 To begin, welcome, welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm glad to see you here today. We have a great set of guests and who are doing some very important work. I'm looking forward to our conversation about that. We've been taking a look at COVID since, well, since it began in late fall of 2019. And we've been taking a look at this from numerous angles. We've been thinking about how our education has changed in terms of pedagogy, in terms of how we care for students, in terms of faculty and staff stress and workload, and not to mention research and all kinds of things. Today's guests have an unusual, unusual approach. What they're doing is they are working on documenting what happened as a result of the pandemic. They're doing a lot of research into this to accumulate stories and building up deductions about what the COVID experience did to higher education. Now, I'd like to hear more about them, but let me bring them each up on stage, first of all. We have great people, Tula Dlamini, Stephanie Pirriotti, and Ribbon Puethedore. So some of you may know these people already, but just in case you don't, let me bring them up one by one so you can get a sense of who they are and what they do. So to begin with, let me bring up Tula. Hello, sir. Distinguished panelists and all participants in the forum. Brian, thank you so much. For pleasure. It's a pleasure, too. Now, to the audience, my name is, as you've already heard, is Tula Dlamini. I was born and bred in Africa, Southern Africa in particular, at a place called Bulawayo, and this is in former Rottisha, now Zimbabwe. It's in Southern Africa, as I've said, Southern Africa is the home of my parents, grandparents, and a trailer load of relatives. So I am home in Southern Africa. Excellent, excellent. Just outside of Johannesburg, right? Yes, absolutely. Excellent. Tula, the way we ask people to introduce themselves is to ask what you're gonna be working on for the next year. What are the big projects and what are the big ideas that are gonna be uppermost in your mind? I'm quite a beg-full of ideas. My background is in journalism and writing, and so documenting stories is something that I consider part of my DNA. And working with the team at SAU, we're doing exactly that, except our focus is on education and how we can take a leap from the lessons that have been learned through the COVID pandemic. And so what we have done is interviewed, I think, by now over 20 individuals who have told us very unique, diverse stories about their personal experiences. And we are now taking these stories and putting them through analysis process to find out what is it in the studies that we can learn and leverage in terms of solutions. Well, terrific. That sounds like an amazing project. And I look forward to hearing more about this over the next hour. Thank you. Thank you, Tula. Let me bring your colleagues up on stage so they can join you as well. Let's see. Let's see if I can find the awesome colleague of mine who people sometimes mistake for me. And so let's just bring Ruben Puentador up on stage. My good friend and hero in the world of education, technology and world leader in beard growth. Ruben, hello. Hey, Brian. It's good to see you. Good seeing everyone today. It's really a pleasure to be here. I am really honored to be sharing a stage right now with Tula and with Stephanie and really feel myself very, very lucky to be working with them on this project. For those of you who know my work, I work on how technology can make a difference in learning. So that's where the SAMR model and yet that Quintet to the models I developed come from. But of late, I've been also turning my attention to the whole question of black swans and antifragility. And this project is at the nexus of some of my earlier work as well as some of that antifragility work, which is we really need to understand these stories. And I always have had a fascination with storytelling. So from my perspective, we'll talk more about this, being able to better analyze what these stories are telling us as well as collecting them and sharing them with the world are all part of a package that helps us better understand what happened and better build new solutions, new antifragile solutions for what's to come. So that's what I'm looking at for the future, Brian. Excellent, excellent. Black swans, antifragility, storytelling. We need more of this. Thank you, Ruben. And now let me add last, but definitely, definitely not least, let me add your colleague here. And I think a chief cat herder of events here. Let me bring up Stephanie Pierralti. And she's going to correct me because I probably mangled her name some kind of bizarre mock Italian. You said it beautifully. Thank you. Well, you're very kind. Stephanie, hello, and thank you. You're coming to us from Scarsdale, Arizona? Scottsdale, yes. I just came from the ASU campus where we did a launch of our Zoom Innovation Studio. Very cool. But yes, I am the chief cat herder slash co-show runner and ringleader, if you will, of shaping EDU, which is a community of about 4,000 education change makers around the world who work together to help lifelong learners thrive in the digital age. Well, it's terrific. That's a great project. And I really am really glad that you could spare some time to talk about it with us. Stephanie, for yourself looking ahead for the next year, within shaping EDU, what are the big projects and the big ideas that you're focusing on? Well, we'll announce in the second week in January our five calls to action, which we rally around throughout the year. And we'll convene in person for the first time since COVID at the end of February of next year. And that kicks off our annual project cycle, which runs from the beginning of March to the end of October. So that will be our big focus, five new projects for 2023. That's a lot. And can you tip us off at all? Can you give us any hint about the announcements in January? Yes, we'll continue some of our current focus around digital inclusion, which there's a lot of work being done around that and we'll announce some new projects for that. We're also working on developing the physical classroom of the future and learning environments of the future. So those will be two areas of focus. And then we're also looking at holistic wellness of educators and of students. So really addressing the mental health crisis. And I'll keep two of them secret, but those are our big guys. Thank you for the sneak peek, sneak preview. And let me just show off the visual skills of this platform here and arrange you in a nice kind of 1970s style panel. I have all kinds of questions for you. And friends, I'm just gonna ask a couple of them just to get the ball rolling, but then I wanna get out of the way and let you all ask your questions too. If you wanna learn more about this group's work, on the bottom left of the screen, you should see a link that says, are we there yet? And then that will take you to their page. So I'm just wondering really quickly if the three of you could start off by talking about what are some of the lessons that you think higher education learned from the pandemic period? And what are some of the lessons that your research into this has yielded? I'll let Ruben go first, and then you can popcorn it over to one of us. Well, I think one of the lessons frankly learned is the fact that it's not enough to just provide a campus and little boxes where classes take place and lectures take place. The whole question of mental health, the whole question of social emotional learning has come to the foreground in a very deep way. In my conversations and stories that we're collecting, we're hearing this not as an ornament or as an, oh yes, by the way, we offer this through health services. No, no, it's coming through as a fundamental aspect of what we need to be thinking about and I would say if you ask me to choose one key highlight, that would be it. It really is remarkable. And by the way, it's not just higher ed, it's the entire K-20 range. So that's the one I would pick. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Oh, go ahead Tula. Yeah, for me, the number one is, you know, student engagement for better outcomes. And I think this is why COVID-19 was such a dilemma for those amongst us who define student engagement only in terms of face-to-face learning. Of course, the other variable related to that is student-centered learning where you have to start by assuming that every student knows something and that student, you know, has something to share with other students and their technology is an enabler and it's coming out in some of the stories that we've collected. Excellent, excellent. I can see how that connects with social learning that Ruben mentioned. And Stephanie, that brings us back to you. What other lessons did you derive? I think two big takeaways for me were the need for community, that sense of belonging to a group of, if not like-minded folks, folks to have constructive conflict with and discuss issues. And I think also the learn anything from anywhere concept that allows learners to embrace new types of journeys in learning and what does that mean at the end of the day? What are the micro-credential options? What are stack credentials? How do we put all those pieces together? And I think people now realize that there are many different paths that they could take, whereas it might have been a linear journey for them pre-COVID. Oh, that's very interesting. That's very interesting indeed. Those are five very, very powerful and nicely interconnected principles to derive from all of this. Friends, I wanna ask a more material question about this project's work. And then I wanna get out of the way and hear from you and to see what questions you have. And the material question is, could you say a bit more about how are we very yet functions? What do you, how are you gathering stories? Where are you finding them from? Tula, you mentioned processing them. How are you processing them? What should the rest of us expect? I mean, are you gonna produce a fantastic film? Are you gonna do a series of podcasts? How are we gonna be able to access the results? Tula, you take that one. Yes, what we did was solve the idea of collecting the stories to a range of individuals. And that included my own daughters who spoke to students that they knew. I also spoke to, as a former lecturer at the university, I spoke to a number of my colleagues that I used to teach with. And the university administrators were willing to give us these interviews, which we collected. And as a team at SAU, we also collected range of stories from a number of people. We've had each team member collected a story. And more stories have been collected as we speak. And what we are doing now with about 20 stories we've started developing the tools which we're going to use to analyze the stories. And I think Ruben is best suited for you, Stephanie. Thank you. Thank you, that helps a lot. Stephanie, you threw that to Tula so quickly. I assume you were about to say something yourself, too. Well, we've published several of the stories. I think we have 13 maybe live right now on our YouTube channel. So if you just go into YouTube and look up Chapingedu, you'll see our channel there and you can access all the stories. So basically the interviews take place over the course of an hour and we boil that down to about seven or eight minutes per video. So after we complete the interview series, Ruben and Tula are going to work together on an analysis of the stories told and the key takeaways that we'll publish early next year. So that is what's happening at this moment. Excellent, excellent. And how does this all fit within the Chapingedu enterprise? I think that it's important to see representation of different elements of the community from around the world and discussing a common topic, a common problem and looking at how everyone has dealt with those challenges differently. So we can learn by sharing the storytelling component of what we do at Chapingedu is so important. We really wanna be able to develop resources that could be events, could be interviews, could be white papers, could be toolkits and for the community to take back to their communities of practice to then share out. And in doing that, that is how we foster change. Wow, I love how that integrates so smoothly. Thank you, thank you. Friends, this is the time for you to put forth your questions. You just learned a little bit about how they do their work. You learned a bit about the major conclusions, everything the importance of mental health, learning from everywhere, student engagement. What questions would you like to put to our group? What questions would you like to ask them? This is the place and time for you to do that. So if you're new again to the forum on the very bottom of the screen, you can click the raised hand button and that'll let me beam you up on stage. And I promise you can see already, in fact, that our guests are very nice. And if you would rather type in a question, just hit the Q&A box and type that in. In fact, already we're having a good exchange between several people in the chat between Tom Ames and Kiel Doomsch about online education and how this works. Well, people are thinking about this and they're starting a couple of questions. I have one more quick question for you. Why are we there yet? What does that question refer to besides the inevitable cry of children in the backseat of a car? I think it's a moving target to a certain extent, right? Because we don't wanna say in the post-pandemic world, we don't know that we'll ever actually be in a post-pandemic world. So what does that look like and how do we learn from this experience to then whatever the next global crisis may be? How do we take what we've learned from this and adapt it to future situations which Ruben can speak to as he is the herder of all Black swans? Right, I was going to say, yeah. The interesting thing for me is exactly what Stephanie just said. Not just say, okay, so this is what happened. How interesting, we'll write a little book about what happened and that's it. It's how do we use this to learn to move forward? And for instance, the tool set that we're developing for this is all designed to be open source what the European Union calls Libre. So all the software is going to be openly available. The raw interviews are going to be available to researchers. In other words, we want this to not just be, well, we found this out and that's it. So we want this to be a point of departure to explore what happened in light of how we could make the good outcomes be better, maybe apply in cases that have nothing to do with pandemic, but also avoid some of the bad outcomes. And again, not have to have everybody reinvent the wheel, reinvent the tools, but to be able to say, hey, these tools work for thinking about this, for developing this, we can just take the tools and use them. And the last point I wanted to make in this context is for me, there's also a very nice match between the tool set itself and what we're talking about because we're talking about story time. And the tools that we're using to develop the analytical tools for the project is built on what a platform called Jupyter. And Jupyter takes what is a notebook and narrative approach to the integration of data analysis and talking about it. So you're not saying to somebody, well, you go here and you have this data set and you go and you run that program there and then after that, you write a separate paper and somehow all the pieces, the whole thing is integrated. And as I say, it's designed to be freely shareable with the community. So once again, we're taking a, if you will, data storytelling approach to also telling these stories in terms of how we think about them, both in understanding, but also in terms of what we do for the future. Very nice. I just put a link to Jupyter in the chat and tweet this out. And speaking of the chat, our good friend, Sarah San Gregorio, thanks you for acknowledging the pandemic isn't over, especially for me to compromise to this. Agreed, agreed. We have a question here from our excellent researching friend, Kail Duhmsch. And let me just bring this up on stage. And again, if you're new to the forum, here's an example of a text question. If I can hit the correct button. COVID didn't change the obscene prices of higher ed. The catalyst for change in that area will come from alternative forms of credentialing, breaking higher ed's degree monopoly in high rate. So that's not so much a question as an assertion. I 100% agree. And I think that, you know, knowing that the average student in the States graduates with over $100,000 in debt is a frightening statistic. And it's interesting. I was just in Europe a few weeks ago and talking to folks that aren't involved in the education world, that number just blew their mind. And to know now that we have a generation of students looking at higher ed options and thinking, I don't want that debt, I don't wanna go down that road. So if there's something else I can do that will still get me the job of my dreams, why would I not do that? So if employers are validating that level of concern and embracing the alternative options for education, I think that all schools need to rethink how they're marketing their services to prospective students. And if employers are working in conjunction with higher ed institutions, that's kind of where the magic happens, right? Because then employers are forming relationships with students earlier in the process and the education institutions are offering broader options that won't require that obscene price tag. Thank you, that's a really good response. Tula, do you have any insights from the South African point of view? Yeah, just to add that, of course, as my colleagues have said, the problems are bigger. But we have told ourselves that to achieve useful interventions, we need to understand real challenges empirically. And that's why we're collecting these stories and analyzing and the preliminary analysis that we've done. Some of these challenges around access are already coming up and we are therefore going to be able to make informed recommendations based on what is coming up. Oh, good, oh, good, very good. Urban, did you want to add anything to that point? No, I think that covers it nicely. The only other thing I was going to say is, again, if we look at some of what happened, what we can learn from during the pandemic and things that work, it's in terms of seeking out these new opportunities or different opportunities, student networks are becoming very, very central to the picture. So it's not just what universities and faculties decide to do. It's also how students come together to share knowledge, decide how they're going to pursue knowledge again. So very, very interesting opportunities opening up on that front as well. Okay, very good. Thank you, thank you. And thank you, Kio, for the question. If you're new to the forum, that's an example of a test question. And speaking of which, we have an example question coming up from one of your colleagues. And this is from the irrepressible Tom Hems, who asks, what kinds of actionable suggestions for institutions are you seeing so far from your interviews? What tool and ribbon answer that since they've been doing the interviewing? I think owing to the commonality of the challenge, it's become clear that issues around access to technology are key in the professor. And they're easily adapted to across different environments. So we have to solve the digital interview. It's just one of the priorities that come out very clear. I'm sorry, Tula, I lost your last sentence. You're pretty quiet. Can you up your volume or get closer to the mic? Yes, I said, it has become clear that the proposed solutions, especially around digital access, are adaptable across different environments. And we really need to solve for this digital access, digital inclusion, because it is indeed an enabler and it's coming out very clear in the interviews that we've done so far. And that's just one of the challenges that has come up there several. We mentioned earlier, or it was mentioned earlier, issues around mental health, access to appropriate management systems and how those systems themselves provide opportunities for development, making the user interface more adaptable and all these things we need to solve for. And the interviews are beginning to tell us and guide us which that it needs to be done. And I think this is just to show kind of the joints in our work, if you will. A lot of these interviews have surfaced the challenges with connectivity to Tula's point. And this brings us to another part of our work where we're advocating for folks to sign up for the ACP, the Affordable Connectivity Program and working with the FCC and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance as well as locally the Digital Equity Institute to make that happen. So there's been, we have an amazing member, Lisa Gustanelli in Florida who's run two programs, one with the Haitian community as an example where she's gone through the churches to connect with folks that could use the ACP funds to get connectivity and teach them what to do with it, what their opportunities are to connect with once they have that connectivity. And in doing that, we've surfaced challenges with the internet service providers knowing what ACP is and who do you talk to? Once you're approved, where do you go from there? So there's, it's like an onion, right? So we're peeling away the layers of the onion. Yes, you wanna learn online but you need affordable connectivity. You need that, you qualify for it. How do you actually get it? So I think diving a little deeper is a really important part of the process. Excellent, excellent. Thank you, thank you. Ruben, you live right on the edge of connectivity yourself. Would you like to add more to that theme or another answer to Tom's question? No, I was going to say it's funny you bring up connectivity because I don't know if this is coming through my mic but I have a steam shovel working outside my house and I have to admit I'm a little concerned that my long pipe to the net is at risk right now. But, so anyhow, so no, I think a tool and Stephanie did a great job of summarizing that the only thing I'm going to highlight is just one thing that's less a direct takeaway more a mode, if you will, which is really listen to what your faculty, your students, your communities are telling you. Not what you think is sort of a grand summary. And this is one of the things that sometimes concerns me because I will see narratives about mental health in the press but they don't match up frankly with what we're hearing in our stories. It's a much more complex and nuanced landscape. I'm a little concerned sometimes that people say, well I read the story in pulling the blank of your hometown newspaper that you always listen to, therefore all the sign policy around that. And if I had to take away that to say, you know what, listen to the stories really being told because you're going to find that there are very many nuances and very many differences with what sometimes is an over-generalized narrative. And to that point Ruben, I think it's so important that we can look at stats and we can look at research and we can read articles that to hear it from the proverbial horse's mouth what's actually going on with the folks who are boots on the ground that makes a huge difference and it won't always align. There could be another, you know, continuing with my onion metaphor, there could be another layer of the onion that needs to be pulled away to get really to the meat of the problem. Can the two of you give us an example of such a case and anonymizing the parties to where degree necessary but of a university listen or college listening and hearing this one outer layer of your onion if I'm going to completely mangle the metaphors now. But instead there is a deeper layer or deeper message that they should have heard instead. Tula, do you have a good example from your interviews? Tula's been doing a lot of interviews. I think it's fair to say, you know, this is early days. We haven't even begun the deep dive in people. It's suffice to say, when we have spoken to the people who have spoken to them, they approach us and they allow them to tell us. And we believe that the analysis that we are about is not a secret issue for the interviews that are telling us. This might be a good opportunity for Tom to jump in too because Tom's been, that's conducted several interviews. Well, in that case, let me, I can easily just draft him up on stage without asking his permission. And let me just clear out some room on the deck so he can join us. And let's see if you can hear. Hello, Tom. Yeah, yes, got you. No, I'm not wearing a bathrobe either. Yeah, no, I mean, the interviews have been kind of an interesting experience. I mean, I was one of the interviewees and then I interviewed a couple of my colleagues at the community college. And it was very interesting to see the range of responses. One colleague who was teaching art, she was like, oh, it's no big sweat. I was already moving in this direction and the way my courses were set up, it wasn't that big of an adaptation based on what I was teaching that. I was already doing a lot online. And then the other colleague was like, I was completely unprepared and it's always been a struggle and getting through. He's just not good at getting through to the, in that kind of environment. He just didn't feel like he could connect to his students. And it's interesting because the first professor has continued to heavily teach online as I have as well. But the other one has gone back to in person as fast as he possibly could. And he has a very different mentality. I've known him for 20 years. He was actually my first boss at the college. And he has a very different mentality about how his teaching works. And he's certainly more traditional. But he's very good at doing that. It's just that he's trying toward the end of his career and he doesn't really want to throw everything out and start over from scratch. But he kind of looks at the stuff I'm doing and goes, okay, that looks interesting. I'm not sure what you're doing, but I get it sort of. I'm curious, Tom, if I can put some of that. And of course, from the rest of the crew, I'd love to hear your thoughts. If we can consider that to be an example, an exemplary case where we've got some faculty who learned to love teaching online and some who decided that while they could make it work in emergency, it's not for them. What does that tell us about higher ed going forward? Does it mean that we are increasingly bifurcated in our teaching experience with more online? Does it mean that for the next crisis we're going to have to go through the whole spring 2020 process again, or will we be better ready to meet the next crisis? You know, I think one of the things it tells us is that a lot of the professional development that we've done toward teaching online has been very technical in orientation. It is really focused around, this is how you use the learning management system, not what you can do with it or what you can do differently. And I think a lot of times we miss having those conversations about, I mentioned in the chat, that a lot of institutions miss this too, is that it's a very different environment when you're teaching in an online space as opposed to an in-person space. And it's not always obvious what the differences are until things simply don't work. And one of the things I learned fairly early on is that in an in-person space I teach very socratically. That doesn't work. It just really doesn't because you spend half the class wranging the students to respond to a prompt and most of them are hiding behind boxes and they don't. So you have to do something a lot more active than that. You actually have to be doing activities in class and that takes more work. It takes more prep work. It takes more upfront thinking about how you're going to get to the same place in a different way. And those are conversations that I think a lot of times that we don't, even at places like community colleges, which are very teaching focused, we don't have those conversations enough because frankly, it's a lot to ask people just to master the technology or certainly was the case for the last 20 years, especially people who are not terribly comfortable with technology as a whole and all of a sudden, you know, have to somehow figure out. And of course, there's a, you mentioned in a talk almost 20 years ago, I saw you, these two levels of technology. So in the first level, you basically are copying what you did in the old method in theoretically a more efficient way. And then the second level, you've completely redapted everything you're doing. 99% or 90, a large percentage, 90% of the faculty out there during COVID were barely getting into that first bracket. And they never had the time to stop and go, okay, I'm going to rearrange the deck. I had an advantage in that I had done that from a conceptual level of several years before, not because of teaching online, but because I wasn't satisfied with what was working in my in-person classes. And it turned out when I transferred that online it actually worked pretty well and seamlessly in an online space compared to what other people were doing. And to add to that, Tom, I think, you know, one of the reasons that we're looking at game-based learning and gamified learning and how eSports affects that is because the expectation level of the student is much higher for a deeper level of engagement than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago. So what we as educators were doing 10 years ago, 20 years ago, isn't going to engage students in the same way. We have 95% of kids from 13 to 18 that play video games every single day. That's what the instant reward and that deep level of engagement is setting a different level of expectation in the student and educators need to adapt to that. So there is going to be a bit of a, I think, survival of the fittest, if you will, of educators that are able to create really engaging, amazing learning experiences for students and those that are perhaps not willing to adapt that technology and are just going through the motions of teaching the same way that they have for their entire teaching career. And I think one of the things with digital is it makes everything very transparent. There's no hiding, especially if you're recording things. And I have every lecture, not lecture, but I have every one of my classes for the last three years on recording. And it changes a lot. I mean, if one thing you can see everything and you could assume the students can go back and look at things too. And like the other day, I had a really bad day. It just wasn't clicking. It was one of those days when I was pitching, I was Justin Verlander on Tuesday and I was pitching everything best I could and they were hitting it out of the park. And I was just like, it just wasn't working. But I think that one of the things that I would say that I'm not sure it ever really worked. I mean, when I went to school, if I remember back on my undergraduate experiences, and I challenge everybody to do this, reflect back on your own undergraduate experiences, also be aware that you're not typical. If you're in this business, you're not typical. You like school at some level to do. So your reactions to this are going to be slightly different than the quote unquote average to it. But even with me, I remember quirks of professors. Do I remember the content? I mean, I remember the professor who used to start every day playing rock and roll music in the class. He showed up with cut off shorts and flip flops. It was an astronomy class. He was very entertaining. Do I remember anything from the class? No. Do I remember another professor in astronomy at one point? What he did, he was literally flipping transparencies every 20 seconds or so. And these were crammed with handwritten text. And you just spent the entire time writing as fast and as furiously as you could. Again, do I remember anything from that class long term? Not really. So I mean, the question is, that's what we've had a lot. That's the education we're used to. We're used to the Kingsfield method of teaching. And one of the problems, of course, is that when we start changing the modalities, where this is not hidden around in four walls, people start to see that. And then they go, wait a minute. What exactly are you doing here? And think about where your actual learning comes from in college or otherwise. Where does the stuff that's stuck? Skills and things like that, yes. Methods of research and learning and scholarly inquiry and things like that. Certainly from grad school. But content, especially in undergrad, not so much. So we'll be there. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious, Tom and Stephanie, between the two of you, what you're describing is a professoriate that seems to have improved marginally over the course of the COVID experience. And in the chat, we have affirmations for this from Lisa Durf and Sarah Sangrigoria. But that we haven't advanced far enough either to do what we need to be done now sufficiently or to take care of the next crisis. This is the Afro-the-Future Transformer. We look at the future of higher ed. So Rubin, let me ask you to do a little forecasting, perhaps a little scenario. How do you think higher education is going to respond to the next, maybe not necessarily COVID level, but something substantially dangerous, such as, we can pick a few of these disasters. How do you think we're going to respond? Are we going to rerun Spring 2020? Or are we going to do something a bit different? It's a great question, Brian. I'm not sure, to be honest with you, so the good news is I don't think you're going to see somebody just replicate what happened at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and that's it. So I think some lessons have been learned. So that's the good news. But let's take it from the perspective of, for instance, climate change. Let's put it a little bit more quickly. So if you're looking at the type of scenarios, I think there's going to be a learning curve for adapting some of the lessons learned to a different type of scenario. So, for instance, people learn that they had to go remote because of issues of contagion with COVID, et cetera. But climate change could push you in the other direction. Climate change might push you to a point where, in fact, the learning space becomes a shelter space. So the question becomes, then, which lesson have you learned? Because whatever you learned about how to use Zoom probably isn't going to be directly applicable. But this goes to a question that Tom was bringing up, which is thinking about how the spaces work, thinking about how to think about that. I'd like to think that things are a bit further along the issue of technology, which was brought up by Tula, the issues of how that technology is mediated, connectivity brought up by Stephanie. I think all of these play into the picture. So if I had to make any sort of forecast that, say, probably hiring isn't going to get it right at the next major challenge. Probably you're going to see lots of mistakes, lots of missteps. But I think a few fewer. And my hope is this type of project that we're doing will help people say, hold on, we don't have to reiterate or re-replicate everything we did wrong with COVID or all the errors we made. We can at least make new and exciting errors, but hopefully a few fewer. That's my take. I welcome to hear from the rest of you what you think on that block. New errors. That's from the Black Swan herder. I'm curious, Tula and Stephanie, what do you think, based on all these stories? How do you think higher education is going to respond to the next COVID? One of the things that some students have told us is that it was not all gloom and doom. Not every student had a challenge with access to technology, for instance. Although that position is not evenly distributed. But they say that having to learn from home and not going to class meant that there was no peer pressure for them, for instance, that they could study from wherever they were in the world. That there were no compulsory extramural activities for those who didn't like them. They had freedom to organize their own time, decide when to study, what to study. Some of them say they prepared the online exams. They say they were less anxious. They just woke up, pep, sit on a desk. This is different from regular school. There are all these things that we are learning, but we think somehow we can find ways of leveraging on them. Good point. I remember seeing studies which showed all kinds of interesting virtues to what was then emergency online instruction through people who were suffering from social anxiety. Being in a crowded lecture hall, for example, being online didn't give them that necessarily. Some people who, in the K-12 space, were reporting social problems, such as bullying, found being online was a lot better. And, of course, there's the environmental change that people are not burning CO2 as they travel from and to universities and campuses. It's really important to thank you for showing that there are really positive lessons that we learned as well. Friends, what other questions do you have? We only have about 10 minutes. I can't even finish that sentence before someone asks a good question. This is from Charles Finley, our good friend, who says, any international global initiatives addressing access, students are attempting to write required essays on phones and trying to meet deadlines with no electricity for a day or two. Change of requirements? What do you all think? I think it will continue to be a problem, especially as we struggle with how we adapt to climate change. But I think this first step of getting more people connected with the ACP will be very telling in what's the norm, right? What's expected? How do we get more folks access to online education? But it is creating a digital divide and it's up to us to try to close that. And again, the ACP, that's the United States FCC effort to give some financial assistance to people who don't have you. Exactly. It's basically a stipend, you know, just something to help ease the burden of the cost. They don't cover 100% of it. I apologize if I get these numbers incorrect, but I think in the tribal nations, it's a $70 a month supplement and then it's either 30 or 35 for other folks. So just having that as, you know, something to help is important. But also making sure that our libraries are being put to good use. You know, we do have a lot of resources available at libraries that aren't always utilized. So making sure that that's accessible is really important too. I'm the facilitator here. So my job is not to ask questions, but to ask them. I would just say one of the great takeaways from the pandemic is the massive realization of the digital divide at a worldwide level, just how thorough that is and how unaddressed it is. Someone started answering and I didn't mean to cut you off. No, no, just a very quick thing. Because I want to, to Charles point, there's something very important that comes out what Charles said because Charles mentioned international aspect and that to me is really important. Because there is work being done internationally. Some under the auspices of UNESCO, some under the auspices of international NGOs. Et cetera. All sorts of different organizations. And it's important to learn from them. One of the points, for instance, being brought up, which is so students are arriving on cell phones, et cetera. We actually have good research that's been done on that front from UNESCO, from Japan, from several other locations that say, no, of course you don't say, let's get a traditionally formatted essay out of this. But it is a way of saying, how do you re-adapt or re-say, what is the purpose of this task? And then can I rethink it, re-adapt it, et cetera, in the context of that technology, which is available, which happens to be robust in the face of a technological challenge, whether it's a flood due to a hurricane or what have you. So absolutely, Charles, the point you brought up in your question as to the international aspect of these initiatives is really a crucial one. And again, if you ask me for strong encouragement, for me, for instance, it's a joy to be able to work with Tula, but I would expand that to, it's a joy to be able to work internationally and to share with colleagues from around the world their solutions, their ideas, and to be able to look at this work. And that's part of the amazing, the special sauce of having a community like Shaping EDU is that we do offer global perspectives, and we hope to be able to say, okay, our friends in Sweden, how did you deal with connectivity issues there? What can we learn from you that we can take back to our communities of practice in the States? And the more of these conversations we have with a broader, the broader community, the more solutioneering we can do together. Stephanie, in your capacity as director, I just want to put a bug in your ear. I would love to host your broadband access group here. And we can follow up by email perhaps, but... Yes. No, the only thing is at least one of those people has to have an impressive beard. I mean, that's just got to be... Ruben, you're in that group, huh? Yeah, but we need to diversify. I think we need to encourage more members of the group to... To grow a beard, I think that's right. In the chat, on a more serious note... That's a pretty clean shaven group, actually. We don't want that. That's only a sign of troubled characters. In the chat, Susan Klausmuth reminds us a more serious note. There are still people impacted by recent storms. Fiona and Ian here in the Southeast U.S. struggling to reconnect their lives in general, not to mention stay on track with their education. And again, looking ahead as the climate crisis worsens, and that means we have a greater incidence of such storms, and those storms will tend to be a greater destructiveness. This sounds like something that we really need to focus on in higher education, and we need to be well-prepared for. Charles, thank you for that excellent question, and each of you, thank you for those answers. And I think, you know, getting back at what Ruben said a minute ago, is that one of the things we need to learn from the pandemic as well as the, you know, the potential interruptions of the futures, we need to be looking really carefully at how, what our tasks are, you know, what we're trying to do when we're teaching, and create a flexible framework that allows us to slide from virtual to in-person, depending on what makes the most sense, not only given the circumstances of the time, but also given the learning needs of the learner. I mean, some things are just better taught in-person, some things are better taught online, and we don't tend to think critically about which falls into which bucket, and or what are the trade-offs, you know, for this environment versus that environment. There are many things I've lost teaching online that I would love to recapture, but my school does not really have a very fluid, hybrid environment. You're either online or you're in-person. And sometimes it's 50-50, but that means you're online half the time and in-person half the time, and it's not 55-45 or whatever you need it, it's 50-50. That doesn't make sense. That's arbitrary, and it's based on the antiquated industrial learning systems that we've built up, and that, you know, one thing that COVID has hopefully taught us, at least that first year, that first semester especially, is how can we be flexible and fluid? Although one thing I do remember from quite a few institutions having these conversations in the spring of 2020, there was a casual discussion about, why don't we extend the semester into the summer? It was almost always got killed, because, God forbid, we mess up the graduation date or something like that. What differences does it make if you graduate on May 31st or June 31st? June 31st might be a little of a problem. That could be like a Trump University certificate, but June 30th. But, yeah. But that's the kind of thing we're getting into these fundamental systemic things of time and how we think about time and structure. Of course, we also get into this question of, some students can learn this material in 16 weeks, some need 18, some need 19, some need 12. How do you, how do you, you know, adapt for that? You just fail all the ones who need extra time, right? That's what usually happens. And then the ones who don't need much time get bored. It's this arbitrary 16-week limit, you know, these are all things that we didn't play with, and yet we're scared to. And we don't do that, but yeah. Tom, because that's an incredibly important point. And we did see a lot of our churn on innovation on scheduling and taking a hard look at this. In fact, at the forum, we hosted a couple of guests who spoke about this. One group at Small Liberal Arts College redid their calendar into smaller chunks. And we've also hosted Eddie Maloney and Joshua Kim. We've spoken about the sheer variety of institutional creativity. I think that's another thing that we need to remember. Don't forget about Dean Dett and what he was doing. Never forget about Dean Dett. Matt Reed is brilliant. But I wanted to ask you one last question. If I can pull together a few different strands here. One is, Tula, you mentioned the importance of student engagement. Ruben, you spoke about the faculty duty, really, to redesign their teaching once the computing environment has changed. And Stephanie, you've been speaking about the difficulty of trying to get students engaged with educational technology when they're already hyper-engaged through social media, gambling, and other tools. What did we all learn from this experience about instructional designers and instructional design? Did instructional designers come to the forefront of how we teach online? Or what else did we learn about the profession and the function of instructional design and instructional designer? I can speak from an ASU standpoint of being part of the learning design experience team, making sure that professors have access to tools from learning experience from point A as quickly as possible and learn in their education process, their own education process, how to utilize those resources. I think it's become really critical to the success of educators. I mean, I have to admit to being biased. I teach in a master's degree program for instructional designers. So I'm like, good, good, yes, but please, Tula, what do you think? Are you seeing more interest in instructional design in South Africa and elsewhere? I think for us it's been our first goal has been to collect the stories really and to avoid preconceptions around what the problem might be. Of course, there is preliminary data which indicates that digital technologies and access are an issue, but we need to delve deeper into the stories that we are getting and to speak to more administrators and hear from them. They must tell us because if we approach this investigation with preconceived notions, then we might miss the story behind the story. So this is where we are at at the moment, but hopefully the data we are getting will be a deeper dive within time. Thank you. Back to the story collection, thank you. Ruben, on that story note did you want to add anything? No, I think Tula has summarized the point accurately. I think we are seeing some instances for instance of what I would call a deepening and some institutions of re-engagement, but it's early to tell what the overall profile has been from a personal perspective. I couldn't agree more about the crucial importance of getting instructional design at the forefront of thinking about what happens next as well as a certain, for lack of a better word, having instructional design permeate faculty practices. But I also agree with Tula 100% in terms of what actually has happened in the pandemic, where we've seen instructional design play a key role where we haven't that's part of what we're trying to find out. Okay. Thank you. Thank you all both for answering my bizarre last question, but also for being just fantastic guests. I really appreciate all of you. Tula, Ruben, Stephanie and Tom, what's the best way to keep up with your group? Well, we do have weekly meetings that we welcome folks into. If you go to the shapingedu.asu.edu site, that's a great place to connect with us. And also going into our YouTube channel, our shapingedu YouTube channel to actually watch the interviews there. Excellent. Excellent. Well, we've gone over the end of our hour so I need to pause, but once again Tula, Ruben, Stephanie and even Tom, thank you so much. Thank you for all this work and please keep doing it. And we'll circle back and catch up with you. Thank you all and be well. Thank you, Brian. Thanks, Brian. Thank you. But don't leave yet friends. I've got to let you know what's happening next on the next few sessions of the Future Trends Forum and I want to thank you all for your questions and comments. And by the way, if you would like us to do more sessions on this topic of what we learned from COVID, there's some interest in the chat there and I'd be happy to do more. So if you want, keep talking about this. You can use the hashtag FTTE on Twitter or Instagram. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian Alexander at Shindig Events where you hit up my blog at BrianAlexander.org. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions, again, we did quite a few sessions on COVID, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. If you want to look at what else we're talking about, we're covering everything for how to reimagine higher education to campuses and local inequality, to free speech, black students in debt, just go to forum.futureofeducation.us for more. If you have any of your own projects that you want yourselves to celebrate, Sarah, you mentioned an article of yours, shoot me a note so I can tell everyone about it. And above all, everybody, good luck working as we work our way through October here in the Northern Hemisphere. We're getting cooler and darker. I hope everybody is succeeding well. And above all, I hope you all take care and are safe. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.