 Welcome everybody to the Future Trans Forum. I'm really glad to see all of you here today. We're doing something special in the forum, something we don't often do. I'll explain what that is in a minute. First, let me explain what the forum is, how it works, where it comes from, and what we hope to accomplish. Now, that's a long introduction. So hello, if that was too familiar. Where we are now is we are starting the fall semester. Some campuses have already begun, some are just about to, but for all of us in higher education, there is a whole overarching set of questions about this unusual extraordinary semester. How will we support face-to-face instruction, everything from testing to PPE to plastic shields? If we're not doing face-to-face instruction online, for those of you who are entirely online, how do you manage that? How do you start up for first-time students? How do you welcome them to a college or university? How do you handle all the technology? How do you handle the faculty support? Is your faculty, how are you teaching? If you're a student, what is this like? So that's the idea for this session. The session is to hear from you, to hear from all of you. We'd like to hear your stories, your thoughts, your questions, your hopes, your fears, your experiences. This is a kind of open mic. In fact, here, I will give you a literal open mic. There's a kind of teal-colored box next to me now. If you'd like to join me on stage, just press that button where it says Join Podium. You'll join the podium and be up here with us. Now, if you can't do that, then just let me know and we can use the question-answer box. Hello, Terry. Hello, Brian, how are you? So good to see you. How are you doing? I am hanging in there. We've got some smoke around us, as you can imagine. You're in San Francisco, right? Yes. Oh, my gosh. So it's been an interesting start to the fall. When we talk about the world being on fire, yours literally is on fire. Literally, yes. We're very lucky. We actually, I'm in Menlo Park, which is south of San Francisco, but we've just had some days where we're just socked in with smoke. Today is not one of them, thank goodness. But yeah, we're hanging in there. Oh, my gosh. Oh, Terry. If you don't know, Terry, by the way, this is Terry's extraordinary person. She's the guest in the program, a terrific guest. She's a political scientist. She's been all over higher education, doing great stuff. And now she runs this great Center for Higher Education Leadership where she helps improve leadership across higher education, which we badly need this right now. I know. What are you seeing from this fall semester? What are you finding out from your contacts and your charges? What are you hearing about this? I've been having a lot of discussions about this as you can imagine. And I think there's two things that I'm seeing of, and I have a ton of friends who are faculty who are struggling through all of this, but it's communication and transparency. Those are the two things I think that we're struggling with right now. And you always talk about the, well, you can call it a pivot or I forget the term you use. Yes, toggle semester. I mean, I see so many faculty and students and I'm a parent. I just sent my son up to Lewis and Clark College in Portland. Oh, whoa. Yeah. And so obviously I'm feeling fairly comfortable with how they're handling things up there. But yeah, and well, the too much or too little is the question, it's both, right? There's some, I've seen some faculty complaining, it's like, oh, no, there's constant barrage of information coming at us. And others saying, I don't understand, what will it take for my institution to decide they're gonna go online? Is there a cutoff point where they're gonna say, and some it's, and I know as a proper provost, I know how hard it is to say, to have a hard and firm, if we hit this number of COVID cases, we're gonna go online. That's really hard to say because, it's a very, it's a moving target, right? So I guess what I'm hearing a lot of from faculty friends and is struggling to figure out, I don't want the constant barrage of email that's maybe not that informative, but on the other hand, I wanna know, what is, what will it take? How are we going to decide that we're going to close? I have questions about this, but friends, if you know the forum, you know, it's your questions that matter. And if we have Terry here, we've got a pounce. And click that raised hand, if you wanna join us on stage, you can tell we're friendly, or just go to the question market and type your questions. One question, I won't ask you, specifically about communication is, what do you think about the dashboards that campuses are putting out? I like the dashboards because as a parent, I can tell you, I've got the list, right now I could go to the Lewis and Clark College of dashboard and find out how many COVID cases they have on campus. And so to me, as both, I think as a form of communication, it's wonderful because otherwise you're gonna have anxious parents, I need to know your numbers, what's going on? And so it's kind of like, I've become less obsessive about it, but for a while, I was going almost every day to the Johns Hopkins website to see where the cases, globally, US, state, county. So yeah, so I've definitely slowed down on that, but since I just sent my son up to campus last weekend, I'm watching the dashboard at Lewis and Clark very closely. And actually, I've heard complaints from friends, faculty, and other parents that there isn't a dash, if there isn't a dashboard. So I think that having a dashboard is really important, but it's also needs to make sure, what is, what does it mean to have a dashboard? What's on it? And so that's another important component. It really varies. I did a list, I've got about, I don't know how many now, about 80 or 90. And they're really, really diverse. I mean, you've got everything from really elaborate, very, very detailed dashboards that are generated by Microsoft to people with a couple of numbers. Some have little stories, like water stories. I mean, it's really, really interesting to see. I don't know what proportion of campuses have them. Well, this is, it raises another question, which is who's doing the research right now? And because we all need to be paying attention to this and from one perspective, from another perspective, I keep telling people, there's gonna be so much, I mean, there's so much data potential out there. And we need to come out of this with some clear understanding of what's working, what's not. Something as simple as who's got a dashboard and who doesn't and what has been the response because of that. And so I think there's some really interesting questions and there's some other questions out there, I think. And I don't wanna be the only one up here. So somebody else, see you, jump in, feel free to jump in. Let me bring some of these up and let me read these because people are putting these in the chat. First one is an observation from Myron Williams, Kentucky who says, they're doing two to three minute videos sent to everyone. Myron, I guess I would wanna know how often do you do that? Yeah, that's interesting. And Roxanne adds that the Connecticut government updates daily as a PDF type of dashboard. Interesting, interesting. Lisa Durf has a question, she is kind of an ethical, moral question. She asks, I wonder why any institution opened at all? One death is too many. Yeah, I think that last one is an interesting one because I've struggled with this question. My son wanted to get back to campus and Oregon overall, besides what's going on in downtown Portland has been relatively low set of cases. I think for, why send them back at all? I know people like Mike Orcelorell have been coming out and saying we shouldn't open at all. But I guess my concern, I think the other side of the equation is, well, there's several things. First of all, there's students who have to be on campus. They don't have anywhere else to go. So, I mean, and what does it mean to open? I don't think we've defined that, right? So for example, on my son's campus, they have maybe at the most a thousand students on their campus and it's mostly remote. There's just a few, so it's more a question of, it's hybrid and what does hybrid mean? Is that open or not? And students are gonna be living somewhere. And for my son, I knew he was not gonna last. He did great over the summer in terms of quarantining and not having his pod, but I knew that wasn't gonna last if he stayed and all of his, he didn't have friends around. So I think for me personally, I feel he's safer in a dorm where they're actually doing the sewage testing and they're gonna test everybody for COVID before they start face-to-face, anything face-to-face, drinking very limited face-to-face. I mean, is it any better than him being here? Yeah, I think so. Good luck to both of you. Yes, thank you. I know of the two of you, I know who's more nervous. Easy, that's easy. Thank you, Dr. Barron. We had a question, actually it's a new story shared by Joel Bloom who's at Hunter College and he's the director of assessment there. And let me just flash this on the screen but I'll show the link. Anthony Fauci says, bringing students to campus and staying in the home a couple of weeks later is the worst thing we can do. Yeah. I think students will spread it all over. Yeah, I saw that on Twitter as well. Here's the link. I'll put this on Twitter and make sure everyone can see it too. I don't wanna read the story to right now as fun as that would be, but that's, I wonder if Lisa, that's not partially in answer to your question, if campuses are figuring, or if we brought students back and faculty and staff, it's less destructive to keep them on campus than this in the home. I'm hypothesizing here, I haven't heard anybody make, well no, that's not true. I've heard a couple of universities make that case. Cornell actually said they thought that they would be so good at public health in their space that students would actually be better off there. So I wonder if we might not see more of these coming up. We had another question, I wanna make sure we didn't miss this. It's from the awesome Joe Murphy who's in rainy Ohio. And he said, this is for you, but also for everybody. I'd love to hear stories about alternative strategies for communication which are working for people. So that's a question for everybody. And Terry, do you have any that you wanna share? I think it was alternative forms of... Strategies for communicating. Oh, alternative strategies for communicating. Yeah. I haven't heard of anybody doing anything particularly innovative. It's basically, I mean, I think people are sticking with the usual email. I think that we're still in a phase where people are figuring things out around that. But I don't know if anybody else has any ideas about that. I just, yeah, I'm thinking about the organizations and institutions I've looked at. And I haven't, besides the, there's video, there's podcasts, I think probably the most innovative thing I've seen is using Twitter live feeds. I know some folks who are using Twitter live feeds to communicate to students in particular Instagram live feeds. But, you know, that still seems fairly traditional to me. Well, you're an advanced person. Yeah, I know. I've said 2016, yeah, yeah, but, and we did have a follow-up question with that or an observation from Dean Raj, who asks a related question, but it touches on other topics, which is, how is the institution addressing the digital divide? Does it have access to broadband or computers? So I want to put that out there for everybody. And then, Tara, I'd love to hear, what are you hearing? What good stories are you hearing about that? Um, and sorry, I'm following the chat and trying to listen. So run the question by me again. Okay, that's okay. Digital divide stuff. Oh yes, yes, yes. Sorry. What works? What works? Oh gosh, that's a hard one because, you know, what we're seeing is students going and hanging out and parking lots to get hotspots, you know, I think that's one of the arguments for bringing, you know, keeping students on campus, especially low-income students who don't have access. And I think if, you know, mind pulling in the K through 12 space, this has been a tough one as they, you know, have tried to, you know, give up Chrome, but I mean, not part of it is, you know, is how much support, you know, how much funding resources is the word I'm trying to come to get to. And so the resource issue is a difficult one. This is where I would love to see, this is one area where, you know, the federal government really should be stepping in and providing not specific guidelines, but some resources for institutions to give students hotspots and laptops. It's amazing the number of students who just rely on their phone. And that's gonna have to be another innovation is that we set things up in a way and there are some companies trying to do this so that students could do most of their work on their phone because that's a one reliable thing that students have is their cell phone and, you know, they may not have wifi, but at least they can find a cell tower and access it that way. You think we'll, I mean, we can talk about how much people can actually write on phones, but I wonder, I mean, not everyone can do that. Do you think we're gonna see a shift in assignments where faculty ask people, all right, if you can't write on your phone, maybe we'll supply you a Bluetooth keyboard or make your assignment a video or audio? Yeah, I think so. Audio is definitely something I'm seeing. And I was actually looking at the Georgia State case. I need to read the article more carefully because they've actually seen an improvement in how some of their students are doing in their classes since they've been innovating with the use of their CARES funds. So yeah, that's another interesting idea is to use audio and allowing students to do assignments that might be more creative. And that's where design thinking comes in. It's like, let's not just stick with the usual if it's gonna be hard for students. Let's brainstorm and figure out some new ways of teaching that will allow students to use their phones and so on, so. People are just living in a text chat and they're asking all kinds of questions. But in one of them, a few of them point out that there's a lot you can do with phones and there's a long history with us. But also we have somebody who wants to join us on stage, the author, Maria Anderson. She's the course tune founder and CEO, former guest on the program and co-founder of awesome all around person. How are you doing, Maria? I'm doing well. Am I up on the stage or am I? Yes, you are. Well, I thought I would share some alternative communication strategies. I actually took a page out of corporate world with what we kind of do with stand-ups and created a way to flex with that. And then I also went old school because I know that we're having so many issues with bandwidth, technology, and students are really struggling with the different technologies they're using in all of their classes now because it's not just one class using technology. It's like, this class uses Zoom and this class uses Teams and this class uses broad, this class uses, right? So I thought, okay, I'm teaching math. So I wanna make sure that it's as that technology is not the thing that keeps them from learning in this class. So I went to campus on the first day of the semester armed with a large suitcase full of whiteboards. And these are whiteboards with a blank side and a graph side, so let's put that right side up. And so all of the students were issued a whiteboard pen and eraser with a label on it for them to write their name and phone number so their whiteboard doesn't wander off from them too far. And when we meet in class, so I was originally planned to use them in two places. One in the socially distanced classroom because it is very difficult to discuss in an active way when everybody's wearing masks and you can't look at the paper next to you, right? And so one way I was gonna use them in the classroom was to just like, they could hold their work in front of them and talk to somebody about it, right? In the end, I ended up teaching remotely but I was planning on using them remotely when we went remote because I figured it was just a matter of time because I've been using them all summer this way and it's a lovely way for students to take their hands off their keyboards, do some work in a very safe space where they can erase easily and then when I need to see the work, I just have the ones who have their cameras on, show me their work on the screen and we talk about it. And then for the ones who don't have cameras on the screen, they're still working on their boards and it does still provide that safe place to make mistakes, right? I think students are a lot, and what I've observed over the last couple of decades is that students are a lot more willing to try something to make a mistake on a whiteboard than they are on their own paper, right? And so that has been working out swimmingly. When they go to their small groups, they can also share in their small groups by holding up their boards to the camera and they don't have to have one more technology to use and have to try to write using their touchpad which is like a significant detriment in the math and science class to try to do that. So I've just taken the technology down a lot for what is required to participate with graphs and diagrams and mathematical notation and things like that. And I do know that some schools have used carousel funding to purchase whiteboards for all their students in particular, like I know K-12 district that purchased 3,500 of them for one for every student in the district because they can use them in all their classes. And certainly like on campuses, the STEM fields could all say like, hey, let's issue one whiteboard to every student and use this, right? Cause you could use it both in the classroom and in the remote classroom. So it's cool. Yeah. You know, a lot of fans of this in the chat box, people are looking for the VOTEC solution. Yeah. And then the other communication strategy I thought I'd share has to do with that standup kind of mentality. So I had all of my videos recorded in all my lectures, you know, in small chunks recorded in a previous semester and captioned and all that stuff because I was teaching an online. So this year, along with their whiteboards, they were issued the guided notes for those videos which are incomplete notes and they have to fill in the rest by watching videos and trying problems where it says to try the problem and things like that. And so in the first, we meet for two hours twice a week remotely. And in that first hour of class, maybe first 45 minutes of class, they get the time to either watch videos if they haven't done it or work with each other on the assignments in small groups. So anybody who's watched their videos has kind of an advantage cause they can go and work on answering questions in their groups. And for those that have not watched the videos yet, they can get that done before we get to our active learning session. We use the whiteboards and do all that stuff. But the thing that's different about it, which I think is really awesome as well, the students are working during that first hour. I have the time to text the students who aren't in class, text students who maybe have missed an assignment and find out what's going on. I make one extra breakout room when I make my Zoom breakout room. So if I really want, if I want like four in a breakout room, I just make one, I like increase it to make one extra breakout room. And then I just bump students out of that breakout room immediately into other rooms. And then I use that extra breakout room for myself to meet with students. So I will just bump students into that breakout room if I need to have a conversation with them. And then we have a private place to chat with each other about what's going on, why their assignments aren't turned in, et cetera, right? But that 45 minutes at the beginning of class, I can use that as like an active, get a hold of students. I know they're not in another class right now, they're in my class, right? And I can have private conversations with them in that breakout room or by text. And they're not disturbing anyone else, we're not disturbing the rest of the class. And so that's worked really well too as a kind of something I haven't ever really done before because there hasn't been the opportunity to do that before. That's a, I mean, I keep telling you this whenever I see you, as I say, and for your students. And I had terrible math experiences. So that says a lot. You can come back and have a good one now. I'm tempted to. What are you teaching? So I'm teaching a class called Functions Modeling Change and it's a modern contemporary version of a pre-calculus class where we mostly look at real-world data for everything. So we tackle everything from the perspective of what you would be seeing out there in the real world. It's actually where graphs in the world, graphs in the world was born out of this class because there was such a need to be able to find graphs easily to look at. And yeah, so it's just a lot of like looking at, today we looked at the growth of Slack, the growth of Microsoft Teams, the periodic behavior of emergency room visits in Utah for respiratory illnesses. And what else did we look at? I can't remember, but a couple other things in class. So people were asking about the alternative communications and you brought it to them, especially embedded in class. Thank you. Can you stamp on stage for a bit with us? Sure, yeah, and I'm gonna share, if you don't mind, I'm gonna share in the chat window the graphs in the world website in case people don't know about it. It's kind of a fun way to learn about all of the different things going on in the world through more than just the last data point. So there's a Facebook, there's an Instagram and there's a Twitter account you can follow depending on what poison you'd like. I just repeated that, so make sure everyone can see it because not everyone's in the same. Oh, right, right. No, it's no problem. So thank you, graphs in the world. We had another question from another wonderful person in a long time supporter and someone with far too good a sense of humor. We've got Tom Haynes coming to us from the Houston, Texas area. And Tom, I guess the, hang on a second. Tom, the first question I wanna ask is just how hot is it there? Oh, I don't know. It's probably in the upper 90s, but we have a lot of humidity, so. Yeah, that's what you know. You wilt in Houston. I think it's funny because I used to have people working for me who are from Nigeria and they complained about the heat and humidity in Houston, so that says something. Whoa. So, among other virtues, you have a great habit of asking great questions. One of them was your question. Physical presence and the college experience. And I just wanna, if you can unfold that observation slash question a bit and toss it to Maria and Terry and then give everybody a chance to take into it. Well, sure, absolutely. First of all, I wanna say, Maria, I've been doing the same thing with whiteboards except suggesting them for faculty. I don't have them to give, but people are like, I wanna use this complicated digital whiteboard. And I'm like, why? Just hold the damn thing up. You've got a camera, you know? Yeah, or a document camera, which you actually can almost not buy because they're all out of stock, but a document camera is another super simple solution for faculty who are not used to what a technology. And I'm used to technology and I still default to using the document camera over screenwriting any day. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I wanna riff on my question a little bit because I mean, it was from the part of the conversation that was 10 or 15 minutes ago, but that's okay. That's the way this works, I get that. You know, I mean, one of the things is, and this gets back to your whiteboard thing. And oh, by the way, how dare you make math concrete? Just stop that right now. It's tough. Stop it. I had a student today ask me, can we use X and Y? Is it okay? It's like, I never use X and Y anymore. Yeah, no, I feel your pain. I try to relate government to students. It's every bit as abstract in a lot of ways. So no, the thing that I kind of wanted to get at here is that relating to my earlier question is this concept that physical presence equals learning. And I mean, I know there's a lot of ways in which we use modalities in a physical world that we don't even think about. I mean, that we've learned over years of practice either intentional or unintentional, most of unintentional, when it comes to communicating in an in-person environment. And it is definitely dislocating to have that part of it taken away or distance out. But you know, we have a vast panoply of communication tools. It's not like people have to be isolated by this technology. You can, as Maria is doing, it just demonstrated very clearly how she's doing it. You can touch your students and listen to them in the same way that you can in an in-person environment. And there are many things that, undiscovered opportunities about this current situation in terms of things that I've kind of been thinking about doing for a long time, but kind of suddenly have been forced into doing, like putting a lot more content online just because it's like, I'll get to it tomorrow. Well, now I have to do it by tomorrow. And so that asynchronous part of my class is completely shoved off the table. And I've been very brutal about saying, okay, do I really need to do this live? Do I really need to do that live? And so my in-person classes now are almost exclusively, okay, what are you working on? Okay, do you understand this? Let's talk about some tricks and techniques for how do you can understand this better, work your project forward, et cetera, et cetera. And so the thing that always crops up in my mind is these schools are struggling with whether to open or not is there's almost no discussion about where the learning's actually occurring. I mean, I know there's some physical things and there's a small percentage of classes that require things like physical labs and other things which are hard to work around. And it sucks for football, I get that. But at the same time, there's so little discussion about, okay, well, fine, this isn't working out the way we expected, but learning doesn't have to stop. And I'm just wondering, it's kind of a question slash observation, but have you guys seen this discussion happening about learning specifically at most institutions? Because I'm not seeing it. I'm not seeing it very much. I see it among the faculty, some, but a lot of times the faculty are dear in the headlights at this point, right? And they're being, in some ways, sometimes the institutions actually trip up the learning because they insist on, we're gonna do it this way, period, right? So I'm just curious what your observations are. Yeah, so one of the things I found interesting was we got an email from one of the deans early on in the summer that said, we all know that in-person teaching is better than online or remote teaching for all of these reasons. And I was like, I completely disagree with this, right? And it was interesting as the summer progressed that that message changed, you know, over time. And there was a point at which the college said, if you've proven that you can teach remotely in an excellent fashion, then we will let you do it because it can be, it can be superior to the current, you know, in-person experience that, and I think that was the consequence of running out of classroom space, honestly. But it was interesting to see that message change, but I am actually willing to put my foot, my line in the sand here and say that my remote teaching class is better than my in-person one because- I would actually probably say that about my own class as well at this point. Yeah, I'm seeing, yeah. I think that personal connection during the first 45 minutes with every student I need to connect with, that it's hard to get a hold of them otherwise and I have the time to do it, right? And then we do active stuff for the rest of class, I can get them in and out of groups, like that. There's no social awkwardity where like a student's like, I don't have a group, nobody likes me. You know, like that's all gone, right? Yeah. And as long as you know the pedagogy behind it, you know, to like have students try a problem before you send them to a group, right? So that they have something to discuss when they get there. As long as you're good at the pedagogy, I think remote teaching is actually far superior to face-to-face in many, many ways. And I can play with space and time in a way that I can't in a physical classroom. There's nobody driving me out of my classroom at the end of an hour and 15 minutes. There's no expectation necessarily that the students are there. You know, if it makes more sense to talk to a student at a time that's not part of class time, I don't have to drive into campus for that. I just fire up a Zoom session. I can do that anytime. I've got a week and a half of class scheduled in, or a week of class scheduled in October and again in November. There's gonna be nothing but individual meetings. You know, hey, what's going on? How's it going? What are you struggling with in the class or in general? How can we get you through this, right? That's what I'm doing. That's really hard to pull off one person. Because everybody has to be physically in the same place. Sorry, Brian. I'll pause you just for a second because some people have come in. I just want to make sure that everyone who's come in since we started is welcome. And as you can tell, we're engaged in an open mic, free-willing discussion about the fall semester. We've been talking about communication. We've been talking about technology. We've been talking about pedagogy. And now we're in a great discussion about balance, trying to compare face to face versus online teaching. Yeah, and I think we have to be careful. I mean, first of all, I want to say I have friends who are now teaching online for the first time and just amazed at how well it's going. So that's one side of it. The other side of it is a lot of our, unfortunately in higher ed, a lot of our faculty don't know anything about pedagogy. Right. I talk to them all the time. I know what you're talking about. Yes, but the third point I want to make is that we have this situation where some people are teaching maybe 20 people in a class, but what are we doing for the people teaching 300, 400 in a class? They don't have the time to do that one-on-one. Well, they wouldn't regardless. So it's normal in a sense. But I think- This doesn't work in that scenario. I mean, you're right about that. So I mean, one thing to look at and I will hat tip to Ruben Pontodura on this, but is that, look at the Open University example. And they had classes with thousands of people in them, but they operated around the basis of small groups of tutorials of 10, maybe 20 people assigned to a tutor. And that person was actually doing the real teaching at that point. The professor was providing the high level content, bringing all that down. But the tutor was the one who was making sense of it to the students, right? That's what we need to be looking at. And whether that tutor is a grad student or a other professor or whatever, 300 people, for a lot of students, that doesn't work anyway. You might as well be by yourself remotely sitting in a large lecture hall with 500 students. I've been there. That's what I did in my undergraduate years, but I'm fortunate to teach at a community college where we have much smaller classes. Sorry, Brian. Walter Raj's question here. Okay, one second. This is from Ryan Downey, who's a prof at Georgetown University and is also one of my students, which is remarkable. He's a glutton for punishment. And I want to put this up so you can all see it. The comment about having an online course being better than a face-to-face course, I wonder what the panel thinks of the idea of the one design strategy that I've heard about as an educated person. So just to be clear, I said my remote course is better than my face-to-face course. I think that the hacked version of an online course that I've been teaching for the last two years, which includes a remote component, is also better than the face-to-face. But I think the traditional asynchronous, no common time to meet. I actually think it does miss a little bit from a face-to-face class. But I think we have this opportunity right now where colleges have now figured out they can offer remote teaching and schedules, and it's okay, right? We finally have it as a possibility in schedules. And so maybe we can shift from having only online and only face-to-face to online remote or face-to-face. And I think that just allowing online courses to have a scheduled meeting day and time is like a huge leap forward for us because there is still so much that students get a benefit from not having to drive to campus. No childcare, no traffic, no car, right? I don't feel so good today. Like, although these are reasons to not show up physically on campus and having the sessions be remote, still needs a need for them. All right, that's just my initial thought. Well, that's okay, that's okay. Terry, what do you think, Tom, what do you think? And do we... I think teaching is like jazz. I think we've all been given a different set of instruments, but that doesn't mean we can't make music with it. Very nice. Well said. I think it's a pretty bad jazz. I was muted there. I muted myself because there's a little noise in the background, but I think that we... I would just love to see that what comes out of all of this is us to be more student-centered. And I've spent my career in Stanford, UCLA, University of Washington, University of Texas at Austin, and my last one was more student-centered, Menlo College, because I wanted to be at a more student-centered place. But I think the broader issue is that, to just kind of take it up to the 30,000 foot level is that we don't have a commitment to teaching and being student-centered in our R1 institutions. And that has to change. So we need to teach graduate students how to teach. We need to make sure that what we're doing is in the best interest of the students. How are we designing spaces? How are we designing if we're gonna be face-to-face? But if we're gonna be online, how are we designing those courses that it's reaching? For every... And we know that... And I'm gonna pull in the diversity hook because here we need to. But it's an issue of accessibility, not only in terms of learning disabilities but accessibility for students who don't have the same resources as if, we're talking about this at the beginning, the digital divide. And so at every institution, there are going to be some subset of students who need more help. And whether it's because of financial reasons or because they are, you have learning disabilities. I have a son who's got ADHD and we're all struggling with how to deal with this from a remote learning perspective. And we're finally getting some traction with his school, but what's gonna happen when he goes to college? I have to look at institutions that actually care about the stuff. So, Perry, do you think the lack of teaching focus is related to the decision-making around whether to open or not in person? That's a good question. You know, it's hard to answer that, right? Yeah, there's the devil there. I got my horns on. I think it's, that's a, you know, and I've had this discussion with people, I think it's more complicated. I think it's a very complicated decision. And I would hate to impute anything on these leaders when I'm not sitting there watching their, how they're making these decisions because I know how, I mean, you can't disaggregate the, we all wanna say, and I was saying this the other day, is that, so if you'd follow me on LinkedIn, I have a lot of fun, LinkedIn, Twitter, I'm on all those things and there's not too many Terry Gibbons's out there. So please feel free to follow me because I'm having these discussions out there because it's important. We're at a phase where higher ed has to change. And, you know, but what direct, are we gonna go in the right direction? And I think that a lot of decisions that are being made, you know, how damaging is it if an institution is closed and all the businesses around it suffer and, you know, people are losing their livelihoods. And, you know, I mean, I, you know, I'm not totally bought into the debate that some people are having, you know, that, you know, we need to open up because it's economic. But I am open to the idea that if we can do it in a safe, I mean, my goal would be, the federal government should, and state government should step in, give higher ed enough funding to get through this year online, but also to support local communities, to support anybody who needs economic health and give us a year to get through this and figure out how we can figure, how can we can do this in a way that makes sense? We're not, this is not making sense right now. I think that's what it comes down to. Everything we're doing, whether it's remote or face-to-face or whatever we're doing, it's not making sense because we don't have that, we don't have a safety net. We need a one-year safety net that would allow everybody to say, okay, we're all gonna take a deep breath and look at how to do this. We're gonna share, I mean, and collaboration, that's the other thing I wanna make sure I brought up today is collaboration. Everybody should be talking to everybody else about how best to do this because we have some great minds out there that are doing amazing things and we should be learning from each other. We should be sharing resources, you know, we should be giving funding to people like Maria who are doing this really in a great way and helping her spread the word. You know, it's funny because we're pretty good at collaboration at higher ed, but for some reason when it comes to these bigger issues, we don't seem to be able to find a way to work with each other and figure out what the best practices are. And it's like we're so caught up in the competition that we can't get, stake a step back and say, this is not a time for competition. I was going to say, I think it's a competition problem, right? Like every institution of higher ed is competing with every other institution of higher ed for students. And when you threw all of them into this uncertainty bath of will students come back? It got kind of like people's, on the one hand, I think there was a lot of sharing like publicly with, you know, faculty support stuff and like whatever you could to try to, you know, help as many people as possible. On the other hand, I think there was a circling of the wagons, like we need our students to come back to us. So it doesn't matter what's best for students, it's what's best to bring students back to us, right? And I think that's really hard. Like how do we get past the competition aspect of, you know, there's a real competition between community colleges and four-year schools between one school and more like neighborhood four-year schools. And like, you know, it is a real issue. I want to point, Roxanne in the chat, wonderful, Roxanne was pointing out the question of timers, which may be a gentle hint to me, but we are going to be running out of time in about eight minutes. It goes by and you passed. Well, you guys are just splendid and people are all over you guys on the chat on Twitter. I did want to ask, if we could look ahead a little bit, this is what I was doing in that quarter of this. First, quick question. Terry, people wanted to know where to follow you to get the most Terry Givens? Would that be LinkedIn or would that be Twitter? All of the above, I'm big on social media. So I'm putting it in the chat and actually I'll let you can copy and paste it for those who, so Twitter is at Terry Givens and then just look for me Terry Givens on LinkedIn. I have a Facebook page, but I'm not that active on it. And I just posted some more mental health resources because Raj was asking about that. So we have a whole set of articles and things on faculty mental health. So yes, please feel free to follow me. And because I mean, one of my goals is, I mean, we're going to be actually starting as some more like a weekly something like this, but more focused on what's the news and higher ed and leadership and those kinds of things. We're going to start a weekly discussion soon in the next few weeks to kind of, we have to stay on top of this. And so my solution to the collaboration issue is to get out there and start talking to people and saying, knocking heads and saying, let's do this. We should definitely be talking together more about how, and we have this window of opportunity this fall semester to say, okay, who's doing the things right? Who's doing things wrong? So anyway, yes. Thank you, thank you. Stephen Downs just wants you to write a blog. So I'm just sharing that with you, just so you know. Yeah. Can I add something to Raj's question about faculty emotional support? I think one of the best things for me that's come out of this pandemic is that I formed a group, like a yoga group that meets for 30 minutes a day with friends from all over the country. And we have met on a weekday at four o'clock every day since like March. And because we're mostly educators, we talk about what's going on, how we're doing, what weird things happened in class and what our campuses are doing. And it gives us a kind of like a water cooler to just, and we just, we all do yoga on a nap, but you could clearly do the same thing over coffee or something else. Yoga just gives us a reason to show up and stretch ourselves, which we need because we're all standing at desks all day or sitting at desks all day. But that like regular, somebody always shows up at four o'clock, there's like 15 of us and there's always at least three people who show up and you've got somebody to talk to and just, I think we all kind of need that. And that for me and for most of the people in this group has been our primary form of emotional support. It's like this little tiny bit of normalcy and a weird sea of uncertainty. I love that, I love that. I've got some thoughts about it, but I wanna bring this right back to you. And Raj, as usual, thank you for the great question. Heather Zhang, I wanna say Zhang, forgive me if I mispronounce it any, it says that there should be a national response with fires, hurricanes, unemployment, social unrest, COVID-19, et cetera, to advocate for all learners. The question I'm wondering about is if we look ahead to January, what are we learning about higher ed in this situation that we can apply in the next year? I know it's kind of a stretch to think that far ahead to the next year, but it's a long way to go, I'm treating it now, but looking ahead, what are, I mean, are we, do you think we're rethinking competition? Do you think we're becoming more accustomed to online learning or at least digitally-mediated learning or what kind of changes are you seeing looking ahead? Real quick, I just see us muddling along. A lot of muddling. I think it's going to become even more Lord of the Flies as the cuts that we're starting to see right now really start to bite. Yeah, because it'll start permeating throughout the community in a way that it hasn't really yet, I don't think. I think we're going to see a decoupling of the social aspects of higher education from the educational aspects of higher education to the point where we finally realize that dorms could be used by other 18 and 19 year olds who aren't going to go to college but need a place away from home for a little while to get used to being away from home and easing into the adult world and having some contact with other young people. And like there's a need for, there's really a social need for that, right? And we're seeing that in the colleges that have reopened specifically to meet those needs. But I don't think that that has to be tied to the educational needs of students. And I think that's going to start to decouple the seams. Well, that's a very powerful image. Thank you, thank you. But we have, I love the muddling, but Tom, hang on a second, I need to clear some room on the stage. I'm going to push you off just for a minute. You can push me off too, I can push you off too. Yeah, we have to. Yeah, I'm going to hold on to you for a minute because we have Rebecca Pogorek wanting to come up. And she's a wonderful person who we've had as a guest. And I want to see if we can, if we can hear from her and maybe through her, we'll see. Rebecca, there's all kinds of great work on faculty burnout and faculty stress. Rebecca, are you there? Yes, I'm here. Oh, beautiful, beautiful. I'm just curious, looking ahead, where do you think faculty are going to be in about four months? Are we just going to be fried? Are we going to have more quick outs, like the one in the I believe I am? Are we going to reduce our assessment and intensity of students? What do you think? I mean, it could go so many directions. My hope is that faculty members will find some groups or create some groups that help them model, help them do the muddling through some kind of support networks. And I've said before one of the things that has come out of this whole situation unexpectedly is that faculty seem to be more willing to share their humanity with other faculty and also with their students. So I'm hoping that will extend into mastermind groups or just kind of peer mentoring groups that faculty can use to share ideas to say I don't know what's happening and I'm confused and to get some ideas kind of faculty mentoring teams. If we don't do that, yeah, we are all going to be fried by the end of the semester. I know people who are fried now, right? You know, that we didn't really get a summer to prepare for this or prepare mentally for this. And we dove right into it. And do you mind if I ask you, Rebecca, real quick, because one of the things I've been thinking about is the fact that we didn't have the summer. And when you say that, do you mean it's because you didn't get the word that you were going online quickly enough or what was that? Well, I'm in the Center for Teaching and Learning. So I spent the summer helping with multiple units across my institution, helping to prepare faculty for what's coming in the fall. So I'm at Georgia Tech and we still are partially face-to-face, mostly hybrid at this time. So, but we're hearing from faculty that they put so much effort and really, I mean, for some of them, this is the first time they've considered pedagogy at large. Right, exactly, that's what I was saying. So I mean, we were starting from the ground up with some folks and we had wonderful faculty who were mentoring other faculty, but there was never that time to really kind of process things. It was the rush up. All of our classes in the summer were online. So we had folks doing that. It's that run up and then you get there and then you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, right? You're waiting for the signal to go all remotes. So you never really feel like you're in one place or one connected space at the same time. And that's taxing, you know? Because, yeah, sorry, I was just having a discussion with somebody yesterday about this, that, you know, we kind of wasted the summer because decisions weren't made quickly enough. Well, according to the Chronicle of Higher Ed as of Monday, 24% of higher ed still doesn't have a full plan announced. Wow. Wow. But speaking being belated, thank you for sharing that. Everyone, everyone, pay attention to Rebecca. And Harry, thank you for being an impromptu guest in Spain. Sure. I know, I just got to, I'm not, you know, whatever. Let me just quickly ask the crowd. This kind of session, would you like us to do more of this? Just put it in the chat if you'd like. I'd be glad to, of course, as the Chief Caterer of this. I'd love to hear from you. And oh shoot, we've just popped over the edge of the hour. Yep. Rebecca, thank you again. Thanks, everybody. Terry, thank you again. And of course, this is my thanks as well to Tom and to Rhea for sharing so much. Let me just quickly bring up where we are headed before I let you all go. And thank you again for being flexible and letting us explore today. I really appreciate that. Thank you all for all of your questions and stories and thoughts. Just want to let you know that we are continuing to throw along the next couple of months. We've got a whole stack of sessions. I mentioned the topics earlier, so if you want to learn more about those, just go to tinyurl.com slash forum fall 2020. We have lots of social media places for talking about this kind of stuff. My Twitter is really in the lead, but people are also at us on LinkedIn and Facebook. We have an archive, which now cracked 221 videos, going back almost five years. So if you'd like to go back into the past and look at the different ways of exploring these topics, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. In the meantime, again, thank you all so much for your energy, your contributions, your discussion, your conviviality. Above all, please good luck this fall and stay safe. I'd be glad to hear from you all. Take care. Bye-bye.