 I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome you. Welcome everybody to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator. I'm its host. I'm its cat herder for the next hour, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation for community session today. This is one of our all two rare events where we don't have a guest. In fact, our guest is all of you. The idea here is instead of having one expert, the idea is to share all of our expertise on a particular subject. And this subject is what we are expecting for the year 2022. What do the next 12 months hold for you? What are your hopes? What are your fears? What are your plans? What would you like help with? What would you like networking with? This session is an open mic for you to share all of that. And if you're new to the Forum, please know this is a welcoming, warm and friendly place. We're really here for all of you. And just to begin with, like if I slide out of the way, I promised I would, one bit of research I've been working on with a few friends has to do with how campuses are changing their January class efforts. That is, the class is going to be in person or online. Right now, we estimate that nearly 100 American colleges and universities have some or all of their classes online for some or all of January. Sounds like a lot. It's about two and a half percent of the total. There are some leading institutions there, like Stanford. And they're all over the US now, West, Southeast, Midwest, Northeast. But that seems like a minority position. It seems that instead, overall, most colleges and universities are beginning this year with face-to-face instruction with different degrees of PPE, different degrees of social distancing, mediation, and so on. So just to begin with, I want to put that on the table and say this is a space for you to talk about your coronavirus concerns, plans, hopes, and how you're all doing. NOAA is a CU at Colorado University, starting a road for the first two weeks. We'd love to hear your thoughts. And oh, thank you, NOAA, that's really good to know. I can add that to our list if we don't already have that. That's a really important one. By the way, this research, this is a spreadsheet that is crowdsourced. We have people coming in. We have a dozen people at a time. It seems like adding more and more information as we go and as things change and develop. So what just happened there, with one of you suggesting or pointing out the development, that sounds great. Thank you very much. The last thing I had was that CU Boulder wouldn't alter its planning. So I'm really grateful to hear that. Thanks. And Tom, as you can share with me a link, that would be good as well. Now, for everybody else, I just put that table on the table right there and people seem interested in it. Diane Deusterhoff. Please, Diane, forgive me for trying to do your Dutch-looking name, trying to do it right. St. Mary's has delayed the charter classes. So they're going to be face-to-face, just not online. But delayed, got it. A lot of campuses are doing that. Doyle, first thing you mentioned is in Kentucky, that the public universities are also delaying. They are face-to-face, not online, but delaying the charter classes. So that's another option to track. Jody Green points out that most University of California campuses and most California State universities are now starting remote. Jody, what happened to change the CSU frame of mind? It looked like they began this semester breaking apart from the UCs, trying to start late or to start at a different time. What happened to change their mind? I can bring you up on stage, just so that people don't get to hear from me all the time. You can tell me what you're thinking about. Hello, Jody. Hey, it's good to see you, Diane. It's good to see you. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you too. And yeah, I think a lot of people know most of the UCs are on the quarter system. And so we had to make some decisions in December, a little bit ahead of other schools. Obviously, Stanford is our neighbor here in Santa Cruz where I'm located. And so we were very aware of their decision. I think it's not entirely well understood why some campuses are making this choice. It's not exactly about safety. And I see in the public discourse that it's often thought to be, like, why can't you just understand that people are not going to get so sick. But it actually has to do with institutional capacity. It has to do with how many isolation beds we have. It has to do with whether we can, if we bring 9,000 people back and then the dining hall workers get sick, how are we to feed those 9,000 students? And the other thing that really went heavily into our considerations was we really didn't want to start in person and then have large numbers of students unable to attend in person because we think that blended synchronous is not a particularly good way to teach and it's very hard on instructors. And so if you imagine a class where only a third to a half of the students could attend in person because the rest of them are in isolation, we wanted to avoid that. So we have started with a two week remote. I think a number of the UCs will be announcing today that they're actually doing the whole month of January. Some of that depends on whether or not they have a medical center. And it's interesting to me that the CSUs, which of course were very early in announcing that they were going remote for last year, that even though they're on the semester system, we were informed today that most of those campuses have decided to do remote instruction into the first week of February. And I guess the last thing I'll say is, on the West Coast, our surge is expected to kind of peak in the third to fourth week of January. So East Coast schools have already maybe had their peak. And so we're also trying to think about if those numbers are really gonna peak at that, not for another week or two, how do we make sure that we don't bring everybody back and try to force an in-person campus when we know that we don't have a medical center or enough medical professionals to take care of everybody in isolation. So it's safety and institutional capacity which overlap but aren't the same things. They're not the same thing. No, and people keep explaining to me that we're not gonna get that sick. And I'm like, I know we're not gonna get that sick, but we still have to have enough people. Someone, our registrar yesterday, said that his husband works for the airlines. And he said, I wish that universities would learn from what's happening with the airlines that they do not want to try to come back in force and then not have a staff to keep the university running. So the airlines are learning that the hard way right now as are our travelers. By the way, Jodi has not only been a great feature transform guest. You can find her show in our archive, but she's also the main instigator of our collaborative spreadsheet. She's the presiding genius over it. And I'm really grateful to her for doing so much organizational and leadership work and making that happen. Jodi, can I keep you on stage for a minute and bring up a couple of other folks? Yes. Because we've got some wonderful people here even though Tom Hames has just made the brilliantly horrible joke of Omicron dinner parties as in Donner parties, rather. But let's, I want to add a Canadian friend, Mathieu Plourde, coming to us from Quebec. And Mathieu mentioned that University of Paris Laval is starting online. But also Mathieu, from what I can tell, it looks like a whole bunch of Canadian universities are starting online. Yeah, absolutely. What's the Canadian thinking here? Is it the same or is there something different going on? I think that it's kind of a, it's mostly hospitals that are struggling. Like we're struggling with a surge and then other provinces, since all the institutions are public in Canada, a lot of, like basically they got guidelines that they have to shut down. Because even if Omicron is not as bad in terms of hospitalization than like this variety of the cases, you're still, they're still struggling with understaffing in the health system. Also a lot of the people in the health system have Omicron and can't go to work. And now we're starting to actually see like the guidelines for five days isolation instead of 10 and that kind of stuff. So they want to get people back in their workplace as fast as possible. So we're following the same guidelines as the CDC a couple of days ago and stuff like that. So because we're understaffed like all over the place, that's basically what's guiding everything around what we're doing with the school closures and the online remote stuff and whatever. Now, when you say we are moving to the five-day lockdown instead of the 10, is that just Quebec or is it the whole nation? I think that every province has their own guidelines when it comes to, because the healthcare is actually provincial. So it really depends on what every province is going to decide. But in Quebec, they're looking at it. I don't know if it was announced or whatever. I know they were looking at it. But then we're basically in, we have a curfew. We can't invite people in our houses. We have a curfew at 10 p.m. in Quebec. So people can't be on the road between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. So we're pretty much back to what we were. They were actually even closing all the businesses on Sundays to give people a break and stuff like that. It's pretty severe. So, well, first of all, please be safe. Take care of yourself. Jodi, this sounds like another instance or adding to the idea of capacity. In this case, it's not just the university capacity, but also the general healthcare capacity. Yes, totally. I mean, we have a, in the Kaiser system in the Bay Area, we have a 41% positivity rate for symptomatic folks. At least a 17% to 20% positivity rate for asymptomatic folks. And I just heard from a dear friend who works in public health epidemiology that at least one ER is going to have to close for five days because so many people have COVID. What? Oh, an ER? Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Wow. And the, well, thank you. Thank you both for sharing this. I don't mean yay, that's happy news, but I mean, this is important. We need to know this as we're making decisions and as we're walking through this. In the chat, we've had a few different comments. Tiffany McLennan says every Nova Scotian university is starting online, most until January 25 or 30. John Hollandeck says his son at York is 50-50 live online, which is another way of approaching this. We've got quite a few different institutional strategies, it seems, right now. And Brian, I would just also say for quarter schools in the U.S., just so that the full range of what the considerations are well understood, we have a holiday in the U.S. on January 17th. We have a three-day weekend. And so there was also a concern that if folks traveled for, if students primarily traveled for the three-day weekend, that we would just start the wave of infections again. And so another part of the, initially we had wanted the students to come back right at the start of January. And then we'd have two weeks to kind of get them tested and get them through any little surge. But then when we realized they would, many of them would go away at the end of that two weeks for the MLK weekend, it seemed better to bring them back around the 24th of January and then try to get started on the 31st. Well, this is, and this is coming after the winter travel season, where, now, just to be clear, Matthew and Jodi, you're talking about cases and you're speaking about infections right now when you're talking about rising numbers. I mean, the- Hospitalizations are a big concern in Quebec. It's not even the infections. They basically give it up on PCR testing. They just said, we're just keeping those for the healthcare workers and the vulnerable populations, like the old folks and stuff like that. Everybody else has just used the rapid tests and self-isolate and you don't even have to report. So most of the numbers that are reported are probably like, it's probably three or four times more people which are getting infected than what the reports are saying. Well, this is a pretty pretty- It's just, it's too early for us yet to know about what's going to happen with hospitalizations. We've really just started the Omicron rise on the West Coast, although that 41% is telling us that we're getting into it here. But New York I noticed is going up by about 400 hospitalizations a day and so that tells us that it's not, this is not a benign disease for some people, although it will be benign for many of us. Also a really interesting thing out of the Mayo Clinic yesterday about people who are only test positive for 48 hours and that that's a completely new wrinkle to this. Well, this is a, there's a lot of data here that we have to work through. There's a lot of data that we have to grapple with and a lot of it is just emerging and often perceived through a pretty wide range of lenses that aren't always reliable. It's really important to be able to have, for us to keep our eye on all of this very carefully. I just threw in the chat, there's a link to a page I've been maintaining for a couple of years on resources for tracking data on this. But just to just remind everybody where the stage where overcron is on a per case basis seems to be less likely to cause tissue damage, death than its previous strains. On the other hand, it's much more infectious. So we have this interesting case where depending on how these numbers work out, we may see a greater surge overall of hospitalizations and deaths. This is still early and we're still trying to model this. In the chat, a couple of people have asked about mapping this and I thought I would just quickly show you this. This is a very DIY object you're about to look at. And here, let me just put this. This is a quick Google map of all the colleges and universities in the United States and Canada that have closed, or sorry, that have classes online. It's incomplete right now. It's behind a couple of days. And the Canadian one is woefully incomplete. That's just a question of me getting time to hit copy and paste and save. But you can see that it's already now pretty widespread within the US. You can see the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Southeast all have instances in the West Coast in particular. You can see Hawaii too because the University of Hawaii is there. At a more ambitious level, I tried to map this under Google Earth. So that looks a little more lovely. But you can still see the spread of light blue dots across all of that. So thank you for the question. And we'll keep updating that as we go. There have been more questions that have come up and I want to make sure people get a chance to ask them. And you know, Tom Haynes does this thing where he puts in a question and then I just say, I'm not going to listen to your question. I'm going to bring you up on stage because you're off. And we need to hear from you. Hello, Tom. Good afternoon or morning wherever you happen to be. So my question is a bit of a topic switch. Instead of the firefighting here and now, I was curious, looking forward, whether anybody was seeing any kind of interesting class modalities, class structures that have come in a post-pandemic world, things like shortened terms, amorphous terms, fluid moving from in-person to online, those kind of things. I'm just kind of curious, what do you think has changed at your institution? I'm throwing this open to everybody in the group. You know, what do you think has changed in your institution in terms of how we view what a course of study actually is in this environment and going forward? Yeah, I'm going to do a quick answer, and then I'll get off the stage because other people should get up here. But thanks a lot for raising that question, Tom. And one thing that we've seen a lot more interest from students in online offerings. And one thing that we're really thinking about is how can we sort of get engagement at the bit, including from students and residents. So how can we use the first week of the term to possibly have them meet in person? And my colleague, Michael Tassio, is here who knows much more about this than I do. But use engagement in the beginning of the term, we saw real increases in the outcomes in a course where we had students come in person at the beginning and then have a relationship with their instructors and then beyond all, this is particularly critical for early career courses. I will say, as my Parthian shot, that the biggest concern that we have right now is how are we going to language to students that we are an in-person university, except when they're taking actual online classes and that we can't offer remote attendance in in-person courses because we now have a lot of students who want to attend in-person classes remotely. And we just, I just don't think we are, we collectively are there yet. I don't think that the design principles, I don't think we have the technology, I don't think we have the faculty remuneration. I don't think we have anything in place and yet students and their families are absolutely wanting to be able to phone it in. Well, I'll leave that one on the table. Well, I mean, the flip side of that with some students is that they don't have the technology. And that's been an ongoing struggle throughout remote teaching. So I mean, you can't forget that either. A lot of institutions, I teach at a community college, so that's really the bigger fight there. Yeah. Maybe I think if I can add to that, I've just had a couple of conversations recently with some faculty that are going to be starting that flipped remote, emergency remote semester. And basically they're asking, well, if I was supposed to teach in class and I'm going to start the first three weeks remotely and I just keep going remotely, people are going to say that. And it's like, we always have students who are going to make the decision not to show up anyway. So why can't you just keep going? So I feel like faculty are also going to see that doing high flex and going into classroom is not going to give them that much. But at the same time, it's like, basically it's always the same problem with a lot of these things. It's the people who have done the most effort to deploy good pedagogy that are actually going to be punished by this. Because people who have used the face-to-face class to do a real, real interesting experience where there's a lot of engagement, a lot of stuff like that, that's when you try to translate that into an online course, that's where it fails. So you get basically our good teachers are the ones who are getting kind of cornered by this. Because now they're asked to do something that's like in between, that's like the worst of both worlds when you're doing high flex. And trying to figure out are you keep engagement when you have half of your class in class and half of your class online, it's just really a lot of work. And you have to do the work twice. And people are not prepared for that. So to me, that's the big problem. But I think that a long term maybe strategy is going to be diversification. We've been talking about the adult learner forever. But now we really have to figure out what is going to be our course offering? Who's our target audience? And are we targeting the adult learners for real? Are we giving the non-credit space the space it needs? Because every institution is going to have to basically just scrape by and try to find a little piece here and there to actually have enough revenue to make it work. So I think that that's the kind of stuff we're seeing. I've changed job. I work for the College of Business now. And I'm going to be working a lot on non-credit. I'm the first instructional designer who was actually hired to work a part of his job on non-credit for the College of Business. So I think we're going to see a lot of that stuff because it's like anything else. You know, it's about managing risk. Yeah. I think one of the things we struggle with is rigid definitions. This is an online course. Therefore, it's like this. This is an in-person course. Therefore, it's like this. This is a hybrid course. Therefore, it's like this. And, you know, it's been my experience. There are certain things that work better online. There are certain things that work better in person. I like to mix and match that in a way that benefits my students. But there's really no clear definition of what that means in my institution. It's not hybrid. It's not 50-50. It's whatever the students need in order to succeed. That's really what it compiles down to. And just thinking of it in terms of the more traditional way, of the way we think about it, this is a special class because it's online. That kind of needs to, I think that needs to shift. I think we need to talk about modalities when people are available to learn. Asynchronous versus synchronous, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the kind of things we need to be talking about. And those definitions aren't out there. And I'm just wondering if anybody's creating some creative definitions as a result of all of this toggle terming. We have a glossary. I mean, we have to have a glossary because of both regional creditor and academic-sendent rates. And so we have actually developed Michael and I, I think Michael's still here, quite a sophisticated vocabulary. And we even have something called emergency remote attendance now, which means attending an in-person, when we thought we would be fully in-person, it was acknowledging that some students who are trying to graduate cannot or will not return. And so it's a way in which they are allowed to attend an in-person class remotely, but there is no guarantee that the class will be redesigned for them. So it's not a blended synchronous class that was intentionally designed. And that is the kind of find, that is the fineness with which we're having to slice things. And I think one thing that we always have to keep reminding everyone with some of the stuff that people are saying in the chat about parents and remote instruction, is at least when a class is online, it's had some intentional design that's gone into it. Most of our in-person classes were not intentionally designed prior to the pandemic. And so I think we have raised R on both help-seeking behavior and intentional design. We are beginning to help. I think we are beginning to get the message out that pandemic-era instruction should not be used as a referendum on remote modalities, that there's a great thread in Twitter that some of you may have seen by a student, actually, that's been circulating in the last couple of days. It says remote instruction is not the problem. That's not where we have mental health challenges. We have mental health challenges because we're trying to survive a pandemic. I think that bears repeated because there's still people trying to manipulate from what happened during a pandemic about the benefits or lack thereof of remote instruction, which is ridiculous. I think this is a fantastic turn that we're taking this conversation. Judi, I'm going to follow your kind wishes and put you off the stage. And I'm going to let Matthew go back and enjoy the precious few hours of daylight he's got in the North country. And I want to just drive in a bit more on this question of how we're mutating and how we're changing, how we're developing new vocabulary, how we're developing new practices, how we have new programs and new designs. And we had a question about this from a wonderful personal hero of mine, David Scobie. He's been a guest before. He's the leader of Bring Theory to Practice. And I wanted to bring him on because he's building on Tom's question. Hello, David. Hey, Brian and Tom and everyone. The comment I put in chat was prompted by Tom's question because it connected to something that is one of my own headed sessions, which is the value of breaking out of the semester quarter credit hour ecology, which is good for allocating labor, but in my view, not good for learning. And I long thought if we could design academic calendars that mix longer form team-based learning with short modular skill transfer experiences, neither of which is handled well by the semester, that would be really valuable. And there have been some experiments with that. But Tom's question made me wonder if the pandemic was opening up opportunities or experiments or mashups there in the same way that it has been doing with these issues of modality that we've just been talking about. I heard that. And your question made me see that the discussion about hybrid high flex remote in person could touches on these questions of how time the time of learning can be reshaped. So I don't have any answer, but I do have a question. That's a great question. For a couple of you. And you know, you can't cough or sneeze innocently in this time. Please be safe, David, please. God, has anybody here seen any instances of this? Have you seen any mashups or alterations? Just to give you a bit more fodder for thinking about this, Jodi was very, very right to insist on the difference between quarter and semester schedules for responding immediately to Omicron. Has anybody been blending this? David, I'm thinking of the shift from semesters to quarters or blocks that a few small colleges have been doing. So instead of, say, 12, 13, 14 week semesters, they've shifted down to eight, seven, six-week terms in order to be more flexible. We've done a set. That's one that comes to mind. From everybody else. Everybody else is saying, yeah, this is a great idea. Sorry. In response to your question, David, it was I can't bend the 16-week semester or however long semester that I happen to be teaching in. But what I have been able to do with remote teaching is bend time within that structure. In other words, I've had breaking up the class and the smaller groups that only meet for shorter bursts of time. I've had entire weeks where I've basically said, okay, we're going to meet individually. I'm going to go through the entire class and everybody's going to talk to me for 15 minutes. And these are things that are logistically a lot easier to do remotely. You just turn on a Zoom session and you're good to go. So in that way, I have been able to bend time. I mean, that overall 16-week clock doesn't stop. But some students need more time within that 16-week timeframe to get to the same place as the other students do. And I've tried to accommodate that as much as possible. And remote teaching has actually helped that. But obviously, some students are not going to get there in 16 weeks is the other problem. And we've had a lot of disruption outside of class, too. That's a big problem. People getting sick, people's families getting sick, missing a month of class, and then expecting to somehow play catch-up is really tough. Brian, if I could quickly piggyback on that. My own experience, as Brian knows, in community-based, project-based, teaching, and also in supervising history, senior theses, seminars, in both of those, a lot of the semester can be much more flexibly used for individualized work in ways that Doc would, that rhyme with what you're talking about going to remote. But I also want to push for longer term. I actually don't love the making shorter, the Colorado College nine-week unit, the most important one. It seems to me the most creative work we've done in the world of civic and community-engaged learning is to figure out how to staple together different semesters and summer experiences in longer arcs of team-based learning. In addition to all the creative ways you've hacked this semester, I think we need to develop a mix of much shorter and much longer opportunities for students to work. Brian, I agree with you that 110%. As an adjunct faculty member, I don't have the ability to massage the term. I'm going to do what I can in that respect. I hear you. We've got some responses. And by the way, if you're using the chat, if you would like to type in something that you want everybody to see, use the Q&A box, and so I can flash that on the screen. Julie Metzger mentions Evergreen's alternative format, which has multiple quarter sequences. Pam Mack mentions a frustration that they can offer now half and a quarter special courses, but most departments don't offer any of those. That, let's see, Perdue was thinking of adopting a J-turn. I still gave him back to the smaller scale, but there was some pushback about that. And Mark, who's been asking great questions the entire time, has asked why are some courses not intensive and long and others like literature and poetry who take more time to digest? It's a great foundational question. I think it may be that the pandemic has pushed us into an emergency mode, David forcing us to short-term thinking, and that the instinct is to shorten, it may be more flexible and not to extend, but I think this is terrific. I'm not seeing any other examples, so I'm glad that you just put a stake in the ground here to ask us to think about that. Bennington is the only other one that I know of with a year long, a little bit like the way that the Evergreen sequences. Which campus was that? Sorry. Bennington College. Thank you. Yep. Very good. Well, this is a great idea, and we'll put this out there, so we'll see if anybody else thinks about this. Thank you. Thank you, David. Can I keep you up here for another minute? If it won't drain you too bad, I don't want you to be sapped by being on stage with us. We've had a lot of comments that have been flowing through the screen with a lot of different points and a lot of experience. Rich Shultz, the founder of Golden, has a really good question I want to bring up. If designed properly with forethought, true online classes can be flexible for student work. Is anyone teaching in a similar format to MOOCs where students have much time to meet learning outcomes? This is a great question. I guess MOOCs would be one case of that, Rich, and it'd be interesting to check out MOOC enrollment numbers to see how they're doing this year during the pandemic. But is anybody else doing that? Is anybody else shifting to that kind of more learner-centered, flexible timeline schedule? So that's another question to keep up. Thank you, Rich. I'll monitor for that. Well, we have all of this here thinking about the coronavirus, thinking about strategically and thinking about it personally. And I just have to repeat for everybody who's here, my heart goes out to all of you, looking at all the stories I'm hearing in the chat from all the exhaustion, the burnout, the stress, the worry, the anxiety, the fear. I'm sorry for all of you and I support all of you. I want to make sure that you can come out of this as best you can, and we're here to help as best we can, too. We have, Tom shared a blog post he just did, and Jody adds that in many public systems, the intense pressure at decreased time to degree works in the opposite direction from what you're asking for there. That's a good problem, a good point. Randall shares another link. There's a bunch of links in the chat here, by the way, which are really, really useful. Shares a link about his notes on benefits of online versus in-person and how to use those benefits in online course design. Thanks, Randall. Good stuff. Mark adds that in California Southern California University teaches PhDs and gives them all the time they need to get the learning objectives, and then they can move on to the next module. Mark, was that a COVID era development or did that predate the pandemic? And then Robert mentions alternatives to Zoom. Thanks, Robert. Always looking for that, using one right here right now. So glad to hear it. Brian, could I? Please. I don't want to derail you from where you were going, but a question, a thought came up in response to these last several comments. The, I think it was Rich Schultz's comment, several of the others talked about the individual flexibility and kind of customization of time with more competency-based and more asynchronous learning. And I get that that's a power of breaking open the time constraints, but I'm equally committed to the way in which new schedules help create opportunities for team-based and collaborative learning. And I really worry about that kind of isolationism of that's one set of outcomes to what Rich and others were talking about. So I'm interested in people's thoughts about where this kind of flexible and asynchronous learning can be married with collaborative and team-based learning. That's a big, big reach. That's a great point about that. Learner-centered can become learner-isolated. And for a lot of us, we either, we see higher education having a major socialization function. And that may be for civic engagement, that may be for preparation for the workforce. And right now, it's also kind of re-socializing after the pandemic, after a lot of traditional age students have lost their socialization opportunities to some degree. So we need to have that as something to consider. By the way, I'm conscious of time, and I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to bring something up. David, Tom, let me let you guys have a rest. Let me let you go down. And I want to bring up Joseph, because Joseph has pointed out something else since we're talking about technology. And I think this is an important one to bring up. And he has a different technology that he's using. And because he has a great beard, I want to hear from him. No, because this is an important point. Joseph, hello. This is the apprentice beard. That's a mighty beard, my friend. So, yeah, I've been using Discord for the last few terms. I looked around at the beginning when, when Canvas was kind of failing me. And asked who is using really good technology to communicate over distance. And I thought about the gamer community, which is where Discord came from. I actually went in search of TeamSpeak, but that didn't really help very much. But Discord has absolutely everything I need in it to facilitate communication among class. I teach technical writing and business writing and multi-modality. And in that setting, they can video chat. They can, I can arrange it so that they're in teams and have their own private rooms to talk about, anything they need to talk about as a team in there. Sometimes they do like to go form their own modes of communication, but every time I find out about that, I just throw them the privacy policy of whatever it is they're using, and they usually come back. Privacy, that's an interesting move. That's an interesting move. Just quickly, anybody else using Discord? And before I get to ask that question, they'll already be answering it for me. Lisa Durf, who is a hardcore power user, talks about using Second Life and Discord at the same time, which seems to be frying her hardware. I can see that. John Hollendec is doing a Kimbo in Discord. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds like a positive one. Noah Geisel, I hope it's Geisel. Sorry, Noah. Embracing students' use of it. That's great for classroom engagement and community. Students really get into it, start making stuff, so that's good to hear. Pam Mack mentioned the students seem to use GroupMe for shadow courses. Pam, what's a shadow course, and how does GroupMe work for that? Sarah would love to use Discord. Jody Green points out a UCSC-authored article on using Discord as a class server. Thank you. I think I've read that. It's a good piece. John Hollendec is talking about Seth Godin's learning platform, which I don't know. That's new to me. And Emilia mentions using Teams as a hub. And Joseph, you just turned over a big rock. Well, a lot of people have done a little bit. I'd like to say one more thing about GroupMe before. This is the one real problem that I've been encountering with a lot of this technology is the privacy and the amount of personal data you have to surrender in order to become participant. GroupMe is one of the ones that you actually have to give your cell phone number to in order to participate. And some of the other ones like Discord, they don't do that. You can use your school email to sign up and have a completely autonomous account that's separate from your personal life. It's a lot more desirable for me to teach it that way. The only thing with the privacy there is I have to refrain from going into their private rooms and looking into what they're talking about. And I promise to do that at the beginning of the term, every term. And so far, I've been able to keep to it, except for when I'm called in there to settle it. That's it. Oh, that's tricky. That's tricky. It is. But if they bring you in there in a mediating role, then it's fair for you to come in. Yeah, I tell them I won't only come to fast. Very nice. Very nice. Well, this is interesting. It may be that, I mean, Joseph, we talk about Zoom University and it's kind of become the avatar of online instruction during the pandemic. It may be that we're also seeing a whole series of other tools really pop up that deserve a lot of attention. And one of them is Discord. Thank you. Thank you, Joseph. And by the way, enjoy the winter that's down there. I hope you don't get too much snow. Just a little bit. I like Huntsville a lot. See you soon, Joseph. And we've had a rich discussion coming through the chat, but also here on stage, we've had a really, really great range of topics and points. And I want to bring up, if I can, Pam Mack from Clemson University. Pam asks a question about a, or I asked her a question, rather, about terms she used. I want to give her a chance to unfold this a little bit, because this may be another sign of academic innovation and the threat of this crisis. Hello, Pam. Hi. Can you hear me? We can see and hear you, and both are great. Excellent. So this is something I believe, at least at Clemson, students invented and invented particularly with the beginning of emergency remote instruction, they started forming group me groups for their classes, not including the instructor. And those groups give, they give each other hints. So I had a class at one point where with the help of teaching assistants, I was running two groups at the same time, and then I'd moved to another two groups. And if I called on people in the first part, the students in the other group would be all prepared to be called on, because clearly in the group me, they'd been warned that I was calling on people that day. But they also have shared, there was a case, another faculty member who had an essay assignment gave some questions in advance. Some student looked up an answer on a cheating site and shared it on group me. And lots of students gave pretty much the same answer to the essay exam, and it was a bad answer to start with. That's always a problem of cheating, copying off the wrong thing, right? But people, I think two thoughts out of this, one is what are the students inventing, and the other is just to be aware of the shadow course thing that's going on at some places. Well, those are two very, very important points, and we haven't talked about them yet today, and they're both really important to see. In fact, someone, I don't know if you saw this in the chat, Pam, someone was talking about how in their class discord, the students were inventing new stuff, they're inventing points and features in the game, so that's a good example of that. But then also, as Dave Scobie just said, those are the dangers of student collaboration. This is the negative side of it. But these things are occurring. This is really important. Thank you, Pam. Thank you. And stay warm down there, too. Yeah, we got a little cold weather in South Carolina. Just a touch for you guys, yes. Good to see you. We have a whole bunch of comments that have come in, and I want to bring one more up. This is coming from Rich Schultz. I've got his name correctly this time. Rich asks us to rethink some of these things, that hybrid and blended are two terms that are changing with time. Asynchronous with synchronous elements versus face-to-face remote, which is blended, which is hybrid, why? Rich, this reminds me of Jody's comments about the new terms they're having, which was Jody was this emergency remote attendance, I think, that we're developing a whole anthology or a whole vocabulary in response to all of this, which may both reflect and drive some of the changes. So thank you. Thank you very much for sharing that. We have a few more comments and a few more ideas. Sarah Sangregorio mentions WhatsApp. Her doctoral class is using that for cohort and as individual classes. And as she says, it can be used for good. John Hollenbeck gives us another view on student cheating or negative collaboration, which is that plagiarism is to be praised. It keeps us honest as teachers. And speaking of terms, Lisa asks us to think about learning, which is very, very good. And then I mentioned a glossary. Jody already has a glossary. My God, I'm just behind the times. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I'd like to ask a couple of questions for all of you right now as your host and as your cat herder for the forum. To start with a request, if you learn of any cases of campuses moving online this month, if you hear of them starting remote instruction or shifting online a hurry, doing what I call the toggle term, please, please let us know. Put it in the spreadsheet or contact me directly, or contact Jody directly, but it would be great to keep up and to keep that resource going because it's right now the best one out there. I want to then ask you also, looking ahead to 2022, on the face of it, our discussion today shows that we are all very, very concerned about the pandemic and what that does to higher education and how we respond. And that under that response, we have a whole series of different directions and topics, everything for academic honesty, to structuring the timeline of classes, to questions of credit, to questions of exhaustion and faculty workload and staff support. And then Mark DeFusco reminds us that a lot of the institutions are also fragile and some of them may not survive this year. What I'd like to ask is, what would you like us to cover on the forum over the next year? What are some of the topics that you'd like us to really zero in on? I can try to hunt good guests for each of them, and of course I'm always looking to hear more of them from you all. But what are the topics that you'd like us to think of, based on what you're thinking right now? So there's that moment of quiet where everyone scratches their head, thinks about it. And again, don't be shy, respond to all of you because this is a forum for all of you to support your ideas and where you'd like to go. Lisa asks us to pray the local college would go online instead of bringing us more virus from Baltimore. My Baltimore in particular, Lisa. Pam brings up the question of, Pam, if I may, of exhaustion, as I think it's hard for us to keep enthusiasm up for trying new things as this stretches on. I hear that. And that may be a topic that we need to really dive into or return to. Ayla Moore asks about that on their campus, their mantra is preparing students for the real world, which suggests we won't know what the real world is, what it will be. How deeply held is this notion of the real world? How helpful, how accurate? Good question. Good question. I've done in the past a few different workshops and open sessions that are, we've nicknamed the future of everything, where we'll have people talking about the future of work, the future of media, the future of food, the future of governments. It may be that doing a series like that might be something that would be useful. Jodi asks us to think about competency-based education. We really should do that. I don't think we've had a session on CBE yet. Lisa asks us to think about culturally relevant pedagogy, which is a really, really good idea. And Lisa, if you have a speaker in mind or a guest, please let me know. Greg thinks that this session is either so good or just so appropriate that we should do it every three months. Thank you, Greg. Happy to do that. Marcus points, or sorry, Mark DeFusco points out that stimulus money, say, have been at colleges not truly anywhere stimulus this year. Mark, I'm not seeing any stimulus money coming from the Feds this year. The Feds can barely get things going at all right now. So I think that's going to be a source of some stress. Lisa, thank you for answering my question. Rich Schultz has a topic idea how to move from emergency remote teaching to, whoops, excuse me, I just lost that screen there, to remove from emergency remote teaching the true online learning. A good question. And then the metaverse. We have a couple of sessions in the works for the metaverse. So very briefly, I'm trying to approach that with as little hype and buzz as possible to think about it very clearly and practically. So we have some speakers lined up to talk about the VR side of it. I'm looking for speakers as well to talk about either the blockchain Bitcoin side of it or also the Facebook side. So if you have anybody that would be great. Sarah has the great resignation in mind. Sarah, I would love to talk about this. I would love to hustle on this. The thing is I'm just hearing all kinds of contradictory data and ideas about it. Maybe a panel would be good to have a few different people. So it's an important topic. Alex asks, all right, try this. Alex Zitzibol of Boricero. Oh, I'm Alex. I probably massacred that. My apologies. He wants us to talk about flex work policies. We had a session on that and that would be good. And David is really interested in student engagement with exhaustion with politics under conditions of polarization. That's a lot to talk about, actually. That's a very, very deep one. John likes the future of work idea. Heather McGowan gave a talk. Oh, good. John, if you know her, let me know. Otherwise, I can just cold call her. I'm shameless about that. Noah is thinking a lot about how we can equip students with learning records that are made to be consumed in the real world. So that's a really good point. Now, do you know our guest and longtime friend Phil Long? He's been working on some projects along these lines. Mathieu wants to see institutions that have done the work of positioning themselves in regards to modalities. Learning modalities, Mathieu. And then Joseph Ravershaw, who is still recovering from being on stage, wants us to think about. Let me put this up here so you can see it. What's happening in administration is the university accumulating power and removing department leadership as a result of the pandemic. So if we have emergency organizations, what extent is that overriding, say, faculty governance or consideration on campus? Good question, Joseph. Jim wants to know about the new normal on campus. And Marty wants to know about the most relevant and existing and new educator competencies that are related to these new and emerging modalities. This is terrific, friends. This is a great, great list. Thank you all for sharing those. We are right now, again, at the top of the hour, which means I have to wrap things up. Let me thank you all, first of all, for answering my questions so generously with all these ideas. But also, thank you for coming together today. We've sat around the virtual fire. We've shared our fears, our anxieties, our hopes, some of our aspirations. And also, we've pooled our thoughts together. We've put together a lot of different ideas about what we'd like to accomplish. I'm really grateful to you for doing all of that. And we can do more of this if you'd like. Looking ahead, just want to remind you, we have a whole series of sessions coming up on a wide range of topics. We also are happy to keep talking about this on Twitter or on my blog. We're also always happy to point you to our giant archive of sessions which have touched on a lot of these topics in the past. And above all, I'd like to make sure that as you dive into 2022 that all of you take care of yourselves, that you are safe, physically and mentally, that you're able to keep doing all this great work within higher education. And I hope that here at the forum that we can serve as a venue for you to think about and work together as we apprehend the future of higher education. Take care of yourselves, friends. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.