Coming up on DTNS, the portal opens for Facebook and Twitter, stopping deepfakes right at the processor level and animatronic dolphins. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 15, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Usher Chang. We were just talking about the idea that you can't use getting hacked as an excuse anymore, folks. It's all over. The gig is up. Get that wider conversation. A good day, internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Barnes and Noble confirmed it experienced unauthorized and unlawful access to certain Barnes and Noble corporate systems on October 10, causing outages in nook service and cash registers. Outages continued through Wednesday when Barnes and Noble acknowledged a system failure and added Thursday it has no evidence that customer data was exposed but can't rule out the possibility just yet. No financial data was exposed. Snap introduced Snapchat Sounds on iOS, letting users add song clips to snaps and stories. Snap has deals in place with BMG, Universal Warner and Merlin for tracks. Notably, it does not have music from Sony. Swiping up on a snap, though, will give you music which will show the album art song title and name of the artist with links to listen to the whole song on various streaming services. DJI announced two new gimbals, the Ronin S2 and the smaller Ronin SC2. The S2 has a small 1.4 inch touchscreen display that supports active track without a need to put your smartphone on top of the camera, which is nice. DJI also introduced the Titan stabilization algorithm to optimize speed, dead band and acceleration settings. Both gimbals have built-in batteries for up to 12 hours of use and both feature a new quick charge function. Both are now available, $849 for the S2, $499 for the SC2. We need a gong. Yahoo! announced to users it will shut down Yahoo! groups on December 15, 2020. Yahoo! suggests Facebook groups, Nextdoor, Google groups, or groups.io as alternatives. In fact, groups.io supports importing members from Yahoo! groups. Yeah, end of an era. While Apple announced that it will not include headphones with the new iPhone 12, for most customers, those in France will receive a free pair of wired earpods. French regulations require phone makers to include a hands-free kit at a customer's request as a precautionary move to protect children under 14 from any potential risks of electromagnetic waves from the device. Promoting the use of a mobile device without a hands-free accessory is also a finable offense in the country. Let's talk a little bit more about Stop and Deepfake. Sarah, how do we do it? Well, CNET reports on a San Diego startup called TruePick developing a system to verify the authenticity of videos and images. TruePick foresight runs on Snapdragon processors and creates a digital signature that can be then used to prove an image has not been manipulated or defaked. The effort goes alongside similar systems to being developed by Canon for its devices. Adobe has one for its software, but TruePick hopes to embed its technology in Qualcomm processors so it would be available on the majority of phones. Qualcomm processors are kind of everywhere. TruePick foresight works by moving images taking in secure mode to the secure enclave where it then authenticates pixels, date and time, geolocation, a 3D depth map creates a cryptographic signature also. So it's doing a lot. Public key infrastructure is used for validation as well. So if you want to try it out, TruePick offers an app for an Android called Vision Camera that uses TruePick foresight to embed the signatures in phones taken within the app. In the photos. In the photos taken within the app. Yes, photos. Not the phone. Well, I point that out because it's not at the phone level yet. The app just lets you try at the signature. But the point being, of course, as you mentioned, that eventually they want to put this into the chip so that it's just happening anytime an app takes advantage of it. Now, granted, every photo app wouldn't have to take advantage of it. That would be up to the manufacturers of the phone, the makers of camera apps, etc. But with, as you said, 90% of the phones out there, at least particularly Android phones running on Qualcomm chips, if they strike this deal, pretty much every phone would have that capability. This has kind of been a worry that we have had in technology for the last 30 years. The idea that our eyes indeed can lie to us. And we saw a lot of the cultural fears around Photoshop along these lines that software can change it. What we found culturally is that people who were practitioners in the software were able to tell elements of its use. So, of course, this building is not actually smoking. You can tell that this is the stamp tool that was used to make it look as such. That's indistinguishable from somebody's random eye, but not for somebody who knows what it is. The question now is with deepfakes, are we getting beyond even somebody who knows how to use deepfakes to tell whether or not this is something that has been altered? So, I think this is the next level, figuring out a way for us to tag these things earlier. And if this isn't the solution, my hope is that we continue to find different places in the chain to authenticate photos. So, there's just one more piece of evidence to show that we can trust what we're looking at. Yeah, I think this is going to be... I've got three questions about it, put it that way. Does this work well? Will it, in fact, in practice, and I shouldn't say work, will it be effective in combating deepfakes? Will we get trained to look for, whether it's from Canon or Adobe or TruePick, will we be trained to look for that check mark to go like, oh, I can trust this image, it's verified, and look a scant at any photo that doesn't have it. That's what makes this effective. If we're all trained to say like, I saw this crazy picture, but it didn't have the little check, you know, so I probably is faked. I'm not going to believe it. And that takes us a bit of social learning. We all have to get used to that, has to be out there in the wild a lot. We have to get used to seeing it. The other part is, can it be faked? Can somebody hack these digital signatures? Now, TruePick is doing all the right things, putting it in the secure enclave, making it a cryptographically sealed signature, but pretty much everything can be hacked. It's a matter of how and when. There's also just, you know, there's a lot of... Well, I don't want to say lazy, it's just convenient ways that people share images on the internet these days, whether it's on mobile devices or otherwise, you know, take a screen grab in a variety of ways. So a original image that has a check mark, you know, saying it's authentic or doesn't, you know, that's not always going to be the end, the image that you end up seeing that might be shared virally. Well, and that's why the training is required, right? In other words, it's not the check mark is on the image. It's that the check mark is generated when it's displayed, because the cryptographic signature is there. And if you're taking a screenshot and spreading it, then we all have to get trained to go, yeah, but it's not generating the little check mark. And I'm using check mark. I don't know if it'll always be a check mark, so whatever, whatever that symbol is. Yeah, but and we're going to get into this a little bit later in the show. You just want points of data.  We're always piecing together little pieces of it to make a better understanding for ourselves. And to markup's point in the chat room, I wonder if there will be tags like altered by the artist. Yes, both Adobe and TruePick have systems that they want to put in place to allow you to see how an image was edited. So that if an artist is like, Yeah, no, I did edit this. You can see like, Oh, yes, it was edited, but it was edited by whom by the original artist intentionally, etc. And I've talked to some photojournalists who are like, Yeah, I don't really love that. I don't I don't want to reveal how I, you know, touched up my photo. I don't want that to be something that people always see. And in the Adobe situation, that's optional. But if it's optional, then it doesn't become as effective. The lament of the artist. German mobile measurement company adjust released a report on subscription services in the United States. Adjust worked with census wide to survey one thousand and three TV and streaming customers age 16 to 60 in the US between September 23 and 29th. Streaming video apps made up 30.7% of subscription based app downloads followed by gaming and news. Consumers who use streaming entertainment services spent an average of $33.58 a month on them. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney Plus and YouTube TV made up the top five favorite streaming services. This is lower than I thought it would be, honestly. I mean, I subscribed to YouTube TV. The prices went up a little bit recently. It's 65 bucks per month now. It used to be 50. But it's still exponentially cheaper than any traditional cable service that I used to pay for, which was always over $100. I wonder, I wonder how many folks are like, All right, well, now that we have all a card options, we just have to choose the stuff that we care about in the way that we never were able to with cable subscriptions before. I mean, I don't know anybody who's like, I have 150 channels and I watch them all. Now you watch five. But you like the fact that they're 150. But if you don't have to do it that way, then you end up paying less. Well, sorry, Tom, go ahead. No, no, no. I was just going to say the perception to is that people are spending even more now than they used to. And I too, like you, Sarah, was taken by the idea that this was only $33.58. When everyone thinks the average cable bill is lower than it is, the average cable bill is somewhere north of $150 if you go and look it up. It's because they always advertise $40 a month, but it doesn't stick there.  So we pay a lot for cable TV. And if this is the replacement, even if it goes up, there's a lot of room to go up. There is. And really the biggest difference here is that we are not looking at a world where everybody is competing in the same business model, which is what you had with the satellite and cable situation. Channels were only going to, they set their prices at this amount, you know, $3, for example, at the high end per subscriber. And that is a one-way street. Nobody was ever going to negotiate that number down. It was only ever going to go up. We might see that creep again in some of the slings and Hulu lives and YouTube TVs going forward, although they're bundles, they're starting at a smaller bundles, smaller bundles that you're able to mix and match a little bit more. But what really changes the game and why this number is so low is that our culture is centered around a lot of the originals on streaming. And that's why that number gets as low, not because they have stuff like Sarah and I and Tom, I'm assuming you have some live distributor. It's because they just have Netflix and Amazon Prime. And guess what?  And Thursday Night Football on Amazon. And Thursday Night Football. So that's why that number is as low. If we continue to get into the over the top streaming live channel battle, that number will creep up higher. But the good news is we got what we wanted.  And I don't think it ever gets as high because you have control. This is the other thing this points out is you can cancel Amazon Prime. You can cancel Netflix. You could whittle away at that amount. And you can switch from sling to YouTube to AT&T TV. There are more competitors to choose from. But I cannot tell you how many friends and family I have because I'm always the person that people come to like, how do I get this? And what's the coolest new thing? And who say, well, but I just canceled Netflix. And that's the only place I can watch that show. Everyone's talking about that show. Man, this is all too much. I think that the fact that people are paying less is not because they don't want to pay for all the services. Well, it's because they don't want to pay for all the services. It's not that they don't want the services. And you just kind of got to choose your battles. We've always loved the content. We've always hated the bill.  But first, I want to thanks all those who participate in our subreddit. We get some great story ideas over there. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Now, yesterday, we did mention that Facebook was limiting the reach of posts with a link to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden, Vice President Joe Biden's son. Twitter subsequently blocked the ability of its users to link to the story at all or repost images from that story because Twitter said it violated its hacked materials policy. More on that in a second. This is the first time that either has gone after an established news organization in this way. The New York Post was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. You may have heard of his musical. It is currently owned by News Corp. You may have heard of succession. That doesn't make it infallible, of course, but it's not an upstart. It's not run by unknowns. This is an established media company.  The shop owner says that they made a copy of a hard drive before handing it over to the FBI. They handed it to the FBI because of the nature of the content on it. The Post's story shows multiple emails, but those emails do not show metadata or other headers. The sources who brought the information to the Post are from the opposite party to the Democrat candidate for president, and the Democrat campaign says they were not contacted about the critical elements of the story. So there are a few questions about whether all standard journalistic practices were followed in this reporting. But the story is not unique in that. There was an Atlantic story about the president's remarks on military members recently that was also based on unverifiable sources. In both cases, it's up to you to trust the editorial organization or play detective and try to uncover evidence in the stories themselves, which ends up throwing it in the laps of social networks when Democrats and some journalists claim the story is not reliable and could do damage if it goes viral and therefore should be blocked. And of course, the Streisand effect means that we've made this the most well-known story of the day, but we're a tech show, so let's get to the tech part. How do social networks determine if they should take action on this? Both these companies have policies. Facebook invoked a policy from October 21st, 2019 that reads, in many countries, including the U.S., if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third-party fact-checker, which is exactly what they did. They had a policy that says, hey, man, if we think this is really going viral and it could do damage and it might be false, we're going to go ahead and pre-reduce it while we fact-check it. So they followed their policy. We don't know what the signals were that made them think this, ostensibly it's all the journalists who do not work at the post claiming it's a weak story, and it's also unclear how you go about fact-checking a story based on private documents and sources you don't have access to, but that's what they're doing. To Twitter, it introduced rules against hacked materials in 2018 to stop doxing, and it updated that policy in March 2019. That policy says, posting hacked content on Twitter, e.g. in the text of a tweet or in an image and linking to hacked content hosted on other websites is prohibited, and it has implemented that policy before. It shut down the DDoS secrets account, which posted newsworthy leaked documents, but this is the biggest test of that policy, and it fits the letter of the policy. These were hacked documents from a laptop unauthorized by the owner of the laptop, and therefore you can't link to them or repost the images under Twitter policy. But one wonders, would they make an exception for a story in the public interest like leaks by Chelsea Manning or Edward Stoden, which theoretically would violate this policy if those things were coming out today? Hold that thought. A couple more quick points. Twitter and Facebook have not broken any laws. Notwithstanding, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai plans to move forward on a rulemaking to clarify Section 230 because Pai said social media companies, quote, do not have a First Amendment right to his special immunity denied to other media outlets such as newspapers and broadcasters. He's right. The First Amendment doesn't give you the immunity. Section 230 does, and Section 230 doesn't have anything to do with this, no matter how much you might want it to. Section 230 means if outlets decide to control what's on their platform, they won't be penalized for allowing illegal content posted by someone else on their platform to slip through. It is meant to say you can decide what goes on your platform without being liable for what a third party puts on your platform. It protects your right to editorialize exactly the way that Twitter and Facebook are accused of doing. It doesn't apply. This is a First Amendment situation, and the First Amendment has been interpreted to protect a platform from deciding what it can and cannot carry. You don't have to think it's fair. They have a First Amendment right to do it. Section 230 just doesn't make it liable for what other people say on its platform, specifically giving it the right to make editorial decisions of what they allow on the platform. That was the whole point of Section 230 was before it was either all or nothing. You either had to let everything on the platform or nothing on the platform, or you were liable for what anybody else says. So, bringing Section 230 into this is weird to me. Anyway, being legal doesn't mean you have to do it. So, Justin, Sarah, what effect do you think this is all going to have? Tom, this is all proceeding as I have foreseen, and everybody who has listened to Daily Tech News Show understands that I have been calling for for the last several years. It is, again, say it with me, friends, hashtag Hell Portal, hashtag Portal to Hell. This is the biggest example that I can remember seeing of it, largely due to the loud nature of our American political system and the current phase we are at in our electoral season. I don't agree with Twitter's ruling specifically. I'll hold that for a second and just get to the Facebook thing. One thing I would like to add to your description of it, signals that there might be content that could do damage to the election could also, and I'm drawing a line here, be Facebook being informed by intelligence agencies or other security firms that there are certain pieces of information that they believe will be fed through new sources. If that is the case, then I believe there is a reasonable expectation that Facebook should be up front about that, and furthermore, should be transparent about even if they're not revealing it immediately, they should be up front about things that they have been told once they make these kinds of editorial decisions that shape their news content. As for Twitter, I think this was overbroad. I think this was terrible precedent, and I don't believe that at least the spirit of their hacked materials clause, which to me is more along the lines of raw dumps in Pacebin and stuff like that, should be stretching out to organizations that already have a lot on the line and are vetting these stories at least to their own detriment, should they get sued for libel or in the case of a television network slander. The New York Post story is something that I think there are a lot of journalistic questions about. I have very legitimate journalistic questions that we could go through here if this were a different kind of show. However, I don't believe that these are unique. I think that there's a tremendous amount of journalistic questions that you can ask specifically in terms of political reporting. So you're a living Twitter policyist, not an originalist. Yes. Again, as they get into this game and they start making the rules as they're going, they're going to get into trouble. And ultimately, I think both of these companies need to have just big hard lines in the sand of exactly what they are going to do, and then they need to take the heat when they are making controversial interpretations of that specifically in our current political time, where look, you're going to get yelled at. You're going to get yelled at if people believe that this is Russian propaganda. But guess what? If it's not violating anything else that you allow on your platform, then I don't see how you can censor it. It's so interesting and not always in a good way to watch an evolving company try to evolve and figure out these kinds of issues. It's not like you're selling Coca-Cola and it's like, that's what we sell. Just drink it or you like it or you don't like it. That's what we do. It's constantly changing. Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, wrote in response today about this whole debacle quote, our communication around our actions on the New York Post article was not great and blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero contacts as to why we're blocking was unacceptable. Now, I don't think that that was wrong. I think that communication, especially from the top, is important, especially when a company is like, huh, we should have approached this differently. And we've learned something in the process. But depending on who you are and what you want to believe, you read something like that and you go, they don't know what they're doing. Now they have to apologize. They've really screwed up here. And there's so many mixed messages that people can get from things like this. And it happens all the time, particularly with Twitter, but Facebook as well. I think in the end where I come at this is is more and more to just what Justin said years ago, which is as soon as you start even hinting towards deciding what is okay on your platform, what's true and what's not, and adjudicating that you're going to end up in these issues where someone doesn't agree with you and there's going to be controversy over that. And we have seen other examples, but this is the biggest one so far. All right, folks, we need an amuse-bouche. So let's move on from this and talk about some dolphins. Oh, Tom, your timing is so good because Reuters reports on edge innovations. It's a company which has developed a remote control animatronic dolphin that it thinks could be used in movies or even in theme parks. The dolphin weighs 250 kilograms and is two and a half meters long, looks like a dolphin. Its skin is made from medical grade silicon. It costs three to five million dollars to make, so these are not cheap dolphins, but they are supposed to be realistic after all. Edge is using the animatronic dolphin in a partnership with TeachKind from PETA, that's people for the ethical treatment of animals. Edge creative director, Roger Holsberg, describes it as a kind of a Sesame Street underwater situation. The company says it could possibly make sharks or even Jurassic era reptiles as well. Oh man, can you imagine if Megalodon came jumping out of the marine world pool and did some tricks? Or just, I don't know, I mean, I went to a lot of zoos and marine theme parks as a kid and over time it has become, not that they don't exist anymore, but the treatment of animals has become much more at the forefront of what we should all be doing and some of those theme parks has suffered. But really, as a kid, you're on a school trip, you're trying to learn things. A lot of this stuff could really still be fun and teachable and we'd all come away learning something and have a good time and you wouldn't have to have real animals there. This is also a classic PETA story. They love getting any time that they can get their name out that isn't necessarily about something gruesome and awful and brutal and part of the solution and not the problem, they love to do it, so it doesn't surprise me that their name's on this. Well, we're glad to take advantage of that behavior today to kind of lighten things up here at the end of the show. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Bruce and his guide dog Stu, for those of you on our video feed, we've got a picture. Always love the animal pictures. Bruce wanted to comment on Microsoft's Seeing AI story from Wednesday. Bruce, who is vision impaired, says, I use the Seeing AI app to help read my mail among other small print. I'm curious to see how it will integrate into Office. I'll also use Zoom text for screen enlargement as well and I noticed when using voiceover on Facebook, it sometimes describes the picture and also any caption texted and I really appreciate that. So I think it's a good reminder that a lot of that data is helping somebody out there to be on the same page and that's really cool. Always good to see Stu, too. It's now a series of Stu pictures. Also, we got an email from Drew who wanted to thank us for our balanced coverage on the 1-0 article about Clear Yesterday. Drew transparently says, I'm a clear employee and I usually brace for impact whenever we're in the news and I really appreciate that your coverage was an even keeled assessment of the pros and cons of our service instead of the what kind of idiot gives this much data to a private corporation that a lot of outlets default to. Thanks for what you all do every day. Thank you, Drew. Thank you so much, Drew. And if you have feedback for our show, please send it. We love your feedback. The email address is feedback at DailyTechnoShow.com. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Kevin, Paul Boyer and Philip Shane. Also, extra special thanks to Justin Robert Young, PX3 man himself. What's been going on with you? Well, of course, Politics, Politics, Politics is where you can get the more political side of the story that you just heard about. You also can get my political history podcast, Raise the Dead, Johnson vs. Goldwater, all about the 1964 election. I'm very, very excited for people to hear the episode that we just aired, mostly because it is the result of really a year's worth of research looking into the comparisons between the upstart campaign of Barry Goldwater and Bernie Sanders in 2020. Two guys that could not be further apart in terms of their ideological perspective of how the government should be involved in our lives, but in terms of dealing within a massive party power structure are almost identical. Check that out right now. Raisethedeadpodcast.com. Hey, folks, if you'd like a DTNS hat, hoodie, mask or mouse pad, we have all that and more at our DTNS store, DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store. We are also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Shannon Morse with us. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com.


Hey folks Mariana and Sumantro Great to see you both And it looks like it is 9 30 so let us begin I'm Marine Ordon. I am Fedora's community action and impact Coordinator and I will pass it over to Sumantra introducing self. Okay. I'm Sumantro I work for the QA team and I am a colleague for the Japan with Mariana. Hello everyone and welcome to our session. My name is Mariana And I am a Fedora contributor Awesome. All right. I'm gonna work on getting my slides up right now. Let's see what we got here. Give me one moment. All right Can folks see that? There we go All right, welcome to our session on the community outreach revamp objective. So first off, I'm just gonna give folks a little bit of history on how this objective and revamp came to be. So what is the Fedora Ambassador Program? It is a 15 year plus program within the Fedora community to provide outreach outside and within our community doing various events, activities Yes I started the ambassadors love to all the ambassadors everywhere. We love to see that so over over the years The ambassador program grew more people came to it and the Fedora project in general grew so as time went on things changed and The program wasn't really focused on sustainability. So things kind of went this way or that different directions and It wasn't seeing quite as much success as it was in activity. So meanwhile The other question is what are what is the join sig advocates and calm ops came, right? So Join sig is something that kind of came off of The ambassadors as really just a low barrier to entry group to invite and welcome newcomers So just setting them up with Hey, here's your Fedora account and hey pointing them in the right direction to get started advocates with something that came along to to Lower the barrier entry to get resources to run events. So it was for folks who Didn't want to necessarily do the full ambassador program, but still wanted to be able to run events in their local areas Com ops team is something that existed from a couple of f-cakes ago And that was originally ideated ideated as a community operations team that focused on metrics and communication Between the different teams that are now known to be under the mind share committee so There's a lot of different names and a lot of different teams and backgrounds and And little bits that this team does and that team does or doesn't right? Okay, so how did we get to the revamp? Well I came into this position. I remember the first thing Matthew and Ben said to me said Probably I don't want to do anything with ambassadors for a little bit So anyway, it was a couple months in and I think there was some activity I'm one of the ambassador tickets. It might have been a mind share A conversation about Matthew says we didn't Want to throw you right into the fire, right? So Uh, there was a conversation. It came back up And meanwhile in my in my work with the open source program office We were reading about change management And we looked at uh, the fordore ambassador program and said We kind of used it as a case study said, hey, what could be changed here To to meet this program of success again So armed with those kind of evaluations that mean a few other folks from ospo or ospo book club did I decided to write a proposal for a revamp and I sat down hacked it for two days came up with a bunch of pages of stuff and and then put it out there and we went through Multiple rounds of feedback and then I'm just going to Leave it to mariana from here Thanks marie so revamp initiative started back in july 2020 marie presented the initial proposal on a on a ticket on the mind share repo Uh where she presented the entire idea the background of that the program story and was Uh inviting people to leave this initiative And this is where Samantha and myself joined and we formed our small team of free people Once our team was formed We started planning what our next steps were going to be in the next month And this is where we came out with a trailer board where we added tasks and Action items and timelines for these action items hoping that we will have to Work with the broader community in order to fulfill these tasks Uh a few months later we realized that this board didn't attract many contributors So we retired it it's there for documentation purposes, but we don't use it anymore Instead we have a hack and defile a public have a community file where we keep notes On our weekly meetings and where we keep everything About what we've done so far and what our plans are for the next months and weeks So once we had everything in place in terms of documentation, we started launching the Uh the revamp process and presented it to the community Uh initially we had to kick off meetings to video meetings with community members We participated on a council's video meeting where we presented Uh the revamp this video meeting the council meeting is on youtube So you can have a look at that And we also had an MA meeting and asked me anything meeting where we Answered two community questions, but also came out with a list of questions That we thought might be of interest for the community To know in certain topics Our very first project within the revamp I like to call them projects Was the ambassadors cleanup We we all know that the borough project has so many ambassadors but many of them have been quite Inactive over the years and it's this is uh completely normal So we run a script in november to check who has been inactive through their FAST account In the past six months so from november and going back six months And we identified those people we reached out to them let them know about the revamp And uh we asked them if they want to come back and if they didn't come back they would be Awarded the emeritus status. Of course everyone is welcome to come back anytime Uh the next thing that we worked on was the community outreach revamp This was one of the most interesting uh things that we have worked so far And i'm very happy that we did work on that because The results that we had were very interested about the future of the entire fedora community So what we need was create a survey for the community members not necessarily ambassadors, but everyone who has contributed at any Way to the fedora community. We asked them how they participate in the community have the organized events How they do outreach locally in their local communities And we asked for their suggestions on what they think that we can do better on this And one of the most interesting outcomes was that we found out that people love so organizing This means that there is a lot more fedora activity out there that we're not aware of Because people do organize events and they do not let the entire International community on what they work and on or what they do Uh you can find the full list of uh the the results and after we analyze them on the Uh community blog. I can share later on a link with the blog post where we presented that Um with the entire rest of the community Uh in those lines together with the outreach Survey we also did some mindshare teams interviews where we asked uh people in the mindshare community to tell us a little bit more on their involvement with the the various outreach teams Besides being a community project The revamp we are now officially a council We have the status of our objective starting from month from February 2021 And we hope to have this objective Finished in the upcoming months. Hopefully in 2021 Our current project within the revamp is the role of handbooks. This is a work in progress project I'm very excited about it same as the Outreach survey because together with the documentation that we have now the outreach the role handbooks will serve as an onboarding for the new contributors in order to help them Understand better what they can do within the community and what they can do within a certain outreach team And how they can interact and collaborate with our other Teams once they're there We are drafting those role handbooks if you're interested in writing or even reviewing the the text that we've created so far Or even translated that in the future. You're more than welcome to join us Another thing is the community engagement Survey questions. We have to embark for the council. They're creating The council is creating a list of questions for an annual survey and we are helping draft those questions with the experience that we have from the Outreach the community outreach survey that the the experience we have from the results once we heard that what the community is interested at I'm happy that we Have the chance to to join deaf conf CZ in february again, this is A reported talk and you can find it on youtube And also you are all invited to join us at the community central in june Community central is the series of video interviews sponsored by red hat and will also be in youtube I think it's going to be a live session So if you have a chance to join us, I'm not sure about the time or the date But uh, we'll have plenty of time to let you know When to when to join us Our next sub project is at rt martin We have some really exciting news. We are going to have an outreach heat intern for the upcoming Major august and the project's title is develop and design assets for the fedora community outreach revamp So we basically have a design intern and we are super excited about it. So Based on the different places. We've received feedback and just looking Having conversations with mindshare committee and various other groups. We've kind of tried to figure out like What we want the intern to be working on so First of all, we want updated logos with the new fedora logo and the proper formats We want to create some infographics for the different team structures within mindshare Just so that folks can get a better understanding of like what those are and how they relate to each other um We want to make an outreach focus sticker sheet something that Ambassadors can be really proud to hand out and also to use and just outreach in general something that keeps coming up is cheat cubes and People want revised updated versions of the cheat cubes. So we want to create some modern designs of those Um, kind of updating what used to exist, but then also kind of making something fun too We've been making something a little bit artsy earth related to badges and maybe one on how to join fedora um We also are working at currently working on and want to continue improving with the intern How to join fedora printable handouts. So this is along the lines of Empowering folks to organize on their own and and have the resources and and materials they might need and then We also want to create a piece of team swag. So we're not sure what that's going to be yet we probably have to talk to the stakeholders the people who are really interested but um, we want some to to make something that will kind of Gives a team feeling right so something that helps us Relate to the identity of ambassadors and outreach and community operations so that's the story for the internship And i'm so excited. Uh, we've had a ton of super talented folks come to apply for it already and we can thank those intern applicants for the work adventure maps That we're using today at the at um the release party. Okay. I will hand it over to samanchor So there are a couple of things we Finally would like to touch base on as a part of the revamp The as as murry pointed out primarily there was a lack of sustainable growth We were not able to scale out ambassadors program as we wanted to so the one key factor to keep keep in mind When we designed this revamp was the sustainability And we realized after a lot of surveys and talking with different temporary task force members that we needed needed to create a a bunch of role handbooks which Mariana described in multiple as many languages as possible and we figured out 10 languages that we'd like to do it as a part of Making sure this is accessible to everybody and making sure that everybody wants to They can sustain it. They can move it on to the next Person that there is to make sure they understand and align with the role and the identity of that particular outreach team Next to be to kind of put in perspective. We wanted to have this Empowering strategy for individual contributors. So we figured out a lot of people would want to go ahead and Like do their own events? Contribute to the project help with outreach, but we wanted to Make them understand it it is easy for them to contribute and you know Like a lot of other federal contributors would think that it's it's mostly about coding Which it is not there are a lot of ways you can contribute to and one of the effort that murry You know figured out was to have something called zine which would basically talk about You know the ways that a non technical contributor would also be able to contribute to the project It is highlight a lot of other contributors who have already contributed to a project and we want to make sure that these Um Contributor recruitment handouts would reach out to Respective outreach teams when they're going out for events and so on so forth Right. So that that builds that sense of identity that builds that sense of Empowering individuals about how you can contribute to various things and various outreach Another important thing which is How we want to wrap it up as a long term strategy because We are currently a counseling objective and we would probably be there for 12 to 18 months But the whole idea is to make sure that we have these Utilize this 12 to 18 months and make sure that this thing is taken Way ahead of its time the way we want to do it as we want to have very regular surveys um by making sure the comop steam the Mindshare team they are participators the Community gets awareness about what's happening in the entire federal ecosystem. It's not just about events. It's not just about Um Contribution happiness. It's all about it's also about small changes that come like the new logo that came up So the the community should be aware of what's happening and we we want to make sure we get there Taking baby steps towards that and we want to make sure there's a long-term strategy as we build this So we don't have to fall back upon You know fall back upon and say hey this this did not work out great for us What to do next so making sure that that we take As a onboarding process as a part of the onboarding process and we move it ahead with time So with with these couple of things in mind, we would like to You know go ahead with our revamp program if anyone is willing to you know Work with us. There's a temporary task force team Me mariana and marie would help you With all the ways we can to enable you to contribute to this revamp initiative Other than that you can read about us on community blog. We usually release one You know post every month, which kind of highlights what we have done and where we are heading So currently we are heading towards in a making share of design in turn works on those the things that marie talked about before and The role handbook the wording of the whole handbooks and designing that entire structure So we are in the process of doing that as we move ahead the process for gaining regaining the Emirates ambassador process and making sure they come back to the program Already a lot of people have started started reaching out to us as they want to get back to the Ambassadors program and soon there would be a Formalized process how they can get back to us. So these are the kind of fun things which would be We would be doing in the coming days you can read about them And that's all that's If you have any questions post them Feel free to ask any questions Maybe I have a question for the attendees. Was this the first time you heard about the revamp? Um Alberto just smiles We know you've heard of it Oh, edward has A question for us What revamp herald the revamp. We're just talking about today Okay, fedora groups so meaning probably irc or something Very fun Yeah, I think edward has a question for us, but he's typing Okay, as part of the marketing team There are tasks that some ambassadors can take and work in the marketing team to help revive the team So, yes, we actually are thinking about marketing as we do the revamp and um I wouldn't I would say that I think the marketing team deserves its own special attention to an extent But some of the things that we're incorporating into the processes For the various outreach teams will include marketing efforts That help I do think that marketing team on its own could use a revamp, but we can only do so many at once Ha ha And we we're kicking out. There's another awesome. Yes. So marketing is definitely part of what they think about Any other questions? Well, thanks everybody for coming to our presentation. We are excited to continue this work and um It's something we've found is just it's like uh, what's the turtle wins the race or whatever It's slow, but steady and we've found that um When we ask folks to jump in and help us they are more than willing and excited to get involved So, uh, maybe we'll think of you next and invite you into to work on a project for with us and um We're going to continue steady on See you want to drop Oh, did you want to say something you unmuted? Okay, well, right. Thanks to everybody for for coming and I believe the next session Is a cpe weekly report live. So I will see everybody over there in a couple minutes Thanks again


Well, we're at the top of the hour and now that I have my awesome New Zealand sweatshirt on let's begin Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends forum. I'm absolutely delighted to see so many of you here We have an important subject to go through and I'm really glad to have all of you here with us So we can go through it together. After I'm new to the forum Welcome. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator host and chief cat herder And for the next hour, I'll be guiding you through this conversation discussion and exploration Now today's session Is the last one in a two month long string of sessions the future trends forum over its history has explored many many subjects everything from the economic sustainability of higher education to open education to women in education And along the way, we've dealt with many stresses and pressures But nothing quite like the novel coronavirus pandemic And this has been hitting colleges and universities worldwide and really reshaping our institutions and the process of post-secondary education We've been devoting episode after episode session after session to it and Based on our conversations with all of you You've said that you'd like us to continue it, but you'd also like us to continue Reaching out to other topics as well, which we'll do starting next week I just want to remind you that uh, we are still in covid mode You can see here the screenshot is from about an hour ago Looking at the global red reach of the pandemic from the johns hopkins university site You can see our total infections officially are closing out of four million people And the death toll is past a quarter of a million people already biggest outbreaks are in the united states So we've been doing a lot of things long to help this. We've posted a bunch of resources online You've got tiny world comm slash covid edu to find links to a bunch of those and I continue to write about this Today we're going to host an open discussion. Think of it as a virtual town hall For us to all share and put our heads together thinking about the impact of covid 19 on higher education And as we go today, uh, we don't have a specific agenda That is we don't have a specific course of action that we'd like to follow We want to throw this open to you so that we can hear from you We'd like to hear your stories That is what you've been experiencing as Your campus as you as a professional where you as a person as well have experienced during this extraordinary time We'd like to hear what news stories have struck you or that you think we should be paying attention to What are the greatest challenges you've been facing and what are the successes? What tips strategies would you like to share? Now helping us in this course of action is a good friend and a good friend of the program and a splendid guest in the past Maria anderson Maria is a wonderful colleague and friend. I just want to just Say more good things about her than I can for almost anybody else Maria is a futurist. So, you know that makes her a dangerous person She's also a beautiful and fantastic math professor who's been teaching math to Math phobes and people who struggle with it for years and years On top of that, she's a founder of a company called course tune So she's a wonderful wonderful mix of people and she has a great sense of humor Maria, I'm so glad you can co-host with us today. Thank you for coming. Thanks, Brian. I'm happy to be here Well, tell us first of all, where are you coming from today? Where are you at your home base? I'm in salt lake Had a beautiful day off yesterday and went into the uenta mountains and did some hiking saw three people So there is some some spaced social distance, especially on weekdays the trails are much more crowded on the weekend Oh, I imagine I imagine And how are you doing? Uh doing okay, you know, it's it's been a really interesting few months for everybody. Um, I Uh, I already teach my classes with quite a bit of remote teaching So I teach as an adjunct for west minister college and I Education classes and math classes and I was teaching a teaching with technology class ironically and When I'm out of town for a conference or business meeting I teach them remotely and likewise If we're in town and the student can't make it to campus for some reason They just attend class remotely using zoom so we already had all that set up I already had all assignments set up to be submitted digitally You know and we were well used to having small group sessions remotely You know if somebody was coming in from away They would just you know be on a computer with a group that had a computer in front of them, right? So like it was interesting because as the whole world kind of Went into craziness about teaching remotely my students actually said to me in our first Remote truly remote session, which was just you know normal class for us Really? Yeah, this was the only class that I figured would be exactly the same as it was before all this happened and they were right We made Pretty much the only adjustment we made was that the test that I would have proctored in first and I proctored through zoom and that's it so um Yeah, that was So so that was interesting to watch because for me that's kind of always been I think there's so much you can learn from remote teaching that helps students all the time, right? And helps professors all the time to to keep a closer eye on what's going on. So I I'm glad to see everybody You know adapting to these things and learning some new things and learning some new tricks that are going to be so helpful for student success when we Get back to normal, which may at this point not be till like 2022 or something. I don't know um But then you know, I also run a company and so, you know, we had certainly had a bit of a tumultuous month With every school basically putting all payments on hold As they tried to figure out what was happening to them and Yeah, I mean, but we we have pretty smart fiscal policies So we had a cushion we could rely on and you know, we were able to apply for the government support and um You know, so we've just been trying to do our best even though our our Our company doesn't focus so much on faculty development We've just been putting out faculty development help and you know things that we can do to try to help our clients You know weather this storm and get to the other side of it and be ready to start thinking about ironically quality curriculum design, right? And uh, and we are kind of seeing that uptick again and people It's saying okay, we think we might need to focus on quality now Which is good, right? Which is great for everybody. Which is great for everybody. Yeah, especially students Well, then, you know, you've been on the program often enough both as a participant as a guest to know that I like to ask people what they're gonna be working on for the next year And uh, I think you just told me what you're gonna be working on for the next year Yeah, I think we're gonna um, we've been talking about The possibility of trying to get out some systems for uh helping people to Re-navigate the way they Um approach their face-to-face classes Certainly, I think I always think that having a solid backbone of curriculum design Makes it easier to teach everything and easier to pivot on a dime when you need to you if you know what's in your classes if you know How every learning objective is tied to Learning activities and assessment activities Makes it much easier to you know, pull up that design and say all right. Where do I need to make adjustments given what happened this week, right? um Without that kind of underlying backbone of knowing what's there and How do you currently design that curriculum? I I think it's more difficult and I think you know one of the things that higher ed has always been Particularly, I don't know whether the right phrase here is good at or bad at that um faculty who you know Fairly have no actual experience in education but go on to be teachers, right? Um, they uh They often you know teach on the fly right because they don't have curriculum background They don't have curriculum design experience instructional design experience And so when you teach in person you can get away with you know, like teaching on the fly I mean you can get away with it and that especially if you have a charismatic personality if you're the right Gender and ethnicity like your students will forgive most of the kind of crappy things you do in the classroom But when you're teaching online, you don't really have those same So same fallbacks As you do teaching on the fly in the classroom, you have to you You have to design experiences if you want to have students have aha moments You have to design that experience instead of hoping to see it in the classroom, right? and changing, you know As as the semester progresses so i'm hoping to see a lot more A lot more quality design and faculty development Not just around using technology but around actual design of learning and design of assessment I think this is an opportunity for all of higher ed to kind of have their Uh for lack of a better phrase there come to jesus moment on Hey, assessment can be more than tests. There's all sorts of variety of assessment We can use it really should depend on what the learning objective is and how deeply it needs to be learned in the world That we live in today with the information we have access to today There's a variety of ways that students can learn things They don't necessarily have to follow your prescribed path of learning to get there You probably shouldn't be failing them if they get there You know, I think there's just so much that can happen as a result of this. I know that People when they teach online for the first time like in a really well designed online class that they've built All of those aha moments that they themselves have come back to their face-to-face classes like Oh, I should be doing this in my face-to-face classes too. This is really awesome, right? So I think higher ed is like fairly criticized For you know, not moving very quickly, but I think we've all had a semester where everybody moved a lot quicker Then they thought was possible And maybe that's the only way we really could have kind of Given ourselves a fast boot into the future and it was painful and everybody's exhausted right now that I know in higher ed and everybody is like Ready to take a couple weeks off and that's about all they're going to get before they have to start planning for the next term I have so many questions So many things to ask you and this before I do that.  So again, just just scroll down to the raised hand button to join us on stage or just click the question mark if you like type in a question or comment My one to ask the there's so many things you said they're just brilliant. I just want to I just want to repeat You know, there's the possibility of all of us Striving hard to improve the quality of online education There's the fact that we are living in a kind of accelerant moment You know higher ed. It's just been shoved into the future very very hard and very very fast And that that may let us make up for some of the weaknesses and in our operations. Do you think we're going to see a mass hiring of instructional technologists and educational technologists and instructional designers over the summer Or do you think campuses are right now so shell shocked and so financially stressed that they're basically going to keep The staff they have and work them even harder Well, like everything else in higher ed. It depends I think one constraint here is that I don't think that Let's say higher ed decided to hire 3,000 new instructional designers tomorrow I'm not sure there are 3,000 new instructional designers higher, right? So I think that's one issue I think um people are discovering they have some budget left for this last academic year And um, I know that um several colleagues have seen just an uptick in the desire to have professional development for faculty right now Like let's get faculty now that we've weathered the initial panic of this Let's get some real professional development to faculty because that ultimately Is going to do a lot more good than hiring one more instructional designer, right? If all the faculty level up that helps everybody, right? So um things like professional development for um and and certainly Every school provided as much as they could Right as this crisis was happening, right? But that was panic mode professional development And now there's time for some more kind of thoughtful I'm planning ahead. What can I do to restructure my course like Uh, that isn't just the keep your head above water It's the you know, like hey, I'd like to be waist deep in this water instead, right? And so um, and I do think that there's Uh, you know some really good stuff that that can be provided for for faculty to help That has been around for a long time, right? But now there's like a true desire to Um to reach out and embrace that in a way that we didn't have before I do think Instructional designers are in high demand Um, and are going to continue to be in high demand. I think they're all working really long hours and school should really think about, you know In crisis mode and in the hours that these folks are being asked to work What are you doing to help that? Are you providing? Yeah Something you know if it's not pay. Is it child care? Is it you know, like these these these folks are really taking the the brunt of this and to any school out there who has Is also in the midst of moving their LMS during this. I'm so sorry For their ERP system for their ERP system or like of all the semesters This was one to be doing that. Well, I just I said this before several weeks ago. Actually, um I just want to just give a shout out to the structural designers Academic technologists who have been working their brains out for the past few months and they get zero publicity for this John O'Brien at edu cause review just did a really really great tribute to them Because you're not going to see them talked about in in less location So that's one of the reasons I wanted to focus on that question But before Maria, I have other questions Folks have just shared theirs with me and I want to just put a couple of these up here for us to bounce around Robert McGuire asks the idea of campus-based courses improving after this experience interesting Can you say more? Will you expect novice online teachers to take back to their classrooms later by rubber? I assume but later you mean once face-to-face instruction Let me just give you a really simple example So a lot of instructors only use a learning management system to post their syllabus and put in final grades because that's all they're required to do But you can certainly use a learning management system as a drop box for assignments And you can have students turn in assignments that way Which means that a student like if you're on a traditional face-to-face You know offering with very little learning management system involved You expect students to show up physically in person and hand you their assignments, right? Which means that if a student misses class because of a doctor's appointment a sick kid Or you know what the bus was late whatever they can't physically hand you that assignment And if they can't make your office hours, they can't hand it to you there And if you weren't able to get to camp but if you are now used to accepting those assignments digitally A student can turn it in even if they were not able to get to campus, right? And so some of these like really simple things Bleeding backwards to a face-to-face class Give so much more equity to students who may have trickier schedules than others That that ability to or that ability for me to say yeah I will let you turn this assignment in late get it to me tomorrow. They can turn it online, right? And and so like teaching students like I teach my students how to use a scanning app on the phone, right? From day one they learn how to scan a handwritten assignment and submit it to me Right, which is often something you need to do in a math or science class like with a lot of graphs and diagrams And and so they know they can do that for anything like for any of their classes once you teach it to them Right as long as the teacher will accept a digital submission, right? And on top of that I think it comes down to this realization that When you teach online you start to realize that That in person kind of lecture time that you have Not it's not actually that like there's a lot of good done by doing this online instead because Actually, there was just an article in the New York Times. I read today from a student who was a New York, right? She said I am learning more in this remote teaching time than I learn in the classroom because in the classroom Students are disrupting the classroom all the time. It's distraction after distraction. We don't get through the same material I don't have time to ask questions. Even when I go to help sessions There's not enough, you know teachers to do the help and during that this time I can watch the video and I can stop it and rewind it and watch the parts I don't understand again and there's no distraction from the other students You know creating chaos in the classroom And so you start to have these realizations when you teach online for the first time like they Oh, like this is really helpful for students to be able to Rewind and rewatch and if I'm an English language learner I can read the captions and that's really helpful because now I can tie this very You know specific language to the discipline that I'm reading With the way you say it which I don't get in the classroom, right? and so teachers start to have these Aha moments of their own about what Good instructional design actually looks like and as soon as you have that realization that a video online Might actually be a better way to get that information than A professor teaching it over and over in the classroom that opens up the classroom for more active learning practices, right? So we see tons of this like bleed back From a professor truly learning how to teach online well and then taking it Back into the classroom and reworking everything they do in the classroom I say within about if an instructor truly goes through And learns how to teach a high quality online class I would say within two or three years. They're face-to-face classes look very different than they used to The fantastic response Maria. I'm just tweeting out the article if you haven't seen it. It's uh By a middle schooler named Veronique mince And it's tied why i'm learning more with distance learning than I do in school. Yeah and Just before I say more there was a quick comment that came I just wanted to share this This is from Kelly Walsh college of west gestures is observation We're all seeming to learn how to finally go paperless for the most part. I hope we can sustain that going forward Definitely definitely and we're learning how to deliver things without I mean students don't often have printers at home. So we're all having to make that adjustment to like Right, you know, no, they can't just come to campus and print something Uh, thank you. We do have to learn it at home In fact, uh, Kelly wanted to join us on stage Kelly. Uh, would you like to add to that? Sure? How you guys doing? Good nice to see you. Yeah, likewise and nice to uh to kind of virtually meet Maria Um, I guess I had to chime in when you were saying rewind rewatch and the use of a video Um, you know, brian knows I've been a big advocate of the flipped classroom for many years and um You were just really hitting some of those key words and it's so true for for The potential for instructors to begin to understand the power of short videos and what they can do And then you hit on the other key thing freeing up class time to use it in a more active learning Scenario, so uh, it's going to be really interesting coming out of this to see how How we embrace blended further and and the flip as well Yeah, I think what we're moving into is Uh, kind of a more dynamic way of designing our courses And just being you know, whether we call it flexible teaching remote I mean flexible is I think kind of what we're all heading into this wall Unless your campus has already made a decision that like you're fully online Just plan on it being flexible teaching like there's no real other option here Because even if you have to go to campus and teach your classes in person You will have students who are still in quarantine somewhere, right? And um, and that's not going to go away And it's just going to keep coming and going So you're going to be teaching students who are remote this fall Even if you're not remote this fall and you know, you may find that your own health Or somebody in your family needs to be quarantined and even if you're healthy You're in quarantine right and then you're teaching your class remotely So I think we're all going into the fall with this idea that that our design needs to be Really flexible and uh, accommodate all of these possibilities and It's completely doable. This I mean like I was saying at the beginning of this This was already the way I taught my classes like maximum flexibility for everybody for me and for the students like However, you can come to class. However, you can participate Whether it's you're there in person or you watch a video class afterwards Sure Like my job is to make sure that you learn what you're supposed to learn That's it Yeah, and you know to add to what you're saying, you know and put a fine point on it um We may be faced with How do we teach a class where some of the students do want to come in because they want to be You know, we're hearing that we're not hearing a ton of it, but certainly hearing some students saying listen I really don't like this. I want to be in front of my teacher Teach that class to that student and teach the remote students and To some extent do it synchronously synchronously because There's something to be said particularly for you know, the traditional day student wanting out those time slots Really interesting twist on that so I got a math for elementary teachers class this last school year uh, both semesters And um, it's a very hands-on class. We do a lot with manipulatives and group and partners and and things like that and so Uh, my students would when I was out of town and teaching remotely They would actually show up in the classroom One of them would pull up the zoom session on the instructor computer and project it to the wall And I would teach them with them all in person and me remote Yeah, and it was us. We did some similar last Came up incidentally. Yeah, and they had all the manipulatives and things they needed for the group activities And you know, they would pipe up if somebody was still oh, we need another minute one second We're still working on this, you know, and I could see kind of like the classroom You know, if one of them would point their computer at the classroom, then I could see that right There's a lot we can do with this like I think that a lot of schools and a lot of teachers are just starting to scratch the surface of possibilities But I think there's such great possibilities. I'm so excited to see where we are a year from now in education. I think if we can all try to be optimistic and remind ourselves that in education, we don't tend to do things unless there is a Uh, a high state what I call a high stakes deadline Like it will be super embarrassed because it doesn't happen. Then suddenly we write the paper We get the presentation done. We write the syllabus like Tends to happen for most of us at the last possible minute Everybody just learned technology because they had to Yeah, it's quite Really interesting for I just want to share a quick thought but then I I wanted to ask a question for both of you because you're you both be great at this um, the quick thought is that um Last year we had as guests the folks who studied the council of independent colleges Um, really interesting online education program Which was one where they were doing upper level humanities seminars team taught or taught across up to a dozen campuses in the us And one of the interesting side effects they found was the faculty who taught those classes Usually teaching online for the first time Found that when they went back to their face-to-face classes that had completely revitalized their face-to-face teaching That they found that in literary critical terms. It was de-familiarized They have things that they had assumed or now open questions And they started applying things either directly or directly the question I want to put to both of you Um, and then I want to get to the more of the questions because the question is piling up, which is great Is we're talking about optimism. We're talking about, you know positive things that could come from this How do we talk about that and at the same time? not sound Course or callous because we have so much suffering right now I mean at all levels emotional physical physical suffering All right, I mean, I've been hearing from some people who say we shouldn't talk about Optimism we shouldn't be talking about silver linings now. This is not the time to do that And I I disagree with it but I keep hearing that and I'm wondering what you two would say to that charge I'll let kelly go first. He has something he wants to say. Thank you, maria. Um, you know, I think I think it's necessary. I think we need to they belong together, right? These are very challenging situations And uh, people are suffering all across the spectrum. I mean Uh, we teach I teach in westchester of my colleges in new york just outside of the city Um, a third of our students have lost their jobs Uh, 10 of them have lost family members. I mean, it is they're devastated Um, and we need to accept that realize it and we need to look for opportunities to shore everybody up By accepting that reality not being afraid to hide behind it look for this to be, you know, I mean if If if improvements can't come out of challenges and change and challenging times like this then I I mean they they have to and it's human nature. Um, so just you know, just a few thoughts Thank you. I actually just looked at the definition of silver lining and it is a consoling or hopeful prospect I mean, there's nothing wrong with with looking for silver linings in crises I think it's very natural to look for silver linings in crises because otherwise You don't have anything hopeful to look towards, right? I think for faculty and instructional designers and academic staff who are so stressed right now It's good for them to see that something they're learning right now is going to be valuable in the future That it's not just this sunk lost time that they're pouring into You know this new method of teaching that doesn't have any useful effects post COVID, right? It does have a lot of useful effects post COVID You will be able to continue to use these strategies and for all the students who are going through You know job losses and family members who are sick and things like that Us being more flexible institutions at the end of this benefits all of them because let's say you sign up for fall classes And you start to work and then you finally get a new job and it conflicts with some of your classes Well, if I can offer you a recording of the classes you would be attending doesn't that help those students I mean, isn't that going to benefit all of them when things start to come back online? If they have to go home and take care of a sick family member Isn't the ability to be flexible going to help them? I mean, this is a huge huge outcome for higher ed The ability to stop pretending that education is all about the actual time somebody spends in a seat in a classroom And to reframe it around it being more around What are the students supposed to be learning and Did they learn it? I mean, I think I think we For silver linings in crisis and to not look for changes in policies that will help us the next time around Would be idiotic Thank you. Thank you. I knew I could count on both of you Also, I just want to give you this like uh I can't remember the right phrase, but you'll tell me once I said I think we've all been going through a reality show called academic survivor And with every like week that goes by like Yeah, there's new lockdown rules. There's new there's new technology problems like, you know, we had the week of Zoom conferences being bombed. That was like the reality episode of that week, right? Where we all figured out how to put passwords on meetings and how to not share our links publicly and You know and every week, you know, like if you if you make it through another week You're like on to the next episode. So I think we're all to the point now where we can be like Whoo We're close to or we're there, right? We survived academic survivor season one and this summer we go into academic survivor season two And then we're on to uh murder hornets Kelly, I just want to say it's nice to see you at home Um, you've you've been a frequent guest and a video participant and that's just I was thinking is that really Kelly? Because I didn't recognize you from your uh from your uh, your office. Thank you My music studio Looking good Okay, we have a whole stack of questions and I'm just going to start bringing these up And friends if you're new to the forum, you saw how easy it was to pull up Kelly and you see how easy it is to uh Flow questions. So let me just bring up a few of these and give you a chance Again maria to to grapple them and if everybody else to pounds too Tom hams a great friend of the program asks has have we finally ruled the artificial dichotomy between online and in-person classes? No, because I I think that there isn't an artificial dichotomy an online class is very different than an in-person class because of the design of The assessments and the design of the learning, right? I mean, we we can't imagine that these two things aren't actually different They should be designed differently. I think that what we're removing Is this barrier around? What is course but that there should actually be a design for courses, right? Uh, that we're starting to acknowledge that it is not actually the time in the seats That matters, but I don't want to pretend that an in-person course is the same as an online course They should be designed differently. They are To design an asynchronous experience where people Still experience some transformation around their education and still have aha moments in their education Is much harder to do than when you can like kind of move around a classroom and in real time Poke at students knowledge of things, right? And so I do think Yeah, so yes and no I guess Tom it's a really good question and maria that's that I'd love the way you unpeeled that That's that's really good. Let's hear it for design More questions. We have one from patrick cox at sage Who says In reporting on webinars using kovat during kovat. I've never heard anyone talk about online universities I know one seeing increased enrollment for fall 2020. No any trends in that sector of higher ed So I i'm not familiar with like trends at all schools. I have heard from one school That's quite large that they are expecting Increases in enrollments because they have a more flexible option for students I think we're going to see that the expensive online options take a hit Because everybody's a little worried about their economic circumstances, but I think um And I think that for those students who are Really wanted the traditional college experience We might see them stepping out for a year. They may have Unfortunately thought that what they got in their sudden online remote experience is what online education is And it's not really So I think the more traditional age students will pull out but those more traditional age students aren't the ones who typically do an online education experience so I think for expensive schools, they're going to see a drop It's just my gut feeling expensive schools are going to see a drop in enrollment less expensive schools The ones that have a pretty fair tuition rate community colleges with online programs four-year schools with state schools with online programs Uh confidence some of the competency-based institutions that have affordable degree programs those those I think might see a bump especially if you know Financial aid comes through grants come through the cares act stuff might help with some of that We have a couple of strategic questions along those lines, but first I just want to share quickly uh rosemary ren Thought the point is to the silver lining for learning dot org has a webinar discussion on this very topic on saturday So thank you rosemary. Um, I tweeted that out as well but on the strategic question, uh, peter shea at um, university albany asks this very challenging question We're seeing estimates that social distancing for classrooms results in a 60 to 70 percent reduction in seats Our others grappling with that I think that there are lots of schools grappling with this especially because if you're worried about lower enrollments And you start doing any thinking about what it takes to disinfect a classroom Uh, you start realizing that your only option during a crisis like this might be to go online Because you can't afford what it would take to keep classrooms clean like the classroom. I teach it. Uh I think the trash gets emptied once a week and the classroom gets disinfected about once a semester honestly Now think about the fact that that classroom turns over every one to two hours with a complete new set of students Even if it's only 50 of the number of students Doesn't everything still need to be cleaned between students sitting at those desks Like you have to find all that cleaning equipment which is scarce right now You have to pay for the staff to do the cleaning. You might need more space between classes to do the cleaning Like i'm not sure it really makes a lot of sense to attempt to do more than have maybe a couple of scheduled meetings During the semester and if your students are coming from all over the country, that doesn't even make sense anymore right because That's just not realistic. So I think what schools are maybe having to to do is um really convince people that uh Their online offerings can be as high quality as their face-to-face offerings in the fall and that they're they're doing things to Get ready for that. You just anticipated peter's follow-up question. Okay, let's have it Uh So how do we bring a thousand plus courses online between now and august? And I you have to get your faculty trained Okay, so training the faculty Yeah, I don't see another way to do it You can't possibly hire enough instructional designers to get this done Your faculty have to be ready and I think you have to embrace some remote learning As a part of that some synchronous remote learning as a part of that There is no way to get all online courses designed and I don't think that your traditional students want that My students at Westminster Love having our in-person sessions. They are happy to be on video with each other They love being broken into small groups to talk to each other Like and they can't always all make those sessions sometimes they don't have good internet sometimes But they can watch them later, right? And so I think that bringing online those courses is making sure that the faculty have a good professional development Discipline specific if possible because teaching a Spanish course online Berks is teaching a Humanities course online versus teaching a physics course online How we would design those well is completely different because they really have a different Cadence and pace to those courses, right? So if you can get your faculty access to some High-quality professional development from an expert in that field about how to teach remotely how to teach online That's going to be the best thing you can do like i'm running some Saturday workshops right now for STEM folks And like we come together for a Saturday and we hold sessions like like it's a workshop Like you went somewhere and did a workshop, right? but we have breaks between the zoom sessions so nobody gets too burnt out and And we spend an intensive day like learning all of these different possible strategies With a four-week follow-up where once a week we meet and do a q&a about like what people are thinking what they're trying like You know what their new? Questions that have popped to the surface, right? And so that for STEM faculty Is is really what they need they need to talk to somebody who's done their subjects online to figure it out That's the fastest way you can get to scale here And so I think it's just like deciding how many different pockets you have that need to be trained. Is it like you know languages technical fields softer skill fields Performing fields, you know like and then find some professional about me you can get all your faculty into and just be kind of that the hardest thing I think is going to be getting faculty to To step up and do training But I think people are worried enough about being embarrassed by What happens in the fall that again? This is kind of that once in a lifetime opportunity where Everybody might show up They can't mandate it at least you can kind of put social pressure on it And get them what they need to be successful These are our faculty are smart people if you give if you can get them the resources They need to do a successful job and to really plan for A successful offering this fall with a variety of activities and It experiences I think that that you can be successful You've got to get them the training and you got to convince the students It will be different in the fall than it was this term It'll be different and better We have a good way. I assume it can only be different in a good way at this point There's the bar is set and the bar is not super high there's um One Kelly Morrison at AP us also raised I did outsourcing You know hiring a team like iDesign for example. Yeah But I so thank you Kelly. Um, so we may see more of that So this might be a good time for that kind of uh work to be done But I also think that if every school out there goes out and tries to hire a team That that capacity is going to go away pretty fast, too There's only so many instructional designers out there and so many People who have this expertise, you know tapping I would like to say that tapping local instructors at schools like tapping your own Experts to teach the rest of the department would be great But I almost wonder if you'd be better off finding a sister school and swapping experts And that's because there's this kind of like you can't be a prophet in your own land phenomenon Many of us experience which is that Your own department may not want to hear what you have to say But they're willing to listen to what somebody at a different school has to say Right so finding like a sister college where you can be like Can your expert on teaching business online talk to my business faculty and my expert on teaching business online We'll talk to your business faculty and everybody will feel like they got something new And like it's it's it's it's an even trade, right? Um So to consider something like that It really depends on the culture of your college and the culture of the department and only you know What those things are right, but there are some creative solutions. I think out there to do this Great that's great. I we have a whole bunch of questions about teaching with technology They're they're more tactical than strategic here And I I want to bring a few of these up and I don't think we can get to all There's so many of us do it again friends We'll have to do this again and and also I can blog the questions that we don't get to We have a question from john stites Who so he's preparing to teach this fall on site allegedly a class He's already talked twice online. Have you found any tools or strategies that are either on site or online? But not both So just one and not the other Um I think there are some that you do online that would be really boring to do on site You know take to have students go through and watch a video on site would seem a little weird, right? People do that People yeah, yeah Um I so I think like some of the digital's You know, like there's some really great digital tools where students read and answer formative questions as they read, right? That'd be a really weird thing to do on site. I think um Yeah, I don't know like I can do most things I would do on site online Like I don't know that I could think of something that Hmm, I still can't I was trying to think of something that I couldn't do online at this point and I'm not really coming up with anything Um All right, that's okay. We john that's Students practice giving presentations online with each other. I just put them in in a small group Small groups of size two and they take turns presenting to each other for practice like there you go It's actually easier than doing it in person because they don't all hear the other groups and get distracted by it So if you're all in the same room, yeah, I don't know I think it's pretty easy to do things online, but I've been doing it for a long time and so I think some of it's like You need people to get comfortable with that and you know, one of the things I do in saturday workshops is like Let people practice with things I feel comfortable with it. So they have an experience Where they're the student doing all this active stuff online and starting to feel comfortable with like, oh I know how this works. I know how this feels from the student side like I feel this yeah a related question from uh, ruben platedura who's been a great guest in the past We're going to bring him back About video um, and he he points out that Video is not new. We've been we've known about this work starting all the way back in the 1970s So question is how do we introduce all the faculty to this work? Is it more of that uh pure instruction that you're talking about having faculty teach each other and swapping instructional designers I think some of it honestly has to do with um Understanding a little bit more about how learning really happens, uh, which sometimes just happens from teaching online, right? um That learning happens when you engage with that video not just because you watched it So learning happens when you like try to do a problem set and you can't figure out a problem So what do you do you go watch the lesson on the problem to figure out what you don't know, right? It's very rarely.  No, they go take the multiple choice quiz first And if they don't know something they go back and look at this tiny section of the textbook, right? So I think um More and learning has always happened that way when people are sitting in classrooms To assume they've been paying attention to the professor this whole time like this the last 50 years It's kind of a farce, right? Are some of them paying attention? Yes Many of them don't have the attention span to to to pay attention for an entire class. They're daydreaming now They're on their phones or their computers, right? They're watching what the people next to them are doing in class like There's all sorts of ways. They're not paying attention in person and so Um I don't remember what the question was now, but About teaching um teaching faculty how to use video again, it's such a the technical part, you know, we you know, that's important But also that we we've been doing this. We've been thinking about this And there are a ton of fantastic video collections out there already, right? So Depending on the field and what you want to say there are plenty of fantastic options for You know pulling in content from somebody else and supplementing it with a little bit of your own for like what the discussion is actually about or what the um or bringing it into modern times or Are things like that like I would have loved to watch the the Feynman physics lectures when I took physics Like that would have been a really cool thing to do You know and the principle those basic principles of physics haven't changed much and you know To watch it from somebody who was truly a master at teaching it would have been fun We have a question that's kind of the mirror opposite of that and I wanted I want to flash this up This is from mark rush uh, Washington and lee um And he says the thread of class recording is being taken out of context means that impromptu aspects of the live class may disappear No more jokes for example I wonder about that. I mean So I think that there are um A couple things about this. So I don't think that we should take um Live classes and turn them into the permanent online archive for something I think that if you're going to make permanent online videos that you need to actually kind of design those plan them and Record them in a separate uh environment From a live class They just turn out a little bit better that way and you don't have to worry about privacy concerns with students answering questions or things like that But with the classes the classes that you record live There's a couple possibilities. I think you know sometimes the If I know that one student can't make a live session I just send the one student that link if it wasn't something that was like I'm actually teaching something in this session If I'm going to actually teach something in the session I'm probably going to record a video on it for a permanent online experience, right? if it's us discussing things quite honestly Like 50 of my class time is the students working in small groups I'm not saying anything that recording is gets kind of boring if you actually want to watch it and um, I think that maybe we should have already been thinking about If you wouldn't want somebody to see this in a video should you be saying it in class every student's got a cell phone Every student's got a video recorder on that cell phone Even if they're not holding it up, you don't know that they're not recording it at their desk So if it's something that you wouldn't want repeated to another faculty member a news show something like that then I don't know that you should be saying it in class or You should record it in a video that you designed so you can say it exactly the way you want to say it So that's no question what the context is it can't be misinterpreted You can point to the exact source if it comes into question, right? Like I think that's actually a safer way to go I've been meaning to do that for some of my some of the lectures I have to keep giving um Speaking of which we have a fan note here From cali morrison. She says, you know, there are all kinds of tools like, um course tune Good for you, I think Have you have you heard of this thing called course two? But we We are almost at the at the end of time. So we've got um, we have one, uh one last question Which is from the industry mckinnon at the university of wisconsin stout And she asks well lab activities like chemistry lab and fieldwork. How do we teach these online? Yeah, so I have a ton of ideas about this. Um, one of the things I think faculty can do so like I've taken every kind of lab biology chemistry physics engineering And uh, one of the things that's interesting about a lot of these labs is they're kind of cookbooks If they're not designed very well and that that's kind of our default in academia is I will hand you a lab to do You perform the lab and do the calculations. We call it a lab, right? But interestingly, I think students are asked often enough. Why do we do each step of this lab like What if I have several choices here? Which choice would be the right one to take at this step in the lab, right? We have to monitor and watch the labs instead, right? That's what we do with our time in lab is make sure nobody blows anything up and make sure everything is safe and Well, you could record A lab, right? You could record all the different individual steps of labs with a place to ask questions about why Steps are happening and what like why you could do them live You could do them in individual pieces with responses to the parts And then, you know, if you need them to analyze data You can just give every student a set of data that's their data for the end of the lab Right? It might be good data. It might be somewhat questionable data They should know what to do with it. Either way, right? Don't grade them on the quality of the data because you gave them the data Grade them on the quality of the analysis of the data, right? So there's really two things there. There's Why do we set up experiments the way we set them up? What is the scientific method? What is Uh, you know, how do we do that? I I fear we don't actually do enough of that in lab classes We focus so much on getting the good data and analyzing it. We kind of skip that initial part So again, like our silver lining is maybe this is the opportunity to finally address that Because we don't have to worry about the safety of 30 or 50 students in the lab setting We can actually focus on why we do things like And how we design experiments and what would happen in this experiment if you did this instead of this Because you don't have to worry that they're going to actually do it You just have to find out if they know what would happen if they changed the experiment at that moment, right? In a sense what you're asking for is you're asking for people to talk around the hands-on work And to explore the intellectual framework around it Yeah, and certainly every discipline has some specific tools where you can have somebody do that recipe based experiment But I actually think it's better if we focus on the scientific method of the the process And the can I do an analysis of the process and so much the time we grade them on the correct data I'm actually a little more concerned right now whether students can do a correct analysis saying You know what this data is no good. I would rerun the experiment Like right there. They never get that because they're so afraid their outcomes are going to be bad, right? But if bad outcomes happen in the real world, we should know what to do with them Well good outcomes happen When you folks ask fantastic questions and we have brilliant people like yourself when you're answering them We're we're just past the end of the hour. So we need to stop. I hate to say it, but Maria first of all Well, we're gonna haul you back. Don't worry. That's how we're like we've got tasers lined up to bring you back What um, uh, is the best way to keep up with you uh, business in this girl on twitter Yeah, I see business girl if you have any faculty who are interested in the stem workshops We're doing um, they're all you can sign up for them through all me education And if you're starting to think you want to do some like higher quality curriculum design work Um, we can handle some of the load of bringing in all your data and and you know helping you really move forward on that With course tune so if you haven't seen course tune Come come by the website and sign up for a demo and we'll show it to you and tell you how we can help you Be ahead of this for our schools who already were using course tune. I think they were a bit ahead of this crisis They knew a lot more about their curriculum than everybody else The course tune edge Maria, thank you so much. You're welcome much.  I need to announce some stuff for the next couple of weeks And I I want to thank you all for the terrific barrage of questions I'm going to save these so that we can cling to Maria when she comes back um I just want to say that uh looking forward uh over the next few weeks We have a whole series of guests lined up And they're going to be talking about a wide range of subjects. Um, we have uh, sonia ardoin is going to be talking about student experience Uh, Jonathan Rothwell is going to be talking about inequality and professions We have james lang is going to be talking about small teaching online And we have a few more on top of that. So the next month is already being booked up Uh, if you have other topics or if you have other people that you'd like me to invite, please reach out to me Um, I'm always grateful grateful to hear that if you want to keep talking about these subjects Like how to teach with video how to teach online how to bring A thousand plus classes online to hurry we have all kinds of ways of talking about between forum sessions So you can tweet at us at the ftte use that hashtag or tweet at me, uh, bryan alexander We have groups on facebook groups on linkedin. We have a slack channel We'll be delighted to hear from you And in the meantime, if you'd like to go back and look at the 200 Uh recordings give me 201 tonight. Um, please just head to that URL. The archive is there waiting for you Um, and in the meantime, um, we look forward to seeing you next week I hope you're all well. I know you're all brilliant. Please stay safe. We'll talk to you soon Bye. Bye