 Well, I have the top of the hour. So let's begin. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm glad to see you here today. We have a terrific group of guests, the panel, covering a fascinating, deep topic. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. From a topic, we're thinking about redesign and design thinking and how to make teaching and learning even better with technology and other ways. We have a great group of authors who are both scholars and practitioners who are all here to help us and to explain what their own research is. If you look in the bottom left corner of the screen, you can see a kind of mustard-colored button that says Rewriting and Writing. And that links to one of their papers. It is a deep analysis of a workshop and a new method of teaching and writing, which is very exciting. They have more research to come. So what's going to happen now is, one by one, I'm going to bring them up on stage so that they can quickly introduce themselves in our special, patented Future Transform way. And then we can have you put questions to them. So to begin with, let me bring up Mike Gern. Hello, Mike. Hello. It's good to see you. Way up, nearly in the upper peninsula of the state of Michigan. Yes, I am. I'm coming to you live from the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. Wow. I envy you. It must be gorgeous out there right now. It is a beautiful spring day. The Forsithy is out and it's just a wonderful place. Well, I envy you that. And I'm also grateful for you taking an hour out of that experience and joining us in the virtual world. Mike, the way we ask people to introduce themselves is actually unique. We ask people not to describe their current position or their job title, but to describe what you're going to be working on for the next year. And what are the big ideas that you're likely to be spending most of your time thinking about? And what are the big projects you're going to be working on? Well, thanks, Brian. You know, actually, I'm up here, as you can see, on a competency-based education network retreat. And we're really talking about what we're going to be doing for the next actually two to five years. So, and a lot of exciting things in the competency-based area. My work in the last couple of years has moved more into using artificial intelligence, along with knowledge, skills, and abilities, linking those together. And one of my big projects right now, and the principal investigator on an NSF Artificial Intelligence Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education. So, a lot of big things coming up in the next year. Oh, indeed. That sounds terrific. We'd love to hear more about that. Thank you. Thank you. Let me bring up your colleagues. And, in fact, let me clear some space up here on the board and make sure that everyone can fit. And let me add to our growing roster. Let me bring up Karen Vignare. And she's probably going to correct me because I have just stumbled right all over her name. Let's see what you think. Welcome, Karen. Hi, Brian. And that is close enough. And hi, Mike. It's good to see you guys and thanks to the audience for being here. Vignare, it's usually like think of wines, right? Vignard, that's the way to do it, right? Oh, listening to Mike, it was a little bit hard for me to think of all the things that I might be doing that's exciting. I'm more or less still working in the, with the AI work, but in the adaptive learning and learning analytics work. So, we expect to be doubling down. One of the things we think a lot about is not only have faculty been working incredibly hard over the last two years, but we still don't have enough of the quote unquote, right tools for them to determine when students need help and how to get that help to them really quickly. And their workload is just huge. And if we don't give them the right kind of tools, we really can't help them save the students and help them succeed. So I'm kind of excited to be working on that as well. Interesting. Karen, if you get a chance, might be curious, might be interesting for you. We just did a blog post yesterday based on a crowdsource query of someone looking for a simple tool to help them make an online class outside of schools. Sure. A lot of fun to go through. That sounds great, Karen. Karen Vignare. And thank you. And where are you coming from today? Oh, Washington D.C. We're on our first of what will probably be many heat waves, right. So, so we had wonderful wet spring weather. And then today it's 85 and then the next three days it'll be in the 90s. So I know a few people in the chat said sweltering in Texas but you know typical D.C. weather where we go from I think earlier in the week we were around 40 to 95 by the end of the week. Where D.C. is APLU in the department? APLU is we have moved to 12th and L Street. So we're pretty much what is considered downtown. But it's always a lot of fun because I go walking around monuments in the wall and I get to see the White House every now and then. Well, that's good to hear. I'm not too far from you. I teach at Georgetown and Wesson and I live in different places in the D.C. area. So we'll swelter with you. And welcome. Welcome. I'm really glad to see you. Let me bring up some more people from this panel. This may be the biggest panel we've ever done. So let's see how big it is. Let's see how many people we can hold at once. Let's bring up Rob Cadel and let me see if I got the name right. Rob, is it Cadel or Cattle? It is Cadel. Well, welcome Rob Cadel from the George Institute of Technology. How are you this afternoon, sir? I am well. Thank you very much for having us on, Brian. Our pleasure. Our pleasure. So I actually went through a bit of a career transition about nine months ago, shortly after we completed the reports that we'll be discussing today. So I'm working more in administration now at Georgia Tech, not so much in online learning, but it's still, it's highly relevant, I think, because as I read through your newsletter of your blog posts, which folks, if you're not subscribed to Brian's newsletter, please go to his website and subscribe. Excellent. And so when you're talking about things like which school will be the first to charge $100,000 for tuition, it's not going to be Georgia Tech. I can tell you that. But those are the kinds of topics that I seem to be queued into these days. Well, that's good to hear. What are you administering, if I may ask? I am doing the research program in interdisciplinary research. So we have 10 interdisciplinary research institutes at Georgia Tech. And we have a vice president, Julia Kubanek, who is in charge of all of those. And I am sort of her chief operating officer, you might say. So I get things done across all those institutes. Getting things done is a great thing. And you help other people get things done. And so the work we're talking about here today, you're managing, I think, to diffuse it through the institution. Fantastic. Well, welcome, Rob. Glad to see you. And let me see if I can bring up some more people because we are just crowded with geniuses today. Let's see if we can bring up. Hello, Rishon. Hi, everyone. How are you all? Good afternoon. We're great. Now that you're here, how are you doing? I'm good. Also, I wanted to say thank you, Wesson. I have figured out how to hear. It's unplugged from the monitor, so thank you. Thank you, Wesson. And Rishon, is it Rishon? Did I get that right? Yeah, you're spot on. Rishon, thank you for your patience and for joining us. So tell us, at APLU, what are you going to be working on for the next year? Sure. Yeah, so APLU, I'm currently a senior associate. So I work with Karen in supporting some of those coursework projects. I've been there for the past two years. So yeah, it's been really interesting, but also really a meaningful work, especially speaking with faculty and kind of figuring out where course, where it can continue to be personalized. So I think the future can certainly be bright, but I think it's also really important to have that specific feedback for people who are working on the ground. Agreed. Agreed. Well, that sounds like terrific work. Very seriously, we may just follow up with all of you this fall or this winter to see what you've discovered, what you've identified. And you're also based in DC. I'm seeing some boxes nearby. Yes. Yeah, Karen and I are actually feet away from each other. We're in the office. Hello. But yes, she is right. It's been a heat wave. I think this Saturday might be 98. So for those in the chat wishing they were working here, maybe not during this season, but certainly come down and visit, of course. I hear that. We'll welcome. I'm glad to see you here. Let me now add the last but definitely not least number of our panel today. Elizabeth Lopez coming to us from Georgia State University. And here we go. Hello, Professor Lopez. Hello, how are you all? Oh, great. Great. How are you doing this afternoon? I'm well. I'm in Atlanta. So it's it's also warm here. DC doesn't have the corner on the market of humidity at the moment. This is true. So I'll just quickly given your question say, I worked on an adaptive learning project with the APLU starting in 2016. And then through that work, I ended up meeting Mike and working on a project with Mike and Rob and my life will never be the same. I'm assuming that's a good thing. Absolutely. I think that as someone who comes to this work from 30 years of classroom teaching and 10 years of supervising teachers doing curriculum design and being an administrator in a university setting. I am so interested in the question of how we can teach writing better and allow for students to succeed, allow for teachers to do this work more easily. And I feel that we're at this really perfect moment to be talking about this. So I'm really excited to be here. I agree. I agree. Well, welcome. Welcome. And we I'm pushing the limits of what I've done with the technology before, by the way, so you can see we have this way, not quite Brady Bunch effect. We've got something else going on. But what I'd like to do is I'd like to begin by putting to all of you a couple of starting questions. The way we do this in the forum is I ask you a question. You all cut loose. And then everyone in the forum gets to put their questions to you. So what I'd like to start with is to ask all of you and whoever wants to answer this, please just just, you know, you go ahead. What is digital forward design in education? What does that mean? Elizabeth, I've got I've made you go last and I've got you on the screen. Do you want to take a whack at this or should I click over to somebody else? I'll say two things and then be quiet and let the others sort of speak. I mean, I think one of the themes we've talked a great deal about in our work so far together is technology takes sort of a center stage, not because we're trying to minimize the instructor in any way or the student experience in any way, but because we're really focusing on what role technology can play in making a big difference in how we design courses, how students experience instruction, how they're served instruction. And so rather than sort of focus on traditional techniques of designing a class, we're really thinking about sort of the technology piece and what it can do to enhance what students need and what teachers can can serve. That is digital forward design. Thank you. Thank you. Who should I pick next? Who's the most likely suspect, Elizabeth? I'll pick up next on that. Let's put him. Let's put Mike on stage. Let's do that. Please go ahead, Mike. So I think digital forward started out really as kind of a challenge. And it came from conversations Karen and I had several years ago, but, you know, we've done really good things with adaptive learning and math. But one of the things we found out is that frequently the adaptive tools are kind of in the background. The class is kind of what we call instructor forward. And if the tools aren't really well integrated into the course, students may or may not use them. And that means they may or may not be effective. And so the better faculty could integrate things in, the more effective the adaptive tools were in helping the students learn. And, you know, the challenge really became, well, what if we designed a course that was more, we started with adaptive forward? That really that was had a more central role in the instruction. Because we thought we could learn quite a bit from doing that. One of the things that we did learn is the technologies, it's not just about adaptive learning. There's a whole range of technologies that fit into that. So that's really where we got to the digital forward idea. And we felt that, you know, we know from a lot of anecdotal evidence and research that the two courses that make the biggest difference for students coming in, either good or bad, is math and writing. And while we had a lot of digital tools in math and tools that help students work on their own and work productively, there wasn't, there weren't as many of those kind of tools available. And there really wasn't a model for that in writing. So that's really, it became kind of this challenge of, what would it take to design a writing course that was really, truly digital forward? That's a fascinating idea. I mean, computers and technology for writing go back to the 1990s with like the Journal of Computers and Composition. But what you're seeing is that it needs to be done much more extensively, more creatively. I'll let Karen take that one. Happy to do that. Oh, Mike always turns it over at a prime time. I just want to jump back from Elizabeth's standpoint because, I mean, again, we started in this work knowing faculty are dedicated like Elizabeth, and I'm not going to sit here because I already see in the chat there's a few people who say the better faculty. Elizabeth is a better faculty. I'm not going to disagree that there aren't differences in faculty, but I have to say with tools, I think all faculty can get better, right? And I think that's what we owe higher education. And our ideas around digital forward was that students don't always have the choice of quote, unquote, or no, which one is going to be the better faculty, right? And so we have to really think about ways where the classroom is supported and students are supported, where we design in, and I like Mike's term, integrated and implemented the tools so that they are rather seamless, right? And what that means is as they go through the process of writing, which I am not a writer, I just heard a little bit of background noise. That's okay. Yeah. So I think the point is when we have these tools, we can also do something really important and that is provide faculty with data. We believe that faculty need data about their students. And in an analog scenario, no matter how hard they work, they could offer an assessment every single day. They can't get the data that they need about what students really need in terms of support. And digital forward is all about figuring out how to support student and student learning. Because again, we start with this learning centeredness that people are able to learn. So digital forward is all about the fact that we have some great tools. And I'm not going to disagree that they're not perfect tools, but we have some great tools that are beginning to help faculty understand where students have issues or where they don't understand things or the fact that they're not active enough to be learning. And all of those things become incredibly important resources for faculty to then do what faculty do well. And that is instructs. They can go say to a student, I see you're stopped here. What can I do to help you? How do I turn on the wheels that are natural in your brain? And how do I move you forward? And so digital forward is, you know, I often say it's actually very, very simple. It's about getting faculty the data they need so that they can help students learn. There's so much. And what all of you have just said, everything from big data to process to neurology, I think, and design thinking. Steve Ehrman in the chat corrects me. I mentioned computers and composition from the 90s, and he points out that computers and writing conference began in the early 80s. So thank you, Stephen. We have more questions coming up. I want to make sure that we give Rob Kidell a chance to speak because he's burning to add to this. I just wanted to add one other perspective that we had at the beginning of the project, because we spent a little bit of time talking about scale and whether or not the digital forward, as we described it, process was something that could be used to actually increase the scale of a course. And to a certain extent, I think that depends on the subject area, the knowledge domain. And when you look at teaching writing and composition, scale in terms of the number of students isn't necessarily a good thing. You need to have a much more, if you will, intimate relationship between instructor and students so that they can get to know your writing style. They can provide feedback that is personalized to you and so forth. And so when we talked about scale, it wasn't so much about scaling up the numbers of students, but scaling the number of opportunities to write and to get feedback. And so that's where a lot of these tools kind of come into places. It is designed to kind of help writing instructors say, we're going to give you a chance to get through six different big assignments this semester. You're going to have a chance to get feedback on all of them. But without putting the entire burden of that feedback on that single instructor. Okay. Okay. This is, friends, if you haven't read the paper, don't read it right now. But definitely, you know, that book market, tablet, and you can see each person here has added a different aspect to it. There's a lot going on. This is a very, very ambitious system. In the chat, people have been making all kinds of comments and I want to bring out a couple of these. In fact, a couple of questions. This is one from our dear friend and author, Tom Hames. And Tom says, asks, how do we better align the tasks of teaching with the technology that supports them? Should we design for tasks first and technology second? Who wants to take it? Rob, we've got you on the camera right now. You want to give that a whack or? Sure. Yeah. I mean, in some ways, this kind of gets back to user experience design kind of principles where you think about, are we designing from the functionality perspective or are we designing in order to address a particular need? And I think the way that we approached this, although I won't say that there was consensus on this in the workshop that we held, was that you needed to think about what the tasks were first and not think about what tool can I kind of cram into my course, if you will, to have some sort of digital experience for the students. And fortunately, as our workshop participants worked through those tasks, we made lots and lots of lists of these kinds of things and then found that there are a number of tools that address the different kinds of tasks in different ways. Well, Tom, if that answers your question, please go ahead. Brian, let me expand on that a little bit and then maybe send it over to Roshan to talk about our process too. We did several sessions, Friday afternoons, working with people, and we focused each time on a particular journey, like the student journey. What did it look like? And we used a lot of visual tools to kind of follow the student through that course. Then we looked at the faculty journey, if you will, of what teaching that was like. So those proved as good, as Rob said, starting with the tasks and then thinking about where does technology fit into that. And I don't want anyone to think that it was just the five of us sitting there thinking these things up, or four of us. There were a lot of people involved, and Roshan is on. She had the glamorous title as Wrangler. So Roshan, maybe you want to talk about all of the people and how we got them involved in the project. Wranglers always win. Yeah, I take on that title with honor for sure. But yeah, I think to expand on Mike's part a little bit, we did do some outreach to different universities and just colleges and different institutions, both four and two-year. So we did have representation across the board. And when we did these workshops, we had time to kind of create some collaboration and some deep conversations. And I think, because we hosted several workshops, right? But I think what we also found after kind of the feedback and just debriefing with one another is that because everyone is coming from a different institution, they also have different resources and courses are taught differently there. And so I think it really played into hand of what digital forward even means to the institution itself versus just kind of branding it as a catch-all definition, right? And I think to Rob's point, but also to what Elizabeth said earlier too, I think when you think about digital forward, I think oftentimes technology obviously is a big component there, but also from our conversations that we had with faculty, they are also able to share the tools that they are using, right? And that's nice because we have a really large list of tools that are already existing and already doing certain functions. But of course, there's so many tools because there's not one tool to fit all of the needs. But I think too, it's also really important about kind of, you know, diving into this exploratory zone of what digital forwardness could mean is also just starting at the basis of, it's not just instructional designers developing something, right? It needs to be a collaborative process to kind of expand and open up the door of what that could look like in the future, but also to make sure it's sustainable. So it's not just a one task per tool, it's more of an encompassing one. How do you do that last part? I mean, how do you make this sustainable? Oh, Brian. I think that's a good question. I think this is kind of, we're scratching some new surfaces. I don't think that technology is new by any means and I don't think that we're having new conversations. But I think specifically after this pandemic, we're realizing that courses that were not originally meant to be taught online can't just be flipped and crammed into some online spaces or courseware, unfortunately. So I think maybe, and this is also coming from, I think on this panel, I might be the only one that has never taught, right? So I think that's also from a different perspective too, but I think that I know that it's easy to say that these conversations need to be held, but I also think it probably comes from having conversations with administrators and faculty and kind of support and funding for these things to be expansive and sustainable too. Indeed. Thank you. It makes me think about higher education, post-pandemic commitment to improving teaching at the same time our financial stresses. And just one word, I should take a step back really quickly. I mean, a couple of you work for the APLU, the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities. And if I understand that's membership organization that works with all the many public universities across the US that were funded by the moral grant. And what's your role in all of this work? We've heard about these workshops there. Are you a funder and convener and organizer? Yeah, so the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, as Brian just said, did. Actually, the Association didn't start with the moral grant in 1862, but the Association started much later in the early 1900s and represented all public universities at a certain point. We in ASCU sort of said, okay, we have different curbs, but we still work very, very closely with all public universities. And our work in APLU is very member-driven. But in the last 10 years, we do have a president who is retiring, Peter McPherson, and we're pleased to say that our incoming president is Mark Becker, who is associated with higher greatness at Georgia State University and people like Elizabeth. And APLU is working around student success and equitable outcomes. And our work with personalized learning started back in about 2014 and we continue to work in this area of both things like academic advising, transferability, affordability. But we also work on the academic and digital tool side, and that's the work that I mostly focus on with Rashawn here. Oh, very, very good. Not all membership associations and higher education have that kind of focus on technology. I'm really kind of focused on technology. I'm really definitely to be circled back with you and to hear more about this. Friends, by the way, this is an example if you're new to the forum of how participants get to ask questions in that text box. Now I've got another one to flash on the screen for everyone. This is from our friend John Hollenbeck. And John asks, we were using collaborative docs in Google 10 years ago for writing remediation. Was that digital forward? Isn't from there it's a curriculum issue, not a digital issue? Who wants to tackle John's comment? Well, I'll start and other people can correct me as we go along. It was certainly utilization of digital. I think what we're seeing, and I don't think anyone believes we'll see less technology in our courses as we move forward. What we're seeing is more artificial intelligence, algorithmic tools, cognitive tutors and things like that coming in. And I think what we're really looking for at this point with this workshop, we were looking for what are those things people are seeing. We had a presentation by Peter Foltz at the Colorado University of Colorado and also has worked with Pearson for a number of years. And he's got an essay and they're on essay scoring and how that works. I think there are a number of technologies that are more effective than we'd like to believe and certainly more threatening than we'd like. Part of this was an attempt to begin thinking about where would some of those things fit in? How could we automate some of the rubrics that we use for writing? What parts of a rubric could be automated now? Might be automated in the future? So it was a real challenge to better than 30 people that we brought in to think through this. And I want to say one of the things that came out of this was we came up with a set of principles for digital forward design. This is we asked people to help us kind of think about digital forward. One of the things you really ought to be focusing on. And I'll just real quickly read our list but there's much more description in the paper in the report. But their equity, engagement, interaction, instruction, process and practice, feedback, timelines, availability, tutoring and remediation, flexibility, scalability, and evidence based decision making. And we really talk about what you should think about in those areas. And last thing I'll say on that, we intentionally put equity first. Because often that's like the landscaping when you build a new house, by the time you get to that you run out of money. So we spent a good part of one of our sessions talking about diversity, equity and inclusion and what that meant for digital forward design. Thank you, Mike. That's a great answer. John, I hope that gives you a good response. If you want to jump in and say more, click the raised hand. But speaking of... Brian, can I just ask? I think John is also pointing out there have been a lot of innovative faculty, which I'm guessing John puts in that. But I do think it's a curriculum issue as well. I think it's a curriculum. One of the things that we do here at APLU is whenever we do projects, we require that the teams joining us recognize a pilot to scale type of scenario. That is we certainly want your individual champions, your piloters, your innovators to start with us. But if we have an evidence base that this work is moving forward in the process, we want a commitment by the department that this is going to be integrated in the curriculum across all the courses. So I don't want to say some of you weren't pioneers using incredible tools that actually haven't been replaced. Wiki spaces. But I do want to say we're back to and Tom and I were having that conversation around scaling and sustainability. I think that's a huge problem in higher ed. I agree. I agree with all of that. Elizabeth wants to join in. But by the way, if you're seeing weird fuzzy blobs around me, it's on the screen. It's one of our cats. It's absolutely shameless. It's your production assistant. No, it's a different production assistant. Elizabeth, please. It's kind of funny for a technology talk, isn't it? So I'm thinking about listening to my colleagues speak, the idea that the possibility of an adaptive platform and AI also puts technology in a different position than this may be controversial than something like the Google Doc. I think the use of Google Doc encourages collaboration and student and teacher interaction in really powerful ways. So I thought to ask why adaptive platforms and AI, I mean, the technology takes on a more substantive role. And we've had many conversations internally about this. I see that as a positive because I firmly believe that still puts the student and the instructor in a really critical place. And that if we see that the technology has the ability to do some work for students right? So that if an adaptive platform has the ability to give student feedback on a piece of writing in the middle of the night when a student wants it and the teacher is not available and the teacher has already focused on sort of more critical instructional tasks, isn't that a beautiful thing, right? So it becomes more of a win-win-win putting the technology in more of a sort of critical place. I'm thinking about the theories of Andrew Feinberg that have talked about that kind of notion of technology for years. Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. We have a couple of folks who wanted to join us on stage and I wanted to bring up one of them, our good friend, a former guest and all around wonderful researcher, Stephen Edmond. So let's see if we have room for him on top of the program. That actually maxes us out. So I'm going to actually really, really quickly make a little bit of an introduction. I'm going to temporarily get Rob out of the way. He just volunteered. Let's bring up Stephen Edmond. Hello, Stephen. Hi, Brian. How are you? All my friends on the panel. Good to see you all again. My knowledge of computers and writing is a lot richer for the 20th century than the 21st. So this is a question out of ignorance. I've heard about applying AI to writing. A lot of it seems to be about things like grading student papers. When I think about, on the other hand, where computers and writing movement come from, a lot of the emphasis on trying to get through the really tough teaching and learning task of convincing students that writing was actually about learning with other people about something that matters. So my intuition, my major reaction is to be very cautious. Even if all the only words I've heard are AI and composition courses. I'm wondering what applications of technology are interesting for the panel these days as ways of getting students learning to communicate authentically and to motivate students to do the work on writing, which in my past those two things have been very closely related. If you can get students convinced that they're trying to communicate with somebody about something that matters, that is motivation. It certainly can be motivation to work harder and less mechanically. Less thinking that this is a game of making teachers happy or score points or something. That's a great question. I'd like to share something. It's good to see you again. I just saw a presentation by a writing instructor from Savannah State. She was talking about getting students who are not good writers. One of her first assignments is I want you to tell me a story. I want you to use text. That's what the students use. We're not grading grammar. We're not grading spelling or anything. Tell me a story. What she gets out of that is Steve getting at that very kind of authentic. This is the way I communicate. This is what I talk. The way I communicate now is, okay, here's the core of your story. Now let's see what we can do. Let's see if we can get that into standard English. What would that look like as a way to communicate that? I just thought that was such a brilliant way to start with where students are and it's the low stakes. There's no judgment about what you're doing even on the grammar, the spelling side which would have been a gift to me back in college. I'm going to bring that and use technology then to say, okay, let's run it through grammar. What's grammar we're going to say about that? Do we agree with that? Is that the way we want to do this? I thought it was an interesting way of taking the assignment and flipping it around. I agree. Thank you, Mike. Anybody else from the panel want to engage with Steve? I'm going to jump Elizabeth on that because Elizabeth wrote the forward to our report. We talked a little bit about her feelings about that. As you're doing that I do want to say there's also a second report that we did because going through the first one we found a whole lot of new positions people talked about. We're going to need a digital ethicist. We're going to need a data scientist. We're going to need a digital learning engineer. A learning analyst that Karen talked about. Our second publication there out of this work followed on looking at the new positions we might be seeing in the future. We're always going to rely on faculty. I'll turn it over to Elizabeth. Let me bring up Elizabeth and then I want to circle back to what you just said. I'll share a link to that in the chat. Elizabeth has the best background as she knows. I'm just absolutely in love with the tree behind her. Elizabeth, I'm going to turn it over to Elizabeth. I feel like I should set some fake birds on it. Anyway, I'm thinking about this idea of student motivation and engagement and what the 21st century student is all about and the idea that writing is a risky subject. It doesn't matter who you are and what your experience and your writing life has been. You probably carry some baggage with you. Unfortunately, that's the nature of the beast. When students come to a writing class, they carry with them negative experiences, negative feedback, anxieties and worries just as maybe as professional writers we, I don't know, maybe we have some of those too. This idea that we can be a way for students to engage in a lower risk environment without having to just rely on instructor feedback or even peer feedback to maybe get some small wins to build their confidence about their ability to write small passages to analyze a piece of text to maybe do something that's a little bit fun, create a game about writing, heaven forbid. Teach some rhetorical principles in a way that would be interesting for them, maybe using digital like a digital example with audio and video from a social medium that they engage with on a daily basis. And so using technology to sort of serve some of that content and to allow them to get some feedback on their writing in that really low stakes way is, I think, a really powerful contribution. Now, writing teachers have been doing that for years in sort of face to face classes in old school ways. But again, there's only so much one person can do in the context of a classroom setting and so having the technology take on an integral role while retaining the role of the instructor I think is the promise of this work. I hear the peril it's in the back of my mind but I think there's some promise here. Thank you. Thank you Elizabeth. I love the balancing and thank you Stephen for the great question. Let me boot you off and bring Rob back up so that we've got the panel all together. And I wanted to circle back to what Mike was just talking about. Mike was just talking about this other paper and I'll put a link to that in the chat so everyone can see it because this is definitely a subject of a great deal of interest and in fact let me see I'll bring Mike back up just because he mentioned this but this is a fascinating paper about how staffing changes on campus that if you take digital forward design seriously then we need a whole series of new and or different roles and Mike do you want to lead us off about this and then hand it off to one of your confers? Sure. It turns out that faculty didn't start out their career as wanting to be an LMS learning management software administrator tech support desk for students and they don't all have a love of learning of data science and all of these tools one reason for using all of these tools is that they provide a lot more empirical data that we can really begin to understand into much more finely grained and immediate and technology manageable level what's going on with students so it really as things grow more sophisticated it's going to take much more of the team and I think what I'll do is maybe hand this off to Rob really a substantial lead in the thinking through of how we were going to do that workshop and where we ended up we got some really kind of interesting findings out of that I think. Oh great. Welcome back Rob. Thank you Mike. Thanks. Yeah. Excuse me. The idea when Mike and I started talking with Karen and others about that staffing workshop one of the questions was sort of like we don't even know necessarily what these job titles would be because we wanted to kind of figure out what is a learning engineer exactly what is that going to mean and of course it's going to have variable meaning so we did actually create a survey for the participants in that workshop where we asked them to kind of give us some feedback not just on the terminology but also on what are the types of of KSA's if you will knowledge skills and abilities that you would need to have on hand even if they didn't have a particular title for it in order to do these things and it was really interesting to me when we started to get some of their feedback and we started to look through some of these responses that one of the things that kind of bubbled up to the top I think second just behind obviously needing a faculty member for helping to design a course was a learning experience designer somebody who was going to say that there is there is more to learning whether it's writing or anything else than just putting the curriculum out there and teaching and that to make it a more effective to make for more effective instruction you do have to think of it like an experience and now you know we are starting to see some of these programs graduate programs that are an instructional design and so forth that are starting to to have you wouldn't really call them a minor in a graduate program but you know sort of a concentration area that's in learning experience design or that is in some sort of course engineering or something like that it's always the way I think that we tend to by a need that already exists and then in higher ed we have to respond to it by coming up with a program that helps to teach that but I think with digital forward course design that's more relevant than ever well thank you, thank you for that description by the way in the chat Sarah has had a couple really important comments she points out that learning designers have seen instructional designers have seen their roles and flux for years which is really really important and then she adds there's an emotional labor part of ID jobs that are in the descriptions but relationships are a huge part of the jobs and I want to put that out there but then also add our good friend George Station asked the question has anyone discussed ethics and the use of student data and how informed students are and I'm wondering if if you all could take a whack at that and maybe our ACLU sorry, our APLU comrades would you like to say a word about that or one of our others? I'll defer to Karen for data stuff I was going to punt to Mike but I will start it's very difficult and I'm slightly tongue-tied so we do think data privacy particularly by institutions is paramount when working with technology companies but there is an issue and I'm really aware of it that many data companies ad tech companies adaptive companies actually don't have student profiles they have student data and one of the things that is missing is a way to join those two things because one of the things that we know about our national landscape right now is we do not have equitable outcomes in order to improve equity we're going to have to know what's working and what's not working for the students in those equity populations and so we've got to carefully think about how do we help and protect how do we help ourselves get better at improving equity protect the privacy of students and help these companies design better tools that's not completely George's question but I do want to bring that up as part of the conundrum that we're in and given Mike's work in AI and with his new NSF grant I wanted to punt to him because I know he's thought about this a lot well it's thought about it a lot but we haven't solved it I think these are the real challenges sometimes it's going to take a real shift in our thinking we tend to think about like with a learning management system something the school runs and that's where all the data is captured we could be talking about cognitive assistance of our own by the students and that they control that so that PII is really on their device or in their tools that they're using so there are ways that we'll be looking at and trying to address that I remember there was a software association and someone asked one of the developers about accessibility this was maybe seven or eight years ago and he said well if you're going to want us to be accessible it's going to really stifle innovation and I think that's the conundrum that we're in we're trying to innovate we're trying to do it responsibly but it pushes boundaries well thank you thank you George thank you for that great question and friends thank you for that answer we're almost out of time and I want to make sure that we get one last question in and we're almost out of time I want to make sure it's here and so if you have to speak quickly we completely understand this is from Mary at Southern Maine who says from a faculty developer perspective how do your institutions deal with so much of the burnout from faculty with all the technology since the pandemic so doing digital forward design thinking about staffing how does faculty burnout because the pandemic intersected that okay I'll start off and I'll talk quickly you know those are some of the challenges we're not as I said before we're not going to see less technology in the future we're going to see more and other sides of that are that some faculty are like with the great resignation resisting going back into the classroom they found the technology brings in some advantages we shall see I was in a meeting a couple weeks ago in a very long narrow board room and there were probably I was probably 30 feet away from the screen we actually ended up moving the meeting on zoom just so all of us at the other end of the room could see the screen so I think we're going to find ways to use the technologies we become more comfortable with in the pandemic era to do more things with when we're face to face well that's thank you that's a that's a good answer and anyone want to add to this before we go I'll say one quick thing please which is if we I'm going to be optimistic and say if we can find a way to design an adaptive platform that is really unique and it's a writing instruction that integrates these tools maybe we don't have to go to the latest greatest thing every week but instead we have more one-stop shopping for a writing class and perhaps if the technology does something that supports student success the teacher can focus on a smaller number of more critical tasks and in the absence of all of that coffee helps well thank you for that beautiful thought and for looping back to the to the beginning but we have to loop back to the beginning because we are I'm afraid at the end and this has been fantastic you all have done such great work it's been terrific to see where you're going let me just ask you collectively how do we keep up with all of you your work do you have a single site is the APLU the best place to find you or what's the best way to keep up with your next steps I would say the APLU site Karen you can mention it I do want to say the original funding for this came through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which APLU directed so we're grateful to them for trusting us to do some good work well said thank you I think collectively probably APLU but we also work very closely with colleagues at a network group called the every learner everywhere and the every learner everywhere dot org website contains even more about caring for students caring for faculty digital learning equitable best practices so that repository has grown even more than our own has and so I would want to also add that in to the mix of places where you can keep up with us one other little plug is that for those of you that work closely with faculty ASU is collaborating with APLU and other great sponsors like Bill and Melinda Gates to offer the remote connected faculty summit June 8th and 9th it is totally free faculty runs about three and a half hours and lots of great sessions including a few on writing and living a few on design and digital forward types of techniques so please share that with your networks as well indeed if you've got a link if you could toss it in the chat that would be great thank you and friends with a great deal of regret I have to wrap things up Elizabeth, Mike, Karen, Rashaan Rob, thank you for being our biggest panel and definitely one of our best please continue the great work and we look forward to hearing what happens next from all of you thank you all but don't go away friends I'm going to clear the deck here just to really really quickly just to be able to show what we are doing next because I want to make sure that we don't lose track of that and I want to thank you all for your excellent excellent participation so far for your great questions Karen thank you for the link to the remote to remote summit if you'd like to keep talking about these subjects if you are really fascinated by what this means in terms of staffing pedagogic technology and more you can keep tweeting at us at FTTE or at me, Brian Alexander or at Shindig events or hit up my blog BrianAlexander.org for more if you'd like to dive into our previous sessions where we've discussed all of the things that we're going to be talking about in the next session we're going to be talking about the idea of technology and teaching just go to tinyworld.com slash FTF archive if you'd like to keep up with our new topics and topics that we're retaining new develop next week we have a session for our book club on climate crisis and academia so we'll be talking about that we have sessions on inclusive teaching that we've had to share with everybody else and in the meantime thank you all again for a very very terrific session thank you for all your thoughts we're coming into the summer time I hope that means that some of you get to be warmer I hope you get to be not too warm above all I hope you're safe take care, we'll see you online next time bye bye