 All right, it's the top of the hour. So let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trans Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host and chief catator. And for the next hour, we're gonna be exploring one particular topic about the future of higher education. Before we do that, let me give you a quick explanation about how the Forum works, how our technology works and how you can participate. So one thing you should know is that we've been doing this now in our fifth year. So every week we've been hosting a video conference about a particular aspect of the future of higher education. Sometimes it's a technology, sometimes it's a policy. Often it's anchored on some fantastic practitioner being a professor, a college president, a legislator, an inventor. And every week we do something that's pretty unusual. Instead of having a series of slides, and what I have here is just for the introduction, that's gonna go away soon. Instead of that, we have a conversation either out loud or face to face over video. And we do that for the hour. Our idea here is to host a discussion, a conversation, an exchange of ideas, arguments, support, pushback and controversy. That's what we're all about here. And I'm glad you can join us. Now we're doing this in the middle of an extraordinary situation. The greatest crisis to hit higher education, lifetime of the Forum, and indeed perhaps in most of our lifetimes. The coronavirus pandemic has upturned higher education worldwide. As of right now, we have approximately one million infections worldwide. More than 50,000 people have perished as a result. And the coronavirus continues to expand. What this means for higher education, something that we've been exploring for the past few weeks, that we'll continue to explore as we know. I hope the Forum is a good space for that. Now in particular, we'd like to ask you for a couple of minutes of your thoughts about how the Forum should respond. What we've been doing right now is holding a series of special events with a lot of invited guests. But is this the right thing to do? Should we change our schedule? Should we change our format? Are the particular types of ideas that we should be focusing on? Well, please fill out this little survey. It'll only take you a minute. We already have dozens of responses and we'd love to hear your thoughts. Again, we make this Forum with you. It's on a broadcast medium. It's a communication community space. So just go to tinyurl.com slash forum-c and you can tell us what you'd like to see. Now, if you'd like to get more resources on higher education and the COVID-19 crisis, you just head to this link. This will take you to my blog post where I point to a wide range of resources, including a spreadsheet about how colleges and universities are responding. Now, could give you a bit more background about the forum and how it works. We're sponsored by a few different supporters and we're really grateful to them. And I always want to thank them before we proceed. To begin with the New York State, there's NigerNet, which does great work getting the state's colleges and universities on broadband connections and doing fantastic collaborative and professional work with each other. We're really grateful to them for their support. We're also grateful to Shindig because as you can see, they make available the technology we're using right now. If this is new to you or if you haven't seen it for a while or if you've been spending the week immersed in a half dozen other platforms, let me just walk you through it so you can see how best to get the most out of our session. First of all, where I am right now, where these slides are just for a minute and where you can be is called the stage. And they call it that because everybody involved in this conference, all 80 plus of you, can see and hear everything that goes on this stage. And right below us, you should be surrounded by about 18 to 20 other people. And when I say people, I mean an icon which is a login from somewhere on the world's surface. It might be Phil Katz from the Council of Independent Colleges. It might be Cindy Miller from the AFT Vermont. It might be Colleen, excuse me, Kino and Salonero from Reimagining Science, all kinds of people. And there are many, many of these rooms that are formed right now. In fact, you should see at either end of your screen, a little button, like a kind of chevron. If you wanna switch rooms, you can just click on that chevron and it'll take you to the next room. But all of that is you. All of that is what I think of as the group formerly known as the audience. How can you participate? Well, there are several major, major ways. Look in the bottom of your screen. There are two key buttons I want you to be able to have access to. One of them is a raised hand. And one of them is a question mark. So as our discussion goes, if you'd like to intervene, if you have a question, a comment, pushback or evidence, just click on one of those buttons. You click on the question mark, up will pop a little box into which you can type a question or a comment. And in fact, we've already had one person do this right now. Now, if your microphone and camera work, then click the raised hand button. That tells us you wanna join me up here on stage. It's really easy for me to do. I literally press two buttons and up you come. If your mic and camera are working, your broadband is good, come and join us. We can have face-to-face conversation. It's a kind of video chat platform in many ways. And if you're on Twitter, just use the hashtag FTTE. And we find that people often tweet out during the event and they often tweet us questions, especially if they have broadband issues or if they can't make it. So use all those methods. Remondering Twitter, but please think about the video chat. That's in many ways the most powerful way to interact. We're grateful to Shindig for making this technology work. We're also grateful to our supporters on Patreon. And if you don't know Patreon, it's a crowdfunding site that supports people doing creative work. In this case, it's our work doing creative studies about the future of higher education. So if you just go to patreon.com slash Brian Alexander, you can see all kinds of ways to support us. The folks here contribute $10 or more a month just to make sure that all the lights are on and all the systems are running. Now, I'll just show you their names. There's wonderful folks like Kristin Eshelman, Phil Long, Robin DeRosa, Jay Gary, Chris Johnson, Cory S, Michael Slade, a whole bunch of terrific people. We're really grateful to them for their support and you can join them. Just go to patreon.com slash Brian Alexander. Now, that's who supports us. That's how our technology works. That's where we came from, where we wanna go. What are we doing today? Today, our focus is on our experience of this enormous transition for higher education in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today's focus is on sharing your stories. What have you learned? What have you seen? If you're an instructor, what's it been like teaching remotely as opposed to face to face? If you're a librarian, if you're a technologist, what's it like supporting a population that's migrating across the physical and virtual worlds? If you're a student, what do you think of the experience so far and so on? So I'd like to welcome all of you. I'd like to welcome you to hear from you. I'd even like to welcome some of my cats who are chewing at my legs. And please join us to share your stories. Now, there's a bunch of people here who are already beginning to click their question boxes and they want to share their stories. But I would love to hear from all of you. So tell us, what's it been like? What have you learned? What's your experience? What's been a problem? What hasn't worked? And what's really helped everything? Besides having cats, and of course, you can see many, many cats on video these days. Let me bring Joy Connolly up on stage. Joy is the president of the Association of Learned Societies. Joy, how are you doing? I'm doing well, even here in New York, even in the center of things as it feels like to us, not to discount what other people are going through. Oh, thank gosh. Joy, first of all, first of all, are you in lockdown? Are you safe? Absolutely, and all of the American Council of Learned Society staff, there are almost 30 of us. Everyone's in good health, inshallah, as we say. And facing all of this with good cheer. So I would say the first thing I've learned from this is just to be impressed by my colleagues all around the world, all around the country at how they've greeted this with a lot of fortitude and good humor and patience. Well, that's excellent, but a great group. That's testimony to your own leadership in making that happen. Well done. Thank you. Let me ask, for everyone's benefit, Joy, I was really glad that you could come in part because to me, you represent graduate schools and what's happening in research universities and what's happening to graduate students. I mean, it has to be just an enormous, enormous, I don't think challenge is the right word. I think nightmare might be a better word. If you were somebody finishing your master's or finishing your PhD thinking about the job market and all of a sudden this hits us, what's the situation with grad students? What's the story there? Yeah, it is, it's really severe and I'm hearing a lot of anxiety. I came to ACLS from the Graduate Center at CUNY and so I'm still have a lot of connections with people at the grad center. And I'd say that there are three levels of reaction really briefly going on. I mean, one is trying, faculty and graduate students trying to work together to be humane and realistic about what we can actually expect in terms of progress on dissertations and especially with grad students who don't have 20 years of experience teaching. Typically the switch to online teaching is especially challenging for them. So it's been great to see a lot of different institutions and learning societies step up with resources and advice but the fact of the matter on the ground doesn't change. People are spending, I mean, everyone in this group knows this, we're all spending a lot of time pivoting and learning new skills. So the first thing is supporting grad students now making sure that the lines of communication are open for what they need. The second is looking to next year and certainly at ACLS we're thinking about ways we can support students who are coming out with a fresh PhD or who've been on the market for a couple of years trying to talk to them and learn from them. And I'd love to hear from people, what short of creating jobs which we can't do? What can we do? What kinds of holdovers will work? And then thirdly, and I'd love to hear from people about this and from you or now or in near future, the question of reforming graduate education. I don't wanna sound like a crisis opportunity person but I think that this is really a wake up call for doctoral programs to think about, are they equipping people with skills for diverse careers? And if not, why not? And what do we need to change systemically? And I'll just throw out, I would love to see a major change in envisioning what the final product of a doctoral education is and doesn't have to be a dissertation, doesn't have to be a proto book in my view. So anyway, a lot there but it's those three levels, I see the response and discussion working on. Wow, well, those are huge, huge topic to think about and they're exactly the right ones. Let me just say first of all for everybody, if you are right now a grad student or if you're really close to a grad student, please feel free to click the raise hand button to join us and share your experience and thoughts. In fact, we have a question right now. Let me just quickly flash this on the screen. So again, if you're new to the forum, the way this works is people can type in a question when they have the question mark button. And then what I do is I quickly put it up on the screen like this. So this is Pamela Cooper, Cambridge University Press, who says she has a nice starting grad school in the fall. I'd really love to hear about what institutions are doing for new grad students. And Pamela, good luck braving this crisis. I know publications, Cambridge University Press is having an issue with the supply chain for your print journals, good luck. And good luck to that grad school, to the grad student. Joey, did my screen just go black for a second? Whoops. Can you hear me? Brian, I just lost you. I lost all video and audio, but I think I'm back now. I can hear and see you. Can you hear and see me? Okay, I can now. I've lost you for a while. And I also seem to have lost the bottom, so I've lost all the people floating on the bottom of the screen. But I'll go ahead. I'll connect them to you all. It was a really, really good question. And the question was, we have a fine person who works at Cambridge University Press, her niece is starting grad school this fall, and she wants to know what advice you have for that. That is a great question. I would say that I do see grad programs stepping up and thinking about ways to prepare students remotely without having the luxury of bringing them to campus or even reach out by phone, given how busy people are with zooms and students in the current semester. But I would say the more incoming grad students can learn about how to navigate online resources and get comfortable working with Zoom and talking with groups, also learning about online resources for teaching and research. That's what I would, some self-help along those lines will go a long way. Also, this is the moment to band together with your incoming cohort remotely before you go on campus or start the program, hopefully go on campus. So learning how to use online resources in general, especially for research, but also for materials that will help you teach online. And is this something that the ACLS has pointers to or guidance for on its website? We're developing right now a research resources page. A bunch of people have come up with some pages already, institutions around the country. At this point, I think Googling around will help, but the ACLS page should be up sometime in the coming week. Thank you, that'd be great. That'd be very useful. Thank you for the really, really good question. Again, good luck to your niece. Anybody else have any grad school experience right now? Are you just coming off of a PhD? Just entering a master's or are you teaching in such a program or administering one? Please don't be shy, we're all friends here and we'd be glad to hear from you. While people are thinking about this, Joy, while people are typing, striking their chins and wondering about the grad student experience. Let me ask you a question about your last point. If we were to refine or revise graduate education in light of this, what are some other products? What are some other artifacts that grad students can generate besides the dissertation? Well, that's such a good question and I think there are lots of good answers and I guess that's really my meta answer that there should be more than one, there's more than one answer to the question of what the final product should be. The easiest is of course the bundled dissertation which is something a bunch of fields do now already. I think of philosophy as a leader in this where instead of a long proto book, the dissertation committee approves and the program approves a set of essays work that might go back to a student's experience in seminars earlier on in their career. So with an emphasis, I would say on the importance of letting ideas percolate over time, acknowledging that people in grad school typically in their 20s and 30s have a lot of ideas. They're curious about a lot of things. Hopefully that never goes away as a habit of thought but a habit of mind. But allowing students to be true to the plurality of their own curiosities and produce work like that. That's the easiest answer. I would say that on the more challenging end of the spectrum for dissertation committees to think about are graduate education, people committed to grad education to wrap their heads around are more engaged projects, projects that do things in the world that start groups that engage in activism, that are more projects engaged with other people framed by a detailed scholarly write up of that kind of work. So whether that, as I say, this is more on the far end of the spectrum and I've met many, many faculty over the years who are just bone deep skeptical about that as counting. But I think that's where the conversation needs to happen. And the right answer for me is probably, well, my thinking's evolving on this but it's probably somewhere in between at this moment but my point is that this is the moment to have a conversation about what students and faculty think is worthwhile work. Well, that's a huge question to rethink. And again, that spirit, I hear you in your hesitation about using the, you know, never let a crisis go to waste, but I would think of this in a more humanistic point of view and say that the crisis is revealing more about our society and how we function. We have a few more questions that have come up and then we just flash them on the screen from Sarah Keeling at Cengage. She's a learning designer there and she notes that her stepdaughter will receive her PhD in a STEM field this May. Congratulations. But she wants to enter industry and the, well, let me play it back up and the conference is connecting grad school that have been canceled. Well, congratulations to her and commiserations at the same time. Joy, do you have any advice for Sarah and her stepdaughter? I know that, oh, first of all, let me say this, there's nothing that I can't imagine the shock and the startlement and the sense of where do I turn that she must be feeling. And I would, I hope that in the first instance, her department and advisor and committee are mobilizing to support her. There are a number of grad student groups. Now I confess, I know that humanities and social sciences better than STEM fields, but I know that PhD career diversity websites are hyper up and running now because they know they're really the only link in the absence of conferences. So I would encourage her to seek some of those out and look online for those kinds of Zoom and other network connections. I'm sorry, I don't have a specific recommendation for STEM, but there will be ways to connect largely bottom up grad student or recent PhD driven. Well, that's a really good answer and I appreciate the humility as well as the practicality of the answer. Sarah, good luck to her. I have to say, we were asking for stories and already we have two stories about graduate students at both ends of the experience. If you're new to the forum, it's the kind of thing we do here where we share stories and we support them. And we support the storytelling. We have another comment that comes from Myron Williams. Good to see you Myron at the TCM International Institute. And he observes, in our experience in Europe, there's a move toward peer review journal articles as the final product. Myron, if you can, I'd love to have you join us on the stage and say a bit more about that. I'm curious for both you and for Joy, are we talking about like a cluster of journal articles? How would this work? What do you think, Joy, while Myron figures out if he can join us on stage? I think that's a really interesting way to come about it because it's in a way, it's making the dissertation level work, the advanced research, that final step in research for a PhD be evaluated by people outside the program as well as within, which I think is really interesting. I've long had the fantasy idea, which I would love to make less of a fantasy and more of a practice in some way in coming years of inviting non-academics, in fact, to weigh in not on the final product of a dissertation level project, but at the dissertation proposal stage. I think it would be so interesting to have that moment that at the moment where a student, when a student is conceiving of the project and how to frame it, how to scope it. Imagine having a dissertation proposal committee that includes an interested civic activist or urbanist or lawyer or what have you, someone sympathetic to the project, sit in and comment. That's a great answer, that's a great answer. Well, let me bring Myron on stage, Myron. Hello. Hello. Good to see you. Thank you. Our school was investigating the possibility of instituting a doctorate in organizational development. And because we have both the US presence, but primarily an Eastern European presence, instead of dissertation, we began to explore with some of our faculty who teach at other schools throughout Eastern Europe, what they were doing and many of them, especially Estonia and Latvia are now doing a, the committee determines a set number of peer reviewed articles of certain links that must be in place of the dissertation. So there's no uniform number of these, but each committee sets how many they want published. Interesting, interesting. So it could be four articles of 20,000 words each or two articles or whatever. Yeah. Can I ask how that works in terms of timing? Because I'm a class assistant in my own field. I know that it can take, partly because the field is not very big, it takes a long time for things to get reviewed and published, is it to point of submission or does one actually have to wait to get the doctorate until they're out in print? They don't have to be in print, but they have to be accepted rather than in print, if that helps. Yeah, a bit, although getting them reviewed and placed is not always easy, but I find that approach so interesting and a lot of graduate students in my career have told me, I'm sure this is familiar to everybody who works with grad students on this forum that part of the challenge of a graduate program of navigating a program is the sometimes overly close or slightly claustrophobic relationship, students find themselves in with their advisors and their committees, their sense that they have to please this one or two or three or four people and if they get knotted up in some disagreement or some kind of personal issue, they feel so powerless. So this is very interesting to think about opening it up and getting a little fresh air in the picture. Yeah, well, that's what we're gonna try to do. Well, good luck and Myron, please stay safe and keep sharing these stories. All right, thank you. Thank you very much. As you can see, again, if you're new to the forum, this is one of the ways we work is we beam people up on stage to share their thoughts and their comments. And this is just fascinating to see unfold. Joey, it reminds me of some of the calls for a open university, not in the British sense, lowcase O or porous university, where the boundaries between the academy and society are a little bit more porous. We have a whole bunch of questions that are just pouring in right now and let me just flash these up on the screen. And again, if you're a mic and camera working, we'd be glad to see you. So we've got Alex Z. Borissa from the University of Nebraska. And Alex says, I have an MS in counseling and student affairs working online learning and we're beginning a PhD education leadership program in the fall. How do you see this pandemic shaping this landscape and research? I'll break back up there. Good question. That's an amazing question. And all I can say is I think of academia, I'll just say in the US, but I think globally it's even more complex. I think of it as a big Rube Goldberg machine with a million moving pieces and because it's so complex and diverse and because it's also a landscape in the US for sure of competitive fragmentation more institutions are competing for tuition dollars and students and strong faculty and so on, it can be really tough to think about systemic change. So my vote for transforming PhD ed education, the program that you're entering would be to encourage thinking about institutional structural transformation and really transformational change on the systemic level to make our programs more inclusive, to make them more variegated in their outcomes and connect them as Brian just, as you just said, connect academia with the world. Well, it's an ambitious idea. And I mean, Alex would probably tell us about issues of privacy and security with Cheryl, right? And also think about how you can get student affairs wholly online. Great question, Alex. If you wanna join us on stage, just click the raise hand button. Also joining us is one of my other cats. This is Ash, who is mostly fluff. So if you see a fuzzy tail whip back and forth, that's entirely air fault. We have questions is piling up and we have one from the awesome Phil Katz of the Council of Independent Colleges and he asks, can we clarify how these dissertation adjacent products help prepare for non-academic careers? And that's a subject that we've been investigating in the forum for several years now. I mean, I should let others weigh in on this and in YouTube, Brian, but in my experience, it's a lot easier to convey the meaningfulness and the skills involved in crafting something that's not a big 250 page book manuscript. I think that's so far from the experience of so many people outside the academia that in itself I've found many times in recent years, it's a kind of psychological block. People say, what would I do with a staff member who has a PhD who's done this thing, this, I mean, they often say it with respect and admiration, but it baffles them. So a diversity of whether it's, you know, peer reviewed articles or bundled essays or something more engaged, more on the experiential end, I think is gonna, I mean, we'd have to take each of those and unpick how to make them legible to people outside the academy, but I think it's a lot easier psychologically and intellectually. Well, thank you. I think that's a really, really interesting answer. I mean, all that career movement just keeps growing and growing. Phil, if you want to follow up by thinking about undergraduate careers, please let me know. We have Dr. Duplantis from Delgado Community College who wanted to speak to his or her experience with research. Hello. Hello, I recently completed my Doctor of Education in Higher Education Leadership Management and Policy through Walden. It was a completely online program and the biggest advice or best advice I can give to anyone starting a doctoral program is to start collecting journal articles at the onset of your program. Get an idea of what you want your end result or your final capstone to be and start that collection at the beginning. It makes writing so much easier. Do you have a mechanism that you used for that collection, you know, with the printouts? Was it a pin board or something else? I use InNote because it basically did your APA citations for you. That's a big win right there, yeah. Yes, it is. Well, thank you, thank you. Where are you today? We're in Delgado Community College. At New Orleans. Oh my gosh, that's a huge epicenter. Oh my God, please stay safe. Thank you. And thank you for coming up. Thank you. We have story after story, which is many ways how we make education happen. And if you'd like to join us on stage to share your story again, just please click that raise hand button. Joy, I have so many questions for you about this. I mean, do you think right now that we will see a change in graduate school enrollment come this fall? I mean, will we see people deciding to take a year off instead of pursuing that MLS or whatever? That's a really good question. And thinking about this from the student point of view is really important. I have not seen any confirmed stories of withdrawals of offers of support at the PhD or master's level, although I'm keeping my eyes open for that. I think people, I mean, more or less the timing of this pandemic meant that university budgets were, if not fixed, getting there. And so the real fear that I'm experiencing now when it comes to master's and doctoral students is really not this coming academic year, but the year after. I think there's gonna be enormous financial pressure in institutions if undergraduates don't enroll and the tuition dollars don't come in as a result. And at that point, there will just be intense moral and financial pressure on schools to honor their agreements, to pay fellowships, to offer tuition benefits, all the things that make graduate school possible for so many people. Do you think, this may be a very naive question, but do you think this will play out in terms of profession or program? I mean, it seems kind of obvious to me that we'll probably see allied health fields do very well and people may divert more money to that, especially as we don't have a vaccine yet, but could this mean cutting funds to other programs especially to universities? I think again, the immediate impact on non-science fields will be probably in faculty hiring. I think we'll see some, we're very likely to see some freezes, maybe massive freezes of hiring in non-stem fields at the faculty level. I also think that the next area to think about, and here I would wanna not just lament, but try to find some way to make laminates out of luminesce or I think departments and areas that are seeing low undergraduate enrollment are especially gonna feel the hit. And here, this is most of the arts and the humanities, although not creative writing, creative writing does pretty well these days, but arts and humanities, humanistic social sciences, the laminate I would try to urge people to think about is how can we use this in a disciplinary context as a way to think creatively about disciplinary boundaries and think about what kinds of doctors, what kind of scientists, what kinds of engineers do we wanna educate today in the 21st century? And certainly on the front page of the New York Times there are questions about bioethics and about decisions doctors are having to make. It's a moment I think for doctors and scientists, anyone engaged in public health to have, I want and I hope we have a strong cadre of people who have historical sensibility, cultural sensitivity. These things don't, they aren't core in medical and science education, although they're certainly part of it. But so this would be my hope and kind of exhortation that humanists and social scientists work with scientists on the undergraduate level and develop some curricula fast. We have shown this spring, we can move quickly. So what can we do quickly to explain to undergraduates that understanding how people communicate through literature, through other means, through film, et cetera, and history and other languages and philosophy, the visual arts, all these things have gotta be part of their education in my view. So I hope we use this moment to think creatively across disciplines. I do too, that's vital to think about. We have a question from John Idelson in California. John, how are you doing? Doing well, let's see, am I unmuted? You're unmuted, I can hear you. Brian first, thank you for what you're doing. I think it's great to have these discussions. Thank you. I think an interesting thing, my good friend Casey Green always says, you know, bring me data. I received an email from Lev Gannick, who's the CTO at the University of various ASU, you know. And in the last 29 days, they did 59 million zoom minutes. That's equivalent of 12 years of instruction. And if you saw the blog this morning from Zoom, they did over two, let's see if I get the number right, 200 million daily minutes. And a large percent of that is the K-12 community. There is so much happening out there, I would like to think somewhere in that mass of meetings and events that are going on, some of the best practices, some opportunities, some things that people haven't thought about are coming out. There's a lot of controversy now about Zoom bombing and they're trying to fix that. But I think the reason that happened is was so pervasive that we have some people who have too much time on their hand and like to disrupt. But the total number of minutes that are going on in educational settings right now is sort of mind boggling when you compare that to the total number of hours or minutes of online instruction that happened pre this event. Well, let's start from Casey and then Casey's comment and I want to throw this to Joy for her thinking in the grad school world. But we've had Casey as a guest before who's a terrific guest, his campus computing project is just one of the great, great landmarks of how we get data analysis about how higher education uses technology. And your data point is really critical and data, of course can be stories. I mean, we're right now in the middle of this huge shift to face-to-face online video through Zoom as well as through Microsoft Teams as well as through Big Blue Button as well as through Adobe Connect as well as through Shindig and all of these different tools. John, stay here for a second. I want to ask Joy, how does graduate education change? And then how does education as a whole change when we spend so much time in this kind of environment face-to-face or fuzzy face to the normal face? I think the, of course, the experience is a little bit different for everyone. What I'm hearing are two interesting things I wouldn't have thought of before all this happened. Experience many of us are having all the time every day. But one is that the remembrance that we all have bodies, we're all physical selves and I think that the seminar room, the classroom is such a familiar space to all of us. We know what it's like to be in one. We've often been in them since we're four or five years old. And so now we're in our home spaces for the most part, but we're also in the classroom. And I think that's had interesting effects on the way we think about how we look at each other's spaces, how we read expressions, how we think about the need to structure meetings to remember for time for people to go to the bathroom and get something to eat or drink. I mean, all of these kind of paradoxically in a way, reminders of physicality when we're also disconnected physically. So I hope some of that comes back to the classroom because I think that'll affect undergrad as well as graduate education. On the grad end, I think it's just, I think of the people who we're learning to teach for the first time and how they're never, I mean, we have a whole, really, I don't think it's too melodramatic to say, a whole generation of doctoral students who are gonna be marked by this and never forget that their first year teaching involved this crazy transition, crazy, you know what I mean? I mean, just rush to hasty and unexpected. And I think they're gonna come out with some really interesting ideas about how to think about connecting with students online and they're gonna be, they don't have the baggage that I have to admit even I have. And I think of myself as, you know, pretty innovation positive, but it'll be really neat to see what they come up with. Well, that's a good silver lining at the end of that. I think, you know, when you're saying, you know, what things they come up with at CSU Monterey Bay where I'm officially retired, the faculty have been having weekly meetings of trying to give best practices. And it's been intriguing to me because some of my fellow faculty members who were really, I wouldn't say anti online learning, but decided it wasn't for them. And they have actually come up with some of the more creative and more interesting adaptations of what they were doing in survival mode. It's clearly not well thought out instructionally designed online education. But these faculty members who may not have been the people who would dip their toes in the online learning have come up with some very creative things particularly in some of our graphic design classes where they normally would be all in the same room. Looking at a piece of work, they've been able to come up with creative ways to replicate that small seminar setting. And in the last meeting, this one faculty member said she even liked a little bit better because there was a record of it that she didn't have when she was just doing these in a classroom. Oh, John, don't tease us. What's an example of one of these creative implementations? I might just claim her all my experience in doing this is with Zoom. So I'll talk about the Zoom has a whiteboard feature. So the students were able to put their work up on the screen and the faculty member was allowing them, other students get permission to do markups on it. So that was recorded each student doing the markup. The other is that even in a small group, sometimes people like to discuss a piece of work. So there's a breakout room capability. So for even before the works would go up to be reviewed, they would break into small groups for two or three people would start speaking and then they would come to the bigger group. And what she was doing is breaking the barrier. Most people are uncomfortable even asking a question in a classroom. It's even harder when you have to raise your hand or push a microphone. So by getting them talking in to each other in a breakout room and pulling them all back together, which was a challenge, because people wanted to say in a breakout room and keep talking like typically you have when you have a class teaching, that changed the level of discussion. So it's trying to figure out what features are in the tool that you're using and how you can, I'm not really saying replicate what happens in a classroom because I don't think you can do that, but use those things we know about human interaction and see how we can make those things that we know work. People like to talk to each other, people like to comment on things and put it into the system. Yeah, thank you, those are two great practices. What do you think, Joy? I think that's great and I'm much as I know we all miss seeing people in human presence. It's great to see what people are doing. I wonder on an institutional level whether this moment isn't also a wake up call to remind ourselves really why universities exist in the first place. I say this with respect and understanding and sympathy for students and staff whose lives revolve around the non-academic side of the university. So I know it's been really painful. I was a student athlete, I would have felt the loss of the spring season when I was an athlete very painfully when I was 19. So those things are important, but when it really came down to it, what we all had to rush to save and make happen was teaching and learning. And I would love to see university presidents who might wanna put a bit of a slowdown on spending on the non-academic side of their universities who are seeking an excuse to do it to seize the moment. Well, thank you. That's a great answer. And Joy, as a classicist, I wanna do the men's corporeal, sano routine. That's very, very good. John, thank you for bringing that up and good luck to you in your so-called retirement. Yeah, failing retirement miserably, but I think there's so much out there when I think of just one university coming up with 12 years of online instruction. Boy, wouldn't it be great if some artificial intelligence could be looking at it or faculty members get flagged what they thought were great, teachable moment or ideas. There were 22 of the faculty in our CSU Monterey Bay campus talking about what was working and not working and what they were gonna try to do. You multiply that by 500 campuses. Somewhere there are gems to be mined. How to do it is the question. It's interesting. That's a controversial statement. I mean, because on the one hand, you think we have this huge amount of data. I mean, either qualitative or quantitative. We have all this experience to look at, to learn from, I mean, to be mined by AI or just to be shared out loud, as you described your faculty doing. On the other hand, we have people like John Warner who will say, well, this is a terrible experiment. It's done unintentionally, involuntarily, with all kinds of scrambling and mistakes. And we shouldn't think about it that way. In fact, we should prioritize the emotional wellbeing of the students and faculty and staff through that experience. And I'm seeing people making arguments on both sides of this across the room. I don't think that's an either or. I mean, I think the one thing that's come out with this and I like your idea of, you know, throwing more resources at teaching and learning. But I think this has made it very clear how much student services and support are key to the success of our students and student learning. Right. So in some way, I think student services where I'll admit I was your typical faculty. Students came into my class. I didn't want to have to worry anything other than getting the right hour and to write classroom with the right equipment and let them worry about all those other things. Well, you can't do that now. If your students aren't prepared to learn, they don't have the resources. They are worried about a meal. They're worried about getting back home. One of the challenges we had in California is that when they closed the campuses, they had all the students leave the dorms. And then they were telling the students they had to clean their dorm rooms. And there was this clear out their dorm rooms. It's this outcry at this moment of crisis, why are we putting this extra burden on our students? But at that point, there were concerns within the government that the state of California was going to have to commandeer dorms for use of extended hospitals. So this human support is critical. But yeah, this wasn't a planned experiment, but Velcro and Post-it notes came from unanticipated. I can't even tell you. Well, thank you so much, John. And please stay safe, stay safe. Joy, have you seen any New York campuses that have been actually commandeered to be used as field hospitals or other support? I've heard some were considered and examined, but I don't know if that's actually been implemented yet. Yeah, I don't know either. I think I know all the leaders of these schools have offered whatever they can help, especially in the last week, I think the first couple of weeks of this going back now, almost a month, were obviously taken up with looking after the student and faculty community, especially and staff, but especially students, especially undergraduates. Now, once the dust started to settle around that and most students were looked after, presidents and provosts and CFOs and so on started making the opening up the campus strength, so to speak, to support the effort. Well, thank you, thank you. And everyone should keep an eye out for that. I'm just still trying to get used to thinking about field hospitals in the United States. Central Park has a number of tents set up right near Mount Sinai. We have more stories and friends, we only have 11 minutes. So if you've got a story of your experience so far, this is the time to join us, either type it into the question mark or join us on stage. You can tell we're pretty friendly, pretty friendly. Let me just, we have one question that came up from Todd Rizal at Power Notes. And he asks, is the heavy lifting museum subsiding? That is, are academics now beginning to look for digital tools that support synchronous, asynchronous writing labs, et cetera? Todd, I wonder if you're also thinking of people moving more towards asynchronous as we have different kinds of limitations with synchronous. Well, before Todd gets to think about that question, what do you think, Joy, what kind of other tools are we looking at, especially for grad school? Yeah, I think that there's always been an asynchronous level of permission for graduate education. The projects tend to be bigger and extending over the course of the whole semester as opposed to weak assignments and so on. So it's a little easier, I think, for graduate teachers. I think one link that advisors and graduate seminar leaders are exploring is something the previous questioner brought up, making sure that the mentoring and advising of students which happens, not typically in a group in a seminar, but more one-on-one, but often in the hallway or in the departmental kitchen, those moments aren't happening anymore. So how to make them more, how to build them into the day is, and then how to tie them to intellectual development. I think we're, yeah, this isn't a particular tool, but maybe almost a calendaring or a new way of thinking about structuring time that digital tools help us, you know, help us organize, like workflow organizers that will help people keep track of not just assignments, but how are my students doing in a more holistic sense? Oh, that's an interesting angle. And then that can tie into data in some very, very useful ways. Right, right. Hopefully not in a big brotherish kind of way or in a way that makes the students feel, you know, scrutinized, but supported. Well, isn't this where some of the humanities come in to offer help in thinking about this? We have a question from Alex Borissa, whose name I mangled before, who is now gonna come after me to try to say exactly the right way. So let's see if we have... Hello, Alex. I'm so sorry, is it Borissa? Can you hear me okay? Yes, perfectly. Okay, great. So my maiden name is actually Zadie Zabel. No one gets that. My married name is Borissa, which is Polish. Of course, Borissa, da, da, da, da, very good. You got pretty close. I finally got my set up here working, so I figured I'd jump on. Thank you for answering Joy, some of my questions about institutional change. I'm starting a PhD program in the fall in leadership. And selfishly, I am super excited about all the data that's being collected right now about the gaps in online and support services. I think it's really just magnifying some of the things that a lot of folks working in online learning knew was happening, but was never a priority like it is now. And we knew that, which is it's exciting to kind of talk about now. One of the things that our team has been talking about a lot, and I'd love to kind of hear from people here, is what happens after. Here we are, doing this hasty shift and we're all working really hard to make it the best it can be with the circumstances. But how do we now start talking with faculty and students about the shift from remote back to online? And we know that they're not the same thing. Joy, you talked about a year from now how this is gonna affect some of the institutional support pieces for grad students. I think it's gonna affect everything. And I'm not seeing a lot of national discussion about how do we shift from remote back to online and what that looks like. A quick question by remote to back to online. Do you mean going back to traditional methods of online learning? I suppose I would say that remote teaching and learning the way we're talking about it, I think is characterized by kind of a academic continuity of what we have seen in a face-to-face environment. Where online learning in the way we're talking about it, our institution is characterized by pedagogy and very intentional adjustments for an online environment. And they're not the same thing. They might be in some cases, but I know many faculty are going to come back and say this was a terrible experience. I never wanna teach online. And it's some language we're being very intentional about having a plan to say what you're doing right now is an incredible effort to keep academic continuity. It is not pedagogical online learning. Well, thank you, that's a great answer. I can see you're getting ready for graduation for a dissertation on this. Joey, what do you think? What do you think? Well, I think you're right in everything you say. I think we're gonna see reactions across the spectrum, including faculty who especially some with some experience in faculty governance who are wary of administrators who may not understand that true online learning as you're talking about it is not cheap and it doesn't come on the cheap, requires a lot of investment. So having made this quick nimble shift to remote, different mode, are there gonna be administrators out there who are not seeing the difference that you're so rightly pointing out and saying, we can just continue this and maybe there's money to be saved here. I think again, this is just one of the other angles or tensions that are gonna be coming at this conversation and I think the challenge campus to campus is gonna, and then a system wide is gonna be to ensure the diversity of voices out there and not have it devolved into a binary us them or a good, bad, uninformed conversation and that's gonna take all of us to make sure that it doesn't devolve into that. Thank you, that's a great answer and thank you so much. I should say candidate for Ritza for your excellent question. Thank you. And thank you for sharing your story. We have all kinds of directions that we can take this but I want to make sure that we get everybody's voice who wants to be heard. We have an example that just came in from Ohio and this is from Dave Ron at Coyahoga Community College is that support services. We had our counselors, financial aid, tutors, enrollment staff use the WebEx personal rooms along with published hours when each individual is available, seems to be working. But Dave, it sounds like office hours in a way. What do you think about the choice is something that we can translate to grad school and undergrad alike? Well, maybe one of the kind of going back to what I said about all of us being aware of our physical bodies when we're physically separate maybe the other bifurcation that will be a little sutured or healed in this moment will be intellectual development versus mental health and wellness. So we've taken so many strides on this in this area since I was a grad student where in the early 90s you just didn't admit to anybody if you were struggling emotionally. So just taking emotional wellness as one example of the kinds of support services our colleague at Tri-C is talking about maybe the sheer visualization just the manifestation on our screens of the different pieces that go into as students' development and success will help convince those colleagues who are not yet on board with thinking about the whole student that we need to do that. And I just wanna shout out Tri-C as a great place where it was their last summer. It is. As part of a conference that the Mellon Foundation sponsored, it's a great place. They do fantastic work. And I'm really grateful to see you, Dave. And I'm afraid though that brings us right to the end of the hour. Joy, first of all, before I regretfully let you go what's the best way to keep up with your work and with your organization's work? No, thank you. Well, we've moved to a weekly letter that I've read up with the help of my director of communications each week on Wednesday. So you can go check it out on our website, acls.org. And we're also experimenting with a couple of other modes of more frequent but hopefully not intrusive and hopefully informative information. But acls.org is the place to go. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Brian. This is really, really interesting. It's great to see people from all sectors and parts of the world. Well, I like to think in the spirit of my first book that we're all about stories. And I really wanna make sure that we can share them and we can support them. Thank you very much for making yours available. But don't go away just yet because I wanna ask everybody one more question. And actually, Joy, let me let you step down from the crowded stage just for a second because I wanna hear some, I think some other people will have some thoughts. In the one minute that's left, I already shared with you a link to our poll. And I'm just curious, you get the chance to fill out the poll, it's there for you, it's ready to go. But I am curious, what else would you like us to work on? What else would you like the forum to do? Would you like us, for example, to have a panel with people? Would you like us to bring in more wonderful experts like Joy Conley? Would you like us to meet more often? Or would you like us to focus on non-COVID-19 related issues? I've got about 30 seconds here. If any one of you would like to either raise your hand and join us, crash the onto the stage, or if you'd like to ask a question about that, I'd love to hear from it because this is not a broadcast medium. This is a community media and we really want to do what the community wants to do. We want to explore what you'd like to explore. So if there's something else you'd like us to do or something you'd like us to change or something that you love that you want us to continue, please let us know. Let me just hit the chat box so you can hit the raised hand button or type in a question. In the meantime, when people are thinking of that, let me just point to a couple of things for the next week. We're going to continue next Thursday. I think we'll be looking ahead to the next academic year. Tomorrow, I'm working with a Chronicle of Higher Education to do another live session and this one's going to be about how faculty and administrators can come together during the emergency and there's a tiny URL link right there for you to join us. And if you'd like to keep talking about all this stuff, there are a bunch of different ways, including groups on LinkedIn, Slack, groups on Facebook, and of course we have lots of discussion on Twitter. Vlad Stirr asks a really good question and I'm just going to quickly put it here for everyone to see. Vlad asks about what the community thinks in terms of assessment. So two minutes past the end of the hour, I'm going to have to regretfully wrap things up. If you have any more questions, I'm going to be here moving around the audience for the next five minutes or so and again, please just fill out the survey. I'd be delighted to hear from you. But more importantly than all that, in the meantime, stay safe. Don't infect anybody else. Take care. Bye bye.