Time here for more systems and let's talk about firewalls. Picking the right firewall is challenging and there's a lot of choices in the market. To keep this video reasonable and narrower in scope we're only gonna cover the ones we recommend. This is by no means an exhaustive list of every potential firewall out there, a full feature set list in a comparison that becomes very difficult to do and especially with some of the larger enterprise ones which people asked me to review, it becomes a lot more fuzzy because their feature sets are so comparative to each other and it comes down really at that point to some of the support. The ones we recommend, both PF Sense and Untangle, do not require any type of reseller to contact, do not have to be bought, they are free to download but Untangle will be the one we talked about that offers licensing fees which you can buy direct from Untangle, it's not a partner-only program, anyone can just go download it and buy the extra add-ons as needed so I wanted to just put that out there up front. Now the other ones I'm gonna be covering is the equipment from Ubiquiti and I guess I could throw TP-Link in there, I didn't throw it on comparison chart but I did the review recently of the TP-Link firewall, it's basically they copied the Unify so most of the same feature limitations exist within the TP-Link and it's not gonna be on my highly recommended list. The reason I bring up the Unify firewalls is because that's the real question people ask. If you recommend the access points and you're recommending the switches from Ubiquiti, why wouldn't you recommend the firewalls? And I do if people have the most basic of needs and that's what brings the video to be a lot longer here is what does that mean exactly? And that's where we're gonna define the functionality of Untangle, the functionality of PF Sense and where that falls off in terms of using the USG or Unify Dream Machine. Before we dive into all these details, if you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, especially things like firewall consulting and network design, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to support this channel in other ways, there's affiliate links down below and plenty of ways to connect with us. Now let's start by looking at the chart here. We have NETGATE PF Sense, NETGATE is the hardware company, PF Sense is the project in the firewall you can download, there's no fees, there's no registration, you can just download it, you can either load it on your own hardware or you can buy the NETGATE appliance. That's how they fund the project is selling the NETGATE appliances that allow you to run this not only with PF Sense or PF Sense Plus. I'm not gonna get too off topic but I have a separate video and it's documented in our website. They've made a enhanced version of PF Sense called PF Sense Plus with very few features here in May of 2021. More features are planned like a few business add-ons if you buy their hardware but that's documented on their site and once again, no license fee but it does only come with PF Sense Plus right now if you get their hardware. Pretty much the same thing, minor differences. Now on Tangle you can load on your own hardware, they do sell appliances and they have a free version and a paid version. It is based on Linux versus PF Sense is based on FreeBSD. Now what comes with the free version which is open source but closed source add-ons with their complete checkboxes over here you can kind of go through and compare and see what's on there. I've also listed in the chart that many of these features like being able to use WireGuard within there is going to be a paid feature. So I wanted to just break that down to show some of the differences. Now you do not have to buy from a partner but we are a partner so I'm clear on that upfront. If you wanna buy it directly from Untangle there's no need to contact someone on a list you could just buy now right from their website. They do offer direct sales which I really like and their pricing is very upfront. Whether you're a business or as I brought up right here a home user, they do have options. So they have your HomeProtect Basic and HomeProtect Plus and at $150 a year getting all the bells and whistles and features I think it's a really solid system if you need some of the advanced web filtering and reporting that Untangle has. And that's one of the reasons I have it on the list. Now I have the Unify, USG, USG Pro, UDM Pro on this list and of course the edge router. The big reason for them is as I said we talk so much about ubiquity equipment that people want to know why we aren't recommending their firewalls because they give you that complete dashboard where you have all the devices and the firewall in there which sounds really compelling until you have to use it. And that's the one thing that this knowledge I'm sharing with you is based on our very real world use case of actually deploying many, many PF send systems and many, many Untangle systems. These systems that we're very familiar with we have reliably deployed them. So we're familiar with any problems or challenges that may arise from them. And we actually have worked with quite a few of the USG, USG Pro, UDM, UDM Pros well mostly UDM Pros because they seem to be quite popular compared to just the Unified Dream Machines. And yeah, that's the one problem though is so many people have regret because they contact us thinking they can configure it to do something that is just not supported in it. So let's start running down the list here and talk about the features. First one is centralized management. And there is no official system from Nekate PF Sense at this time that offers a central way to manage all the firewalls you've deployed. We use Xavix ourselves to log into and manage and monitor uptime as needed on these devices. But yeah, it is not something native right now to the PF Sense ecosystem. There are third parties out there I haven't used them, but they do exist to be able to manage these firewalls versus Untangle, especially if you're an IT company like we are in Managed Service Rider where you're managing a lot of firewalls for clients. It is nice the fact that they have a central dashboard so you can see all the statuses of all the firewalls in one place that is something that comes with the Untangle system, not really relevant for the home users unless you are monitoring just your firewall, but you're probably behind it. So it's less of a big deal, but it's so cool that they offer that as a feature. Now the software defined networking, the same tool that manages all the unified switches and access points does offer management for both the USG and UDM line. And UNMS is the separate system that manages the edge OS and edge router line. That is a separate lineups essentially of how that works in the Unify ecosystem is these two. And then in the edge line is the UNMS system. It's all under a company ubiquity being the company, but the edge line is kind of a separate line and they're actually decent little firewalls. The thing that scares people away from the most though is they require a lot more knowledge to configure because a lot of the things you do that are advanced on those outside of anything basic for routing becomes a command line option to really dive into and do things. They're nice little routers, they're really inexpensive, which makes them attractive to people. I've found them very reliable, but the configuration challenges of them doing everything by writing, basically the config files by hand makes them a little bit tedious and not up for everyone to manage, makes them overall harder to manage, I would say. Now, OpenVPN is a great place to start. There is a lot of problems where the marketing people want boxes checked because they want to be able to say a product has a feature, but real world use case, well, engineers versus the marketing team is always at odds with each other and that's what we're gonna run into as we go down this list here. OpenVPN support is extensive on PF Sense, also on Untangle. When it comes down to the USG and UDM, it's very, very basic and only command line when you're doing it from the edge router. And I wanna give a visual here at exactly what that means. So here we are in Untangle and we can see OpenVPN status page, we have the server page, we have just a test I have set up in here, but there's a lot you can configure, a lot you can set up, especially when you go under advanced, then there's plenty of reporting that gets attached to the VPN. Well, there's nothing logged in right now with this demo machine, but it has a lot of advanced reporting, all kinds of fine tuning on the options. So if we have these default options or wanna add a different parameter, you can put in fill in and expand on the parameters and get into the details of it. Then we look over here at PF Sense, and same thing, laid out differently, but we have all the different cipher options, lots of different algorithms you can choose, how you wanna do things in depth, in detail, and of course, even more extra parameters that can be added and passed through to the OpenVPN server behind there. And this is great, this is what you want because it's not frequently just one thing, you wanna do with VPN, you wanna be able to have a lot of diversity. And both of these have essentially wizards that will get you through the system to get the basics filled out and then leave you with the options to do something more advanced. Got tutorials I've done on these and like I said, I'll leave that link below. But when we get over here to the Unify, we can go over here and create a new network and we can say site to site VPN, OpenVPN. There we go. This is the feature set they offer us. And by the way, there's not anything here for managing users with this. That's not part of the functionality they've really built in there. If you want a remote user VPN, L2TP server, and once again, very basic, you can choose to use a radius profile and kind of goes back to, it made the marketing people happy to say it has OpenVPN support, but it really doesn't have any of those extensive features that you might be looking for that you're gonna get with OpenVPN on NetGate or on the Untangle. So PF Sense, NetGate has the ability to go in there and do policy routing, do privacy VPNs where you do selective routing on your network. You can do the same thing with Untangle, but that's just not really possible over here on these. There are some ways to unofficially is the way I look at it on the Edge Router and get some of that configured. I put yes command line, so possible, but once again, a lot more work to get that done. Same thing with IPsec. Yes, yes is a paid version on Untangle, lots of advanced options. It does work on the USG and UDM and this is where there's also a little bit of a divergence here. We have found the UDM pros less than stable and this has been something people contact us with. If you're trying to connect one of the Dream Machine line to a non-Dream Machine for site to site. It just, I've seen a lot of porkiness trying to get it connected to other firewalls. It seems to connect well to another Dream Machine pro, but I wouldn't call it stable when you're trying to connect it to a non-Dream Machine. So if you have two Dream Machines and you want to use their site to site IPsec, that works. L2TP, we have that in NetGate PF Sense as part of the paid features of Untangle. Yes, yes, but as you've seen, kind of basic radius profile tie in if you want to use that for remote user. Most people would still prefer something like OpenVPN for a lot of reasons. WireGuard, WireGuard was in PF Sense 2.5. It got removed in 2.51. It's being reworked and brought back in 2.6. It is paid if you want to use Untangle. Untangle does not offer it on a free version, which I know created some controversy in the Untangle forums, but they do have it as part of like that home pro complete version that they have. But it's not an option at all, but I will admit probably there's some forum posts I've had people ask me to do a video on this and I'm not going to, where you can side load it on some of the different devices. I've seen some projects. It's not officially supported by Ubiquiti, so I'm gonna leave it as no. Policy Routing, there are policy routing and very advanced policy routing with Untangle, as a matter of fact, part of the policy routing is really mostly paid features on there, so make sure to set that to paid. But policy routing, policy routing, no. This is where you can do it via command line. It's not an option at all on UDM, not even any command line documentation and command line again over here on edge router, but once again, you're writing rules by hand and it's fuzzy on the USG, USG Pro whether or not those rules survive upgrades. I've heard they don't, but like I said, I wouldn't, we don't help people with them because we don't find them very well supported and they'd be problematic at best. IDS IPS, Intusion Detection Systems, Intusion Prevention Systems, Surcata or Snort, both are supported in a very advanced way inside of the NetGate PF Sense. Untangle has this as well. Untangle is hiding it, but they're using Surcata on the background. I see hiding it, but really what they're doing is giving you a very basic interface, but also at the same time, you know, beating it all through their intelligence feeds to bring it in here. So they do a nice job on essentially kind of hiding so you don't have to dive into the details, but they do offer threat lookup and advanced management so you can fine tune all of the rules that are within there. And then same thing when we go over here like to PF Sense, they give you all the options to finally tune exactly how you want Surcata, for example, to handle things or Snort and then even give you the option to push that data over to another output. For example, we have it set to create JSON logs and push it over to Syslog. There's a lot of ways to tie this in. So very advanced levels of management when you get over here, but when you get down to the way it's handled in the USG and the UDM, they're threat management systems, just kind of some basic checkbox and restrictions on there. They don't give you as much of a fine grain control over how they're doing it. There's not a lot here. It works once again, checks the box that makes the marketing people happy to say they have it, but it's not really any more than a very basic system for doing that type of work. DNS filtering, PF Blocker is one of the most popular applications for PF Sense because it allows you to load up your own feeds, filter sites and everything else. There are filtering options within Untangle. They have their own ad blocking system that works and be tied to their policy. As far as I know that's paid, I think some of the basic features work without paid so I left it just as yes, but that's not a feature on USG. It's not on the UDM Pro used to be a beta feature, I remember, but right now it looks like they, after one of the updates, they took it out all together for the DNS filtering and it's not an option on the edge router. GOIP filtering, so you can restrict by geography. This is something PF Blocker does. This is something Untangle can do. It just lists as a beta feature, but once again, pretty basic. Web filtering SSL inspection. This is one of the number one reasons people start us down the road of recommending Untangle. If people need really advanced SSL inspection and web filtering and detailed granular permissions on websites for who gets what blocked, you wanna block a certain category based on a certain computer or user. This is where Untangle has just a really nice system. Now you can do a lot of that with Squid inside of PF Sense. I have a video, it's an older one where I rant about why I don't like Squid because it's just troublesome and cumbersome and not as simple to use and set up. Not impossible, but much more difficult and very much a challenge. It's not where you can just set it and forget it. And then in some sites may break, some sites may need some updates, it needs some fine tuning, but this is one of the things you're really getting with the paid version of Untangle is a really clean filtered list, a really simple, easy to use system on this. And it's one of the biggest reasons when people say I really need endpoint protection in terms of filtering what website a device can go to, but I don't wanna load anything on the particular device itself, then Untangle is an option. If you want it to be really good, you want SSL inspection so it can peel back that layer of security and the SSL manager in Untangle allows you to do this. So you can load the SSL manager, I've done this in a video before, Untangle does a good job on making that pretty pain-free to set up and manage all of those. It can be done and you can set up SSL certificates and WID to get some information and deeper insights, but it's, once again, a lot more work to get it done and I would not call it easy. But you know, your mileage may vary on that. Some people may be arguing with me saying it's easier but let's just say it's not simple. It's take a look at what's involved in getting that done, read through some of the write-ups. It is not a feature of the USG Pro, very basic DPI but no SSL inspection is all you're gonna get. So they have some basic DPI filters but not a lot of detail. So maybe it'll block something you want. Maybe it will just block it globally. It doesn't give you fine-grained control over it. It's, like I said, not very advanced enough to get the marketing box checked. QOS, advanced traffic shaping options, yes. Yes, on Untangle, yes, on NetGate PF Sense. It's kind of on or off. There's this basic on or off when it comes to these ones here and it's via the command line to be able to fine-tune anything on it on the edge router but it's still kind of limited what options they have built into it. WAN failover, yes, on the PF Sense, multiple WAN as many as you'd like. Same thing here with Untangle but it is a paid feature. So if you're using a free version, sorry, you don't get WAN failover. It does work on the USG Pros. It works on the UDM Pro because it's got multiple WAN and the edge router could be configured that way but when it comes to actual load balancing and figuring out what traffic under certain thresholds need to go out a other WAN, no, that's not a feature you're gonna get with other than just very basic in the USG and I believe it's command lines you have to configure on that. It's not a feature at all currently in May of 2021 on the UDM Pro, maybe in the future. I've heard people mention it's been a feature request for a while but I don't know when we're gonna get there with it. Active Directory integration. This is not something that is exactly native where you're talking directly to Active Directory, you're talking actually through LDAP but it does connect. So whether you're using PF Sense or Untangle there's ways to get these talking to Active Directory. Untangle actually builds in a lot more features for this because they tie it into their policy manager so you can really go in depth with the way everything works on there. It's a little bit more challenging to do on PF Sense but it is possible to get that on there. I'm not aware of any integrations you can do on these. Maybe you could tie it to radius but it's nothing officially supported so it doesn't really tie in all that well and this is often where there's a problem if you want open VPN with users you usually wanna tie it to wherever the centralized management of those users are for many businesses as Active Directory and that's not something easily done in any way on a Unify device. Captive Portal. I put it separate on here where I say Unify SDN even though the Unify SDN is technically part of like the Dream Machine Pro but wherever you have the software to find networking controller running is where the Captive Portal actually talks to and of course, yes, it's supported on NetGate PSense and Untangle. Untangle back to what I mentioned about Active Directory connectors has ways to tie users for your Active Directory in there for some of the authentication but that's not something all supported on the Edge router. Now, the final parts are the Let's Encrypt in HA Proxy. I bring these up and it kind of stands alone on the NetGate PSense side. When you're running HA Proxy or Let's Encrypt with it they usually kind of go hand in hand because a lot of people especially those building your home lab go hey, I'd like a endpoint termination I need SSL on here and I don't wanna click through on certificate errors for servers I have hosted behind the device. Matter of fact, if you only have one public IP and you have multiple services you wanna point at this, HA Proxy can not only handle that termination but then direct to each server internally where that needs to be. This is popular use case and maybe even higher end configs where someone puts a PF sense in a data center or in a colo location and you'll have the PF sense kind of forwarding to maybe multiple servers behind there or in a small business situation where they have a few internal servers and you tie it all to the LAN but they don't want any certificate errors when they're using many of their internal servers that have web interfaces on there. This is just kind of a cool standout feature to me that I really enjoy on the PF sense. It's just so handy to set this up and especially people in the home lab building it this becomes popular that way all their different servers even if they're not public facing they can set this up and I've got tutorials on it so you can manage it without having to have certificate errors and it's kind of a fun thing to play with how all that works on there. Now, in conclusion here, as I said when we talk about the USG and in the Unified Dream Machines we don't recommend them because of all the things I kind of mentioned all those extra functionality that people who have advanced uses they go, hey, I'd like to have these things working but they work so basically they're almost useless. Exactly. That people who want just basic routing is it better than what your ISP offers? Sure. Will it route packets? Absolutely. That's something it seems to do quite reliably. It's all that VPN and packet inspection and everything else that becomes very not so good with the Unify USG line. The final thing I will mention though is the dashboards on these when it comes to all these firewalls they all do have dashboards but whether or not you can get actionable or detailed intelligence from them is also another spot where we're splitting hairs. Because when you look at the dashboard on the Unified Dream Machine here you see 9.3 megs of HTTP traffic or we can go here to look at apps and see how much data was moved. The first problem you run into trying to sort any of this out is there's no time slicing. Without time slicing we know data was used but without knowing what time it was used for we start losing the quality of this data in terms of being useful. You start realizing it's just a really cool chart at some point as opposed to something that's actually actionable and helpful. And as things get more and more encrypted it has less insights into what that traffic is where it went so it becomes kind of fuzzy. Now it does have a clear button where I can reset the stats and start over as long as I remembered when I hit the clear so I can try to time slice it but you can see that's not necessarily the most ideal situation. Untangle on the other hand when it comes to reporting is extensive. They have a great reporting system that can dive into users, events and captive portal and firewall and open VPN and all kinds of stats. They have a great reporting system. I've talked about this when I did my review and I'll leave a link to that down below because there's not much in this device because this is just the demo when I turned on for, well just this demo here today. Now PF Sense has some pretty good reporting. The best reporting from PF Sense once you wanna get real advanced is often where you export this into a more extensive system. There's plenty of tutorials on there and I think the PF Sense toolbox they offer though under diagnostics is where it is a standout Swiss army knife of network engineering. Being able to do packet captures from here being able to really slice things up or look at PF Top and look at every little connection in there. This is something more so than even a dashboard is the actionable intelligence you can gather by diagnosing things. We got trace route ping and looking at the route tables diving into the limiter info and looking at how the data flows through. These are some of the things that I think they do a great job on with the PF Sense but like I said, it also has plenty of export options if you'd like to send the data somewhere else and into some other capture tools to make some really cool dashboards. There's a few projects out there unofficial from PF Sense or just different places you can export things and get the data out there. So that's kind of our overall recommendations on them. The other thing I'll mention because someone may ask is what about open sense because if you say PF Sense people ask about open sense which is also a very popular project. I think open sense is definitely better than probably whatever the ISP provided you. I don't have enough reason to use it. It doesn't compel me enough over using the PF Sense offering. We've been supporting and doing a lot of projects with PF Sense for a long time but if you'd like to substitute that for open sense feel free. There seems to be plenty of happy people. They love commenting on every PF Sense video to let me know I should do a video on it but I don't really plan to at this time. It's not a compelling use case and it is a fork of PF Sense with a lot of similarity. So yes, you'll probably find a lot of feature parity as far as what's supported on there but that's kind of my point. It doesn't go so far beyond it to make me go I need to switch to PF Sense because it's or switch from PF Sense I should say because it offers that much more of a compelling experience and all the features. Now I will mention the wire guard part. Open Sense does have wire guard under the go implementation and the coming in 2.6 wire guard with PF Sense is done under the kernel integrated integration, which would be a lot faster. So hopefully that clears that up. And like I said, this is not exhaustive list of every firewall. There's plenty of other really solid firewalls out there. I just don't have time to review all of them. These are the ones we use and we have had wonderful experiences using them. That's why we keep recommending them going here and going forward after May of 2021. That's what it is today. I bring it up because there could be some time in the future where there's a bunch of flaws and you know, it's always truth with context is also time-based when it comes to any technology because who knows what the future holds. I know what they've done in the past and I'm hoping they continue on a tracker like this in the future. All right, thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of this video. If you enjoyed this content, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. To hire a share project head over to laurancesystems.com and click on the hires button right at the top. To help this channel out in other ways there's a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated. For deals, discounts, and offers check out our affiliate links and descriptions of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly. So check back frequently. And finally our forums, forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel. Thank you again and we look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, check out some of our other videos.


When we are talking about the math of Brahmadan, we are talking about the holy math of Brahmadan, of fasting, the math of forgiveness, the math of giving out. As it has always been in the Gulf countries, we see all is the most respected math because of the religion. Remember this math is respected that you have to know the do's and don'ts of the country when it comes to this math. When we talk about this math when it comes to the country itself, we are looking at a period where we need to give each other, we need to share, we need to help those that indeed and those that have not at that particular time and we also need to give out. Remember it is this math that is occasionally celebrated in all the Muslim countries. When we talk about this math, the Emily, the Amelie, his highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Tani has pardoned a number of prisoners in the royal honour of this occasion of the whole math of Brahmadan. What does it mean that every Brahmadan period that comes, there is honour whereby his highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Tani pardoned a few of the prisoners that were convicted of different cases and they are left free because it is the math of forgiveness, it is the math of sharing. For those that always accept or always that are accepted, they are wrongs or served to whatever period that was given to them, they are always released on this math of Brahmadan and they are left to go free and go back to their family at the same time. It is always a very good occasion and where people are left to go. So in this math we always have to honour and this is exactly that what happens and this exactly it happens in Qatar on every math of Brahmadan where different prisoners that are served a given period of time or have accepted whatever they had to do wrong in any way that are pardoned and they are left free to go in their final destination. Thank you so much for coming back to this channel. We might mix from the next creation, Rory's update to wherever we upload a new video. By the way, don't forget to hit that notification bell because it will be the only way that you'll be updated when we upload a new video. Thank you so much. See you again in the next video.


All right, well, we have the top of the hour. So let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm glad to see so many of you here today. We have a terrific panel. Before I introduce them, before I introduce the program, let me just introduce myself. I'm Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator. I'm the host for the next hour. I'm your chief catherter for conversation. And I'm really delighted to welcome all of you here today. We have three people here today who are gonna be helping us think about the idea of digital transformation, how higher education institutions are changed in the process of grappling with the digital world. And we have three people from three different institutions, each with a different perspective. We have Marina Armey from Saddleback College. We have Jessica Phillips from the Ohio State University. We have Michael Berman, the CIO at California State University System. Now, one person I'd like to bring up right now is from Campus Technology, because we are doing this work together. We're trading some programs and we're partnering up to try to share our ideas and connect our audiences. So in order to do that, let me just bring up to the stage Reha Kelly, the presiding genius over the Campus Technology Enterprise. Reha, thank you for helping make this possible. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be collaborating on this event. And actually some of the speakers we have today will be presenting at a virtual conference that Campus Technology is putting on in a couple of weeks. So I think it'll be great to start a conversation about digital transformation here and then continue it at our conference. So on November 3rd, the Campus Technology Leadership Summit will be focusing on all the ways that IT and higher ed has needed to innovate and flex and be agile through the pandemic and beyond. We have some great sessions, one on rethinking learning spaces. We're gonna be talking about making flexible work policies sustainable, this seizing the opportunity for digital transformation, particularly in student services. And also having Brian speak for us, which is really exciting as only he can do about how the plan for the future in the face of so much uncertainty. So I would love for all of you to join us in a couple of weeks, looking forward to the conversation today. Oh, sounds terrific. Thank you so much, Ray. Henry, if you wanna post a couple of links in the chat box, please go ahead. Oh, yes, I will. Great. Well, let me make room for our guests and bring them up one at a time right now. And let me make sure that everyone gets a chance to welcome all of them. So first, let me just bring up Marina Aminay. Marina, hello. Hi, good morning. Well, it's morning here in Orange County, California. I bet it is, I bet it is. How are you doing today? Wonderful, thank you. I'm joining you from Saddleback College here in South Orange County. Excellent, excellent. Marina, we have a tradition here in the forum, but we ask people to introduce themselves. We do it in a certain way. We ask you to talk about what you're gonna be doing in the next year. What are the big projects and the big ideas that are top of mind for you? I would say my biggest topic is the intersection of instruction and technology. That's kind of where I live as a dean of online education, helping faculty members who have now been transitioning to fully online come back to campus in some part, but then also reassess how it's been going while we've been fully online. For example, our STEM faculty who've been highly utilizing proctoring solutions. How's that working for them? Are there equity issues at play that those proctoring solutions have brought up? If so, how can we solve that through some pedagogical means and suggestions? So I'll be really looking closely at bringing people back, especially faculty, and examining some of the complexities and really problems that technology has posed and thinking about some creative solutions around it. Well, that sounds like you have a lot of work cut out for you. Excellent, excellent. Well, let me get your colleagues on stage so that we can all put our heads together and see what they want to add to our overall conversation. So hold on tight, Marina, and let's reach out across the middle of the United States and bring up Jessica Phillips. Hello, Jessica. Hello. So excited to be here. Good to see you here. And I should say good afternoon because I think it's one or two o'clock there. It is, it is. And it is a sunny day. However, if you'd asked me a half an hour ago, I would have said it was a rainy day. So welcome to Ohio. It's the Midwest, indeed. Jessica, you do so much there. You do so much at the Ohio State University. Tell us, what are you gonna be working on next for the next year? What are the big projects and ideas for you? Well, the first thing will be potty training my daughter. So I'm just gonna throw that out there. That's forefront of my mind recently. How old is she? She's 21 months. She's getting close here. Yeah, but beyond that and more work focused is we're doing some exciting work around Swift coding and app development. And so we have some courses that are public and we're starting to work with some higher ed institutions to share in some of that course access with some of their community partners and their students so that we can cross institutionally create some pathways for students to learn how to code if it's maybe not a part of their major or area of study. So I'm really excited about that collaboration. And we're also in the same vein looking at workforce development and micro credentials and thinking about how we can support a growing number of learners, a growing audience of learners all with different kinds of needs and expectations that they hope to gain from their learning. So there's several things that are happening. They're all really exciting. And I think our fantastic stepping stones as we go forward. Wow, that sounds terrific. Good luck. Just have to get out there. I'm a university, so I'm being really nice here. I'm being very, very kind. Brian. So now there's two of you, two thirds of the panel. Now let's go back out to California and bring up our third member of our panel today. Michael Berman, long time friend, CIO for the California State University System. Welcome, sir. Thank you, Brian, such pleasure to be with you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Well, first of all, I've got a remark. Beard is coming along, I approve. I keep mine a little trimmed, but it's never quite gonna match yours. But who could really? It suits you. It suits you very well. So you know the drill now, looking ahead, what's ahead for you for the next year? Well, one of the really fun things about my job and working with the Cal State System is we get to work on a lot of things all at once. But I'll just mention a couple, our C Success Program, which is our chancellor's initiative to assure that every student in the Cal State System has an excellent device to do their work on and a way to connect it to the campus is very exciting. And we've already distributed about 25,000 devices. We're moving into the telecommunication space. So we're gonna start distributing mobile hotspots to students in a very systemic way and working closely with a couple of telecom partners to do that. And we wanna make sure that every one of our 475,000 or so students has a way to get online to do their work. And so that there's no equity issue in terms of our students' ability to be successful. You can't learn online if you can't get online and we don't want any student to not be able to. And online learning is a component of every student's experience now. So whether they're fully online or they're primarily face-to-face, they're always gonna have online components to their learning and we wanna ensure that every student can be successful. So that's a very exciting, we started with eight of our 23 campuses and we're hoping to add more in January. I think we'll add another three or four and eventually it's gonna reach all of our campuses in quite sure. So that's called C Success and we're super excited about that. And I'll also mention, you know, great to see my colleague Marina here from Salabac, such an important partnership between the community colleges and the Cal States and California. We really depend on each other to promote student success. And I know we've got some very specific work to do over the next couple of years in terms of easing the transfer pathways between the community colleges and the CSUs. I'm super excited about that. My daughter just transferred from, she's in the process of transferring from a community college to a Cal State. And anyone who, any parent who goes through that can see lots of room for improvement. So we wanna make that to where it becomes just transparent and natural. And that for the students, the literally over a hundred thousand students who go through that pathway every year in California, we wanna make sure again that they don't need a parent in the education business with a PhD to guide them through the process. Because again, that creates huge equity gaps and we know we lose students along the way. We wanna make sure that that's viable for every student and that they can focus on their learning and not on how to play the game of getting from one campus to another. So looking forward to working with our community college partners on that transformation. That's terrific, that is so much. And I love the way Michael, you and Jessica both brought in your children. My own daughter several years ago did also transfer for community college to State University. So making that easier is a great thing. Friends, I just wanna crow a bit. In the first five minutes, we've covered teaching, technology, proctoring, ethics, course ethics, coding for general education, micro-predential, student hardware, digital advice, inter-campus collaboration, transfer credits, and the link between family and family. There's a lot going on with this group here. And so they are here. We're all here for your questions and your comments. Remember in the bottom of the screen, you can click the raised hand button. If you wanna join us on stage or you can type into the question mark, type in your question or comment. And before I can even finish saying that, we have a question coming up right now. So this is from Peg Sherwin. Let me bring you up on stage. Hello, Peg. Good morning, how are you? I guess it's afternoon, afternoon probably where everyone's at. So I haven't been to a Shindig in a long time, but I'm curious and I joined a little bit late. So if you already covered this, apologies. I'm just wondering about any hybrid work environment tips, things that people might be experiencing there. Great question. Why don't we all take it then? Marina, start us off. Yeah, we are increasingly leaning toward different forms of hybrid coursework to both satisfy student needs and then also give our college a little bit of agility because with the Delta variant, we just have no idea what's happening. We have to kind of create a bit of agility. And so we handled it a couple of different ways. Hybrid is not really monolithic, right? So it could be a hybrid online course in the sense that there is both asynchronous and synchronous content, or it could be a hybrid online and on-campus class in the sense that every other meeting is synchronous or asynchronous and then there's a physical meeting on campus. And then we also have courses that are simultaneous streaming in the classroom. So the faculty member is meeting with, let's say 25 students, but there's another 20 that's zooming in and the class is designed such that there's some interactivity. There's a couple of screens, they're able to hear each other, there's microphones and cameras placed in the classroom to allow for some interaction. I would say my biggest learning from incorporating a lot of these different methods has been training, training, training, allowing faculty to get into those classrooms, play with the technology, do some practice Zoom sessions is really critical. And then really setting up guidelines. You know, people don't know, how do you take attendance with a synchronous asynchronous hybrid course? How do you establish faculty student contact? What are some strategies for collaboration so that students feel engaged and they feel like they're part of a community? So that training and that support has been really critical. Defining the various elements our own faculty are confused about the difference between synchronous, asynchronous, high-flag, simultaneous streaming. So you can imagine a student, especially a second language learner, especially a first-in-college student, they're going to be very, very confused. So we've had student videos that we've created, there's tutorials, there's flowcharts, there's lots of support there but we can totally improve that area and constantly a challenge for us. Thank you. Wow, thank you, Marina, thank you. Jessica, do you want to pounce on that? I certainly do. So I think when I first heard your question, I was thinking of it in terms of my team of employees and how we're managing and how we're working through some of these things. And it is so reflective of what students are experiencing as well as it very much should be. But I think what's really difficult is that it's very hard to present flexibility, have experiences with flexibility and then pull that back. People want to continue to experience flexibility. Staff, instructors, students, once you taste that it's really hard to go back. And so I think on a workforce side of this, we're very much looking at what are the job descriptions that people have and what are the interactions that we really need to have in person with students and where do we have spaces that it makes sense to be able to work from wherever you're most comfortable working. And there is a little bit of a variety there. And it's a conversation with staff to find out what their comfort space is, what their comfort zone is as well. But I think in both instances of students and staff, when you have people all over the place or primarily interacting online, it becomes ever more critical to make sure that people know where to find resources because some of those water cooler conversations or on your way to the next class conversations where you might learn some of those resources, that interaction may be missing. And so that's been something that we have focused on pretty significantly is how we can make sure students have resources, know where they are, when they need them and have that sort of more curated for where we can predict their needs are at a certain time. And I'm happy to talk more about that later. Thank you. Why is it West, Jessica? Thank you. Michael, what have you learned from your approach at the CSU system? Well, not a lot to add to those excellent comments. I'll just say that thinking about the student perspective, we're in this time of really tremendous experimentation. We went in the Cal State, all of a sudden we had more online students than WGU in Southern New Hampshire put together. And with nowhere near the experience of the structures in place that those institutions add. And I think we acquitted ourselves well, but when I think about the students, the level of uncertainty, the rate of change is very high. And on the one hand, it's kind of exhilarating for some of us to see the number of experiments. And as Marina said, all the different modes of instructions that are possible. And we can tailor that to a particular course, a particular faculty member, but I think I worry about the students just being overwhelmed by the number of options and the number of different pathways. We're not really great at communicating with students and mass in general. And in this time of change, I think it's really tough. So I just hope that we continue in talking with some students, they've actually been very complimentary of the faculty and CSU in the level of flexibility and support they've gotten through the past year and a half. I hope as all of us continue to go through such challenging and tiring times that we continue to do the best we can to support those students. I think it's just, I really feel for what this generation is going through right now. Thank you. Thanks all three. Peg, does that help? All right. Well, thank you. Great answers. It's good to see you back again. Take care. Friends, if you're new to the Future Transform or you're new to this technology, that's how a video question works. In fact, let me make it even easier if you'd like to join us. Let me just set up a little teal-colored button. If you wanna join us on stage, just press that button and you're right up on stage before I can stop you. It's perfect. And now you get a sense of just how generous, thoughtful and differently experienced all three of our guests are. We have a couple of questions that have come in the Q&A box and we flash these up on the screen so people can take a run at them. And this comes from Leslie Harris. I was wondering how you can reply to the faculty member who asks about lockdown browsers or remote proctoring exams. Is there a way to get them to rethink their assessment practices instead? Thanks, Leslie. Good question. Who wants to try? We'll have to kick this one off as well. 100% yes. And I think the secret weapon at Saddleback College is we have some STEM faculty in particular who are the big users of the proctoring solutions who have become very passionate about authentic assessments and project-based learning. And they are at the forefront of this transformation that's happening at our college where they are helping their faculty and colleagues to kind of think about how do I assess differently? For example, instead of a math teacher saying what is the answer to this equation? We have a faculty member now saying this is the answer to this equation. Tell me why. Tell me how we got there. It's a little bit harder to plagiarize that reply than it is if it's just a number or some kind of objective response to that. Or how can you use peer review in a statistics class? We don't normally think about peer review outside of the humanities or the social sciences. So helping our faculty to rethink how they assess their students is really useful. And then also sharing with faculty the various mechanisms out there, and I'm sure you've got other sessions on this, but there are dozens and dozens and dozens of websites currently that will help your students figure out a way to come up with that answer. So if you make it meaningful, if you talk to your students about the importance of academic honesty, if you let them know that you're aware of these sites and then you offer them experiences in the class that are portable, that are meaningful, that are authentic, it's going to really greatly reduce the need for plagiarism deterrence and proctoring solutions that are incredibly invasive. Also helping faculty to better understand that equity notions related to using these proctoring software. So a student who has young children who run into the camera to trigger the plagiarism or the feeding mechanism in that solution. If they live in a home with other people, sometimes we have students in the bathroom taking a test because that's the only privacy they can find. If some students of color have reported that solutions like proctoria don't pick up on their skin color if they're darker tone. So when faculty become aware of these outrageous elements related to equity, it's often from the faculty that will hear what's next. And then you're really right for that conversation around authentic assessments and project-based learning. Thank you, Maria. That's fantastic. Thank you. What a great answer. Jessica, Michael, did you want to add more to that? I would absolutely second all of that. And I'll also just add quickly that I think that it really is about having an initial conversation. I think we found that you have to unpack a little bit what happened when proctoring tools were first introduced and what that conversation was. Because we've discovered, I think that some instructors actually think that they have to do that, that they're required through accrediting bodies or licensure to do that. And sometimes that is the case, but not always. And so it's a little bit of going back and understanding where did their beliefs about these tools and how they should be used emerge and what are the fears that are driving that. And then it absolutely then can help with that next phase of the conversation level. What are your goals and what should students be able to do and what are the different ways we can assess that? Well, it's a real rethinking going back and revisiting that. Thank you, Jessica. Michael, what would you add to this? I think those are great answers. I don't really have much to add. The only thing I'll say is that while we all value faculty agency and faculty autonomy, there's also a line in terms of equity and prejudice and disadvantage in some students that where I think at some point we have to draw lines. And so I think I'm very much aligned with what Marina and Jessica are saying and also what a lot of our faculty are saying is that there comes a point when some of these tools are just not acceptable in an academic environment regardless of the goal of trying to prevent plagiarism or cheating. Very good, hard line indeed. Leslie, that's a great question. Thank you so much. So again, if you're new to the Future Transform or if you haven't used the software before that's an example of one of those Q&A box questions. So if you'd like to ask one of those just look at the bottom of the screen along that white strip, you'll see that question mark button, press that type, hit send, we're good to go. We had a couple of questions that came up based on some of your earlier comments. I just want to make sure that we had a chance to revisit those. One of them was a comment about preferring asynchronous over synchronous. I think that's was Lisa and I just wanted to float that out there. Where have you come down after almost two years of the pandemic? What's the right balance between synchronous and asynchronous online instruction? I mean, should we do more of synchronous because it's more lively and richer or should we do more asynchronous because it's better for schedules and bandwidth? What do you think about that now? You want me to kick this one off first? You're unfair, do it. So at Saddleback, prior to the pandemic, we had a huge portfolio for online education. It was part of our brand. We had the second number of largest enrollments in the state amongst the 114 community colleges. So we really had a robust online existence which was almost all asynchronous. When we talked about online education before the pandemic, everyone thought it's asynchronous. All of our training was focused on asynchronous methodology. It was really seen as the most flexible, the most equitable, the most supportive. But we also did have heavy kind of buy-in from humanities, social sciences and we didn't have a lot going on in terms of CTE and STEM presence in that online portfolio. Post-pandemic, a lot of people who kind of in an emergency had to get online, they really didn't have the time or the tools to do so asynchronously. And so they opted for synchronous Zoom sessions with their students. And that was a little bit problematic at first in terms of just the technology. But once people got the hang of that, I became a believer that it can really be a useful form of online education even though it wasn't much of our portfolio before. It definitely is now. I would say now departments are increasingly looking to offer a variety of methods. If I have 20 sections of English 1A, we're gonna try to offer some synchronous, some asynchronous, some hybrid, some fully on campus because we've realized that students have their preferences. Some students really need that one-on-one contact with their faculty members, with their students. My son is currently a student here at the college as well. He prefers synchronous courses and he prefers on-campus sessions. He's not a big fan of asynchronous. He really misses interacting with his buddies and seeing people, even if it's synchronous and there's no contact between the students in the class, he and his friends have already started a Discord chat on the side and they're talking about the professor and they're talking about the content. So it creates this sense of community that he really misses out on asynchronous. So I would say I was not a fan of asynchronous before but I'm a believer and I think that a good variety is going to best serve the students moving forward. Best of them what's good for the students. I'm glad to hear that you have a child involved. I do, I've got a couple of them. This is great, this has become a family show. That's great. Thank you Marina. Jessica, Michael, did you want to move to the balance? I promise we weren't told we had to speak in order. But it works, it's fine. I think as I'll take this opportunity just to draw in data-driven decision-making and just ask a question. Wouldn't it be nice if as an instructor, I'm an instructor myself of a class of about 200 students online, wouldn't it be nice if at the beginning of that class I could see a map and I could see where in the world, literally my students live and in what time zones and could that help me if I had that information to make some decisions about how I designed my course and how I deliver it and can I make decisions about whether synchronous sessions are required or optional? And so having that kind of data ahead in front of you about your audience, your student audience and what their needs might be, maybe I can also see that they are a non-traditional student but a student who has a family or is a military student and maybe deployed student, there's so many things that could impact what the needs are of students and so being able to see that in a dashboard or with some data, nice data analytics ahead of a course could be really helpful in making those decisions because I think there are use cases for both synchronous and asynchronous and careful, thoughtful decisions in that are really important. Thank you, thank you, Jessica. Great points both. I would say that I think we also have to look not just at hybrid courses, so to speak or different modes of instruction but think about the student lifecycle and the different paths that different students go through and I think that for a very large percentage of the students that come into the Cal State and I suspect in the community colleges, a high percentage of them are not ready to jump right into a full diet of asynchronous courses. They simply don't have the experience or the temperament to do. It takes a certain kind of self-discipline that a lot of us, I certainly didn't have at 17. And the structure of going and sitting with your peers or perhaps as an alternative being in a synchronous online session may make a lot of sense. And then I think for other types of learning, other students, other points in their career, graduate studies, professional education, different life experiences, different types of abilities, different locations, different access to, there's just so many different variables. I saw my colleague, Tom, make the point that it could depend on the learning objectives but I think to me it depends even more on the life experiences of the people and where they are in their learning journey which we all know is a lifelong journey and what makes sense for that individual at that time. And I hope we can get to a kind of flexible schema. And I also think that the idea that every instructor is gonna offer every class in every mode is not realistic. It's just the burden on the instructor is substantial to do that. And where it makes sense and where we can do it and we're an instructor has the technology savvy and the intestinal fortitude to do that good on them. That's great they can do that. But I don't think that's gonna be realistic for every course. I think that we're gonna need some specialization and there are people who really love to teach asynchronous courses. There are people who love to teach face to face courses. And by the way, I'm really fascinated to see the people who thought they hated teaching online and now saying, let's all find things not so bad. There's a lot of those too. So let's do the best we can to match the student and the instructor and the topic to the mode that makes sense. And then from a technology perspective, I wanna do the best I can to provide all those in as efficient and a smooth way to everybody who's involved. Is my voice a little soft maybe? I don't know, some people said they had trouble hearing me. It may be that you're just sounding too mellow but I love a little bit of what can I say? You gotta do it. But matching the student, the instructor, the class, I mean, and the learning objectives and we're all on this path, life path, life path, right? And what we need at 17 and what we need at 27, we need 37 might be very, very different. You're 77, yeah. Thank you. 77, I'm hoping I'll still be learning then. Oh, I know you will. That's too far off so. You've got a lot to do but this is very rich. Thank you, thank you all. Now we have a video question coming in from one of your colleagues, actually from awesome friend of the program, George Station at Cal State Monterey Bay. Let me see. He's where? It's kinda near you. Hello, George. Hi there, can you hear me okay? Beautiful, great. Okay, and I've got one, if I may, one follow up on a previous topic on the proctoring environments and then one, which was my original question, but by way of follow up, I'm wondering if there is actually a conversation between the higher eds systems and the accrediting bodies, the certifying bodies and so on about this need for harsh proctoring environments. I, just by background and another life, I was a proctor at Monterey Peninsula College, one of our community colleges, physically going in for California State teacher certification exams and C-Best and all of those ETS stuff. And I know those rules and that being able to transfer that to the online environment seems just untenable. So I'm wondering if any of your systems are actually having those conversations with the accrediting bodies. Well, I'll go ahead and jump in and go first, just for the heck of it, because it's, since George has colleagues. George, I don't know the answer to that. Allison Rinn probably would be the person who would be the point person for the CSU on that topic at that level, but my personal opinion is given the current state of technology that if you need to have a proctored exam, the best thing to do is have people go to a physical location and do a proctored exam. If that's what you really need. And I think we would both agree that should be required as rarely as possible. But if you're gonna test people's ability to do something and you feel that the only way to certify it is to be certain who the person is and whether they did their own individual work without help. If that's rich, you really have to test, then I think you should go to a test center. That's my personal opinion. I think that's the fairest. Now I realized there might be some people have special issues with that and there would have to be accommodations made because of different abilities. But I think for 90%, that's the best solutions. I just don't think that, in my opinion, that the technology is even gonna... I don't think technology does what it claims, in my opinion. And we know that there's evidence that it does harm. So you have a technology that doesn't, in my opinion, doesn't do the good that it claims and does actual harm. Why would you want to use it? Stress, this is not a CSU stand. This is my personal opinion. But, and within the CSU, it's gonna be the faculty who decide these questions as it should be. So, but I think there's still a place just... This was a problem in COVID, right? Having a physical test center was difficult or impossible at certain times. I think we're beyond that. We know what it takes to make a space safe enough for most purposes, for most people. And I think we should just go back to having test centers if there really is a need to do that. Yeah, and I would just add, I think there's a lot of myths and legends associated around online education and it affecting accreditation and articulation between community colleges and CSUs, or you see that there's a lot of sort of myths and legends around that is kind of what I've experienced. So our accrediting agency is ACCJC. There is no mention of proctoring anywhere in the standards or anywhere in the review. We have used it before and after the pandemic and it's not really come up. It's kind of assumed that this is a discipline specific decision that's made within departments and faculty who are the experts of their fields. There may be, with that, there is a caveat. There may be some specific professional requirements. So for example, real estate has a proctored exam that they give off-site, but that's not related to the class. The class actually doesn't use proctoring, but if somebody wants a professional license as a real estate agent, they would go and get a proctor test. So there are some CTE related requirements, but there is no requirement one way or the other that I'm aware of. Salify College also, and this is a pretty common practice at least in California colleges, we do not specify on our transcripts if a course is online or on campus. So a receiving CSU or a UC or a four-year has no idea if that student has taken all of their classes online with proctoring or without proctoring or on campus. We don't specify that anywhere in the transcript. So if they came up with that information, I have no idea. They just found one of us and talked to us. That's interesting. George, what a great question. Did you wanna follow up with that? Yeah, well, my other one is actually my original question and Brian, you've experienced this before. And Michael, we've had a conversation before in the world. So, you know, I change topics. So the other one has to do with maybe getting back to the equity question of what we provide our students by way of access in terms of equipment, in terms of hardware, in terms of wireless, in terms of broadband and hotspots and all that goes with all of that. I think that pandemic has demonstrated that we're all kind of equivalent participants. It really flattened the hierarchy. So not just students, but the staff, faculty, administrators, everyone was kind of in the same boat for a while, and I think maybe even to a certain degree today. And so my concern is that we still don't accept possibly in the IT usage of the term user, we're still not all seen as the same, even though the hierarchy was clearly visibly flattened. And Cal State has that C-Success program. My campus CSUMB is not yet one of those campuses. I know Michael, I think you said there were eight and that's a student program, but there doesn't seem to be anything for faculty, staff and administrators that reflects the same need that I know exists among my peers and our other colleagues. And I'm wondering if any of your systems have programs that specifically address everybody else who is not a student, but still needs to be as connected as any student does in today's environment. So that's my other question. Thanks. Who wants to take a run at that one? I can take a stab at that to start. We've had it at Ohio State, a program for four years now, a digital flagship and it's focused, it is focused as a student success initiative, but our research as we prepared that, that initiative that tips to launch that clearly pointed to the importance of instructors having the same access to the technology, the platform and the software that the students were receiving. So we started out with a cohort model because our funding didn't extend to instructors, but we did have a little bit that we could play with for people who were initial champions of technology enhanced learning and were willing partners to innovate and try some things. And so they engaged in training and received the technology alongside the training. And that was really critical in the research that we found to is not just providing the technology, but also the course design support, the pedagogy support in using technology to teach. And so we over time have shifted to some models where now we offer more on demand resources and we work directly with departments to help bring technology to instructors, the same technology that students receive. And I think we're around maybe 600 or so instructors who have the same technology as students at this point. And all of the feedback on that has been, been very positive to your point, George, about the importance of that. And during COVID, that was certainly evident as people had to make that, that quick switch. So just a little bit about what we have done so far, sort of in that vein. Thank you. Thank you. I would just say, George, I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead. George, I was gonna say, stay tuned. I saw Cal State LA just ordered 1,800 devices for instructors. So it went down 22 to go or? Yeah, so, you know, have your people call Cal State LA's people and ask them how that decision was made because I don't have, that's all I pretty much all I know, but, and then we also have to deal with the fact that there could be a tendency to, well, we'll get devices for all the part-time people, but the, I mean, the full-time people, but the part-time instructors will have to fend for themselves. And that's a whole other huge issue that George, you and I have talked about, but we, you know, our students don't divide their instructors up by whether they're full or part-time. Their teachers are their teachers and we need to make sure that every one of those teachers has the skills and the tools they need to be successful with their students or we're not, or we're gonna be letting our students down. Good sentiment, good sentiment. George? Yeah, I was just going to add that, I think in addition to faculty needing that access, which we've been fortunate to be able to do and giving laptops and loaners to our part-time and full-time faculty, there's always supply chain issues as well in the beginning, like try to find a laptop or Chromebook, it was rough, but I would also say classified staff need that support as well. So we have an amazing, amazing center. I'm so lucky to have it. It's called the Faculty Center at Saddleback and the entire focus of my three instructional technologists who are in that center is course design and instructional technology. They are there to work with faculty. So making sure they have the tools is really important too. And sometimes we forget about staff who are there to support. So for example, they need iPads so that they can see the Canvas view from the student and from the faculty side. And they need the laptop and they need an Apple because they need to see it, it changes a little bit. The Canvas app looks a little bit different depending on where you are. So I would say classified are on their management have to be on there as well. They need to know what's happening. When we get a student complaint about Canvas, deans need to know what that means, right? If a student is complaining that a faculty member hasn't been present in Canvas, that shouldn't just be a foreign language. Managers and deans are absolutely, I think, responsible for knowing it. So everybody needs a quality of access and I would really agree with the question about what about the rest of us? What about lecturers? What about staff? And we're really working on that. I know at Saddleback. Okay, great. Thanks to all of you for those perspectives.  And I'm hoping that your messages get through to everyone else. And so that there are some system-wide solutions to that coming. Great, Brian, thank you so much. That really was fruitful and very helpful for me. And I can have that conversation back with our colleagues locally as well. My pleasure. Thank you. I'm glad to help the CSU system apparently. Friends, we have just about 11 minutes to go. And I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to have their two cents. I'm really enjoying this immensely. Jessica, you were asking about a dashboard for faculty to find student geography and their technology preferences. I tweeted this out. Donald Clark in Brighton in the UK says he built a tool like this. So I just asked him if it's around or anything else. I'll let you know if he responds. And during this very session, he raised $65 million in Series A funding to create all the tech tools for itself. If anyone could do it, it would be done. Can I explore that a little bit more? So kind of what I understood from what Jessica described is giving faculty the ability to understand the location of their students. And then based on that, determine the right ingredients, right? So I want to do some synchronous and asynchronous. We have a lot of faculty here interested in doing that at Saddleback. And I have mixed feelings about that. So I would love to hear Jessica or anyone else. And the reason is that it kind of creates some barriers for students in planning the rest of their schedules. So for example, we had some faculty in the beginning that said, well, my class is going to be synchronous, but I want to have the ability to have an occasional synchronous meeting Tuesdays at 12. And I might have like three of these in a semester, but I want the ability to have that. But what that does in the schedule is it creates a hold on the student's schedule and they can't take any other classes during that prime time 12 to 130 time period. And so it became a barrier for us not to establish this in advance. And so our faculty were really understanding about that. And we've come to an agreement that if you're gonna reserve a spot, you better meet every time that week rolls around. Like you better meet every Tuesday at noon because that student's not meeting anywhere else and you're requiring it as part of your class. It's not a when I feel like it kind of item. And we put that publicly in the course schedule so that students are aware of it at the point of enrollment. But then again, it's limiting for the faculty member too. And that kind of spontaneous spontaneity that we want to encourage. So any thoughts around how to balance those to competing needs? Yeah, I would say that what we've seen is that while I shared a link to how we explain instructional modalities to students, instructors are just as confused at certain times of what those instructional modalities mean for them and their teaching. And so what was happening is that students were, they were in classes where the instructor, maybe the course was indicated as an in-person course scheduled at a certain time or maybe it wasn't indicated as online without any synchronous sessions. But then the instructor was making decisions during the course to shift this way or shift that way. Primarily during the pandemic. And I think that was largely because students were, maybe it often for the first time for instructors all over the world, that has not always been the case at Ohio State. I think at other institutions, that is maybe more common. That was a newer thing for our instructors to have students that were all over the place. So we have this data. We have a tool called EAB, I think it's from the student as collaborative. We've rebranded it, but that data is all there. But you have to look it up student by student. So what would be nice is if, because it's there, it's like you can almost touch it. Like can we just pull that data together? So like myself as a class of 200 students, I can see something that would be more helpful for me in making some of those instructional decisions. But to your point, I completely agree. It can, this definition of what these different instructional modalities mean and how they're indicated in the course scheduling system is really critical for students to be able to make good choices and the choices they need to make to create the schedule that they need for themselves. So it's a little bit of a parallel. We should be helping to define what these mean and we should be maybe providing, if we can more data for good decision-making. That's a great exchange. Thank you, Marina for pressing on that and Jessica for unfolding it a bit further. Thank you. We have more questions coming in. And this is one from Garrett Monroe at Hiram College. And he wanted to ask about, wondering if we can chat about devices in ALMS. Is anyone jumping ship from a particular platform? Which are checking boxes for students and faculty given emerging trends anticipating the future? Good question, Garrett. I can talk a little bit about all California colleges in California. We are community colleges in California. We are all 114 of us using Canvas as the LMS. And I would say there is very little likelihood that we will jump ship to another. This was part of a major initiative a few years ago to get all the colleges on the same LMS and the state footed the bill for it to make that happen. And it was a lot of work and it took about three years to get everybody there. But we're all there. Saddleback was kind of a reluctant mover. We had Blackboard, our faculty tended to like Blackboard. But now that we're there, it's actually opened a lot of cool doors. So now that we're all in Canvas, I don't know how much you all know about the CVC, the California Virtual Campus. It's an initiative that's statewide. They're wanting to create a one-click enrollment for students to take classes at each other's colleges without going through the application process. So this is a huge deal. A student at Bakersfield College now who wants to take an online English 1A but their college doesn't offer any sections or it's all full can now go on the course exchange and within a few clicks enroll in a class at Saddleback and take that class and it will help him or her finish their degree on time and transfer on time. So it's an enormous equity tool, I think the course exchange. It's only made available because we're all on Canvas as an LMS and inside of Canvas, we create trust relationships. So that student never leaves Bakersfield's instance of Canvas, they're on that server. And when they log in, they'll see their classes from Bakersfield and then they'll see Saddlebacks on that same login. So that trust relationship is there. It's a beautiful, fantastic, easy way for the student to have access to our entire statewide portfolio of 114 colleges and the LMS is really a big player and why that will happen for students more widely and why I don't see it's changing anytime soon. Thank you, Marina. That's a really good story. Jessica? Sorry. Go ahead. I was just gonna follow up on that and Marina knows a lot about this but the Cal States are now, I think about 17 or 18 out of the 23 either are currently using Canvas or in the process of moving to Canvas. And there is discussion and there's been some incentives provided from the state to encourage all the Cal States and all the UCs to move to a single platform. And those discussions are underway about what it would take to make that happen. So I think there's a good possibility it could happen. You know, I'll just mention I have a lot of really good friends and people I really admire who were really deep thinkers about pedagogy and learning who really pushed back and rebel against the traditional LMS. And I'm, you know, incredibly aligned with them in a lot of ways. But then when I talk to students and look at what students want, it's like they don't want a maze of opportunity. They want to be told here's what you need to learn. Here's what you need to do to learn it. Here's the resources you have. And as one student once said to me, you know, I'd rather be spending my time learning the subject matter than trying to figure out where my assignments are. And so there's a tension there. And I'm super supportive of experimentation and people are looking at, you know, and they're very aware of the limitations of a tool like Canvas. But at the same time, what Maureen is describing from a student point of view of a student being able to go to one portal and get access to the entire, eventually the entire online resources of the California Community College is amazing. So I don't have an answer for that. That's just an inherent contradiction. And I think that we've got to create a niche and a place for experimentation and innovation. We can't always live on what works today. But I think from a student viewpoint, having that commonality and also for a faculty. I mean, because Maureen's faculty are my faculty. There's probably hundreds of people who teach at Saddleback who also teach at San Marcos and at Fortin and at Long Beach. The same people, we hire the same instructors in so many cases. So again, asking them to go between different platforms is an unnecessary burden on them. It's the digital aspect of being a freeway flyer. Yep. And of course, now a Zoom flyer, right? You don't even necessarily have to be in the same part of the state or in the same state. That's true. You have to be in the same cafe. We have time for one question from our campus technology guru. I wanna make sure she gets this question in because this is a very, very important one that we just hinted at. Rae asks, I'm curious what student services outside the classroom, whether it's advising, mental health, have there been benefits to taking those online that will carry on into the future? Again, my apologies. We're right kind of at the end of the hour. So I'll make sure you guys each get a chance to attack that. What do you think? I'll flash it on the screen again so you can see it. I would love to jump in on this one. I can maybe start a little bit on this one. We created a student support hub where we consolidated all of these services into a single location and it was very, very useful. We started that work before the pandemic. So student, and we didn't really want it to be a bunch of websites. So it's not a link to a lot of other links. It's really a place with little boxes where students can go in and chat live with a counselor, chat with a tutor. So it's a place to consolidate actionable support for students. And I think it's been very popular and helpful but there's still lots of work in terms of getting students to that hub and I'll post a link as well to our hub so people can take a look. Thank you, Marina. Thank you. Jessica, you were just saying. Again, I mentioned we developed actually pre-pandemic alongside students and subject matter experts a wellness app at Ohio State that is very similar. It brings resources to students but it comes along with some recommendations from subject matter experts about when certain information is presented to students based on what we know about some student behavior. And that's very helpful to help with the white noise of so many resources, which is often more of the challenge than not having enough resources for students is that ability to curate that. And we also worked with various student groups to gather feedback and just one example quickly is international students shared with us that they're more likely to seek out resources that they can access on their own versus resources in a group setting or more professional resources. And so we were very careful to make sure as we crafted the wellness app that we provided a multitude of opportunities in there to reach things on your own on your time. Good thinking, good thinking. Good lessons learned here. Michael, did you have any to add to that? I'll just mention one that really was accelerated by COVID and we've seen some really positive success with when it's done in a really in an intelligent way. And that's the use of chatbots for certain types of student services. We've seen evidence that it's very well received by the students, not as a replacement for every type of face-to-face service.  It doesn't do with intelligence. There's simply another resource and another interface to get information. And the fact that some questions can be answered 24 hours a day by a chatbot is very useful to a student. So chatbots with real human beings behind them can be very effective for a lot of services. And we've seen a growth in that and some real positive reaction from students. Again, when it's done in a smart way and it's integrated with human backup and people making sure that students don't fall through the cracks. That's a great answer. Those are a great fantastic question and three really, really helpful answers. We are friends out of time and this has been such a rich session. I really hate to pause it, but I wanna make sure everyone gets a chance to go back to their lives. Just really quickly, what's the best way to keep up with all of you and your individual work? And I'll just take this left to right on my screen. Marina, how do we keep up with you? Email me, you can come to my LinkedIn page. You can check out Saddleback online and on our homepage we've got what's going on. I've also put in a link to our student support hub. Very nice, thank you. Jessica, how can we keep up with you? Yeah, certainly email, feel free to reach out. And I also, I am on the Twitter and so you can find me at Jess Phillips underscore OH. Yep. Anybody? Very good, excellent. And Michael, how about yourself? I put my Twitter handle in the chat and that's the easiest, quickest way to find me, but if somebody wants to reach out to me at the CSU for anything, I'm not hard to find. Glad to talk to anybody. Excellent, excellent. Well, friends, thank you. Thank you so much for a fantastic conversation. I really, I'd like to have you come back to follow this up, perhaps in the spring as things develop and as things change. I would love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, good luck with your session at Campus Technology and really stay safe and we'll see you soon. Thank you, it was a pleasure. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Jessica and Marina. It's great to get to talk with all of you. Yes, indeed. But don't go away yet. Let me just point out where things are headed for the next few weeks. And let me also thank Campus Technology for partnering on this. It's been a really, really pleasure to work together. Looking ahead to our sessions, we have sessions coming up on enrollment, on disability, on eco-media, on digitization, on libraries. If you'd like to go continue these conversations about everything about asynchronous for synchronous to student services and more, we can just use the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me, Brian Alexander or at Shindig events or hit up my blog at BrianAlexander.org. If you'd like to go back into the past and look at our previous sessions, including some of these wonderful speakers, just go to tinyworld.com slash FTF archive and remember to subscribe. In the meantime, thank you all for very, very wonderful questions. In the chat, we found a lot of learning, a lot of resources. This has been terrific. I hope to see you all at Campus Technology and I hope above all for you all to stay safe. We'll see you next time and see you online. Bye-bye.