 Good morning. My name's Eric Eich. I work as a professor of cognitive science in the UBC Psych Department. I also work at Central Admin as vice provost, associate vice president, academic. And it's my pleasure to welcome you here to the Learning Technology Innovation Summit, the first of which we hope will be turned into an annual event. The summit is part of UBC's week-long Celebrate Learning Week, which is now in its 10th year. I really can't imagine a better lead-off speaker for today's session than Joseph Un, president of Northwestern, Northeastern, sorry Northwestern, shoot me now, Northeastern University, the leader in higher education policy and internationally renowned scholar in linguistics. I can hear myself. A native of Lebanon, president, Un studied in Beirut in Paris for undertaking his doctoral studies in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his faculty advisor was Noam Chomsky. During his tenure at Northeastern, President Un has been actively encouraging his faculty to experiment and innovate in ways that they teach their students. Faculty members who have been at Northeastern for quite a while received the change in the campus community to be truly profound and transformative. President Un is the author of Robot Proof, Higher Education and the Age of Artificial Intelligence. It's a highly acclaimed book that was published last year by MIT Press. In his book, President Un suggests that our society is in a period of profound disruption brought on by the explosion of technologies. This period is similar and kind to the industrial revolution long ago. This insight raises a very key question not only for us here at UBC, but for our counterparts at universities worldwide, and that is how should we educate our students to thrive and flourish in this new society? Well, President Un argues that the answer, or at least a big part of the answer, is to provide students with a robot-proof education. As described by the MIT Press, and I'll quote from them, a robot-proof education, Un argues, is not concerned slowly with topping up students' minds with high-octane facts. Rather, it calibrates them with creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover, or create something valuable to society, scientific proof, a hip-hop recording, a web comic, a cure for cancer. Un lays out the framework for a new discipline, Humanics, which builds on our innate strengths and prepares students to compete in a labor market in which smart machines work alongside human professionals. The new literacies of Un's Humanics are data literacy, technological literacy, and human literacy. Students will need data literacy to manage the flow of big data and technological literacy to know how their machines work, but they'll also need human literacy. The humanities, communication, and design, the function is, well, human beings. Lifelong learning opportunities will support their ability to adapt to change. I think this is a really remarkable thesis by a remarkable scholar. I'm eager to learn a lot more about the man and his ideas, and I wager that you are too. So please join me in welcoming Professor Un to our campus. We're honored to have you here, and especially as the first keynote speaker for UBC's first Learning Technology Innovation Summit. Dr. Un? Thank you, Eric. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me in the back? Yes. Okay, great. So thank you, Eric, for this introduction, and it's a real pleasure for me to be here with you. I know your president well. Last time I saw him was at Northeastern, and we had a workshop on experiential liberal arts, and he was in transition. So he, you know, he was about to become your president, and this is the last time we met. So we have followed what each one of us has been doing for a long time, and you have a great leader. I'm going to be brief in my presentation today because I have been taught by Simon that the value of this gathering is to have a real dialogue, and therefore what I'm going to start with is a little bit what Eric talked about. I'm going to start by looking at this world that you have been shaping. Many of you here have been shaping, and academia has shaped, and industry has shaped. It's the AI world, and we all know that machines are getting smarter, and between AI, intelligence systems, you know, machine learning, whatever you call it, robotics, that the advances have profound implications on society, on all of us. Various studies, in fact, are projecting that up to 50% of the jobs we know in the Western world and in the industrialized world are going to disappear. The World Bank issued a study projecting that in the emerging world, up to 70% of these jobs are going to disappear. And why is it the case for a simple reason? Every job that can be turned into a process will be replaced by machines. I don't know whether the job of a president will be replaced, but a large part of a president's job can be replaced by such. And in fact, there are even studies listing the jobs at risk. And if you think that those jobs are restricted to the blue-colored job, we have to think about that again, because it's impacting the legal profession, the medical profession, accounting, financial consulting. Machines are colorblind. Now, what you're also going to hear is some people say, no, it's not going to be 50%. Yes, it's not the Oxford study or the McKinsey study, et cetera, it's going to be up to maybe 30% or 40%. This is not interesting. What is interesting is that the change is here, the transformation is here, and the displacement of jobs is here with us. What are the implications for society? It's very clear, profound inequality. If people are going to lose their jobs, what are they going to do? But also, it is also the case that new jobs are going to be created. We see them as we speak, there are jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago, ranging from big data to cyber to now machine learning itself. So the question for us in high education is very simple. What is our mission in this changing environment, in this new world? And our mission is very simple, is to make people robot-proof. So the question becomes, how are we going to achieve that? And what I'm suggesting is a blueprint for making, helping learners become robot-proof. I start by saying, if you want, by dividing learners into categories. Those who are short on experience, long on time. The traditional undergraduate students that we have. Why are you laughing? Because indeed, they are short on experience and long on time. And when we look at those learners, we need to start asking, what is it that they need in this AI world? And as Eric said, what I'm putting forward is the concept of humanics. Namely, every learner at this stage will need to master humanics. And what is humanics? Humanics is the integration of three literacies. A technological literacy, every learner needs to understand machines, how they work, and how to interface with the machines. Second, a data literacy. The learners have to understand the sea of information being generated and how to navigate it and how to make sense of it. And third, a human literacy. The human literacy is our last frontier. What is it that we as human beings do that cannot be easily duplicated or cannot be duplicated at all by machines? What are these literacies? The ability to be creative, innovative, entrepreneurial. The ability to work with people in teams. The ability to empathize with people. The ability to be culturally agile across societies and across the world, global too. And I can build on that. But the point that I'm raising here is that every learner at this stage needs to integrate the three literacies, not to master one and then to turn to the other. But how to integrate that? And I think during the discussion with Simon we'll have the opportunity to focus more on the integration. So what I'm saying is that Humanics is, if you want, the Gen Ed curriculum. And it's based on the integration of the three literacies that I mentioned. But it's not enough to teach it. You can spend hours reading about innovation, entrepreneurship. It doesn't make us an entrepreneur. We can talk about how people interact with each other. But this is not enough to make us understand people and to make us understand ourselves. And this is where experiential learning is going to be very relevant. Experiential learning is essentially the integration of the classroom experience with the world experience through internships, long-term internships, meaningful internships, through various interactions, whether they are on campus or off campus. And we'll have the opportunity to discuss that at length. But experiential education is a way for every learner to understand herself and to understand others. To understand what she is good at, what she is not good at, understand how to work with people and teams, how to move people, how to empathize with people, and to spot opportunities too, to spot the gaps. And what I'm saying in the interest of time, I'll be brief, is that experiential education allows the learner to practice integration of the three literacies on a daily basis. So what I have said so far is that machines, learning systems, AI systems, robotics are with us. What's our reaction as educators? And I suggested this blueprint starting with the humanics and the experiential education. But let me turn now to the second group of learners. Learners who are long on experience, short on time. Long on experience, short on time. Those are us. And the adult learners. Machines will continue to ever be more performing, smarter if you want. That displays more jobs and more jobs will be created. And many of them are at the interface between machines and humans. But which means that every one of us in the real world is going to be obsolete. I feel it on a daily basis. Therefore, the only way for us to survive and to flourish in this environment is to reeducate ourselves, as to have the opportunity to reeducate ourselves, and to re-skill ourselves and upskill ourselves. What I'm talking about is simply what we in higher education refer to as lifelong learning. And I would like to pause a little bit here and reflect on higher education, on us, on our practice. Essentially, we looked and we look at lifelong learning as a second-class operation, as an ancillary operation. We dabbled with it, but this is not part of our core mission overall. Now, in the United States alone, the number of lifelong learners is over 68 percent already. The number of traditional undergraduate students is in fact shrinking, going down. Why? Because the Western world has an aging population. Correct? And then the question becomes if you have an enormous growth and all the projections are there to tell us that within 10 years, close to 85 percent of the learners are going to be lifelong learners in the United States. How are we going to serve them? If we look at lifelong learning as not part of our core mission, we are missing an enormous opportunity, indeed an enormous obligation. We risk becoming like the railway industry that looked at the onset of the airline revolution and said, ah, it's not for me, because I am in the railway business. And you know what happened? They didn't define themselves as being in the transportation business. Our mission is education. Our mission is not to educate the 18 to 22 and do research and PhDs only. Our mission is education. And if we do not embrace lifelong learning, then others will. And others are. There are many companies starting their own universities. There are also for profits taking advantage of that. But let's focus on the companies. When we survey and we talk to these companies and we ask them, why are you launching your own universities? The answer is very simple. Because our needs are not met. You in higher education, you are not meeting our needs. And frankly, they say that we prefer not to have those universities because it's not our core competence. You know, when you are going to devise a new t-shirt here about UBC, you don't manufacture that yourselves. We go to another company, we outsource it. Because that's not our core competence in higher education. And they prefer that we take over. There are other reasons why also they prefer us to take over. I can discuss that later. But we are now in a situation where the large majority of learners are lifelong learners and they are not served by us. And that's our opportunity. But then when we start looking at that, it is not simply enough to say that, yes, we want to engage in lifelong learning. Lifelong learning is going to push us to look at everything we do in a different way. Let me be clear. For instance, the way we look at our curricula is that we faculty, we own them. I'm going to devise a magnificent curriculum and I expect people to come. I expect the students to take my courses. When we are working with people who are short on time, long on experience, what they need is something very impactful and the whole notion of a full curriculum is not something, including a degree, is not something that they are ready to commit for. So, when you start thinking about curricula for lifelong learners, the first thing is to sit down with various employers. Where is the gap? What are the needs? This is something that is new to us in higher education because we own the curricula and now we have to start sharing it. We will devise it but the notion of outcome and impact will be there. The deliveries have to change. I'm not going to say come here and make a commitment for a year. People don't have time to do it. We have to start thinking about small burst that we call micro certificates, certificates, nano certificates. We have to think about stackable certificates. That's a journey and we have to think about our delivery mode. We have a magnificent campus. I always admire your campus. It's beautiful but people don't have the time to come to us. We have to go to them. We have to embed themselves with wherever they are. The notion of on demand, the notion of customized curricula, the notion of personalized curricula is necessary when you work with lifelong learners and that is a departure and be happy to discuss that more because there is more to be said about that. But the whole point is that what I'm trying to make is that becoming robot proof is a journey. No one is set for life and that's the opportunity and the obligation for higher education. It's going to lead us to rethink many of the operations that we take for granted, sometimes in a painful way, but if you look at it you can start to see that every time society is facing a change, like the movement from the agrarian to the industrial, the industrial to the tech and the tech to AI, higher education adapted itself, sometimes painfully, but it adapted itself and reasserted its relevance and its centrality. In a world where artificial intelligence is displacing many jobs, it is our opportunity to reassert the relevance of human intelligence and this could be viewed as the golden age of higher education because we are the ones who can make it happen and provide the opportunities for learners to become robot proof for life. Thank you very much. All right, good morning everyone. I'm Simon Bates, I'm the academic director at CTLT here and senior advisor teaching and learning and I have the pleasure of moderating and facilitating this question and answer session that I think these opening comments I hope have given people plenty of food for thought, provoked some questions and some comments and I'm going to take the opportunity just to start off with a couple of questions and then we'll take some questions from the audience both here in the theater and also online so please start thinking about some of the issues you'd like to raise with President Hayden. I want to start with a question around, you know, you must talk to a lot of university presidents about the topics in your book and I wanted to ask if you could urge presidents to act on just one idea or one issue from your book, what would it be? I think that I would start with the experiential learning, why? Because experiential learning is going to lead the learner to integrate the classroom experience as I said with the world experience. In so doing they are going to push us out of our comfort zone because when you have students going all over the world and experiencing the world, as a matter of fact at Northeastern we have 3,000 employers and not-for-profits working with us in 136 countries and the students go on those internships co-ops for 6 months. When they come back they're questioning everything we say because they lived it whether they're in Nepal or Shanghai or Cape Town or London and therefore I will start with that because then it's a transformation moment for them and it becomes a transformation moment for us. They get out of their comfort zone when they do it and in return they pay us back by getting us out of our comfort zone and questioning the relevance of what we do constantly. So I know Northeastern has a hugely impressive experiential learning program. I think something like 95, 96 percent of students, undergraduate students engage in one experiential learning opportunity, three quarters engage in two or more. So this is something that's clearly, if you like, built into the DNA of your institution. Thinking about the experiential learning opportunities we have for here and it's certainly broad but nowhere near that depth or that consistency. What advice would you give institutions about how to scale something like that? Yeah, yeah, that's the experiential learning is not only about long-term internships. In fact, our students, ours is an inclusive hour, are involved in experiential learning on a daily basis on our campuses. For instance, they do research with you. The other, they have club sports. They have various organizations that they are leading. What is, why are we touting the value of a residential model? We're touting the value of a residential model for people who are short on experience, long on time, is because precisely we look at it as a way for them to mature, correct? That's what we say. So if we can capture that, and how can we capture that? You say, but it's impossible to capture life. In fact, it is possible. For instance, at my own institution, we have a center of learning with cognitive scientists, learning specialists, et cetera, et cetera. And they have devised an app that we tested this year with 1,000 students and next year is going to be given to all our students and all our alumni. And it's a coaching app for life. So from day one, the students are going to enter their objectives with the help of the advisors, whatever. I'm interested in furthering my competence in the tech literacy, the human literacy, this aspect, entrepreneurship, whatever it is. Then the app is going to give you a journey, provide you with options, opportunities. Once you enter your activities, what you do on campus and outside the campus, and it will help you with reassessing and assessing constantly your progress. What we do there is capture every activity. The learners are capturing every activities, whether they are on campus or off campus. And this will remain with them for life. It's a coaching app for life. So experiential education is something that every institution has the tools. For instance, here you have the, as I mentioned, the research activities, all the organizations that exist on campus. I'm sure you have worldwide activities, too. You know, we have something called dialogue of civilizations where, for instance, the students go for four weeks to six weeks, complete immersion, 20 students with a faculty in another country. Also, everything can be entered so that you monitor your progress about the various competencies and the various courses you have set. So, and frankly, here, machine learning is helping us. We devised it with that in mind. So, there is a way of doing that because de facto is happening in our campuses, but it's not happening in an integrated way. And it's not happening, for instance, even when a student takes a course in, let's say, computer science and another course in ethics. It doesn't mean that we have an integration. Similarly, if I'm interested in furthering various aspects of human literacies, they're not happening only if I do these activities, but the question is how do these specific activities outside the classroom are going to be integrated with the reflection in the classroom? You know, I'm sure you have also with your students in your clubs where they launch companies, startups, not for profits. That also can be captured. Every aspect of what they do can be captured. And we have the tools to do it. I certainly know just looking around the audience here, there are people and you may yet receive questions or comments around those who support and deliver experiential learning opportunities to the world, to students. I think for us, some of the challenges are that integration piece and also the assessment of experiential learning opportunities. So, assessing against those skills and competencies that students may develop. But I'll leave those questions. And that's where your app is going to help you because it's the beginning of the assessment with the student. The student herself is assessing herself based on those objectives. And you then have the opportunity to interact with the student based on her assessment. And look at it. I'll leave that topic for further questions. The last question I wanted to ask just before I open it up to the floor is I'm interested in the way some of the things you've been talking about are received by research-intensive universities because, you know, large successful research-intensive universities may think our applications are strong. We have many more applications than places. Our students are very good. Our research grants are booming. We're doing fine in the rankings. This is really not a concern for us. Do you ever feel that sort of sense of complacency? No, actually the answer is yes. I feel the sense of complacency. Starting with my own institution, with every institution, look, we are a research-intensive private institution. Therefore, we don't have any government support directly for the students, for researchers, for the, you know, but and we receive 62,000 applications for 2,800 seats. So the question is why should we change? But we all know that when you are at the top, that's where you have to wonder. If I am the best at producing floppy disks in the world, okay, the world is changing and we're shaping the change. Our research, you know, all the work that I described very simplistically about machine learning, about AI, about robots, this work is happening in our research universities. It's happening in industry too. And we have a vibrant ecosystem of discovery. And this is going to lead us now to a new world. And therefore the question becomes is our learning, our teaching, keeping up with the other side of what we do. And clearly the answer is not fully. Our model is still built in some ways on the agrarian model in terms of calendar and then on the industrial and post industrial model on learning. And that's the opportunity for us. And I think in your comments, it's a profound illustration of just how quickly things have changed because I'm sure there's people in the audience who didn't get the floppy disk joke. You know, they may not even have used a floppy disk or certainly a floppy disk that was actually floppy. There we go. I'm dating myself a bit there. It's laughing at those who didn't live it. Let me open it up to the floor for questions. Just before I do, if I could ask people, because we are streaming, we have an online audience. I know it's always tempting to start asking your question immediately if you could wait until one of the two roving mics. I believe we have a couple of roving mics until the roving mics reach you and then ask your question. So with that, if you don't mind, if I may ask you to identify yourself and say what you do also, that could be very helpful. I've said there are roving mics. I certainly hope there are now after. See, while we're waiting, I see here, you know, this sign saying no dishwasher. That's a human machine interface. Mike Van? Yeah. Hi, I'm Charlotte Black from the School of Population and Public Health. I'm the Associate Director and responsible for our educational programming. So we have mostly graduate students. And some of these discussions about experiential learning have been large in our discussions. But I want to shift the focus and maybe even ask a question to Simon. I was very intrigued about the idea of the need to shift our focus to adult learners. And the stats about what proportion of learners would fall into that adult learners. So I'm imagining that, you know, we might as a university think about where we are now and where we want to shift. And I just quickly looked at the UBC strategic plan. And it focuses on experiential learning. But I don't see a theme coming through about shifting to the micro certificates, the, you know, the things that adult learners will need in this changing world. So I wonder if you could both reflect on what universities need to do to take a strategic look at shifting their focus. I'd prefer that he starts. You put him on the spot. Let him take the first answer. I thought I was asking the question. Let me try and sort of offer an initial response to that. I think you're absolutely right. It's something that is a gap in the strategic plan. When I read the book, I was really taken by the clarity of this distinction between short on experience, long on time. These are our traditional undergraduates who come and spend three, four, five years here. And yet the other side of the learner equation, if you like, the other side of that population is people who are exactly the opposite, the working professionals that there is, as you heard in the opening comments. And yeah, I think we do have to focus some attention there. So I know that's not a very satisfactory response. So I'm going to end it with another question, which is how do institutions that have not devoted as much of this or to this as part of their core business? How do they affect that shift? Because we can't ignore the undergraduate population who are going to still come to us for a period of three or four years of constant study. So let me go back to your question. All our certificates that what we have done is that we built all our certificates, all our master's. And now our PhDs are becoming experiential, even the PhDs. And we're very excited about that. So experiential has to be looked at throughout. And even when we have the, you know, the eight week certificate in data analytics, et cetera, they all involve a real life experiential component. So the other aspect what Simon has been asking is about change in general. Amy, how do you change? We already are overworked. Some of them may feel underpaid, but we work 24-7 on whatever we do. And now you are saying we need to add a different component, whatever it is, whether it's lifelong learning or otherwise. I think here if you'll bear with me a little bit, let me talk about how we practice and how we look at change in higher education. We are rather conservative in higher education because we want to change the world and we are doing that, but we don't want to change ourselves. And every time we want to look at something, we want a consensus. We want to vote on it altogether. In fact, every time there is a change and, you know, it's very well known there is a whole literature on change. There are the early adopters, there are the naysayers, and the large majority is in between, correct? Wait and see. So the way to do it, and frankly the way we have been doing it, we change a lot and we like that, is not to mandate any change, but to foster a culture of experimentation and innovation. We have a whole strategic plan focusing on humanics, on experiential education, on lifelong learning, and we have empowered people, colleagues who want to launch these endeavors, new endeavors, let them be the proof, let them succeed, let them refine it, even let them fail, and then they become the ambassadors, the proof. I know of a very fine institution, research institution, and the faculty in a college voted not to allow any faculty to work on hybrid learning, online learning, whatever it is. That's against academic freedom, correct? How can you do that? That's insane. And therefore I think every time you want change, empower groups, dedicated groups to run with it, and that's I think the way to approach it, because otherwise we're all working full-time on what we have to do. I think a really important piece of that is opportunity or permission to fail, or at least not totally succeed first time around. We want to minimize failures when it might impact students, but again that spirit of innovation, of entrepreneurship, which is one of the core competencies that you talk about. We have a patient, Catherine, Catherine next, but it's quite a wide field of view, so apologies if you have to wave your hand a little bit to attract attention, and then maybe after this we'll see if there's a comment or question from those watching online. I'm Catherine Ron. I'm an educational leadership faculty member tenured in the psychology department, where we have about 2,000 majors, and then all the others who we teach. My question is about kind of dovetailing off of your last set of comments, and I wondered if you could give some examples of incentives and practices that you've implemented to help support faculty and incentivize participation in these in-depth experiential programs, something you have hiring practices, criteria for tenure, things like that. Let me start by reminding us all, including myself, that we hold the incentives in higher education. We created them, correct? No one is forcing us. You don't have an outside force saying those are the criteria. We created that, and therefore it is also in our hands to modify them or suggest otherwise. Now your question is very comprehensive, you know, because you're asking about the reward system and before that the evaluation system all the way. Traditionally we know that in our research universities we have, every one of us has three profiles, a research profile, a teaching profile, and a service profile, and usually it's 40, 40, 20. I don't know whether it's the same distribution here, but roughly Grosso modo is along these lines. And essentially we in higher education, we tell our non-tenant faculty, play it safe in, especially when it comes to research, and you want to be interdisciplinary, be careful. We also say, look teaching is important, but it's not going, you know, what's going to be important is really what you're doing with research. And service as on, once you become tenure, we expect service to be to increase, but service is keep it to the minimum. And in some ways that, you know, what you're saying is if this is the case for pre-tenure, we are not helping our colleagues be themselves. So for instance we want them to be much more to play it safe and then to play it in a non-safe way after they get tenure, correct? That's what you're referring to. And you're nodding yes. And at the same time I see a change, why? Because there are no fields being created and by definition those fields are interdisciplinary. They cannot be restricted to one. I can give you many examples you can give even more. Let me pick one, network sciences. Okay, we have invested in network sciences and network sciences by definition, you know, models, networks and says all networks whether they are biological or physical or social or communications etc. Obey the same models and you can predict the evolution of these. This is a hot field now. Ten years ago it was almost non-existent, but the people who are involved are coming from physics, political science, humanities, but the, you know, digital humanities, etc. from economics, from business, from health, etc. And they're all working together and they're publishing in nature in science, whatever. And in some ways, you know, this example is compelling because the results are there to buck the trend. And what I'm saying is that I don't have an answer for you, but what I am saying also is that the proof is in the results in your own field in psychology. Look what happened with psychology and economics. Do we have an economist here? Okay, so I'm safe. Maybe online. Economists built their whole models on the notion of rational choice and he comes an annoying psychologist who's talking about behavioral. It was rejected. It was ridiculed till the person got the Nobel Prize. And now you have behavioral economics and it's a hot field that everybody wants to have. So, look, it's a difficult question. I don't have the answer, but if we have the conviction, ultimately, of, and what we do and we have the results, why did we move to academia to make money? Of course not. To play it safe, even less. Let's break the mold and you are the future. So that's, I don't have much more to say and not much at all. I'd go to something you said in the first part of your answer, which is we created the structures collectively that incentivize and reward certain types of behavior. And if we want to incentivize and reward different types of behavior, while still, you know, sticking within the sort of academic promotion system of promotion and tenure, then maybe we need to think about ways those structures need to be modified. I can give you a concrete example. We fostered the idea that assistant professors do not associate and have joint appointments between different departments. And we asked each department to sign an agreement with the faculty on the distribution of labor, on the evaluation, on how, you know, we are nurturing and providing an environment that will allow the faculty colleague to move forward, et cetera. Because otherwise, what happens when you have joint appointments is you end up being asked to do twice as much by each one. So that's a small thing that we can implement right away. Similarly, I mean, the question then afterwards is you're asking about letters, how do I ask letters, et cetera. A, you know, from whom, from all this has to be at least codified so that there is an understanding. But that's not enough. You know, that's the lowest common denominator. All right, I wonder if we could take, I see a few more hands, if we could take a question from the online audience. I'm not quite sure who's wrangling the online, maybe someone who has tweeted or asked a question. Or maybe not. Okay, gentlemen, towards the, towards the middle there. My name is Jonathan Berkowitz. I teach statistics, the Southern School of Business. So when I hear data literacy, I'm of course excited. The agrarian society was entirely experiential learning. We moved from agrarian through industrial, technological, and AI, certainly the first few steps really on the old school approach of the three R's, reading, writing, and arithmetic. And it seems to me that your humanics approach is really a nice update of that because reading is really the idea about reading people and communicating. Writing is the ability to write code and to make it AI. And arithmetic is your data literacy. So it's a new take on really an old model of education that has moved us from one stage to the next in society. So I thought I would offer that analogy to you. What worries me is your dichotomizing people into two groups of learners, those with, as you've described, our undergraduates and those as lifelong learners. The trouble with dichotomizing is that we lose that in the middle and we lose the continuum. And if we think about, if we do our jobs right at our universities, we are turning our students into lifelong learners. So I think perhaps what you're thinking about or referring to is people who decide to resume learning later in life, which is different from being a lifelong learner. That's what our universities are trying to do. And I also worry about your comment that people don't have the time to learn and we need to give them bite-sized bits of learning. If you see the world only in bite-sized pieces, you miss the big picture, you miss the ability to find those connections between the pieces, the ability to find those patterns, find those connections, those correlations, which is what data literacy, data mining is all about, finding those correlations. And my only analogy to that is, it's like going to a cocktail party or a cocktail reception, and you have your bite-sized pieces, you have to come home and have a peanut butter sandwich afterwards. So I wanted to explore this idea. I love what you're saying. I love what you're saying because in some ways, I completely agree with you, but except I would change, the Gregian model was not based on an experiential model. The model that was really experiential was in a way in the Renaissance model. The Renaissance model where you don't know whether to characterize somebody as a physicist or as a philosopher. And the three R's that you mentioned, I love that, but what I'm talking about is integration. And that's what's not happening in higher education. I love the fact that you worry, I don't worry. The second part, because it's good to worry because it's an incentive to change. But when you mentioned the typology about between the two groups, every typology is not an explanation. That's why the fields of typology, of plant classification died. It's a way of presenting the situation. The third point I think is a fundamental point you raised. Are we incentivizing people and giving them the tools for lifelong learning? I don't know. You have to really ask yourself, and I'm asking myself constantly, are we succeeding in that? The third part that you mentioned, the final part about that, is the bite size. Don't look down at the bite size because the bite size can give you a great way of entering into a new world and reflecting on this new world. Let me give you an example. When you read a good review of a book, okay, a review, for instance, by Jared Diamond, I read one two weeks ago on the world of genetic analysis and evolution. That was so interesting and profound that clearly it got me to start looking at this field. That was bite size. Let me give you another example. Yesterday, flying here, I read a review by an economist on a book about how society looks at value, who creates value, who extracts value, and who destroys value. Essentially, the person was saying that society rewards people who extract value for the bankers because they are the intermediary between those who create value and make this value there for society. This person was saying maybe it should be reversed. We should focus on people who create value and reward them rather than people who extract value. It took me eight minutes to read that. Look at me. I have the hutzpah to be in front of you and to tell you this bite size was a moment of refraction and integration. Don't look down at anything you do based on time. You can waste a long time or you can waste a short time. That's my point. Thank you. I'm an associate professor in education research in faculty of the industry. I know nothing about the industry. I started with Pi and now on my smartphone I have more than five instant messengers constantly pushing out notifications and then the whole notions of helping our students, our learners, or preparing them how to filter out some of this distraction, some of this information overloaded skills seems to be not well discussed in a lot of the literature. The second thing is about this whole idea of customized curriculum for our students. It's a great idea. However, in higher education we constantly encounter this academic territorial war. My is more important to learn than yours. In this kind of structure, this kind of academic culture, it doesn't seem to me that our ecosystem is ready to embrace this idea. So I'm very interested in learning what you think about these two issues, about distraction and academic territory. I'll speak about the second one, the academic territory, the territoriality. Look, in some ways this territoriality, look, what do we value the most in higher education and research-intensive universities? Is no knowledge being created, correct? That's what we're proud of. And we say, look, I have, in my institution, we have those breakthroughs, the breakthroughs, breakthroughs. But if you look at the funding, in the funding now is interdisciplinary, the big funding, the large funding, it's also translational. But take this funding. And the funding agencies are the ones that allow us to have the breakthroughs. Because without them, all these buildings with millions and millions of dollars of research instruments and people would not exist. The funding agencies are telling us already, if you want the big centers, the big institutes, the big funding, go for that. What does it mean? It means that we have to work together. You know, for instance, we have a notion of resilience, a big center on resilience. We have a big center on cybersecurity. Like all of you on the environment, all these require people to come from, you know, computer science, to discuss ethical considerations. You have philosophers there, you have legal professions concerned, legal experts providing input on privacy. And they're all working together. So if indeed in higher education and research-intensive institutions, we live and die by our funding, our funding is telling us go there. And that's what's happening. So that's the change. Okay? The other thing about distraction, we just had an example of that. What can I tell you? We, you know, I don't have anything smart to say that, you know, if this is, if you believe indeed that this is an issue, what I would do is I put it forward as an issue, you know, every institution, including ours, we have seed funding for new ideas about research, about learning, et cetera. Put an interdisciplinary team together and see. I don't have anything smart to say about that. Just on the topic of distraction, it gives me an opportunity to plug an event coming up later and celebrate learning week, which I think is on Thursday afternoon. And it's the issue that many of us have faced if we teach classes, the issue of laptop use in class. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? It can certainly be distracting. It can also be a power for really engaged student learning. And on Thursday afternoon, there'll be a debate between both sides of those arguments. We're almost at time. I'm going to ask one more question from the gentleman towards the back. And then we'll wrap up. This gentleman is also, can I suggest for the following, if the two of you ask you questions, and then we'll try to provide one answer. It doesn't mean that it has a unified answer or a coherent answer. So please, please go ahead. Hi there. My name is Dean Prelatsi. I'm here at kind of a different situation in that I actually work in industry. And I'm with Canada's digital technology supercluster some of the time. Other of the time, I'm an executive in residence with an agri-tech accelerator. So I coach and mentor tech startup entrepreneurs. And I also teach at the university at the BC Institute of Technology. And I teach from a very experiential point of view. So my question is, what is your advice to companies? You're working with 300 plus? 3000. 3000 sorry, plus companies and nonprofits around the world. And this context of this discussion has been fairly focused on higher learning. And I'm wondering, what is your advice to companies that also have to maintain a certain pace with this machine-oriented world and the notion of humanics? And how does it connect back into, you know, your advocacy for where higher learning should be heading? Great. And the question here on this side, could you identify you said can you hear me? Yes. No, it's the question has to do with I'm nearly at the end of my journey. I'm 74. No one believes you. But what I wanted to say is during the lifelong learning, I got a trade in the military in my 20s. I got a degree in my 30s. I got another degree in my 40s. I got another degree in my 60s. And I just finished doing a MOOC certificate in terms of technology-enabled learning. The comment that I have, and perhaps you can frame it into a question, is that what's the purpose of a university? And I've had experiences with universities I taught at SFU for 20 years in a similar way that this gentleman just talked about, mainly in- Could you get the mic closer? Management skills in advanced technology. I also taught postdoc fellows and in Canada, this is last year, 70% of postdoc fellows don't get a job when they're finished their fellowship. You know, there's a problem. So what is the problem? In my life, I've been self-directed. I've been an employee. I've been an employer. So I don't know that we should categorize necessarily what you are as a value proposition. That's how you create yourself. I have a master algorithm that I've developed in my brain in terms of, and it's a value proposition. So what I do is I go out and you use, and what I encourage, okay, from the purpose of the university is learning how to think, as I mentioned this year before, learning how to think, how to express, learning how to envision. It's a place where you learn these skills and then you'll be able to go out and practice them. But I do think that the self-directed thing for me has been, you know, over 70 years has been quite successful. I looked back and I grin because I said, yeah, it was good. But what I saw with the universities was more about training because what I found working in international economic development for the last 30 years is that the British and the Germans seem to have some of the best people in terms of project development. And you can look at everything, even if you're an employee, you can look at things as an intervention. But it's more about problem solving leadership and training people in the universities how to become problem solving leaders. Because once you graduate, you're expected to solve problems. You're expected, whether you're an employee or whether you're on a project. You're not expected to solve problems only. You're expected to find problems. And when people didn't think about them. And that's the beauty of the integration that my colleague about the three hours, that's where we all agree. It's integration. And the integration of these and then going into the notion not only of problem solvers, but we define problems that will lead us to rethink the world. And that's what we're doing. That's ultimately what humans can do, that machines cannot do. So I have described this humanics. Let me go back to the issue if you allow me about. We are in a new world called it simplistically the AI world. This AI world is going to leave many people stranded and others prepared with respect to society as a whole. Society has an obligation to take care of the citizens. And it's not one size fits all. So the way I look at it going back to your question about industry, there should be a real policy, national policy, whether it's in Canada and the United States or anywhere about how to bring universities, industry and government together to look at this new world and make it a world where people can flourish and redefine themselves. And we in high education have an enormous role to play. And you in industry, there is nothing called industry, one conglomerate called industry. You have the startups, you have the mature industry, et cetera. And that's an, in fact, that's an opportunity to have a national policy on that. And then if you look at the partnerships that exist constantly, you know, I can give you my own examples of my own institution with GE where we started looking at advanced manufacturing. We started with IBM. We looked at they have 5,000 badges. How we can take those badges, those are nano certificates and integrate them for lifelong learners too. There are many ways we can work together. But if we don't do that, we always talk about inequality, people left behind. I was talking to a very well-known person in Silicon Valley and he told me in this new AI world, there will be masters and slaves, namely winners and losers. And the mission of high education is to prevent that from happening. We don't want slaves. And that's the enormous responsibility that we have in higher education. Thank you. All right. Let me, thank you. Thank you, sir. Let me just make a few comments in closing. We're heading into a short break. Now I would invite all of you back at 11 o'clock. We have a student panel because if we really want to know what the future of higher education should look like, it might be a good idea to ask the students who are living it. There's a break now. There will be opportunities to purchase President Owens' book, Robot Proof. He mentioned it today. I read it a couple of months ago. First of all, it passes what I call the PhD thesis test, which means you can read it on a flight from Vancouver to Toronto. It is very, very readable. But I want to close with a comment from someone who I know a number of people here follow for his perspectives on higher education. Alex Usher writes a daily or almost daily blog called One Thought to Start Your Day. And he reviewed this book. And those of you who do follow his writings know he is not short of an opinion. And it is frequently, well, it's a very, very clear opinion when he has it. And he reviewed this book earlier in March. And this is where you must be wondering what I'm going to say next in terms of his review. He said it's a joy to read. Everyone in higher education and higher education policy should read it and then ask themselves, could my institution produce a learning outcomes statement as clear and universal as this? And if not, why not? Which I think is a tremendous challenge for all of us here and at other institutions to take back with us and to give some thought to. So join me once again in thanking President Joseph Haroun. We're going to get started. Again, thank you all for coming out today. So in the previous presentation, we got a very big picture view of artificial intelligence and its role in higher education. So today we're going to, or in this next section, we're going to flip yours and really hear what a student perspective is really specifically to how do we, you know, what the future of education looks like specifically with the university. So our first speaker is Stuart and Stuart is a third year undergraduate student integrating neuroscience and biophysics. He's going to challenge the status quo while asking what if smartphones guided students learning. All right, Stuart, take it away. All right, so I have a little bit of a poem to perform for you all. Maybe it'll be a little different than your last section. Love it, hate it, word of blame. Shun it, fight it, it's a shame. When Instagram and other apps rule your eyes, attention seekers decentralize. Now feel the rush as we race to the brainstem. With players adorning their white colored hem. Facebook and educators, it's such a demise. When Google does homework, nobody tries. You all know the storms of ruin, a riot on Reddit with trolls ensuing. I'm here today with prescient perspectives and syllabi loaded with learning objectives. Attention is everything. It's the life we've got. Psych 361 textbooks, let them all rot. See, people are motivated by four simple things. Survival, curiosity, notifications, and raw desire. At least that's what makes our brains we wire. And look at all the progress that brings. Innovation, buzzing, like a phone with wings. Or love for how a little Walmart boy sings. Yet a beehive of productivity is no match to a bureaucracy of UBCers locking the latch. On experiential learning with one little catch, the phone would be your teacher relaying the facts and us students, the users with learning contracts. It's a rapid change I desire and upon generations grown requiring the trust of many but it's worth will be shown. Besides, this world needs knowledge that doesn't slow us down and alternatives to textbooks without making props frown. So where are we going is the ever-present question with the world at our feet and our fingers in another dimension. Experience for yourself a teaching era anew as technological access allows for so many different points of view. And how will we in this room make our mark on the information age? Will we neglect this opportunity to turn a new page? Take the risk. I dare you all. Otherwise, it's the children on whom our logic will fall. Thank you. So our next speaker is someone you've already met. His name is Pranav Menon. He's a fifth year integrated engineering student who's passionate about helping students develop entrepreneurial mindsets through his work as the director of the AMS entrepreneurship hub. The question he would like you all to ponder upon is what if we could use the entrepreneurial mindset to deliver an exceptional teaching and learning experience? So without further ado, here's Pranav. Hey, again. So right off the bat, I'm actually a huge fan of telling stories. So I'm going to start off with that. So a week ago, I actually traveled to the University of Virginia, one of the top schools in the U.S., beautiful campus and incredible students. But I wasn't actually there to visit the university. What I was more curious about is a non-profit student-led organization called Hack Seville. So why did I travel all the way to Charlottesville, Virginia? So for the last year and a half, I've been working as the director of the AMS entrepreneurship hub. And right off the bat, people think, oh, are you here to help students launch startups? Even though that's partly true, our bigger goal is to help students develop the entrepreneurial mindset. And that's what Hack Seville has been doing for the past six years. They've been doing a lot of incredible work. So I flew down there to really understand how they go about doing things and learning from their mistakes. So there's a lot I can talk about with Hack Seville, but this is one conversation I had with the first student that really wraps it up completely. And the conversation was, I asked her, so what does Hack Seville mean to you? And she said that when she came to university, she was so gutted by anxiety because of all the uncertainty she was surrounded with. And so she joined one of the first year, one of their entrepreneurship 101 courses. And after that, she felt like she almost had a superpower. And she called out the entrepreneurial mindset. I'm not even making this up. She said this herself. She said that the entrepreneurial mindset is what allowed her to give her a compass, really guide her through the uncertainty and really, really get equipped with all the uncertainty she feels that she faces at the university. And lastly, she said something very interesting. She said that she gets so much more value from Hack Seville than any other university courses she's taken. Right? Isn't that quite interesting? You'll be surprised. You might think it's only at Virginia, but even if you come back to UBC, you ask students, what's the most memorable experience you've had at university? Almost everyone's going to say, you know what? It's actually the experience that I've had outside of the classroom. So what do we actually learn from that experience, right? And why is it that students feel that way, that they learn so much more outside of class than even in class? So all of us can say, you know what? The system's broken. We can't fix it. It's a really, really old system, right? But what's the point of that? So how do we tangibly get started? How do we actually be a part of the solution? So from our conversation, there were two things that were picked up, right? So the first thing was the entrepreneurial mindset. And the second thing was curriculum and courses. So the question I wanted to ask today is how do we use the entrepreneurial mindset, use it in our courses and curriculum to deliver that exceptional teaching and learning experience, right? So to dive in, I'd like to first kind of talk about what does the entrepreneurial mindset even mean? And to me, it's almost like design thinking, right? So where you have, you start small, you really understand who your users are, and you iteratively build solutions to fill that need using their feedback, right? So there was a lot of words. The only two things you can remember are one, starting small, because when you have a really big problem, it gets really overwhelming, like how do you start to solve that, right? So starting small allows you to really hone in on what you're really good at, what is your area of expertise, try and test things, learn from it, and then eventually go from there. But this is my favorite, redefining failure. So a couple of days ago, there was actually a welcome event at engineering, welcoming first year engineering, incoming first year engineering students at UBC, and then I asked them, what does failure mean to you? And he said, without even thinking, 49%. 49%, isn't that really interesting? So what design thinking does, it flips the idea of failure. So instead of thinking failure as, oh my god, I'm not good enough, or failure means that's it for me. What it does is it takes failure as feedback. So when something happens, your brain is automatically starting to think, you know what, instead of, I'm not worth it, it's, okay, this has happened, I'm learning from the experience, what can I do in the future? So I personally think, these two key things are what, no, it's something that we should do to really allow students to broaden their perspective and understand what the entrepreneurial mindset is. But now, that's all talk. What can we actually, tangibly do today to implement these two principles? So at EHEUP, we're actually piloting two initiatives. So the first one, so the first one is actually called a 7% initiative. Now right off the bat, disclaimer, I actually have no clue if it's actually going to work or if it's not going to work. But the point is we're going to try, we're going to start small, we're going to test, and then we're going to see how it goes. If you fail, that's totally fine. And if you pass, we learn from it and we see how it goes. So the first thing is the 7% initiative. So what the 7% initiative is quite simple, it's 7% participation grade. But this is not participation grade in class, this is participation grade outside of class. So what that means is, if you take an entrepreneurship course, for example, what that would mean is in order to get the 7%, all you have to do is actually participate in either a hackathon, an incubator program, whatever it is outside of class. And when you go through the programs, just provide a reflection and think, hey, you know what? This is what my experience was. This is what I learned and this is what I'm going to do in the future. So what you do here is you're actually bridging the out of class and in class experience, creating something quite powerful. And the second thing is we're going to try to incorporate design thinking right from when you start in a step at a university. So Jumpstart actually this year has opened its doors to all incoming first year students. So what we're going to try is start small, take a handful of students and see how can we incorporate that design thinking mindset or some design thinking initiatives and see what the results are four months after and eight months after. And if there's a change, awesome, if there's a feeler, you know what, let's learn from it and see how we can re-change it next time. So at the end of the day, the question, I mean, what's the goal of all of this, right? So the goal is when students come in, instead of them asking themselves, you know, how do I survive first year? What I'd really, really like them to think about is, you know, how do I make a change? How do I make a difference? Like, how do I make an impact? How do I solve the world problems? Because my belief is that when you start to think of those really high level questions, everything that you do will slowly align towards that. Your courses, your extracurricular involvements, your network, everything's going to align, in my opinion, to really answer that question, right? So at the end, to really wrap it up, the question I'd like to ask you all is reiterating the same thing, is how do we develop the entrepreneurial, or how do we incorporate the entrepreneurial mindset in our courses to deliver that exceptional teaching experience? And when you do start to answer that question, I'm always sure, if you need help, in terms of brainstorming, thinking about how to incorporate in courses, and yeah, that's about it for me, and thank you so much for listening. Awesome. So our next speaker is Kari Markin. So Kari Markin is a UBC PhD student exploring higher education through the interdisciplinary lenses of design, theater, pedagogy, and the emergent research on the teenage brain. So she asks, what if we reimagine the characters and settings within our own imaginations, and within the institutional body where collision, creativity, radical curiosity, and innovation might emerge? Awesome. So I am clearly compared to my co-presenters on the long and experienced short on time category. I'm a staff member at UBC, as well as had been a high school drama teacher for 10 years before coming into the university realm, and I think about our imaginations. So our imaginations as educators and collectively as an institution, and how does our imagination form a foundation for what's possible as a result of our conversations today? So imagination grows curiosity, and as a graduate student studying higher education systems, theater, or the concept of theater, has become for me a very practical but also metaphorical tool that I explore the big picture with, so the why of higher education. It's cast, characters, settings, scripts, and in particular why we delay inviting novice scholars, first year students in particular, to contribute to and even to lead the innovation movements on our campus. So let's explore some of the why together with three simple exercises by a drama educator. So the first is to think about the why of the setting and the script, so the imagination of the institutional body. So to do this, I'm going to draw a line down the middle of the room, and we have the left side and the right side. So if the right side to start could just shift slightly, you're going to be the audience, and the my right side, and the left side you're going to do a brief performance. So if you can assume the audience pose, which is warm, generous, open-hearted, very non-judgmental, in the spirit of acceptance, not critique, because this side didn't realize they were going to perform right off the bat. So what's going to happen on this side is it's a silent, non-verbal activity, you know, you may make sounds, but non-verbal, no words, you're going to stand up when I tell you, and on the count of, I'm going to count to three, sorry, you're going to stand up very quietly and just be standing there. I'm going to say a word, and on the count of three, I'll clap my hands, and you will make a frozen image of that word. As though a photograph is being taken of you in mid presentation of that word. Okay, trust me, it's all very intuitive. Audience, no matter what they do, we will applaud, we will love them, we will, okay, got it. So audience position, so everybody on the left stand up, silently. The word is, and then turn to face your audience, the word is academic. One, two, three, okay, one, and relax. Thank you very much. See, it wasn't so hard. Now you get to be the audience, and this side is going to perform. So assume the audience position, give back what they gave to you. This side, quietly stand up, turn towards your audience. The word is social. One, two, three, I'll get a watch. And relax. Excellent. Okay. Thank you. So, why did we do that? I think that's a visual representation of a barrier that I explore to innovation, which is this deeply held story that we have at a systems and society level about what learning looks like. If we observe the academic side, even though in coming to an innovation in teaching and learning summit, we kind of know better, is quite disembodied, was very individual. Most people were looking ahead or up, and really does experience, it represents, when we take images of academic, they're kind of in our bodies, in our fingertips, and in our heads, as though only our fingertips of our fingers can move. Whereas the images of social, immediately there was this turning towards other people. And doing multiple different things with your bodies and your hands. So we have this ingrained institutional narrative that even when we're trying to think our way out of it, it rests so deeply in our bodies and our perceptions of what we perceive as academic. So I believe that novice scholars really internalize this institutional script. They become it. They become it within days of arriving on campus. And I propose that our youngest members of the academy are actually wired for the socialized to be socialized academic conversation and conversations about disruption and innovation. We just need to write them into the scripts as protagonists. So next, let's think about the why through thinking about cast and characters. So we can all close our eyes. I'm not going to because I'm moving, so I'll trip. But if everybody, please close your eyes. So this is more of like an internal monologue. I won't have you perform this one. Imagine you're traveling to work in the morning on the bus. If you don't take the bus, imagine you're taking the bus. And you get on just before it leaves the stop. You get there just in time. And in a miraculous moment, there's an empty seat. You sit, you press play on your favorite song or podcast, and you settle in. A few minutes pass, just chilling before getting to work. And it arrives at its next stop. And the door is open and 20 grade 12 students get on board right next to you. What happens in the moment? So with eyes still closed, anyone willing to yell out your inner monologue in this moment? Okay, open your eyes. So here's what I observed. And I observed this often with this exercise, no matter what the group. In most people, the minute they got in the bus, are we on? Is it on? No. Are we good? Wow. So this is our response to teenagers in society. It's our collective response to teenager, especially those of us over the age of 30, of which I'm solidly in that category. So I'm going to talk a little bit about teenagers. But while I do that, we're going to do the final, the final exercise, which is everyone lift your knees up and have your back not against the back of the chair. Okay, and hold it. Don't keep the people beside you accountable like a workout buddy. Hold it for the next 90 seconds to two minutes while I talk a little bit about teenagers. So this is our response to teenagers. The demographic that based on emergent teenage brain research is now defined as being between ages 12 and 23 years old, meaning our undergraduate student population. Ours is not a new response to teenagers. It's generation after generation. But I might suggest that in 2018, with Gen Z or iGen entering universities in September, such a response warrants immediate attention. Because we're less likely to invite to the conversation those who are not curious about. We don't create collision space in our institutions with those we're seeking to avoid colliding with. So I'd also suggest that the work of innovation defined as making changes to something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products could be greatly served by teenagers who, according to Daniel Siegel, author of an amazing book that I highly recommend, BrainStorm, The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain. They're in a period of their life in which the changes in their brain compel them towards the things that we need that are the ingredients for innovation. Those things are, keep your knees up, keep your legs up, legs up, keep going as long as you can, as long as you can, keep them up, keep each other accountable. They're primed for emotional spark, social engagement, novelty, and creative exploration. Okay, relax. So I would say on the flip side, the collective core muscles of a group of educators over the age of 30 are about as strengthened and developed as the frontal lobes of our undergraduate student body. So what do we do? We throw at them all the things that frontal lobes are needed for. Logic, planning, memory, task management, reason decision making, the demands of the early years of academia challenge the adolescent learners in ways that they are least adapted, primed, and compelled towards contribution. So with that, my how might we question is how might we design spaces within ourselves, our curriculum and our buildings, to collide and innovate alongside first-year students with a spirit of radical curiosity? A few brief magic wand proposals. Let's stop calling them the class of, because it might take longer than four years if we really want to do this work well to get your degree. One credit pop-up courses that first-year students, staff, students, faculty, community members could teach. Maybe we just take term one of the first-year undergraduates' experience and have it pass, fail, or not use the word fail, or use the word fail in the way that Pranav uses it. I also wonder if we could rename office hours and reimagine the language of how we speak about teaching first-year students. It's where we most use military metaphors, load, front lines, those types of words. So if we just pay attention to the language, and finally, could we please embrace the experiential learning potential of the arts like theater within the classroom space? Thank you. So here's the next little section. I'm back and I got a little bit of an experiential activity just like Kari did, but this one's even more fun. Could I have all of you guys get into groups of four? All right, so look around for your buddies, but the only problems you might not be with your buddies, especially from the faculty of arts, because the rules are you can only have two professors in each group from the faculty of arts, and at least one person affiliated with the faculty of arts. So have fun getting your groups of four, and we'll see what you got. Also please be sharing one device. Everyone agree on the device you're going to be using? Groups of four. Ready, set, go. Remember just two professors from the faculty of arts. If you did an arts degree that accounts as an affiliation, if there's a group of three, I'd love you to move. Yes, any questions? And once you guys are in your groups of four, I see some groups of three, and once you guys are in your groups of four, then one person with the device of the entire group, go to kahoot.it. I think we're all set, so I'm going to begin with the next part. We have sound too, it's really fun to have sound. All right, cool. All right guys, so everyone on kahoot.it should be pretty self-explanatory, put in that pin 6517386, hotline 6517386. All right, yeah, make your name stand out. You don't want to be too common in here. No. Once we get 15 teams, we're going to start. You guys can join at any time. All right, excellent. Oh, we got more coming along the way. Hurry up, hurry up. The first one is 30 seconds. I gave it a little extra time expecting this. All right, can we go for 22 teams? We'll leave it at 20 for now. All right, yeah, go for the start. All right, are you proficient? That is the question. Get ready, team talk, let's go. I think we're okay. All right, and did anyone get it right? Yes, five of you groups. Awesome job to those five groups, the rest of you, dead wrong. And should we go to the next one? Raise your hand if you're ready for the next one. All right, excellent. Let's go for it. Choco pie, well done. This is a tricky question. Get ready. And we're off 20 seconds, 10 seconds remaining. I'll give you a hint. There's two correct answers. And one second, and we're on. I told you there was two correct answers. All right, just to explain this one, the reason why it could be I don't know is because most people don't know. The other question, the other reason is because it is called distance learning, but you really can't do a full degree. I think you guys have checked the courses. They're terrible. All right. Choco pie, let's see if you can get this one. This is the third one. The third and final question, who's going to take the winning seat? Remember, if you answer quickly, you will get extra points. A couple more answers to go. Last group. We're waiting on you. Excellent. Hey, there we go. Awesome. Give yourselves a pat on the back. That's what I do with my mad science kids. You guys all rock. Thank you. Thank you. And tango comes in with the unexpected win. Can tango please stand up? Raise your hands. Everyone clap your hands. That's awesome. All right. So tango seems to know the most about smartphones. So you're this direction. My presentation will be directed at you guys. Excellent. More about smartphones. Let's talk about what the role is in education. Particularly, I chose this image because it reminds me of one of the courses I took in second year. It was called ASIC 200, an arts and science interdisciplinary course focusing on global issues. And one of the reasons why it's so important for me is not actually because of the course at all. It was because of one lecture. It was a really intriguing course. Well planned. They did awesome experiential activities. We even sequenced our DNA, things like that. But one of the lectures, the professor was speaking to what felt like a dead room. Everyone in the audience couldn't care less. They weren't listening. Where were they? Their faces were buried deep in their smartphones. I don't know if you guys have seen this. Maybe there's someone in this room who has that same thing going on right now. So I thought, you know, what can we do about this? I talked to the professor afterwards. He didn't show too much concern. But I clearly was a little bit concerned. So what happened then was I was just curious. I kept inquiring. After that, I was a little bit shell shock. But I also recognized that there was value in taking these questions. So it even led to not this course. That would be a little bit much. But it led to me having some deep rooted questions in my second semester or my first semester this year, where I even took the year off. I was asking questions like, what's going on in the world? What do I want to become? And what am I made of? And the thing is that I discovered this online course which shed light on all of that. And that was the most amazing thing. No course that UBC could ever answer some of these questions that was happening. And I also created a movement for love. But I wouldn't recommend that. But what I would recommend is all of you guys to check out ULab. It's this amazing course that tells the student that there's a solution to global problems within all of us. And that progress is about leading from the future that wants to emerge. It's about going out into the world to discover ourselves and discover what we can truly become. So one of the things that ULab really focuses on is empathy training. And it gets you to, journal after each experiential activity you do. Plus, it also connects to learning communities around the world. There's a couple in Vancouver where people meet up in groups of 60 and they can go interact in even spaces like we're interacting in now, which is really, really cool. And the best, best part of it was it was actually all free. So I got this sort of out of class education for a semester that was completely revolutionary to who I became after that. And then also, don't you guys think that this is the type of course that a UBC student grappling with their desire to change the world might want? It's the type of thing where you get to become a little more vulnerable, you get to open up in new ways that has never really been before seen in classrooms or at least maybe not in our types of classrooms. I'm not sure how it was in Socrates time. And also, this course teaches us to look at the world with an attitude of self-awareness, embracing uncertainty, and taking thoughtful action in it. The other thing is that this course was exemplary in me thinking about what can we do with education. That's ultimately the stemming of what I did for my major is trying to revolutionize education. I'm looking to go into neuroscience education. And some of the courses that I think that we could offer at UBC if we use this sort of model of online experiential learning would be like untangling intersectionality. Who knows what it is anyway. Contemporary First Nations issues, things that are often unaddressed. The spiritual implications of science, which I'm sure bothers a lot of people around the world. And also maybe an introduction to entrepreneurship for students who have these great entrepreneurial ideas but wouldn't otherwise have no way of working up the courage to talk to someone at UBC. Also, maybe evidence-based policymaking, especially good for people from the U.S. who want to go back into the terrible world down there. And then there could be so much more. So these are just some of the ideas. And the other thing is the online learning platform with experiential learning activities is a jumping-out point for a smartphone-compatible curriculum, which wouldn't only just use Connect and Canvas, but also could be a way of carrying cross knowledge and insights around. Instead of, you know, us going to classes where we're bored to death in lecture halls, looking at our smartphones on Facebook, somewhere else, we could be carrying an entire class around on our smartphone, constantly engaging with it, and being absolutely in love with what we're doing. That is honestly, I think, the ultimate ideal here. So if I could just have a raise of hand for any of you guys who are instructors here at UBC or some other school. Excellent. So we have a lot of people in the room. Excellent. And could you keep your hands up for a second? Raise your hand if people in your classes use their devices to aid their learning. All right. Everyone kept their hands up. And also, could you keep your hands up or raise your hand if you'd like to have their attention the same way that smartphones and their devices do? Everyone, right? I mean, I think it's pretty self-explanatory. Having people's attention is a really good thing. And there's some ifs, yeah. I mean, I'm not sure everything on their smartphone, you want to be linking to education. But the entire point I'm making is that I believe there's a way for that type, namely experiential learning. The more we move towards this radically new way of technological facilitated learning, the better off the next generations of students will be. Because here's my analogy. Education is like being in a bike race. And if we added tech to it, we just get better bikes. And that's why I think tech is not a fear. I don't really know what it takes to be robot proof. I didn't go to the last seminar. But my fear is allowing people to pedal in the wrong gear. So I hope you guys really think about that through. And I also think that we don't really know where we'll go. That's one of the scariest parts. We also usually end up doing only what's been shown. So I'll leave you all with a question. How might we let learners choose their own way? And in turn, open up the space of possibility for what professors can create. Thanks. Great. So our next speaker is Nicole, who discusses the venture into her extracurricular activities, which led her exploration of virtual reality. Posing the question, what if virtual reality played a bigger role in education? Give it up. Hi, everyone. So let me just tell you a bit about my journey and how I got into virtual reality in the first place. So growing up, I've always had this motivational drive to pursue opportunities whenever it presented itself. So that inevitably allowed me the opportunity to get in touch with my range of interests from volunteering in soup kitchens to working on projects that incorporated my love for technology. The diversity of my activities often provoke questions about how or why I do these activities because they're pretty unrelated to my major. And I personally love that. Being able to take part in all these different areas and find new interests is what keeps my life exciting. Being adventurous with my extracurricular choices, I've been motivated to look at the clubs on campus, which provided me the opportunity to learn more about my own personal strengths and also learn new skills. While I'm currently pursuing my major in sociology, I continued with my exploration of the opportunities present on campus. And this venture inevitably led me to the AMS Game Development Association. And it allowed me to incorporate my love for technology and join the virtual reality division, beginning my virtual reality adventure. Since becoming a team lead for one of the virtual reality projects, I've had my fair share of experiences. And I like to share one in particular with you. So I have this friend, okay. She was convinced to try out this simulation. The purpose of the simulation was pretty unclear to me at the time, but you know, I eventually found out and I'll let you in on a little secret later. So she gets set up. And for this particular simulation, she needs a plank in front of her. Weird, right? Like, why would you need a plank? But anyway, she gets set up. She puts on the headgear and everything. So she's in this new sphere. She sees in front of her an elevator. She walks in, okay. And she's meant to close the elevator. She presses the button. And the thing with the elevator is that there's like a window. So the elevator is going up, you know, higher and higher. So then it just like dawn on me. This simulation is to simulate one sphere of heights. So something you should know about my friend. She is terrified of height. Horrified, like, can't even. So soon enough, the elevator doors open, okay. She looks out. What does she see? Skyscrapers. The top of the building. Because she's probably about 20 stories high in the air. Could you guess what was her reaction? I mean, she knows it's a simulation. So she tries to take a step forward. No, she starts screaming in the lab. Everyone's like, what's going on? Because she's screaming and she could not take a step forward. She started crawling on the plank because she couldn't take a step forward because she's like just expected to walk out. And this, this right here is the power of immersion. Don't worry, my friend is okay, although she is now very wary whenever she puts on the VR headset. But you see, this power of immersion in virtual reality is what triggers the emotions and feelings, creating an experience within the user, creating an experience within the user that is almost lifelike. By doing it, it brings the different types of experiences from walking on a plank, 20 stories high, to exploring a beautifully animated world, to learning more about the experiences of people around the world. It invokes the emotions and feelings that allow them to engage with what they really see and experience. And the power to develop this kind of connection allows students to feel more connected to whatever they're meant to be analyzing and whatever problem they see, pushing them to pursue greater heights and because, because of this personal connection. So you may be asking me, but why virtual reality in education? Well, I believe it's because of this immersive aspect of virtual reality is what pushes students to do more and be more, like being more effective in education. And because it ironically engages with the emotions of the user. It's weird because normally the stereotype of technology is that it removes us from, you know, social interaction, creating personal connections with people, you know, engaging. But I believe in the contrary, this ability to fully immerse one's surroundings with the visuals, being able to feel and touch things creates a whole new experience that establishes a connection between the student and the content that is projected in the alternate dimension. But how we use virtual reality is what impacts the effectiveness of its use in education. Putting content onto a virtual reality platform won't be any more effective than reading it from a book. If it does not have a specific purpose or vision, it won't be effective. Incorporating VR into any kind of curriculum with any kind of content needs to have a vision or a learning outcome. Whether it is to create an empathetic feel for the students or whether it is for them to analyze a certain problem or whether it is to have them deeply explore a concept in ways that two dimensional platforms just can't provide. If the purpose is clear and defined, even VR developers, even a novice like myself can then visualize this purpose and then utilize the various aspects of VR into ensuring that the user is able to experience and recognize this vision for the project. Now, being part of the virtual reality division of the club, we had a unique mission in to bring UBC's clients imagination and bold ideas to life. So in a way, we had to take this vision and bring it to life. And so by joining this club, I was able to form connections with people I wouldn't have met and learn the skills I wouldn't have otherwise have learned. Now, initially, I joined the clubs for obvious reasons, you know, connections, self-exploration, et cetera. But what I didn't expect to learn so much about was this powerful platform. It started out with a showcase of the diverse projects that was provided by the clientele, where we had to form teams and start work on them. And what I really found amazing about this club was the opportunity for my two interests to merge into one, technology and my passion for tackling social issues. I was able to work on a project which provided the students the opportunity to enter into this alternate reality, allowing them to see and experience the poverty and other social issues experienced by the people from a far-off country, all from an app on their phone with a low-cost Google cardboard, rather than paying thousands of dollars to travel to the other side of the world. And it's because of the flexibility of virtual reality is what allows these different issues to intersect into one. The experience of being exposed to virtual reality projects and my journey with the AMS Game Development Association is only the start of my journey to the many opportunities life will present itself. Having these diversity of experiences is what I hold most valuable, mainly because it's an uncharted path, providing me the different experiences and skills which have shaped who I am today and who I can be. This is only just the beginning and I'm ready to push the boundaries of reality. My name is Nicole. I'm 19 years old and I'm a first-year student. Thank you. So can we get all the speakers up today? This is actually just the four of us. So once again a huge round of applause for the speakers that I presented today. Thank you so much. So there's a lot of information today. So what we're going to do for the next two minutes is I guess just go around and quickly summarize I guess in one or two lines is what is a message you want to send today or how might we or just a sentence that you know that summarizes kind of what you talked about today so we'll start with you. So my message is to the people in here who want to make some change who are you know willing to take their courses to the next level and it's totally focused on this experiential aspect of education as well as mobilizing it right mobilizing your classroom making it so that all of your students can engage with it not 24 seven but at a pace they feel more reasonable with and also in a way that has never really been explored before by UBC. So my presentation is about sort of two aspects one focusing on students like myself who are very outgoing and one the opportunity to do more and to be more involved and also the aspect of virtual reality and education so how might we incorporate virtual reality into our current education system effectively. Mine is my how might we question so how might we design spaces within ourselves our curriculum in our buildings to collide and innovate along students with a spirit of radical curiosity. So my conversation was about how do we incorporate design thinking things such as starting small and really redefining the concept of failure so that students can really learn how to embrace failure try to watch out that comfort zone take risks and really challenge themselves by asking themselves the hard questions because when you ask themselves the hard questions you're not really afraid of failure and you can really answer them. And so the question is how might we use design thinking our classes again to provide that exceptional learning experience to students. All right thanks again. Really appreciate it. So on a final note if you're here today it means you're here to you know understand how can you transform the teaching and learning experience. And what we really hope the outcome today is you take this perspective and begin to make change in your own courses or in your own circles. So what we're going to get started on is distribute some posted notes around incredible. Yeah so I think you probably describe one. I think a couple of posted notes from there. So while this is happening I'll actually turn I'd like to turn the tables to you guys and my question for you is what's the one thing that you picked up from this session today. So if you could raise your hands I'd love to hear your thoughts. Anyone so what so what's the one thing that you picked up from this session today. Yeah incredible. Incredible that's a great start. Students can really present too. Students can really present too. Incredible anything else you'd like to share in the time that we get to distribute our posted notes. I'd take from it that you guys want depth you want experiences that in a way can't be accommodated when we're taking five courses at once and running around and teaching that many courses all at once. So one thing I learned from today's session is that I want to incorporate more technology into meaningful technology into teaching and learning. One idea that I got was to incorporate out-of-class learning participation into my course maybe next year. Any any last burning thoughts you'd like to share? Some of our students are poets. So what are we going to do with these posted notes? So this posted note is your call to action. All right so this is your moment to pan down how you're going to start change again in your own circles and your own courses. So what we're going to do is take five minutes so it's about perfect timing. So it's about 11.54. We're going to take five minutes to really think about and really introspect and reflect how we might start to answer one of these questions. So it'd be nice if you do it on your own. If you can answer these questions we'll have them posted notes and then after the five minutes we'll go to the next step. All right take it away. So the posted notes that you have right now what we're going to do is as you exit the room for lunch we're going to get all these posted notes on either of these boards right here and the reason why is so it's kind of a memento a reminder of what we talked about today and it's how we can keep each other accountable as a community. And that's about it from us and thank you for being such an incredible audience and thank you for taking the time out to come and listen to us today. All right thank you.