 Let's begin. Let me welcome everybody to the featured trends forum. My name is Brian Alexander I'm the chief forum cat herder creator and host and I'm delighted to see you all here today I'm looking forward to hearing from you as we proceed now. I'd like to welcome this week's guest I'm just excited as I can be to welcome Casey green Casey is well known to people in the ed tech world as someone who created and has been running the campus computing project for Casey is it 30 years now this year 2019 marks the 30th survey Brian 30 years Casey. This is fantastic fantastic work. I'm a big fan because for my money This is the freshest most actionable and cold-eyed look at the data about how campuses actually use digital technology Thank you. That's quite a compliment. Casey. This is great stuff And I'm really congratulations on having this run for so long so successfully. Thank you. Let me ask. Where are you coming from today? I'm broadcasting from an undisclosed location. That's the world headquarters of campus computing in studio city, California This is a campus computing towers. Could be Computing bunker. Yeah, bunker. I think bunkers are better Metaphor well from in the bunker, you know, I asked people to introduce themselves a lot of ways But my favorite way is to ask what are you going to be working on for the next year? What are the what are the big topics that are and projects that are going to be Concerned to you. Is it going to be a run-up to the 2020 report? You know the survey Brian and again my thanks to your audience for their time And you for this forum the surveys now 30 years It gets increasingly difficult to do this Not because people don't fill out the damn questionnaire You know, we used to have seven eight hundred responses in the early years of the survey We fairly instant the 235 this year You know for folks who do data, you know, and if you do it well data, it's not about a data point It's about weaving a narrative not telling a false narrative But essentially the sum is more than the parts and I can still do that with 235 questionnaires it just the fabrics night is tightly woven and is when we start to look at sectors and segments And the challenge has always been everybody wants the survey But nobody wants to fill out the damn questionnaire the survey is half the length that it used to be it's now online We try to do everything we can to make it easier for folks to do it and yet each year I have to kind of throw myself at the mercy of the EDUCAUSE CIO list pleading with folks to complete the questionnaire So to those of you who completed the questionnaire my thanks for those of you don't we've got your name and Maybe Well, let's Let me ask a little bit about a little bit more background about this just to flesh this out for everybody And let me just let me just say for everybody here The purpose of the forum is your questions and comments I have tons of questions that I can ask but your questions are much more interesting much more diverse and reveal a far broader background that I could ever hope to achieve so as we go Please start thinking about these and again one thing to think about too is The more a basic question an advanced question were good for all of this So let me just ask case to begin with in the US There's about four thousand three hundred colleges and universities. How many responses or how many of them respond to your studies? All right, so we had 235 this year, but that four thousand that 4,300 is a useless number Brian for a lot of reasons Many of those are for profit and the number of for profits as many in your audience know has been diminishing in recent years The other part is if you look at the demography of American higher education and you would do it graphically It's a large head and a small tail There are about six hundred and fifty institutions that enroll more than ten thousand students that represents almost sixty percent of the head count There are another thousand institutions that represent enroll less than a thousand And yet they represent twenty five percent of the institutional count and yet and they are often very small very specialized So this is not about a single number representing all of higher ed You'd really need to look at sectors and segments and and again I'm very cautious when people say forty three hundred institutions. That's really that's not the core of the marketplace I guess is the most polite way just to describe it It is a large head long tail kind of market and then for a lot of the conversation about technology the action of the interest of the policy questions Really involving the large head large public and private universities community colleges which enroll almost sixty percent of undergraduates Right and many of those are non-degree students who are coming back for individual courses after having completed a degree It is to use the overuse term. It's an incredibly rich and diverse population But it's also one number doesn't adequately reflect what's going on in any one of these sectors or segments Do you in so in your in your results, especially over to say the past ten years? I mean are there particular sectors that really respond more highly than others? You know, it's mixed. I mean, we're fortunate to get about 50 60 community colleges So that's nice about five seven percent of the head count We typically get more public universities and public for institutions and we get privates The number is actually and by the way for those of you who are looking for the slides The full campus computing report is up on the website at campus computing dot net that includes my edgy cause presentation last week the narrative the overview of the narrative Brian mentioned that these are fresh data. I don't know if I think Brian understands how fully fresh these data are These data locked on Tuesday, and we're presented at edgy cause on Wednesday So it really is that these are very fresh data in terms of coming Directly from it off senior CIOs and senior IT officers working through those data double-checking the data Looking at it creating the data tables the presentation and looking at the narrative and said what are the key issues? There's it's a four-page questionnaire. There's a lot of data points. Where must attention be paid? This year in terms of the lead the attention was about the ongoing issues of an employment And also the fact that a new item on the survey was large numbers of CIOs don't think that they're president CAO's and CFOs know very much or very engaged in understanding IT. Let me pause you for a second. I want to Welcome people who've just been piling in folks like Joe and Jeff and Leo. I'm glad to see all of you all here I've been describing this data is about one week old and I think that's pretty close to actually if you think from the freeze date, which was October 8th October 9th something like that. So this is right out of the campus computing kitchen Still fresh. This is great stuff. This is great stuff So let me let me begin by asking about these about these issues The first issue that you were just talking about the one that inside higher ed wrote about is the sense that CIOs have that the rest of academic leadership is not fully cognizant of the challenges. Is that what we are? I think that's right We have a 40% who said that they thought that their presidents with plus or minus their presidents their CAO's provost and CFOs We're well informed that means 60% not now understand the scale that we use as a one to seven liquor You're not informed well informed and we report the data for those who say six or seven the most positive So you can say well, it's okay Maybe but I think it's what's quite telling is the most you know the well-informed very engage In terms of understanding the narrative and understanding the issues I want to emphasize and this is this what came through the higher ed the inside higher ed article The closing sentence. This is not about technology. It's what the technology touches And I think the second part of this in thinking about today's president's provost and CFOs. This is not 1982 This is not 1990. This is not 1995 All these folks are now somewhere between 45 and 65 They are older. They have all now come of age personally Professorily and professionally with the technology that's gone from unique to ubiquitous and from a planning a Programmatic and a policy set of issues Again, it's not the technology It's what the technology touches and the technology touches almost everything on a college campus as it does in consumer life as well And a lot of the expectations about our from our clientele whether their students ranging 16 to 68 68 our faculty our staff our Administrative support folks a lot of their expectations about technology are driven by their experiences on the consumer side And they come to campus why can't I do that right? Why is the analog experience or resource not available to me? And it is the case that we lack and that that too is I think part of the challenge. We are underfunded I may be getting ahead of the narrative you want to focus on Ryan But it is the case that despite the great recession began in 2008 We continue to see from the annual survey large numbers of campuses are experiencing budget cuts admit your budget recisions Those are have compounding consequences. There is no let-up-and-demand for resources and services Even as campuses particularly community colleges and public foreign institutions continue to experience budget cuts This is nuts. This is stupid This is unfortunate and this has severe consequences. And so again, I come back to the it's not the technology It's what the technology touches. This is part of the essential infrastructure in higher ed. It really is it really is We have We have one question that has come up already In fact, let me bring this fellow up on stage so he can address it Let's see. So if you haven't seen this before this is this is how easy it is to do Hello Tom, can you hear us? Can you hear me perfectly? I don't see your blue house. Oh, no, I'm in I'm actually at the Institute I'm actually sitting in one of the the sound boost because I forgot to take my headset with me today It is nice sound insulated place where I can talk without having a lot of echo and background noise going on at the same time So worked out nicely Tom I mean if I may you Yeah, for my purposes at least and perhaps your others would you introduce yourself? So at least my hyperactive inference engine can make inappropriate assumptions while you ask a question Well, I'm easily I mean it's easy to make assumptions about me because I'm everywhere and nowhere at the same time Tom Hames I Consult on a number of different areas including learning spaces Technology have former technology director for one of the colleges at Houston Community College And I'm faculty here as well. So I actually eat my own dog food and I Am in the build the building I'm in right now Actually, I was large part in designing and building it and it's an innovation center and I teach my classes in here as well So and I make heavy use of technology But I do it in a way that is I Develop my needs first my ends in product what I want to get my students doing and so on and so forth And then I sort of figure out what technologies are going to get me there Which ones I don't don't want to mess with because they get in the way and they're distracting I guess that's the 15-second Version of that that's great So So the question I have for you it has to do with that actually and that is you know a lot of times and I haven't looked I confess I haven't sort of been flipping through your slides in the last few minutes, but I have not done a detailed analysis of what you got there, but Is making this connection? I mean a lot of times when we see statistics about technology It's a counting statistic, you know, we have Wi-Fi over 95 percent of the campus and we have Projectors and 80 you know 88 percent of the classrooms or that sort of thing, right? And I know that you have to have the basic infrastructure to be able to go anywhere but I my question is making that qualitative connection to what's actually enhancing learning teaching and learning on this on on on campus as opposed to You know simply providing what most people consider to be basic infrastructure from Starbucks, you know All right, so I'm going to jump ahead a little bit and try to just get conscious of time Yeah, go ahead reality is we do a crappy job of evaluation Year in and year out. There's been a question on the campus computing survey Do you evaluate your investments in it for ROI or impact and overwhelmingly? 75% don't So it's still the case that the large parts of what we do on the not just the teaching and learning side But the operational side the missed right inside as well in terms of these investments are driven by epiphany and opinion Or crowdsourced as opposed to any kind of evidence and that's just nuts. It's you know, we make these investments We don't evaluate what we do. We don't learn from it's not an iterative process It really is the case that everything we teach our graduate students to do in whatever industry But they go into our undergraduates as well. We don't do ourselves and so yes It's easy to pour money into toys It's easy to pour money into sort of the easy parts of the the infrastructure that people are demanding You know, it's more Wi-Fi more stuff The other part though, it's I would say the soft touch part of the infrastructure We do a crappy job and look at the survey numbers little one thing about your own experience or folks in the audience Only one in ten of the survey participants think they do a good job on student IT training Only 20% they think that they do it for faculty and and even though 45% think that they were a good job of User support services yet user support services and what was among the top four items I mean, this is as much a part of the infrastructure as is the hardware If you go look through the slides for those of you in your audience You'll see that on the ratings and evaluation about what we do well or how would you rate the infrastructure? They're color-coded. There's things that we buy. They're kind of plug-and-play They're things that we buy that we have to add value to and there's things that we do And and certainly the stuff we do we don't do well. This would be user supports A lot of the stuff that we buy and then have to add to we don't do well as well The stuff that we we think we do well is essentially the stuff that's plug-and-play Yeah, we're you know, we'll put more access points in for networks. Yeah, you know, we'll do a better job of data communication Yeah, we'll put more toys into classrooms infrastructure You know it's infrastructure is linked innovation if you don't have the infrastructure that you're not going to get innovation And the other part is people won't use it They don't feel comfortable and they don't trust it. So they avoid it. Right. So how do you change the conversation around? Since you're since you're primarily concerned with measuring this, how do you change the conversation around that? Well, one is you bake in evaluation with any kind of campus initiative. Sure. Okay, so if it's toys, you know It's actually it's hard. It's it's hard. We're into a classroom start tracking The user, you know, the user numbers how many hours a day If it's a an initiative in widgets in a particular department Then you got to do ab testing. You got to do some kind of formal evaluation of a curriculum innovation The other thing also and I wrote about this on my blog two years ago presidents from provost ought to get a technology tutor Honestly And I say this drawing on the experience not on campus, but on the experience of both bill gates and lou gersner You know, if you go back in history You know, it wasn't bill gates discovering the internet It was the undergraduates who poured into microsoft in the early 1990s Who finally kicked ass on the adults who in their cells were only in their early 30s to say something is happening here And you're oblivious to it and that ultimately led to gates writing the internet tsunami memo in 1995 That literally changed the direction of the company from focusing on operating systems and applications to recognizing the internet is the future Similarly when lou gersner arrived at ibm as the first outside executive officer coming from a tobacco company To reinvent ibm in 1990 1991 One of the things he did because I was doing work for ibm at the time when he went to the armock headquarters He showed up in a blue shirt. This was heresy If you think about sort of the culture of ibm But the other thing he did is he brought young ibm scientists into his office as technology tutors And what's interesting to me is in my conversations with presidents and provost Yeah, they can rattle off while we're doing x and we're doing y and faculty members z is doing this stuff But when they when it gets personal In terms of the technology stuff is when they start talking about their children and their grandchildren And then you see their eyes light up And so my thought about a technology tutor is not an undergraduate who's doing show and tell But just to understand this stuff and to elevate the lowest common denominator of understanding and conversation For presidents and provost to to have a better sense On the flip side we need to acknowledge that because students are gen z and millennials not all of them are wired I mean too often I I have conversations with faculty members As i'm traveling around the country who acknowledge what I call the g g t t portfolio The too many of our undergraduates, you know their technology skills We assume that they can do this stuff. It's google gaming text and twitter And they're dead in the water if they can't go beyond that These are day one skills that are as critical as having access to a textbook on day one And let's we provide our students ages 16 to 68 with some assessed prior to arrival assessment tools You want to be successful? You need to be able to do this on day one This is not 1969 when I was an undergraduate and I could avoid the library tour and play catch up You need these resources and these skills on day one. Here's a self assessment tool Here's some online tutorial before you arrive so you can have these skills So every college needs to form an office of technology assessment Just like congress needs one. Well, yeah The feds used to have an OTA a few years ago. I know kingers kingers got rid of it But yeah, no, absolutely. And of course the scary thing about your your comment was that in both instances with gershner and gates That was technically a receptive audience I mean they consider themselves to be in the technology business from the get-go If a college doesn't think it's in the technology business or college chancellor president or Or a board member doesn't think well, we're not in the technology business They're not going to be they're not going to even you're not even going to get to step one with that I mean again, I I apologize for cutting you off. It's not about the technology It's what the technology touches and the technology touches everything Yeah, you know, absolutely and that I you and I agree 110 on that and that's that's my frustration That's why I asked the question is how do we change that conversation? um, and whether or not There's an addendum to your report or potential additional part of that that needs to be, you know, where you where you The addendum is the stuff I periodically post on my blog at inside higher ed admittedly It's nourished, but if you want to see the piece about presidents, it's there Yeah, if you want to see a piece on provost as the new wave of digital lead the third wave of digital leadership That was posted this summer um You want there's a piece two years ago about innovation and the fear of trying Like this folks don't do it because they don't get recognized or reward At least some other folks have some questions Tom, thank you very very much And uh, what's what's the name of your center there where you're coming from the westeastern institute? Great place. Great place. I'm by the way If I have to bail a little early and go deal with those very students We're talking about because I have a two o'clock class, but that doesn't I'm not leaving because I'm bored or I hate the discussion. So Understood very much. Thanks Tom. We have a question from ed gray, which is specifically about leadership. I think you're muted Do you want to unmute yourself? Uh, hi, everybody. Um, hi Casey My name is ed gray, and I'm um I'm a faculty member in school public health at the University of Illinois, Chicago But for many years, I've been very engaged with teaching and learning technologies learning spaces and all of that stuff And which I directed for many years at uac Um, Casey uh, and brian for that matter the question is is anybody measuring the effect of not having Cio's report to provost Have if any on on the focus and the priorities or the levels of focus and priorities Um, given to teaching and learning with technology groups within the campuses So I don't know if I was measuring it to me. This is a cultural issue In the early years of the movement towards the formal cio position some two decades ago. I used to get phone calls Hi, I'm calling from acme college. We're having a conversation about a cio position as opposed to a vice president for something Or a director of something. You're the survey guy, right? Yeah, I'm the survey guy So, you know from your current survey, what percentage of campuses have cio's it's x. What about campuses like y What was it two years ago was z. That's great. Thanks Um, no, don't don't go away. What do you mean? Don't go away. The number is meaningless What do you mean the numbers meaning this you're the survey guy, right? You trust your data? Yeah, I trust my data But the number is meaningless. Why is the number meaningless? because This is about culture. This is about context And if you look at the history of cio positions these things ebb and flow they move like a pendulum back and forth So in many cases, for example, if you think about the evolution of cio's over 30 years In the beginning they were and I say this respectfully, but a little flippantly they were invariably heavy metal guys They were guys who came out of cs or computer science Who were you know, either they stepped forward or they were thrown as the finger in the dike because somebody had technology was a technology problem And so we needed a tech we needed a big mean mother of a technology person to fill it who could speak bits and bytes and all that stuff Um, and then invariably, you know, things began to shift the second wave We often began to see academics who moved into these positions and they would hire a strong number two and in other ways, but the other part also is The technology person may have been the white person in the early days but often I was at many campuses or heard stories that you know Do respect anybody in the audience named steve, you know, steve's been in this position for a long time He was the right person at the right time, but his time is fast, but we're not ready to vote steve off the island Alternatively susan is the newly arrived provost And it's her prerogative or president and it's susan's prerogative to move the deck chairs in different ways And the organizational structure that worked for her predecessor may not be the one that she wants So we can have an abstract conversation about what the role of the cio is and compare it to corporate environments Where those cio's have far more command and control authority over their organizations than do their counterparts in academic organizations But at the end of the day, it's these are the often these titles and the reporting relationships are the prerogative of the folks elsewhere in the c suite Who may for a variety of different reasons Decide that they want reporting Function a reporting function b. I mean at the end of the day the reporting function doesn't matter at more important its trust If I can walk into an office if I can build this relationship if I can Have a place in the conversation even more so than a symbolic place on the table That to me becomes the essence of the issue And I used to think that at least in the past it was a big problem when administrative cio's were running both administrative and academic computing Initiatives and stuff, but I think things have changed. I got them better. I don't know how much better U of I at least is doing very well since we do have a structure with administrative computing For all of u of I is run separately than academic computing and cio's for each of the three u of I campuses I think another reason why it gets better Also is because the stronger for schools with stronger leadership in the teaching and learning technology groups learning spaces centers for excellence in teaching and and also because Increasingly we're having all kinds of it governance going on And if you got a strong faculty senate along with a strong subcommittee on teaching and learning Or education subcommittee within it governance They too Help shape and reprioritize the way things are and what the campus I'm not convinced Because the other thing I see in my data is a tremendous amount of churn in the structure of academic organizations So and then let me finish if I may this goes back also to the issue about evaluation We do a terrible job about evaluation We do a terrible job in terms of shameless self promotion about the value of the investment of the it It's not so much ROI in a financial sense. It's a voi. It's a boi benefit of investment value of investment But the other data that I look at which has been consistent year in and year out for more than two decades We've had a question. Have you reorganized your it on your campus in the last two years? Some numbers say yes Do you expect a reorganization in the next two years? Some numbers say yes And then there's a significant overlap that runs for anywhere from 10 to 30 or this year 55 percent Of those who didn't expect to do it again Now again, anyone a number of issues can help explain that churn and that that venn diagram with the overlap It could be again new provost new president a retiring cio It could be budget issues But the fact is that a tremendous amount of churn doesn't speak to stability And being able to plan and go forward We all like certainty if there's uncertainty in the environment that doesn't help our efforts to go forward Very good. Wow, that's a fantastic answer. Um, and thank you that champ by the way that chart showing those data is available as part of the report Which everyone is probably going to be reading now instead of instead of listening to us. Thank you so much Ed Thank you We have another question coming in and just just to remind people that you saw tom and ed being done stage It's that easy to do. So if you've got a camera now, um our good friend Mike welker does not have a camera. Uh, sorry, he's in a low bandwidth situation So he's typing the question and this is what that looks like What do you think the roots are for the issue that ed tech roi is not rigorously assessed? Are there any proven models or tools out there for ed tech roi for student success? So, you know, I'm going to speak very candidly here. It's a pain in the ass to do assessment It takes time. It takes money. It takes expertise You know, the folks who who want to do something I'm a faculty member and I want to create a widget or I want to do something in my Classroom, you know, they don't are not necessarily supported when they want to do the evaluation Again, a lot of this is driven by opinion and epiphany It's also the case that they don't necessarily, you know, often these are I want to say this carefully. These are the acts of individuals. They're orphans They're not necessarily have institutional support or departmental support and evaluation takes time Evaluation you got to bake it in from the beginning. You can't bolt it on at the end You have to think about what dated we what's the question we want to answer What's the impact we wish to assess this is basic blocking and tackling out of any basic evaluation course If that's the case, what are the data we need to understand? Well, you need a bucket of demographic data about your students You need a bucket of environmental data You need a bucket of data about the intervention itself And you have to have a bucket of data that says what are the outcomes we're looking for And then the question becomes will do we compare it against past what we did in the past? If there's some consistency do we do ab testing because we've got 30 sections of a widget course And we can look at an intervention in some and not others Do you have a skilled person available who's willing to make the he's got the time and make the commitment to run the data And will anybody pay attention to the data once we have it? This is structural stuff in academia, you know, ultimately we are in theory all experts. We're all masters We don't step on each other's toes on these kinds of issues Or if we do so we do it cautiously particularly if you are not tenured or you're an assistant, you know You're an assistant professor and instructor You know and the other part also some of the loudest voices in the room are the ones that come from commercial sources And and it's not that they don't do their own testing. I want to be very clear Many of the commercial sources do an incredible amount of testing if you look at some of the efforts in adaptive and some other stuff But just because it works in one environment doesn't mean it works in another Thank you. That's a very very Precise and a very rich answer. Mike. Thank you for the question For everybody else who's here. You could see just It's this direct and straightforward to ask questions. So please do I would love to hear your thoughts I want to ask Casey a question by Elm to get things to take this a little little broader angle What are some of the other leading issues that campus is surfacing this current report? Well, so no question security is an ongoing concern. You saw that from the top numbers Number two, obviously it was this the employment issue We we are on the verge of what I would characterize and I'm not trying to inflate the language Of a huge crisis in terms of it talent For our infrastructure, you know, the heart of it is not technology. It's the people who make the technology manageable effective on both on both the administrator side as well as the teaching learning side And it's the case in our survey data that year in and year out and was you know, very high number again This year 75 78 percent Brian do flash it on the screen beforehand Of the survey participants who say we have a hard time hiring and retaining it talent Because we can't keep up with salaries and we can't keep up with benefits Now it is the case for years that the it industry is cherry-picked folks at various times along the way That's increasing It doesn't matter again from if I look at across the the data in terms of the institutional demographics and the geographies Small town large city large institution small institution. This is a challenge everywhere We go and and I think it's compounded by the fact that Not only were you not keeping up, but we're we're adding more stress to the environment We used to ask a question on the survey kind of comes in and out about what have you had issues about it security You know hack attacks loss and drives other kinds of stuff and one of them was on employee malfeasants In other words, you have a bunch of pissed off employees who are creating problems And that's a stress indicator Yeah, and that number was at six to ten percent in the years that we did it as well The the mantra of of doing more with less and doing better is nonsense That may be you know, sound good from whatever saying it it doesn't It doesn't play well with the folks who actually have to do it And what used to be some of the joys and the flexibility for many folks who relish working in academic environments Where there's the collegiality of the tech challenger or anything else? We are just draining that You know, we're just squeezing that out And there are just too many opportunities in too many other places In terms of salary and benefits and work environment for folks to stay on campus So there's the cio is trying to inform Leadership about data about sorry about technology. There's the security problem. There's hiring retaining fine staff Are those the big three issues right now? But actually, can you bring back up that slide that you had before that shows that That shows the top 10 and shows the numbers So the way we do this is this is essentially we ask the field. This is not a delphi that some other groups have used So and the question is that's right on a scale one to ten one to seven rather You know, which are the most important, you know critical it issues very important scaled And then report the numbers for six and seven So you and and what's interesting this year is that there's a big break between the top four and the next six When that slide comes up So the top four are 60, you know, are essentially 71 to 83 percent adequate user support no surprise about student success This is this goes back. I would argue to the Spelling's commission Which took higher in 2006 to task about access affordability and accountability But look at the next six. You got a 10 point gap Between number four and number five analytics I'm I'm on record at the number of the surveys talking about atlantic angst There's all this conversation about analytics in higher ed. We're not getting our money out of it And and we're not doing a good job of explaining what we do Probably the best story about analytics today in higher ed is george's state right where after a significant investment in analytics Georgia state effectively eliminated I Honestly, you got to look at the george's state success dot george's state dot student success dot storage george's state dot edu Effectively eliminated the historic retention and graduation gaps among different student populations first gen students of color Uh in other groups in five years and the public presentation of that was we did it with analytics when you talk with tim reddick the vp For uh, who led this initiative I interviewed him as part of the two a degree series last year You hear him speak in any public forum Tim will tell you this was not just the analytics was the front end. They hired 170 people This was tech enabled high touch They had a morning after strategy That said once they sort of ran all these analytics for all these student populations in different ways and different And then I got the monday morning email and said kasey We've looked at what you're doing and we're watching you carefully And you know what you're going down a dark rabbit hole in one two or three of your courses Rather than just sending me the stigmatizing email the email said and this is how you get out of the rabbit hole There are people there are places. There are offices. There are services that can help you This is tech enabled high touch. You see a similar thing at arizona state university with their online programs So yeah, arizona state's gotten kudos for a very effective rapidly growing online program But they've provided infrastructure for those students in the way of support services that makes it work This it's what I've called for years tech enabled high touch It's not one versus the other It's the sum of the the sum of the parts which creates a gestalt which is greater than the sum of the parts And that's and we're not getting our value the bang for the buck and I think that part of the analytic angst is and I say this cautious. I'm not naming names, but there's been the case that there's a lot of providers out there Who are making great claims for what they do and some and many of them are coming in and getting shoved out within a year for falling short And whether they're middleware providers who promise this they'll come You know take the data gumbo from all your stuff and give you the solution and give you the algorithm or provide support services This is a long process that takes significant time and significant investment and institutional commitment On the part of a variety of folks in c-sweets who have to step up and stand up On this issue. Yeah, it's not cheap. It's not cheap and it's not it's not analytics that's going to solve it's an institutional commitment that That recognizes analytics is the front end of building support services and strategies What you said earlier, it's not the technology. It's what technology touches That's a that's a great great answer. Um We have more questions coming in. Um, and we just bring up one. Uh, this is from Jeff Alderson And Jeff from mathworks asks, do you find that stem focused universities are somewhat insulated from some of these tech related issues? Um talent skills because they have built in the source of new talent It is jeff. Is the question is about uh, in terms of support staff I think so not necessarily I mean, it's the case that campuses have used student talent for years It helped us and in sort of tier one stuff many campuses have codified that Not only are you employed you get a certificate. I I let me give a shout out to my friends at seat and hall Who have for years had a student technology assistant program that effectively is on the job training As opposed to just logging hours at the help desk a number of other campuses have done this as well uh Paul fischer who's the uh, director of the tlt and steve ladby the long-serving cio Have done a great job with this and I know a number of other campuses have looked at the seat and hall model In a world when we're talking about certificates and credentials. That's a great model, but that's short term Yeah, some of those students may stay and there are some problems and there are some Challenges with student workers in terms of their schedules that necessarily potentially a commitment You get to be the time when you you need the support is around finals and they too have finals Right. There's some issues potentially about security Um in in terms of at least the concern that these are not university employees And yet potentially they may have access to Secure databases and other kinds of institutional stuff Students can do a lot, but there are some limits to what students can do and and honestly Let's be candidly if you're at a campus with a union You know, there there may be some union roles that limit where you can employ students in certain circumstances Yeah, so You know quite sure students students can be a great resource, but it's not a resource that we can depend on as a solution Well speaking of students and speaking of analytics Ed wants to follow Ed Gray wants to follow up with another question, which is really really good You mentioned communication Could you speak please to the misuse abuse and privacy issues associated with learning analytics? So so this is the great fear, you know much like the campuses that are putting Alexi units and dorm rooms is a version of privacy But you know it was a way to enhance services. There are a couple of campuses this year and last year that that put Amazon dots You know and did some custom programming, but the factors are always on they're always hearing There's a great risk Admittedly The fact is at some point, you know I had a legal basis and some part of our student population is always under 18 So do you have to get parental consent for students who are in classes what we're doing learning analytics The fact is transparency is the best remedy on all this and again. I come back to my earlier comments comment You start at the front end In terms of all these conversations What is it? We hope to do what data do we need to collect? Who do we need to inform? You know it's and and and this is more than just the kind of pro forma checklist Oh, it falls under a category three in the irb process at acme college You got to take time you got to think these things through And then you have quite honestly the other part I I think there's great wisdom in the comment that Scott McNeely that some microsystems offered years ago Privacy forget about it. We have not You know, so if you I mean we talk about it But in many ways, you know, we we we have implicitly given it away. I mean honestly Metaphorically raise your hands. How many of you actually read the agreement every time you get an upgrade on iTunes Or any other software application that allows the provider Yeah, to essentially track what you do You know, how many of you you know roll through those large screens and just rather than just go to the bottom and say, okay There's some we've seen at large parts of our privacy And that's the Faustian deal, you know, if you want privacy stay off of facebook Do you think um, I mean either yourself in your observations or in the data that your project collects? Um, have you seen any Presence of rising anxiety about social media and the digital world in general in terms of privacy I mean is that impacting just for example I've been in meetings where I've seen different faculty and staff With laptops and on one of them they'll have a laptop that has a sticker saying Something with the power of learning analytics and the next person over will have one saying don't spy on students um Do you see that kind of uh resistance to uh data analytics popping up in uh in your work? Look, let me provide a little bit of historical context with brine It's going to be an extra 10 seconds to answer this In a prior life I used to be I was with the freshman survey project at uclas is best known as the cooperative institutional research project We collected, you know, every year at the time. I was there from 1982 to 1989 We were surveying over 300 000 students And to do the follow-up work and the work from the freshman survey really is the foundation for the whole student success movement Sandy Aston was it was an incredible contributor to the understanding in terms of bringing mortal varied analysis And sophisticated methodologies to the understanding of institutional impact and outcomes You don't want to run regression analysis for everybody You run them by separate populations because the populations are different or otherwise You're going to get the same outcomes in terms of you know, what are the characteristics of the students who don't succeed? And when I in my tenure as the operating officers associate director We would have conversations with campuses often with registrars and in the wake of the Buckley act Which is now something else this goes back to the earliest part about registrars giving up data That we could merge because we wanted transcript data We wanted majors we needed some other stuff and the registrars used to guard over the data the way I stood at the door when my 13 year for 15 year old daughter went out on her first day you know And understandably they should have been protected But there are ways to do this that are thoughtful that are responsible and nonetheless protect the data and the integrity for students But the reality is that that students all of us give up so much of our privacy anyhow These are kind of after thoughts to focus on one part of it the reality is that the I don't question the good intentions Of campus officials and the technology providers that they work with To do individual analytics that says that the you know as georgia state and elsewhere Sends me a monday morning email says casey. You're in trouble right because if they Want to have an if you want to design an intervention ultimately You have to target individuals. You can't just blow it all out all of you who self select yourself into a population You have to intervene But you know effectively many of us have by default in some cases you know not by default and say, okay I'll participate Again, if you want privacy stay off facebook Well, that's a good answer I have some thoughts about this, but I'd like to hear from everybody else. We we were down to the last nine minutes or so So the questions that you have I mean think about for example The different many different aspects of the campus computing world think about the learning management system Think about the lab supplies. Think about hardware Think about reporting structures think about the many many questions you'd like to know about how Campuses literally and actually use digital technology. This is your chance to ask and and don't at all Feel that your question might be too strange or too effective to your own institution Higher education is a wild and woolly beast to an awful lot of variation So we'd be glad to hear all of your questions and thoughts I I want to ask you to go back to one of your previous points casey I think sometimes you and I are the only ones in educational technology who remember that the great recession happened Um, I mean no one wants to talk about it anymore, which is interesting, right? Just how far down is it funding in 2019? Thanks to the great recession I don't have a hard number, you know, there were 85 percent of where we were versus 2008 What I do know is that year in and year out I see large numbers of campuses meaning 20 to 30 percent by sector Who nonetheless even as we are 10 years past report. They had a budget cut I see numbers that report. They had a budget rescission and these are compounding consequences Because you begin three percent less and then somebody takes another two and a half percent Or you lose one and a half percent through a major budget cut Um, I when I did the edge cost presentation a week ago There was a It opposite it leader from a small college saying well, we're having in the context of demographics We're thinking about cutting support services and I said you're cutting your nose to spite your face He said I know that but how do I convey that to others in the c-suite? Well, as soon as the word goes out that you've cut services and support services that word's going to go That work goes on a neural network Yeah, and the word will be out that acne college is not supporting students whether it's academic support services or technology support services And ultimately that's a downward spiral If anything I would make the argument to at least maintain and potentially improve and be aggressive both in in Offering those services and in the promotion of those services So word goes out. Wait a second acne college is doubling down at a time when others are cutting It's eating and that word will go out as well That would be bold Um In case I want to follow up on that but a whole bunch of questions just popped in and I want to give people Different chance to uh to speak to their questions The wonderful Roxanne risk and asks about online programs in limited physical campuses How can they innovate in the areas of augmented reality and virtual reality? Roxanne, I'm clueless. I don't know I look at our survey data and we ask about ai and ar and vr What I do know is that ultimately these are things that individual faculty members are going to have to affirm Um, what's striking to me when I look at our survey data and we ask it leaders, you know Over the next couple of years. How important will be ai and administrative ai and instructional vr ar other kinds of stuff The biggest numbers in terms of impending importance come from the administrative stuff And and that's easy to understand, you know And ultimately it's going to be bolted in or baked in on the part of a technology provider as part of analytics or something else On the instructional side, these are going to have to be choices that individual faculty members of departments make And again, you know, we're going to have to figure out does it make a difference? It looks flashy. It's a bright shiny object. There may be ways that you can do but you know, we Institutional memory being what it is. We all remember lots of bright shiny objects Uh that you know crashed and burned or companies that crashed and burned offering bright shiny Um, so so I I'm cautious about how this works a lot. I've seen stuff I've you know, I've got to walk through the boost. I put on the goggles It's all intriguing. The question is how does it scale and how does it scale in online programs? Which adds a level of complexity to it as well Yeah, and how do you evaluate? I'm just uncertain So that's probably not the answer you wanted, but that's the best answer I can offer I appreciate the candor and also the turn back to a evaluation We have another question from the excellent Amanda major who asks our project manager is important or in demand within it and higher education institutions And should you have the IT background to work in that field? So Amanda, I'm not sure what when you say project manager I'm not quite you that that's to me is an ambiguous term You know you're talking about managing implementations. Yeah, there's a lot of implementation going on particularly around ERP systems It is the case if you look at my data, we are very slow in the movements of the cloud much slower than perhaps many anticipated That's clearly a case for IT project managers, whether you are hired by a campus or you're part of a third party That's working with an implementer. So yes This is a a big issue a big opportunity The the other issue about project management for IT particularly on the administrative side again Our data year in and year out show that it's a fair number of campuses report their over budget or past time On their ERP implementations the explanation is that way if you can see my hands on the screen Yeah, we can you know the technology providers say the clamp is client wanted customization Or was uncertain or came up with slate specs the campus client says well They were unclear about some stuff and over promised and under delivered So project management is a big part of this But this is again everybody sort of stepping up and getting purple thumbs On both sides of the table in that process towards project management Brian, I know I'm going to take the speaker's prerogative I know we've got a couple minutes late I want to come back to the question you you began with or sort of the accolade you offered me for 30 years What have I learned in 30 years of this project if I may? Um, in respect for for those of you who've got questions. Can I do that? Can you can you take one quick question about before we get to that? I guess you're not going to give me a choice. Go ahead, Brian. Well, I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance So this is from m who asks do you think that institutions are looking towards online learning as a way to boost enrollment or solve declining student populations? Those are the flip side of the same coin And is and the answer is yes and the answer is overwhelmingly yes You know, it's a way to outreach a different audience as you may not necessarily get I mean, certainly if you look at as you if you look at southern new hampshire university Um, even more as you more so than southern new hampshire if you look at a lot of small colleges Um, these these are about enrollments. I think one of the most striking markets case studies about online is among faith-based institutions Which is as I look at these institutions, they are Overwhelming, you know, they're unabashedly clear about their faith-based commitment in their undergraduate programs But at least in the sense of rendering a little bit of biblical scripture render under Caesar render under christ Well, the undergraduate programs are very much Oriented towards that faith-based commitment. The graduate programs are largely or oriented towards market but With the added value of saying well, we are trusted because we are a faith-based provider And you can trust us, right? I mean, it's it's you know, I see a lot of small faith faith colleges going into online programs That to me is a really striking market study about what's going on Let alone some of the efforts of others and some of the ongoing common issues about using opm So there's some data from the survey about it officers viewing opm's very quickly that Yeah, uncertain whether it's an effective or viable way to launch an even greater uncertainty about whether the use of third party providers Is a profitable strategy So let me let me take a couple seconds just to close. I've been doing this for three years And in my mantra for the last couple of years as I've talked with audiences like this Is to say look the technology has changed dramatically over three decades If you think about what you carry routinely and you look at 18 hours a day Compared to what if you started with an ibm pc or a mac in 1982 or 1984 the technology has gotten wonderful It's changed dramatically And yet as I look at the issues from a survey data in my conversations with campus officers and provost and presidents The underlying issues we confront in it haven't changed Wow, they're about user support. They're about financing. They're about infrastructure. They're about evaluation and assessment They're about recognition and reward for faculty members who say this is part of my scholarly portfolio And unless we start addressing some of those issues, we're going to again just sort of be still in the water And and that to me is part of the challenge that confronts not just it leadership, but institutional leadership That's part of what concerns me when I see our survey data that only Two in five feel that their presidents provost and cfos are knowledgeable And 30 percent of presidents and cfos Are engaged 40 percent of caos It's again at the risk of redundancy folks. It's not the technology It's what the technology touches and it touches everything Today, well, and thanks to you. We know a lot more about all those touches work um Casey we're out of time But I want to thank you for being a great guest and I want to thank you and celebrate 30 years of this terrific work. Thank you. That's very kind. Thank you my thanks to your audience For your time today and for letting me ramble a little bit Well, you you didn't ramble at all. You're very very precise But don't go away friends. We have to talk to you about what's happening for the next week Um, we are starting off. Um, thank you by the way today for for coming in with these questions Um, this is a rich rich subject. There's a lot we can do next week on halloween day We're going to be looking at the new horizon report information We're going to have great guests susan griac and malcom brown both who'd been guests before both work with edgacos And we're going to be talking about the latest and greatest news from that So please come by and if possible show up in some costume Um This session that next session all recessions will be on the tiny url.com slash fdf archive So you can go back and peruse them And if you want to keep talking about this stuff all this great questions about evaluation our technologies change But the issues remain the same find our groups on linkedin and facebook join us on slack Keep things going on twitter. We'd love to hear from you in the meantime Thank you so much for all your contributions. Thanks to our great guests and we'll see you next time. Take care Bye. Bye