 Let me welcome everybody, welcome to the future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have an important subject today with great report and we have a pair of wonderful guests and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Last week, the EdTech consultant and beloved forum guest, Phil Hill, published a report looking at recent stats from the national IPEDS database and he found that currently in higher education roughly one-third of students are taking classes entirely online and about additional one-third are taking a mix of online and in-person classes. Only about one-third of students are taking classes entirely in person. That is to say that the long revolution of online learning just keeps growing and growing and seems to be succeeding at least in numbers. That brings us to this week's topic and this week's report. The Chloe 8 report is a fantastic dive into how colleges and universities are actually implementing online learning. The authors, Bethany Samunich and Richard Garrett have done a fantastic job of polling, surveying and analyzing individual campuses and campus leaders to figure out just how we support, structure, maintain and grow online learning. So if you haven't seen the report, look in the bottom left of your screen and you should see a kind of tan-colored box that says Chloe 8. Click that and you'll find it. Now, if you'd like also right below it or right next to it should be another box that says sign up for the next Chloe, click that so then they can contact you for the next report. I think this is absolutely brilliant and essential for anybody thinking about higher education right now. So without any further ado, let me start bringing folks up on stage and I'll start off with Bethany Samunich. Hang on one second. And here we go. Greetings, Bethany. Hello. Thanks so much for having us, Brian. I appreciate the opportunity. Oh, it's a pleasure. Where have we found you today? I am in Ohio and it's not snowing here yet. I usually make the joke of snow, Ohio, but it's cold but it's a lovely day. Yeah. Are you getting that typical wind blasting down on you from the North Pole? Not yet. Okay. I don't want to tempt the weather fates, but so far it's pretty nice today. So far. Oh, good. Enjoy. Enjoy. Ohio can be a lovely state. Listen, Bethany, the way we introduce people on the forum is a little different. We ask people what they're working on for the next year. And so that's just about all of 2024. I'm curious what projects are you looking forward to and what ideas are top of mind for you? Well, for the past six or seven years, my own research agenda has involved looking at how traditional higher ed institutions implement online learning and looking at it specifically as a process of change management and the unique supports that online learners and online teaching faculty need. So from that has emerged a framework or a landscape, if you will, about all the different ways that institutions really need to support online learning in ways that they may not be doing now. So I hope to finish up some advanced research on that this year. I'm interviewing some senior online leaders, speaking of Chloe, but doing some qualitative interviewing there and hope to get a publication out on that. And I also have a book coming out in February. Oh, wow. It's a book, a high impact design for online courses or high dock for short. And it is a full instructional design model unique to online learning modalities. So it's coming out, I think, Valentine's Day. So I'm making the joke makes a great gift. Oh, I'm sure it will. For all your faculty that love online teaching. And I think I'll love it already. Please, please send me a copy. I absolutely will. Well, that's fantastic. Good for you. Thank you, Bethany. Let me pause for a second and bring to the stage your colleague and your co-author. And I want to make sure that we can get everybody, everybody together at once. And I think if I have it right, you two have completely opposite backgrounds. I think yours is completely white or cream and Richards is very, very dark. Hello, Richard. Hi, Brian. How are you doing, sir? Doing very, very well. Nice to be here. Well, good. Well, speaking of here, where are you today? I am in my basement in Eatonton, Georgia. So I used to live in Boston, UK originally, but moved down here for the big houses and nice weather. Oh, I'm sure you're getting some of that. Well, it's actually pretty cold, but not by a north, not by our higher standards. No, not by a Boston standard where you have to start worrying about where to put all that snow now that it's stacked up. Well, Richard, you heard the question that I put to dear Bethany. What are you going to be working on for the next year? Well, all things online, but very much focused on non-degree and even non-credit programs. So as the degree market in general, not least online, gets more and more crowded, and various external factors, slow demand, slow enrollment, more and more of our clients, colleges and universities around the country are interested in the non-degree space. And so far as I think about it, it pushes the logic of online convenience and career impact to the next stage and saying that arguably the degree is part of the problem if you're trying to realize that knowledge, that career push a little bit faster. So we all know there's some positive numbers around non-degree coming out of the Clearinghouse and other sources, but trying to understand those markets when the reporting is pretty weak, pretty fragmented is a challenge. So hence they tend to the likes of us to try and figure it out. Well, that's a lot of work. Do you include certificates in non-degree? Anything and everything. I mean, there is not a great typology. It can be credit. It can be non-credit. And the manager can be all over the place. So we try and be pretty open-minded and broad about it given the lack of specificity. Understood. Understood. What a great project. Well, here, let me rearrange the screen a little bit, make things a little more congenial. Richard, Bethany, thank you so much for coming. The way this works, friends, is I'm going to ask our guests a couple of questions, which hopefully will give them a chance to cut loose and talk about the report and their findings. But then it's going to be over to you. So as we start talking, please start thinking about what questions you would like to put to our guests. Take a look at the Chloe Report as this goes on. And if you'd like to just start rambling and thinking out loud, hit the chat box. If you've got a question already in place, hit the Q&A box. And of course, if you want to join us on stage, especially if you have a background that is neither blank, white, nor very dark, make it more multi-chromatic, please, please hit the raised hand button. I have a whole bunch of questions, actually. And some of the questions have come in from other people who can't make it today. But one of the things that really impressed me that I've realized this but I haven't really put together was you're finding that asynchronous is the dominant mode overwhelmingly that what we're doing right now, synchronous conversation is actually pretty rare. Can you speak to that a bit? Why is that? And how is that playing out? Sure. Well, let me jump in. Well, Vali Richard. Yes, OK. So this has been an interest of mine for a long time. And I think it speaks to the how online has evolved so far and how people think about its value. So I think it's, for many, many years, the dominant piece of the value proposition around online was convenience. And clearly asynchronous, insofar as it frees up the individual to engage when it's convenient for them, has some practical advantages, at least, over synchronous or hybrid or whatever the alternatives might be. And I think even though asynchronous comes with some pedagogical limitations, the power of that convenience, the kinds of people who tend to enroll in online, so far as they have very busy lives, other commitments, anything that compromises that convenience, I think, whether real or perceived, is seen as a potential red flag for a prospective student who is saying, well, I'm struggling enough to fit higher into my life. And if you're going to make me or even encourage me to show up at a particular time when my schedule is unpredictable or something happens, that's going to cause me some anxiety. So I think institutions feel that. And as the markets become more crowded and commoditized, they worry that they've been trading on convenience all this time, you never have to come to campus. And insofar as they want to shift that, either for pedagogical reasons or student experience reasons or retention and completion reasons or just sheer learning reasons, they worry that the market isn't ready. They're running ahead of demand but they're caught, I think. I think everyone recognizes that online for it to evolve both in terms of appeal, enrollment and in terms of perceived value and outcomes, we need to get beyond the 100% asynchronous default. But I think it's intention with how the market perceives the value of online, which is first and foremost convenience above anything else. And that's a key tension that Chloe's tracked a little bit and I think will continue to track as the market changes. Fascinating. Yeah, it's that classic anytime, anyplace, anywhere flexibility afforded by asynchronous online. So traditionally graduate students, even in some cases adult undergraduate students had flocked to asynchronous because it fits in with their lifestyle. A lot of your graduate students are already working full-time jobs. They want a way to extend or further their education. But what is surprising and what we have found during the pandemic is that there is a shift for campus-based students as well. And when you're thinking, well, campus-based students engaging in online learning, they want that same flexibility. So when they're juggling jobs, a busy schedule, campus-based courses as well, they want something that's going to fit into that schedule so they have a shorter time to graduation. Synchronous doesn't help in that regard, right? So one of the findings of Chloe 7 and we'll probably get into this a little bit later, but a big finding of Chloe 7 was chief online officers predicting that you're going to have a see a more balanced experience for all different demographics of students. But traditionally, gender graduates, that's when that story started to emerge that they're taking more online classes, they're asking for more online classes. So in Chloe 8, when we sat down to look at that data, we were wondering is this going to emerge as a hybrid being that balanced experience with birth balance meant on-campus and fully online asynchronous. And how we're seeing it play out right now at least is that combination of on-campus and asynchronous online learning. That seems to be that best match for busy student schedules and lifestyles right now. Oh, wow. This is a huge takeaway, I think. We have a question from Madison, Wisconsin, our good friend John Hollenbeck. He queries my question itself, and he says, isn't online versus face-to-face a false dichotomy? Well, yep, I think it is. Okay, moving on. No, please go ahead. No, I mean, I think it is in the sense that, as Bethany described, the typical so-called campus-based experience is in a sense hybrid, increasingly. Not for everybody, but whether, in terms of what institutions offer, what students sign up for, more and more of an ad hoc, random, personalized hybrid of the two. But I do think for the adult undergraduate, the graduate student in fields where online makes any sense pedagogically, have very much decided that the, there's not a false dichotomy, that there's a choice there, that you can, whether practically or in terms of perception, take a program and complete it fully online, 100% asynchronous, and notionally it's judged as the same experience, the same credential, it notionally has the same value. And I had been looking for years to get a sense of whether, at a certain point, that version of online hits some upper limits. Again, experientially, pedagogically, perceived value, the study just can't accommodate it. And that's when we start to mainstream these alternatives. Or just institutions saying, well, I'm the 600th online MBA out there. Why am I just imitating the competition? What do I do something different? Perhaps it's a little more consistent with who we are as an institution, which typically is grounded in a face-to-face experience. But I think we still don't quite see it. I still don't see many institutions really standing up a very clear, compelling version of hybrid that seems to overcome the reticence around perceived loss of convenience and talks up powerfully enough all the inconvenient things that you have to do if you're not 100% asynchronous. And the market, in theory, people say yes, I could appreciate things that aren't 100% asynchronous. But when push comes to shove, there still seems to be this rather instrumental approach higher ed for these more, these less traditional students where if you're compromising that convenience, you're slowing my time to completion, you're not, unless you give me such a compelling reason why that should be the case, then the market doesn't seem to be yet really raising its hand and saying give me something other than 100% online, 100% asynchronous online. You know, I think that's a really compelling and good question about is this a false dichotomy? And that's something I think Chloe has been really looking at, especially since Chloe 7 and we even looked at it within the title itself is online becoming more mainstream. So I think that right now we are in or we are about to be even more in a situation where we need to stop othering online and looking at it like in person campus-based courses versus hybrid versus synchronous versus high flex. It has become a universal education experience and what modality students choose to study in is starting to become less and less relevant. What is starting to become more relevant is the quality and the type of education that they're getting regardless of the modality that they are studying. So when students are asking for flexibility, they're not just saying give me more online classes, they're saying flexibility within the institution that they're currently at or about to enroll in and they want flexibility within their own schedule and also that assurance to know that no matter what modality I'm going to take this course in or if I transfer it into a fully online degree program at my institution, I'm still going to get the same level of support, I'm still going to get the same quality of faculty, the same quality of teaching in my classes. And I think that's what institutions are struggling with right now because supporting the online student in robust ways in the same way that we have traditionally supported on-campus students, not every institution is set up to do that and not every institution is looking to do that. Thank you. First of all, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of the Q&A box question and John, thank you as usual for a very good question and thank you both Bethany and Richard for fantastic deep answers. Thank you. We have another question actually popped up in the chat and this is from Karen, I always get her last name wrong I'm sorry, Bellignier who asks where does optional synchronous fit into this discussion? Well, you do see use of optional as an attempt by schools to find a happy medium. So rather than require synchronous which then bumps into all these convenience concerns that we just talked about optional allows those who desire it to engage or those who are available allows the institution to get a sense of perhaps with some experience, students really gravitate towards this so you do see it, I wouldn't say you see it a lot, I wouldn't say it's becoming the norm but for certain institutions, certain fields of study, certain preferences on the part of the faculty members, you're starting to see it but I still think as Bethany was implying I think the real question is not so much is it synchronous or is it asynchronous the devil's in the detail, what's actually being done with that synchronous time if it's used wisely and engagingly, then it can add a lot of value, if it's simply we need to show up and be in the same space virtually to feel like we're faculty member feel satisfied or whatever the question is obviously it all comes down to pedagogy and instructional design whatever the modality is and I think so often as we know in higher ed these things are not surfaced, they're not thought through everything's devolved which certainly means some pockets of excellence but a lot of unthinking mediocrity if you like and lack of thought about it and I think we can avoid confusing modality with pedagogy the two interrelate but they're not the same thing and just because you're something synchronous and asynchronous doesn't really tell you very much whether it's fit for purpose or any good I think we could spend a whole hour on synchronous alone I think part of the conversation around synchronous is how online learning became unnecessarily and terribly conflated with remote learning during the pandemic you had remote courses which were not online courses they were courses that were designed to be taught in person that were then hastily migrated in an emergency to a virtual environment for the purpose of academic continuity but what resulted from that were faculty and students and I think the public is included in that they had an online experience and so many of them that didn't have a grounding in online and had not taken good online courses prior to that they said oh well this is online and that became the discussion of this is what I can expect online in a synchronous environment so you have a lot of institutions and wonderful teaching faculty who have progressed from that point and really looked at synchronous pedagogy and how to really engage students in that virtual environment but I think you still have a lot of institutions that have remote learning courses as a carryover and they relabeled them as synchronous so it's like almost every conversation that we have about online learning or frankly on campus learning not every course is the same and I think students and faculty we're heading into an era where we are going to better discern what am I actually getting from my educational investment well that's a very very good point nice thing in the tail of that sentence to think about friends I've got one more question from my own which actually comes from what you both just said Karen thank you for the really good question which is one of the other findings of the report again if you haven't read the report yet please absolutely grab a copy and run with it was that I'm going to try and paraphrase this and please I might get this wrong it seems that a lot of institutions under repair faculty for teaching you break this down into training the role of teaching and learning centers but it seems that there's a good number that might lead to some of the different pockets Richard spoke about because they're teaching online without ever really being trained to do so am I summarizing correctly and can you speak to that point a little bit yeah I think you are I'm going to start with my own little story about how I moved to online I was a former faculty member who was teaching face to face and this was almost 20 years ago at this point I was asked to teach a course online and I thought well how hard can that be I get to come to campus less I need to upload some materials and it's going to be fine I'm sure that the majority if not all of your audience is laughing right now because I quickly found out how difficult it could be and even though that's my own story that's a very common faculty story and it's a common institutional story that we think if you can teach well in the in person face to face classroom surely that's going to translate naturally into effective online teaching and most often it doesn't because it's a different type of classroom it's a different type of learning environment designing courses for online is strategically different than designing courses for in person right so I say that to set up the reality for where institutions are now and the past a couple Chloe reports since the pandemic we're seeing institutions say that we're going to offer more faculty development for online teaching we're going to offer more faculty support for online teaching and that is great in theory but what we're seeing in practice is that it's optional so we are yet again should another instance pandemic what have you happened where we have to revert to virtual learning as the predominant modality you are yet again going to be caught in a situation where faculty and in some cases students as well are going to be unprepared or underprepared so it's this tension that's coming from being a traditional campus based institution and looking at online as that side hustle that we offer or that I think it was termed by Phil Hill as like a side show it no longer is and so how are you supporting faculty in this unique way in effective online teaching are you having conversations about regular and substantive interaction and what that means to actually connect with students in an online learning environment so those are you know just a preview Chloe nine a little bit we're going to talk about RSI this year and what we're seeing with institutions is that the policies are not following what the institutions really want to prepare for it is those campus tensions where we really need to have some complex and crucial conversations around how to best support faculty and students and the institution as well if we are going to mainstream online and promise our students that it's going to be just as good as if they're taking a course on campus but but I mean I agree with all that but obviously online the situation around online that Bethany describes it's a symptom of a problem in higher ed which is lack of systematic attention to teaching and learning good practice and it's not as if and I know you're not saying this Bethany but it's not as if for campus based courses there's somehow a different set of circumstances there's the same lack of development optional arrangements uneven participation uneven student experience so online in so far as it's a novel modality it was more obvious that development was needed as it came in for different schools at different points in time but I feel like online as a disruptive force there's always intention with higher ed as a domesticating force if you like and depending on where you are what metric you look at you know the disruptions winning or the domestications winning and but culturally you know everyone says you know culturally and I think the culture of higher ed which is anti-centralized anti-top-down anti-imposition is I think proving stronger than any benefits that might come from a more rationalised approach to faculty development so you know there isn't going to be a sort of winner here I just think we'll continue to sort of move along and you know you do I mean the counter narrative is from the 100% online schools which tend to be very different you know no tenure typically adjunct faculty their 100% teaching institutions in the main and they tend to report on Chloe a much more systematic approach top-down approach to things like faculty development and but I suppose the question is I don't think we have an answer to this is whether that tends to translate into a superior online experience at scale because there's lots of confounding variables in so far as what kind of students go to that school you know they tend to be less prepared you know if you look at the typical completion rates for a fully online school at undergraduate level versus a more conventional school you know the online graduation rates tend to be much poorer but and to what extent is faculty development making that better than it otherwise would have been or is it too cookie cutter in one size fits all you know they over done it somehow so I think it's an ongoing conversation but it just gets at this this root challenge of the nature and culture of higher it well that is fascinating that that's a very very deep cut well I have questions but I want to get out of the way and make sure that that all the audience can ask their questions thank you both for those great answers this is one coming from Jeff Alderson at MathWorks and we put this up on are we seeing a lag in online learning for disciplines with a harder requirement for hands-on projects or labs or the specialized hardware and equipment such as electrical mechanical engineering nursing medical and so forth I would say there's no shortage of of online nursing degrees in in in terms of lab based hard science courses and what not this has been a prevailing question I think for for years but the pandemic I think kind of showed everybody that there are ways to do you know virtually every course online so I'm hearing and seeing more and more online options for labs to the extent that I was recently on a really good panel with a a professor I think he's in chemistry and he was saying that you know he teaches his his chemistry courses online and students by and large are flocking to his courses even if they don't go to that institution because they don't have the same option to take lab based courses online at their home institutions so I think that that shows you two things you definitely can do a lot of those those courses online there are some things that may be precluded that really do need that hands-on environment but for a lot of them they need re-envisioned for for the online environment it takes a little bit of thinking sometimes it takes a pretty big investment in in resources might be a higher cost for the students when you're looking at lab but they have traditionally been done online very well and when your students again are looking at ways to fit that in their schedule and complete their education if your institution is not offering you know all these electives and your general education courses and courses within the major they are going to look elsewhere and they are going to try to get those transfer credits or in some cases potentially transfer to other institutions and I'd say at the program level there is still a disconnect between those more hands-on fields and scaled online delivery I think at course level it's a little different and I think the challenges there are the difficulty of creating really good fit technology that doesn't take so long to build that by the time it's marketable the technologies moved on I think we've been seeing for many years efforts to try and create more immersive, more hands-on experiential components to online and I think it just hasn't been the business model there perhaps because faculty members don't tend to adopt solutions at scale in the same way that you might have say in a game-based environment in an entertainment scenario and I think that's held things back and it connects back to our asynchronous discussion because I think the default mode of asynchronous tends to be text centric and rather than more hands-on and I think that has limited the pedagogical possibilities and at least at program level because there are course level exceptions but at program level I just don't think there's a sense again it can be different at grad level if someone's got the hands-on fundamentals a grad program can make more sense fully online but I'd say undergraduate level, hard sciences performing arts, certain healthcare fields, clinical fields hybrid at best if you can separate the didactics from the hands-on like the RN to BSN that markets work very very well because in effect it's a hybrid program even though the didactics are fully online but I think beyond that there either isn't the underlying demand unmet demand that online scale would meet or you just still haven't quite found the right combination of technology business model, willingness to adopt to scale these sort of subjects up at program level this is a great answers thank you and definitely Jeff thanks for the really really good question there's a comment in the chat from our dear friend Sarah who says that she helped with the zoom-based acting class during the pandemic they required a big shift in learning goals and objectives we now have a video question coming in from Daya Mudra so let me just bring them up on stage hang on one second alright hello Daya Mudra hello very fascinating I've been reading this report since August when I came out and I just want to give a shout out to the California Community Colleges I think we are overlooked a lot but the online network of educators has been groundbreaking I started my training with them in 2017 and they have a focus on really advanced pedagogy when it comes to humanized equity minded accessible online education and I just don't hear them shouted out enough and I think that when the pandemic hit at my community college we were ready because we had already been trained and a lot of people had been really resistant to online but we had all the best practices set up and we were able to train people and people really turned around so I think our program really does focus pedagogy and in the synchronous environment or the asynchronous environment it really doesn't matter I think it's just a commitment to student centered learning and during the pandemic I was finishing my doctorate at a CSU and I'm going to say I was not impressed with the way they pivoted to online and it was not a student centered approach the pedagogy was really horrible so I think the community college is really good overlooked in these conversations and I would really love some attention focused on what we're doing well here here you have an ally John Holmbeck says he's a graduate of Long Beach Community College they were great in 1969 as well yeah CC's do not get enough love enough attention they're absolutely right I think that's a really good comment and as you know from reading Chloe 8 community colleges really came out strong in terms of supporting their faculty and supporting their students I think that was one of the top three talking points that came from Chloe 8 especially when we started speaking with audiences about it I think traditionally community colleges are also known for equity and equitable learning and access and all of that speaks to online learning so you know last year when we asked them in terms of faculty preparedness and student preparedness and what they were seeing also from you know their students in terms of demand community colleges about 90% of what was said that was creating their students on my courses much less comparison for public or private careers so that those countries really that value teaching that by supporting the students and the whole students they really made that focus and pay off and all I'd add is that I think what I'm curious to see is whether you know those institutions like you say who really do feel they've invested above average in good online pedagogy to what extent does it start to be visible to the market to what extent the students can the institution start to articulate that to the market and say online is not online over here online means ABC downplay modality play out pedagogy and do students start to vote with their feet and say that's what I want and can it start to what to me is a very I use the term commoditized earlier and I'm not saying there are no differences but from the students point of view and I'm talking more program level than course level that the programs all tend to sound the same they're all just leading with convenience and flexibility and career centeredness for busy adults but nothing wrong with that as a baseline but what should be the center of attention that the student experience to pedagogy the support environment why are we using this tool why are we synchronous why are we asynchronous that we don't even seem to entertain the idea of speaking to the prospective student about that and that being why they should enroll in this particular program that the thread between coming in as a as a new student and coming out transform the other end and I think that that's what I'm looking for is how can these pockets of excellence transform into something that is scalable to idiosyncratic and starts to change the game in terms of getting beyond these these base words of online campus to something that's more meaningful well thank you first of all Diane Woodrow thank you so much for that question and comment really really appreciated and Bethany's refreshing her screen to take care of that audio glitch that we just had so thank you to her and Richard both for these for these great answers that's an example of a video question too so if you'd like just press the raise hand to join us on stage we'd be delighted to see and to hear from you we've got more questions piling up and Richard you get to tackle them solo until we get Bethany back on stage so let me just bring these up so we get a chance to look at them this is an interesting question I think there's a deep probe here for Andrew Peterson should the faculty be responsible for designing the online learning environment well I suppose from my point of view it should be a team effort somehow I think there's clearly various skill sets that go into a high quality online learning experience or course or program and it would be difficult for any individual faculty or otherwise to somehow embody that but again it comes back to this baseline of higher ed culture where there's suspicion in some cases justified against any idea that there's some sort of uniform approach to teaching and learning that would constrain a faculty member's freedom of choice so I think a smart institution if there's some cultural room for manoeuvre should very much encourage a team based approach, different nodes of expertise and then trying to separate out where individual faculty choice and autonomy is fundamental versus where it's probably just reinventing the wheel duplicating effort creating unnecessary work and where that line is isn't always obvious but I think ultimately there's a win-win here freeing up precious faculty time to not be doing pedagogy sort of block building that should be taken care of institutionally or across a program or across a faculty or even across a discipline and reserving the faculty member's personality contribution choice for either live interaction with students or it just comes down to this question of how do we optimize teaching and learning, what can be optimized in advance and almost self-service to the student emphasizing the convenience of asynchronous and what really needs to be social, live almost unplanned and human centered and I think those two are both neither one can substitute for the other but I think as a system we're very mixed about which is which and what approach to therefore apply and who should do what. Well, thank you that's a really, really deep answer, thank you Richard. Bethany, welcome back. Hello, I didn't even know I had a glitch until you said refresh. No, and now you sound perfect. Okay, thanks for that. Oh, and was the question should faculty design the online learning environment, was that it Brian? Yeah, yeah, I'll put it on the screen here again. Thank you, sorry about that. Oh, no, no, no problem. Should faculty be responsible for designing the online learning environment? Okay. I would say it depends on what you mean by that, Andrew. If I would parse that out a little bit there is the web-based environment that's part of designing an online course and this is in the forefront of my mind, QM recently designed with D2L Masterclass in designing LMS templates. It's actually going to be released tomorrow. So I've been really deep in this thinking about how you can support faculty with good web-based navigation, good organizational structures, so that they could really spend their time on the pedagogical elements of the course and designing that within. So in that case, I have to say yes and no, as a faculty member I didn't always want to make that decision for what should go in the navigation and how should this be structured and 20 years ago I didn't have the grounding in the research literature that really helped to guide me in that as well. But I did know how to teach my classes. You know your discipline, you know how to effectively reach your students, you know how to effectively convey the knowledge and skills for that. So it's a combination and I think also here's where entering into the conversation instructional designers. IDs are such a valuable member of a good online learning team at an institution so that they can really help with that learning design of the course in a virtual environment in a digital environment. So I don't know the faculty that we're ever going to be able to train faculty robustly in all the things that it means to design a high quality online course, right? I would rather reserve faculty's precious time to the pedagogical elements, to the activities in the course, engaging with students, elevating that presence, increasing belonging, and then pair that up with your learning designers and instructional designers to really make sure that students have a good learning pathway through the course, that all the web based elements look good, that we're attending to digital accessibility and all those other issues. I think it is a lot to place, you know, just on the shoulders of a single faculty member. Yeah. One of the things I love, by the way, both of you about this report is that it effortlessly spans the levels from individual class of pedagogy design through the institutional strategy and programmatic behavior as well as finance, or market thinking. That's a lot, and it works really, really smoothly. We have more questions and I want to make sure that we get to as many of these as we can. This is one from Charles Finley that looks a little bit ahead, and he wants to know how will the use of future technology, for example, the Metaverse, Web3, Avatar, et cetera, create a new campus space for online learning? Well, we've been waiting for this for some time, so I've been in the space long enough, I've been back and I've been in online since the 90s, and ever since then there's always been this impending sense that we're going to move from a tech space model to something more immersive, essentially, and it's never happened at any scale or sustained. And I think that's because the technology plus the business model issues just hasn't been mature enough. Now, clearly over time that has, those circumstances have changed. And I suppose my feeling is that, yes, if we can cost effectively and very flexibly from a pedagogical point of view, create truly immersive experiences, hands on, experimental then online really breaks through in a way that it will no longer be defined by convenience, it'll be defined by pedagogical experience. But I think we're still struggling with either business model issues or technology functionality issues or mistaking what we can do versus what we should do and simply creating a virtual setting in metaverse or what was Second Life years ago essentially the same idea essentially recreating a camp or often a very traditional looking physical campus in a virtual world. I never quite understood the value out of that from a pedagogical perspective. It just seemed to be mixing up a lot of legacy and innovative ideas and ending up in a rather unhappy place in the middle. So I still think it's the right direction to go in, but I don't think and I'm sure it's happening at a sort of course level. I'm sure there are particular applications in particular circumstances where there is a breakthrough, something that is impractical to do in person now can be done effortlessly, multiple times virtually and the technology is mature enough that it isn't going to be obsolescent in a year or two but I don't yet see it scaling up at the program level where a school will say look at our investment in X it allows us to do why this is exceptional both in terms of what's normal in the market but also in terms of what can be done experientially pedagogically. So I'm still waiting for that breakthrough so directionally I think we're getting closer and closer but I still don't think we're particularly close. Just to add to that really quickly I'm not an expert in those advanced technologies what I am an expert in is being asked at various institutions at various points in time to try to integrate advanced technologies into the curriculum so my experience has been that it's not as much about the technology as it is about the logistics, the cost of the technology who is that cost transferred to and equally as important the training and Richard you mentioned Second Life we were all a buzz about that 20 some years ago there's always going to be something new that's going to come down virtual courses and all that thing but I don't see the training accompanying that right so where the pragmatics and logistics hit our excitement about this new technology is faculty needs supported in learning how to use that and using it effectively in their course and it's not about just adding the latest greatest web whatever is out there right now in some cases I think that it is equally as if not more vital to return to good teaching and learning regardless of the modality to return to supporting students holistically making sure that your online students have the same types of supports as your campus based student thank you, thank you those are great, great passionate answers to a really really solid question, thank you we have one more question this is again from our friend Sarah Sangrigoria who is excellent and people should start hiring her I think immediately she asked the question, have you seen anything regarding other support structures like OPMs or academic success coach models having an impact well I can speak to OPMs maybe Beth and you can speak to the other pieces of it so OPMs certainly in theory and so far as they're supposed to so far as they can access Title IV funds are supposed to be about breadth of support not just marketing and recruitment so many of them do offer everything from finding faculty faculty development, some supporting technologies, some course templates, design elements as well as arranging some offline experiential learning so there's definitely a range there and I think that combination of a corporation typically a more top-down systematic approach combined with a more bottom up academic culture in terms of the partnership has at times worked rather well ideally you got the best of both worlds somehow and it's enabled institutions to move forward at a pace and in a more systematic way than the other ways would have been able to do equally the average OPM is a mixture of some true say instructional design expertise faculty background but also a lot of more generic corporate expertise and a lot of learning as you go so you end up again with a I think OPMs are often good practice, are they necessarily cutting edge perhaps not because they'll run into problems around efficiency and business model so I do think online has been aided by an unusual pairing at scale of a corporate approach to higher ed if I can put it that way and a traditional higher ed approach to the same thing but we can see from the fallout of OPMs is that how long does that arc last for is the value of an OPM primarily marketing and recruitment and everything else is kind of window addressing to some extent or not as invested in and I think the closer the OPM contribution comes to the academic pedagogical core the more sensitivity the institution feels around it and the more they feel like well that's core business so I think what will be interesting as OPMs seem to move a little off center stage and institutions seem to be taking on more of this is whether they can take the best of that OPM approach and double down on it and improve on it or whether they find that that corporate rigor is somehow a key missing feature and that they struggle to replicate it OPMs can be a great aid for institutions that really aren't staffed in those unique ways to support online enrollment, online program management etc. It comes with the caveat not all OPMs are equal and we're actually going to be asking some questions about OPMs and institutional relationships specifically with OPMs in Chloe 9 to the second part of that question in terms of different types of student support and mentors and specific student advisors you do see institutions that are taking advantage of that and I think doing really well with it Western Governors as an example but really having you know again looking at the ways that online students need to be uniquely supported and it may not be in the traditional way that institutions are used to supporting students so I think that we're going to need to look at the student focus area of this especially when online is increasing institutions are increasing online offerings not just in their discrete courses but most especially in their online degree programs that was a huge finding of Chloe 8 the number one way that chief online officers told us that they are meeting increased demand for online enrollment was to create new programs that then creates a climate of increased competition so students want to know how am I going to be better supported at your institution why is your online NBA better than the one that's over here and it's not just a conversation around price it's also a conversation around quality and not just quality of design but quality of students supports the quality and effectiveness of the faculty that are teaching that and whether or not it is an overall good experience where students are uniquely supported in that well thank you this is great by the way that OPM stands for online project management program excuse me and in the chat Steve Ehrman said that's the nickname for a company that does that and then Ed Webb gave me the thing I cannot now unsee which is the OPM of the masses which is just that's brilliant we have time for one last question this is from our dear friend in Armenia who couldn't make it tonight but he wanted to ask you how is AI changing how online education addresses assignments and assessments well my short answer is I think it's still very early days but I think the potential benefit is certainly efficiency and volume of production of these things and so far is there any bottlenecks around conventional ways of producing them and if you can ask the right prompts and the tool is trained on the right data then does it surface incremental improvements to those documents and those assessments that otherwise wouldn't be surfaced or would take forever to be surfaced so I think all of that could be helpful but we don't suffer from a lack of assessments or lack of documentation we got to focus on the quality what are we trying to achieve as well as some efficiency potential gains the AI question is on everybody's minds right now and every time I go to a conference it's the AI sessions that are most heavily attended so I think this is a question everybody is wrestling with I think the institutions that are approaching it in terms of how can we better help our students use AI and learn to be responsible with AI because it's going to be part of everyone's life similar to the conversations of becoming a good digital citizen that prevailed a couple years ago I think that that's the route that institutions are going to have to take rather than having policies against it in Chloe 9 we are going to have a section on AI as a team we kind of discussed where do we want to focus this questioning and where are institutions with it and so we're asking questions about whether or not you have policies around it whether or not your faculty and staff are using it really for efficiencies in designing courses and supporting students in unique ways and how are students using it so when I'm looking at the polls and looking at the articles on this student use is far outpacing faculty use or institutional use of AI hopefully institutions get out ahead of this a little bit in academia we're not great on accepting change we're not very agile but I think AI forces the conversation on both of those points I hate to say this but thank you for that last answer because we are at the end of our hour both Richard and Bethany you just delivered really precise and concise responses to Brent's very powerful question I need to thank you both so much for being fantastic guests this hour your report is essential reading and I think your conversation is essential viewing let me ask how can we keep up with you both what's the best way to follow you and what you're up to next me on LinkedIn very good we can certainly do that well we'll see you there and Bethany we're looking forward to a fine Valentine's Day I think for you and Richard we're looking forward to you solving some huge data problems everyone else remember on the bottom left of the screen you can see a link to Chloe 8 as well as a link to signing up for it will be Chloe 9 right yes yes so there's a link there for senior online officers to sign up to receive the Chloe 9 survey because you get a unique survey link for your institution so please do that because we couldn't do the Chloe report without you and Brian thank you so much for having us as guests today we really appreciate it thanks Brian thanks everyone my pleasure well don't go away yet friends we need to just wrap things up but I want to thank you all for the great questions that came in if you want to keep talking about these questions everything from AI and assessment to all the other findings of Chloe please keep the conversation going on and we'll be back with more details as they say you can find me there on twitter on mastodon on threads and blue sky of course on my blog just use the hashtag FTT if you'd like to look into our previous sessions where we've talked about similar reports and online learning in general just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and if you'd like to look ahead we have a whole bunch of sessions coming up and everything from anti-racism and improving college teaching to supporting mental health and a holiday community gathering at www.education.us let me thank you all again for thinking together and participating together I hope those of you in the northern hemisphere are staying as warm as possible and I hope everybody is doing well as we're coming to the end of the academic season for 2023 take care everyone be well and we'll see you next time online bye bye