I've heard this from colleagues all over the place, suddenly people who'd never come to the Treating and Learning Center, people who have never used technology before suddenly are coming in and seeking our help. I think we saw what was it, 85% of our faculty and teaching staff, including adjuncts came through and did our summer series of training institutes. We won Rand Weekly's training institutes. That's unprecedented, right? The teaching and learning centers, you're hoping to get a handful of faculty who self-select every year. And it's usually the same handful. We got a tremendous amount of new people that we were able to level up, right? To go from zero to maybe not where we want them to be, certainly a lot further along than they were. And so it's how do we seize on this momentum and change the conversation on our campus through these kinds of structures to be able to get from, how do I turn this on to, yes, we really wanna do digital experimental learning and digital fluency and all those kinds of things. I think looking at the model of UMW and how they did it is really, really instructive. I think that actually ties in really nicely with a question from our long-term ally, friend, and source of good information about technology, puns, and government, Tom Haynes. Hello, Tom from the Blue Room. How are you doing? All right, I'm wearing my camo today. I could take the camouflage. You had a great question about the pandemic here in various modes. And I think that just chimes in perfectly with what Lee was just talking about. Yeah, so one of the things that I have been playing with in my head a lot lately is that, in my own mind, somehow this dichotomy between online and in-person needs to go away. And that we need to worry about a spectrum of tools available to us as teachers and just use whatever is most appropriate to do the job that's at hand and not to be boxed, dropped into arbitrary boxes as this is an online class and they all shall do it this way. This is an in-person class and they all shall do it this way. And I'm wondering what your impression is as to how much we've eroded those walls over the last year and or going forward in the future what potential there is for that. Cause I'm really interested in trying to slide that. I mean, I think the future is hybrid. I don't, I mean, whatever that means. I mean, the reality is if you teach face-to-face without any sort of online component whatsoever there's something very broken there. And that was very obvious when everybody had to go online. I don't think we're going back to that. So technically that's already hybrid, you know. So, but I'm just wondering where you see that as going and having gone at Georgetown or more generally? Again, I'm going to say it depends. For Georgetown, I'm really optimistic. At least in terms of embracing more in different modalities, rethinking pedagogy, rethinking on how they incorporate technology. I don't know how many faculty, and again, these are self-selecting faculty who come to candles events and all of that saying like, I did this because of the pandemic and because of remote learning. And I'm going to keep doing it once we go back to the face-to-face classroom. I am never doing X and Y again. I'm going to keep using many lecturers to use asynchronously or smaller breakout rooms or breakout groups. I'm going to use Jamboard and Google Docs more. I'm going to do all of these things. Our institution is unique as well that it like culturally that it was decided that there would not be any online courses for traditional undergraduate students during the regular academic year. Now, this isn't to say we don't offer summer online courses and of course we have a whole slate of online courses for the school of continuing studies, graduate programs, certificate programs. I don't know if that's going to change, right? This is, that's a deeply culturally entrenched aspect of the Georgetown experience of whatever your campus may be and what that experience looks like. Now, I do see a more openness to digital tools, digital technologies, rethinking pedagogy, rethinking delivery in a more hybrid mode. But I don't know if it will ever change where, yes, let's do a hack of a lot more online courses. Other places, I think it was already starting to happen and I think suddenly you have a lot more faculty who are on board with it rather than just seeing it as a pain in the butt, something that they had to do or something that they do to earn a little bit more money but something that is now integral to the mission of the university. I think there's also people, I think one of the other things is that faculty in particular are being really faced with the inequities that our students experience and that doing online and hybrid isn't, it isn't enough just to have the will to do it. There has to be the infrastructure in place to support the students. So I think that that is one of the bigger hurdles to overcome because I think we've all leveled up as faculty and as institutions but our students haven't necessarily leveled up in terms of their access to the proper technology, to the enough bandwidth, to any of that kind of stuff. I used to work in rural Eastern Kentucky and you left the town, the town that the college was in, you couldn't get high speed internet access and that's still the case. I don't even know how these students are doing it right now. But you have your camera on and make sure you come to your Zoom meeting and stay for the whole three hours. Like it's confronting the limitations of technology, it's confronting our own limitations on how we view online learning or remote learning or whatever it is. And I think that, and it's also changed our view I think of our students. Some of us were more aware than others but I think there is more of an awareness and I think all of that stuff has to come together in a conversation that institutions are gonna have because we can't go back to the status quo but at the same time, we can't keep doing what we're doing either because it is so inequitable. And I'm just being a bit... And honestly, I'm surprised hearing that. The little truth in advertising, I did my grad school at Georgetown and I taught both of my master's degrees are from there and I taught as a TA in Georgetown and I now teach at a community college. And the difference in infrastructure, I mean, of course I'm thinking in the 1990s but Georgetown was actually one of the first places where I seriously encountered the internet and using pine and links. But the coming hearing in 2020 from you that or 2021 now from you that Georgetown students are struggling with technology ramp up is really kind of surprising to me and a little bit troubling because if you guys are having problems, I know what my students are facing. And I started with that assumption and I personally think one of the big reasons that community colleges have been hit particularly hard by the enrollment drops has been because of that technology question at the student end. And I think we're making a huge mistake administratively in colleges that serve more diverse populations and not really pushing the, will help you no matter what. We'll make sure you have Wi-Fi, we'll make sure you have a laptop or something that's a usable technology device to get you through this class because I think a lot of my students are like, I'm not doing this because I don't have the thing, the other things aside, just getting past that basic step. But yeah, okay, that's an interesting thought. I mean, I'm really always very much into systemic things and no Brian and I and our friend Ruben talk about systems all the time. And this idea that the systems may start to shift a little bit toward a more fluid environment for different kind of modalities when it comes to technology and is intriguing to me and I'm just curious how widespread that is. That's a bigger question, Brian. We might want to ask the larger community as well. I want to thank you, Tom, for the questions. So just to say, I did a panel at the Modern Languages Association where we were talking about the remote and online learning with colleagues of mine who are both literary scholars and in these various positions. And one of them, one of my colleagues who teaches at a small private liberal arts college, very small private liberal arts college, he was completely cynical about it. As soon as we're back in the classroom, all of these faculty are telling me they're just going back to the way things were. So I think it really depends on, again, institutional culture in that sort of sense in terms of just how they're going to do it. Unfortunately, that's not a great answer, but I think there will be shifts. And I think the universities that thrive post-pandemic are the ones who are most able to make that shift. But then again, there might be the outliers that parents are going to send their kids to because it's back to high touch, low technology. That's what they're looking for for their kids. And it's the great thing about the U.S. Well, hopefully still great thing about the U.S. higher education system is the diversity of it. But I think technology allows us to push a lot of the cruft off to the side, the logistics and all that stuff and a lot of the content off to the side so that you may only be spending 20% of your time with the students, but that's a very intense, focused 20% where you're worried about their needs, their concerns, they're helping them as opposed to, yeah, you need to watch my lecture. You need to listen to me lecture on this subject. I've got that recorded. You can watch that anytime, right? So, you know, I just feel like there's huge advantages to this that we, that I'm seeing, I'm just wondering if anybody else is seeing them. One more piece to that comes from the chat, Matthew Pleard notices that faculty might want to come back, but students may demand something different. Yeah. Tom, thank you. Yeah, I know, yeah, exactly. But we got to get past this thing that, you know, you were asking about online cheaper tuition and stuff, that online is somehow inferior and that's a silly question in a way because it's what you do with the tool. Online can be incredibly superior if you do it right to in-person. There's a lot of things I can do online that I can't do in-person. Well, let's... I can have Brian come to my class. Well, that may not be superior, but Tom, thank you. We have a lot of questions coming from the one that... Yeah, thank you. I've stopped monopolizing the stage. Thank you. Thank you. And again, thank you for the answers. And of course, those of you who are cat fans can see one of my cats desperately climbing me because she always wants to be on the screen. We had a question that came in from Sarah Sangrigoria and I'll put this on the screen here. She asks, so many faculty support people are stuck on an island of their own in a team of three or four or one. Do you have any specific tips for these types of folks who had a lot even before the pandemic? Oh, that's a really good question. Find allies on campus. Who else is doing the work? Who else is being approached to do the work? Are there opportunities to collaborate with IT, with the library, with... You know, we have a whole unit for classroom technology. Again, I did like... It's hard because Georgetown... I know Georgetown is an outlier. I mean, we got an office for everything. We have people for everything. And even then, we're all still overworked and exhausted. But it was really heartening to see when we made this shift, that unit. So to give an example, we have a classroom educational technology services unit. And their job is to take care of the technology in the classrooms. Well, we didn't have classrooms anymore. So what did they do? They said, you know what? If the classrooms are now in Zoom, we're going to do Zoom support, right? And so anytime faculty have trouble with Zoom, they can come directly to us and we will troubleshoot. If they want to test things in Zoom, we will test things in Zoom with them. Did people still come to us with Zoom questions? You bet they did. But there was another resource on campus that they said, we can take care of this. And so it's finding those people on campus who are already doing some of the stuff and just saying, hey, is there a way we can collaborate to make all of our lives a little bit easier? Also, just getting to be able to talk to different people. That's really nice and helpful and supportive. But the other thing, and this is complicated and this is hard, depending on your position within the institution, sometimes we have to say no, right? We do not have the capacity to do this. Can we do something else instead? You know, we have to... And this is complicated to say it. I'm in a privileged position to say it, and a lot of you will probably say, nope, can't do that with my administration. And I totally get that. But to know your own capacity, to know your team's capacity, and to be able to push back, hopefully with some data, and just say, this is not feasible. We can't do this. Here's what we can do, but we can't do this. And let the administration know just how bad it is. And hope that makes a difference. Now, again, I don't know if it will or if you could even do that, but we've got to be better. We're so used to being in a deficit mindset within higher education where we're all scratching and clawing for our little piece of the limited pie. And it's even worse in some ways during the pandemic because all of our budgets are just being clawed back to nothing. Furloughs and hiring freezes and even loss of staff because staff are easier to fire than faculty are. But we still need to think about how we respond to these requests and how we make clear to our administrators the work that we're actually doing in our capacity because at a certain point, you just have to say, look, if you're going to burn us out, you're not going to have a teaching center anymore because we can't do it. So being able to make those cases and make those arguments, it's not just, I'm saying no, but here's our capacity. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we can manage. Sarah, thank you for the question. And Leigh, I love where you took that, where you took the labor theme and really, really deepened it. We have a bunch more questions and I'm afraid we might not be able to get to all of them. I talk a lot. I apologize. Why are you here? And we're absolutely delighted to hear. So some of these might be easier to wrangle. I'm going to try and clump them together as best we can. This is from Kate Montgomery at SMU who asks, you see an increase in staff taking on adjunct or contingent faculty assignments. Have you seen a trend towards increase in those types of roles? I haven't. To be honest, we're, if anything, staff are saying no to these kinds of things where they would typically adjunct, but now it's just like I don't have the capacity to do that right now. I haven't seen it. I honestly haven't seen it increased. Now that might vary by institution, but certainly in my institution and my circles that I'm in that hasn't been, that hasn't been a trend that I've seen. Okay. Good question. Interesting questions. I'm going to keep an eye out for it. And we had another question here that comes from Mark Corbett Wilson. Hello, Mark. Where does the curve of the decline of enrollment institutional survival intersect with that 15 year technology learning curve we just described? Hopefully, hopefully before they go before it closes. I think it really depends on the institution. I mean, some institutions, and we've seen it, you've been tracking it, Brian, and I always tag you when I see one. There are institutions that were right before, that were right on the brink before the pandemic happened and it just sent them over, right? There was just no way for them to survive this. They couldn't financially do it. There are some places that don't see the curve and will keep on keeping on the way things were as the pandemic is over and just stubbornly go forward and hope and then there'll be the places that have the will but also the funding and support, particularly if they're public institutions to be able to get up onto that curve. Thank you. That's a good question, Mark. And thank you for that. And Lee, thank you for the, of course, a very good answer. Rachel Barlow over at Wesleyan, who's an Associate Director of Assessment there, has a really good question too. What have you observed about how the relationship between academic staff and faculty slash admins has changed in the past 10 years? And I think by admins she means senior admins. Yeah. I think the pandemic has changed it. I think it has made visible the amount of work that we do to support students and faculty. You know, I think that and then this is maybe a gross exaggeration but you know, I have a lot of friends who are faculty and very often faculty don't think of the larger infrastructure of the university that supports everything that they do, right? They might know the granting office because that's where they get their money from and have to go through them. But very rarely did they have a good understanding of student services that are available on campus and those kinds of things. With an increased awareness I have not seen the culture shift yet. I'm hoping that there is one. But I haven't seen it yet. We're still part of the problem. It seems like we're talking a part about this fast moving crisis. It's barely a year old but at the same time we're dealing with some long-term trend lines. Tobin has a great question about this. But first, Sally Muriamu has this really important observation that just connects with right what you're saying right now. Our teaching and learning center is 100% funded by a fee that students pay for courses that are called online. Students are unhappy. There's a false dichotomy between remote and online. It's just a really interesting observation, Sally. Yeah. Thank you. More questions are coming in and friends you saw with Tom before, that's how we do video questions. So if you'd like Tom did, you don't have to wear blue necessarily. But you can come in. Just press that raised hand button and we'll be happy to bring you up. So one question that has come up here has to do with the digital divide. And I'm glad to hear this. Christine Moore from Phoenix College asks what about our staff who are part of the digital divide? And the fear, concern, the basis of their work has been in-person service to students. I think that there are always going to be things that face-to-face is preferable to online. But what we're seeing increasingly is that most of the faculty that I've talked to, just to give an example, will be like I'll do in-person office hours, but you can rest assured I'm going to do zoom office hours too still. Because the zoom office hours have been way more popular than their in-person office hours ever were. So I think that there are opportunities for consultations that happen remotely for some of that work to happen remotely. But everyone once this is over I think is going to be craving to be able to go someplace to talk to someone. That's our biggest frustration. Everybody's like chat bots are the answer and I'm like well everybody wants somebody to go to and talk to at the end of the day. So I think that I think there still is a staff divide in terms of the digital readiness. But I think that again a lot of us have had to level up and figure out how to do our jobs remotely and hopefully we can take what we've learned and incorporate that into our daily practices once things are back to somewhat normal and say okay well how can I do this better? How can we do this better? That's a great question to unite everybody I think. Just a reference back to a previous question Michael Tassio says he's been blessed to hire underemployed agents into staff roles supporting remote instruction. So they're able to support their knowledge about their team and their time of need. So that's fascinating Michael. If you have anything more you can share on that I'd love to hear it. Friends we're down to the last nine minutes so I want to make sure that we get to hit all the great high points and you are all a fountain of really good thoughtful questions. So I want to make sure that we get to get to address as many of them as we possibly can. This is from our awesome Roxanne who asks what do you see instructional designers and learning experience designers as more significant and necessary now beyond course redesign facilitated by the pandemic? Well I think I'm going to go by the acronym for faculty developers the acronym for the national organization for faculty developers is actually the professional organizational and development group so POD. And we're really great on the development part we're not so great at the organizational part not because we don't have the skills but because the infrastructure doesn't exist to include thus in the organizational changes and I think that's where learning experience designers instructional designers academic technologists can play a huge role going forward that if we're doing if we're reimagining the university and how we deliver education I don't like saying deliver education but how we educate there we go how we educate our students and engage our students then I think we should we need to play a crucial role in that design process bringing our years of experience our expertise our skill sets into that conversation because I think that it would be it would be tragic not to right then you end up in the situation where and I write about this lot where I want us to be active in the process not just the people responsible for delivering it so when they come in with the vision and say okay now make it happen and you had zero input in it and you look at it after the fact and go so make any sense like I can do this but I already know it's not going to work right so that's where I see our expertise hopefully being able to be used and harnessed is in this massive conversation that is going to be taking place around how do we best serve students how do we best educate students which is a great direction for the conversation to go in but right now I want to yank that conversation sideways because we have a question that goes back to another one of your many abilities Lee and this came from Julie Severs and she asked she's curious about the process of pitching your writing series to the Chronicle Higher Education especially because the Chronicles Focus seems to be on faculty so how did you do that how did you manage to get the Chronicle to publish your writing about staff so I don't know if you know David M. Perry L. O. Lawlard Fish he's quite he's wrote for the Chronicle for a while and actually wrote a piece probably about a year ago now I don't know it has no meaning anymore I don't know was it last year or three years ago I have no idea about bullying of staff and you know I of course take to Twitter and I'm like ranting and raving about staff issues and you know or retweeted and getting the conversations on Twitter about these things and he reached out to me and said well you know they're looking for someone to write about staff issues more at the Chronicle I can put you in touch with my editor there and he's like I just don't have the capacity to do it and I think you'd be good at it and I said oh okay so he put me in touch and the editor said all right well send me something so I sent her something and she well then the pandemic happened and so I sent stuff about online learning and remote teaching and then said well I think it's a good time to start talking about staff issues and she's like yep send me the stuff and so I sent it and she said nope this is great I think it will be really good okay so I've been really lucky like all the way back to my days at writing at Inside Higher Ed and having a blog there is that I've had people who have advocated for me and who have introduced me to the editors and believed in my writing to be able to say you should have a larger platform here let me help amplify you and you know so it's and I also don't get I don't get worked up about these things I think I'm pretty chill about the whole thing where it's just like it's chronicle which helps it's like that's good enough let me send it and see what happens so it took a long time I've been doing this since 2010 now I just passed year 10 of writing on the internet so it's been a lot of practice too that's a great very very practical answer Rachel thank you for sharing a link to the piece about bullying George Station notes in chat that this shows the continuing importance of the personal learning network and that's definitely there yeah social media might be evil but I can't quit twitter that's my whole network that's my professional learning network that's those are you know I wouldn't be where I was if it weren't for the people on twitter and so it's kind of hard to if you tell me where everyone on twitter is going to go I'll go there but so far there hasn't been one so I'm staying in twitter I hear that it was Kate Montgomery who asked the question about staff adjuncts before so Kate I wanted to thank you and that was the response back to that coming back to another earlier point of yours I just want to make sure that we don't lose Lee you're speaking so eloquently before about affective labor and Jeff Rosdale who's library director of Manhattan will college asks this to the extent that it's appropriate or inevitable that staff will be asking you more affective work during the covid pandemic how can staff be trained and or prepare to navigate that successfully that's a really great question that is the a million dollar question I think that one of the first steps is to recognize that it is labor and that is skilled labor that requires training and and recognition right I think the first step is really to to acknowledge it to name it that was one of the things I were about affective labor and covid-19 for edge cause that one's free to I wrote about two pieces for edge cause for that and you know the response was overwhelming because people were writing mean tweeting mean saying finally I have a name for it finally I understand why I'm so exhausted you know finally all of these things and so I think a lot of people just didn't understand what was happening I don't think our administration really has gotten their heads around that and so that's the kind of first step because once you acknowledge it as something then you can start develop programming around it right workshops support support groups for lack of a better word we give teaching circles to support teachers in their pedagogy why don't we have the same thing where we have staff members together talking about affective labor and how we handle these situations you know we're we're good at developing faculty we're not necessarily as good at developing ourselves sometimes and so to create the space which is hard to do in a pandemic obviously because we no one has any time for it but how do we create the space for these conversations to happen to happen productively and then figure out what it is that the staff needs right because staff needs will differ by unit by institution type you know I imagine staff have a much different place like Georgetown than they would at Moorhead State where I used to work right because it's a much different student population and so okay well what is it that we need well that's a great question to ask here right at the very end as we start to come almost completely over the edge of the hour we're good at developing faculty not so great developing ourselves that's quite an observation we had a bunch of questions I do more with teaching and pedagogy and but I want to make sure we didn't get the ah there is one more staff question here and this is from Charles Findlay at Northeastern who asks how can the university provide upscaling faculty in the technology in their own disciplines not just embracing technology for teaching and learning I think it's it's modeling it's finding the faculty who are doing it because there are faculty who are doing it and sometimes they're doing it in almost secret particularly in the before times where particularly early early career faculty who are worried about senior professors viewing their teaching as radical and therefore voting against for tenure or making that problematic so in a lot of cases you would find one or two almost every department who are doing great things but didn't talk about it we're totally low key about it because of the institutional culture that existed so find the people who are doing it at your institution because they're there and give them opportunities to share their experience and their expertise with their colleagues and value it and if the university says they value it their colleagues are going to come around to it but if the university doesn't value it there's no way the disciplines are ever going to value it either you know almost everyone has almost every discipline also has some journals specialized in teaching and learning but again we typically view scholarship in the teaching and learning as less than scholarship versus hard research within the discipline you know that's a whole other a whole other change that needs to take place within the disciplines is valuing be it with technology or not valuing research on teaching and learning and experimentation and growth in this area but you know the disciplines and the institutional always don't value that and so of course they're not going to so you're fighting an uphill battle where it's like you know I want you guys to get passionate about teaching and they're like well here are my 10 year requirements teaching is somewhere down here and I also know that my department is not a huge fan of these things so where's my motivation to do this right and so those are the kinds of things that I think about when we think about cultural changes is that they want to hear from their peers they want to hear from comparable institution types but you also have to change in a lot of cases unfortunately disciplinary and institutional culture that has long devalued teaching but we are here definitely to value the academic staff and we found that with your help today Leigh learned a great deal thank you so much we're just past the end of the hour so I have to wrap things up we now know from your confession that the best way to keep up with you is both through your chronicle columns as well as through your twitter feed is that the best way to keep up with you yeah so if you follow me ready writing R-E-A-D-Y-W-R-I-T-I-N-G and Brian tags me has been tagging me for all of the promotions for this so you'll find me there too if you find Brian everything I do I share on twitter literally so it's a bit much but I certainly share the links to all of my writings when I appear on podcasts anything that I do I typically share it over share on twitter so that is the best place and my blog as well readywriting.org there's a link to that down the bottom left hand corner of the screen thank you so much thank you so much for this opportunity thank you all for coming and your wonderful questions really I love this it pushes my thinking especially during the pandemic when you don't get to talk to a lot of people and so you get all stuck up in your head in a lot of cases it really pushes my thinking to challenge me and I really appreciate that oh great glad to please give us a hug from us oh he's still on my lap I'm surprised I can't hear him softly snoring there bye bye but don't go everybody else on that wonderful note of snugliness and warmth thank you all for all of your comments today we just point out a couple of things before we go what is that for the next five weeks we've got a whole series of great sessions again just go to tinyurl.com slash forum 2021 to see those if you'd like to keep talking about these issues about economic staff we have all kinds of venues on social media including LinkedIn and Facebook as well as Twitter and if you'd like to go back into the past and look at our previous discussions about everything from domain of one's own to adjunct faculty just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive to learn more about our forum about our reports check out these two links especially if you want to learn more about Shindig in the meantime let me thank you all again for your great thoughts your great discussion today it's been a pleasure talking with all of you this is still a crazy time please take care of yourselves stay safe and I'll see you all online bye bye