Hello USDLA friends! Welcome to the Sept. 15, 2023, Free Friday Webinar on Trends in Distance Learning. In this hour-long presentation, you’ll learn from five of our board members about trends they are tracking, including hybrid classes, AI, and so much more.

Our panelists for today’s webinar include: USDLA president Chuck Sengstock, long-time advisory board member Bill Ryan, state chapter chair Erica Bell, and public policy chair Alexandra Salas. Our moderator is president-elect Valary Oleinik.

Scroll down for the transcription of the webinar. And be sure to watch the video on USDLA.tv.

Don’t miss a single webinar or event! Become a member: www.USDLA.org.

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Trends in Distance Learning: 2023

Chuck Sengstock: I’d like to welcome everybody! I am proud to be the 2023-2024 President of the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA). I’m also the director of continuing education and professional development within the school of education at Drake University in Iowa, where I’ve worked for 18 years. My professional career has been spent higher, specifically in distance learning.

Bill Ryan: I’m down here in Louisville, Kentucky, and I’ve been involved in distance since the days of video conferencing when we had dishes on trucks that we drove around. These racing stripes are well-earned. I also was a CIO once upon a time. I’ve been running my own company as an independent consultant for the last eight years.

Erica Bell: I am relatively new to this board and working directly with the state chapters. I’m also President of the Tennessee Distance Learning Association. I live in rural west Tennessee and have worked in distance learning for 22 years. I just hide my racing stripes. I’m the executive director of regional centers and online programs at the University of Tennessee, Martin. We have a large infrastructure with over 50 Zoom distance learning classrooms across 6 locations.

Alexandra Salas: Hello, everyone! I am the Vice President of Digital Learning and Innovation at Newman University in Aston, Pennsylvania, and I am the chair of the Public Policy Committee at USDLA. I’m happy to be here today!

Valary: Thank you all. Let’s get the discussion going, starting with the trend of hybrid learning.

Bill: What is a hybrid class? What is high flex? And what is blended learning? To me, it’s all based on some variation of technology. This has been a very personal journey, not only because of my own experience but also because my 21-year-old twins have been going through this process in the education industry, which has been in shock since the pandemic hit in March of 2019. They finished high school at home in 2020, and watching them from the perspective of an application person, practitioner, and curriculum designer has fascinated me.

The idea of our design impacts the various modalities, and watching them choose courses at their respective institutions of higher learning based on flexibility, accessibility, and the idea that they don’t have to be there to set time every single time. On a professional level, watching these modalities impacts our industry, and I’m seeing four trends.

• The whole scalable aspect of platforms in the professional area, like Cornerstone and Dotabo, is user-generated content. Students add information to the conversations, and it becomes part of the course process.
• I’m seeing learning experience designs such as LinkedIn. A great example is Viva.
• Learning from Microsoft is following behind that in that area where the experience comes with you.
• Finally, the whole idea of collaboration is exploding. Noble Ed is an example of this.

Erica: In my role as executive director of regional centers and online programs, I speak for the University of Tennessee at Martin. Our hybrid structure is limited, based on how our tuition structure works. We have an in-person tuition. and then we have to code our hybrid courses, and that tuition is tied to in-person tuition. So I want to be flexible. I want to be able to meet a student’s need that says, You know, this 45-minute drive is not working with my current work schedule. I want to be able to make accommodations because I can easily share that Zoom class link with that student. However, we are limited in how our accreditation and state reporting standards are currently structured. I’ve got the finance and administration departments basically saying, “No, this is the bucket you must stay in.” However, if we had some flexibility, I truly believe that we would see significant enrollment increases and financial growth, and it would be less about this is yours, and this is ours. These are our students across our campus. I want to stand from the pulpit sometimes and say, we’re doing this to ourselves. So I would love to know how other schools are managing this. Where is it working well?

Alex: I’d like to jump in and say I think it’s very interesting that your institution charges differently depending on the modality of the class. At Newman, it’s the same tuition rate for all our students, whether they are taking hybrid, online, or in-person classes. I believe that one of the you know reasons why at the core, this continues is because we want to demonstrate to students and their families that the experience that they are getting, whether it’s online hybrid or in person, is the same in terms of quality and rigor, the student experience. We’re working very hard to provide that continuity so that our students on campus feel like they are in a residential institution. If they need to take an online class, there’s no hesitation. Students from any background or denomination, whether they’re adult learners or traditional 18 to 24 undergrads, know they are studying on a campus that supports them. For those who have families and work obligations and can’t have that traditional college experience, we want them to know that they don’t have to worry that their education will be different because it’s contingent upon the rates. That’s part of the opportunity we are facing — to raise awareness about the quality of education so it doesn’t discriminate. I think that is the silver lining of the pandemic: everyone can engage with online instruction. That’s the new business of higher education.

Valary: I think those are excellent insights. There’s definitely a split in approaches regarding how higher education institutions can make money to stay in business. I think the difference between your experiences, Erica and Alex, is the ideology of your institutions because in our post-pandemic world, higher education organizations have to differentiate themselves in important ways if they want to keep the lights on. Indeed, this is a challenge that Chuck and I have been focused on as the president, and president-elect, of USDLA.

Chuck: Absolutely. Because there’s more competition out there than ever before, we are looking at how to differentiate our programs to make them competitive and provide our students with unique programs — online or blended, face-to-face, virtual reality, or augmented reality. Here at Drake, we offer courses where we have difficult conversations with parents or students because those experiences don’t necessarily happen elsewhere but provide students with practice to handle challenges before they occur in a workplace. It’s about self-analysis; we want our students to be prepared for the future.

Valary: You hit on an amazing idea, Chuck, and you are speaking my gamification language when you said escape room. I believe gamification is the latest way to fix boring. We make learning fun. In fact, I was recently speaking with a colleague who is probably the best escape room designer in the world who explained the escape room is not the training. If you’re just doing a team-building exercise, people have the opportunity to physically participate in something together. In an escape room, the point is to observe the behaviors of what’s happening and then develop a training plan for the group.

Bill: That is interesting. One example that comes to mind is when a company is hiring a CIO. Say they have four finalists and use this model because they want a leader who has strong collaboration and communication skills. In an escape room, you clearly can tell what is a candidate’s system thinking process.

Valary: That’s awesome. I love the crossover and it’s also one of the things I love about USDLA. I get to talk to people across constituencies, and that’s where I get some of my best ideas, which I can share with other groups, especially in the PreK-12 arena. I know from talking to Erica that she had challenges in this area. Let’s dig into that.

Erica: Absolutely. I want to make two quick points before we go back to the PreK-12 conversation. We have four motor companies coming in about 13 miles from one of my regional centers and meeting with the executives, one of the executives was very clear. When we were talking about soft skills, he stood up and said, I don’t know why we’re calling them soft skills. They’re power skills. And I’m hiring based on that. That stuck with me. So when I’m when I’m working with our K-12 constituents, and our dual enrollment schools, I push that verbiage. In regard to the escape room philosophy, we have a new Chancellor that has just come to our institution who has a background in student services. I could see him using that tool to get to know his Chancellor’s cabinet better. With regard to PreK-12, I have about 1,500 dual enrollment students across the state of Tennessee. We teach in-house, and also have a huge online dual enrollment platform, in part because I don’t have to go to the state and ask for a site code. This gives me the ability to go out and market our offerings more broadly. But I’ve seen a disconnect in the support that our institution could provide to our PreK-12 partners. Learning AI is a huge opportunity, I think, for us to partner and help each other, but I’m not seeing PreK-12 address this at all. Many high school juniors and seniors think this is a cool tool, but if they use it, they are often punished. I’ve already had this issue come up four times, and we’re only three weeks into the semester. What does this group think is a solution?

Alex: You are correct. I think we need support to work with the students on helping properly use AI.

Erica: I agree, and I think the issue is that students do not see the risk, and the instructor does, which is why they immediately penalize them. I know there’s an opportunity to go in and work with our PreK-12 instructors and that goes beyond dual enrollment students. We need to work with the entire school.

Alex: I think this is reminiscent of the use of cell phones in the classroom and the risk of plagiarism. With AI, or even the use of learning management systems, there needs to be a direct connection to an agreed-on policy. Not until recently was the definition of distance education revised to incorporate regular and substantive interaction. This is common sense and there isn’t only one answer. It’s about establishing ongoing conversations at many levels to eliminate the fear.

Robert Paxton: I am excited to be here in this webinar, and I want to share an idea I learned from a podcast where the host asked students to use AI to create a report on a company. The task, though, was to determine what they got wrong. This required the student to use critical thinking skills to make edit. Then they had to the class through the process of finding and verifying facts using different sources.

Erica: Yes! That exercise teaches important life skills to find out if an answer is correct and if it makes sense. It’s a great use of how to use these generative AI as a lesson plan to teach other skills while demonstrating that AI is a useful tool, but it is not always perfect.

Valary: That’s a phenomenal idea which I will be sharing with our 75 faculty members over the weekend. This is everybody’s going to be stealing that one I can. I can feel all the pens going. That’s what we’re gonna do. That’s what we’re gonna do. But you shared it. And that’s the important part. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah. That’s why we do this, because we all have heard and and learned things that sometimes we we think everybody knows. But everybody doesn’t. So that’s what I always love about. You know, people sharing things like this. But yeah, I was. I was also just kind of curious: If anybody has any resources they know of that are good resources to help if they’ve seen to the support question of cause. Yes, there’s there’s the support lacking, perhaps, in the both the K. 12 side and perhaps some of the instructors in the higher Ed side that don’t really know how to couch that, you know, and and don’t have those clever ideas about how to do it. But the other, the other question, I think, is about because Bill was having some commentary. We were so most were having some commentary in the chat about it. And also in the corporate space. And there the focus is is a lot on the security ethics and privacy questions of it. And so I was just wondering if anybody had any additional thoughts, because I have a lot of questions in that space. I actually did a post about this after a previous Usda webinar, where we had a participant who was not here today. But the otter AI pilot came to the webinar — 2 weeks in a row, and I had some. I had some thoughts about it, cause I was like, there’s some privacy concern. There’s definitely some privacy concerns here. The the rest of you did not consent to that, like, you know, when you logged into the webinar, you weren’t expecting that this video could be used. I don’t know how. I don’t know how the the Little Otter love otters, but I don’t know how the little otter did that but then I also was thinking, like, you know, some of these things are good assistive technologies, and I didn’t. Wanna people were like, Oh, you should have just kicked them out of the out of the room. You know you can do that in zoom. I’m like, yes, I understand. I can remove someone from the zoom room. But I also understand that maybe the person was using this technology because they needed some assistive technology because of a language barrier, some sort of disability. So I just curious if anybody wanted to chime in any additional thoughts on that side of the AI portion of it. I know there was a a very good video on Linkedin recently by Nicholas Thompson. If any of you follow him, he’s the former editor of Wired Magazine. He’s now at the Atlantic. But he does the the most interesting thing in tech videos every day, and one of them he had recently was the fact that he wrote a book years ago, and recently found out that it had been scraped along with a lot of other copywritten material, and is now part of Gpt. 4, and so this this notion of where the information is coming from is part of this conversation that we have to have with with students, too, with, you know. Them. And that’s I guess, my third part of my I should not ask multi part questions. But I just this is a good topic. How do we get the word out to the general public? I guess that’s that’s part of my frustration about distance, education in general. People have all these misunderstandings. And so if anybody has thoughts on any of those things.

Bill: As a consultant, even in my internal days I was always arguing with clients, internal clients going. You know, we can do e-learning. We can do online, you know, we can do performance support and and and even lead teams. And I let global teams. You know, I teams in India, Philippines, and domestically across the country. So I’ve been doing that kind of stuff most my life, and I still consistently ran into people saying, Oh, you can’t do that! Oh, we can’t learn that way. Oh, you can’t help people at a time. and I will say that since 2020 the conversations have changed. I no longer had to have the first 4 meetings convincing people you can. Now the conversations have turned to one of 2 things either how can we do it better? Or when should we do this, or should, when should we have in person? So now they’re actually getting that, there’s a little more discrete analysis going in place. So I’ve seen a change in conversations. So I think people are more aware. But I think to really come to answer your solution is is that when we figure out how to explain the value proposition to them that meets their needs. II don’t mind, wasn’t it for me when we you know, how did how did siri get so popular? Because it answered my question of Where’s the nearest restaurant near me? Where’s the nearest Chinese restaurant near me? That’s what I want to know I’ll use it. I’ll figure it out when we can do that with the rest of our stuff. Don’t forget the biggest Lms platform in the world: Youtube. We figured that out. We meet people’s needs easily. We’re there.

Alex: Ok, the soapbox is now available for our next participant. I was just going to add to that and say that, and I was going to put in the chat. But I just took too long when we talk about ethics, you know. People fear the invasion of some of these tools, but the reality is, you know, Amazon Echo and Siri. Sometimes they speak to us when they’re not being spoken to. I didn’t ask you a question, you know, so I find myself speaking to the ether, saying that was, that conversation was not with you, you know. So next I’m waiting for an apology like, Oh, pardon, pardon me, I thought you were talking to me, but you know it hasn’t evolved that way yet, but I’m sure it will at some point, because I find I’m having conversations on my drive, and then siri will speak to me, and I’m like, wait a minute. I have the GPS on. You know, I’m having a conversation. And these things, you know. And this is happening. So the use of like auto AI, or you know these note taking ais we have to kind of put it in perspective in terms of at the invasion of our privacy. We’re driving down streets and highways being recorded. So what is privacy? I think maybe we have to redefine privacy in the future, you know, these are just questions, more questions.

Chuck: No, this is all really fascinating. If you don’t mind if I jump in here really quickly. One thing I will say from the standpoint of my position, we’re actually going to have a workshop into a webinar coming up in another month or so, specific to AI and Pre, K, 12, education. And we wanna have a discussion with PreK-12 educators. We’d like to find out what their concerns are here within the State of Iowa and maybe elsewhere. But we’re also going to include some individuals from school of education as well as our Math and Computer Science Department, through Arts and our College of Arts and Sciences. Here at Drake and talk specifically about, you know not. Only I think, really what what we’ve heard a lot here. I’ve heard a lot from. The individuals that I work with are concerned. But going back to you know the opportunities that we’ve been talking about. I think there’s, you know, there’s both sides of the coin. And so looking at not only what are the concerns, but what are the opportunities, and having an open discussion, and then moving forward and and potentially from our standpoint here, within continuing Ed helping answer some of those questions, moving forward as well as ways, providing opportunities to individuals to find ways that they can use AI to move forward in the future, or at least use AI within their class in a positive way, just going back to what Robert had said around. You know, what are some of the the teaching opportunities? So I think I think it’s really trying to, at least on in my mind. Here, within the State and with the individuals I’ve been speaking to, is just trying to find ways that we can educate each other on both sides and then find ways that we can move forward. That makes sense. We just kicked off on our campus women in stem. And so from that in our dual enrollment program, we’re going to do girls in stem. I think it’s an opportunity for our cyber security students here on the main campus to do some outreach not only promoting the program, but you know, encouraging girls to come into that field. So I think that’s an opportunity that is wide open.

Valary: I love that, and timely since for those who don’t know October is cyber awareness month. So stay tuned, and protect yourselves, and change your passwords, and do all the things, and whatever and I kind of I feel like I kind of short changed policy is such a big area. I wanna I wanna I wanna swing back to Alex and see, is there? Is there? Is there another area of policy you’d like to. You’d like to talk about we have. We have about 10 more minutes. So this is flying by as I as I knew it would. But I wanted to pass that back if you’d like to.

Alex: I want to invite everybody to think about policy. I know that our our focus is on distance education. But the policy issues impacting higher Ed are not just specifically impacting distance. Ed, but I think they trickle over to distance. Ed, and it’s important for us to be aware of them whether we’re talking academic freedom, tenure, contingent faculty, definitions of different education, modalities, you know, diversity, there’s just so much change. And and I think it’s I think it’s it makes for interesting conversation to look at policy as not as being a political right which I think is really difficult because of how emotional policy can become. But if we make an effort to look at the root of the the root of the policy, the reason for the policy, I think, that can keep all of us on track, no matter what. And so, you know, I mean, I think it. We’re too short on time to talk about specific policies. You know. II had mentioned earlier that I was interested in talking about the definition, for example, of a distance. Ed. That has been revised. And there are many different organizations, whether the accreditation agencies. There’s Nc. Sara who are looking at specific ways or policies to that impact the work that they do in terms of accrediting. And then it also impacts on a more local level, the institutions to update their policies because there are institutions that you know, it’s almost like a strategic plan. It becomes this very nice work on a shelf, right? A paperweight? Hopefully not. But you know, these these policies need to be living, breathing documents that are also as agile as the change that we have to experience. That’s my introduction to a policy discussion which I hope that we can have one and several, you know, along along the way, and maybe not make it as broad, maybe have more defined policy discussions because they do merit the space to really, you know, dive in, take a deeper dive. So if anyone wants to chime in.

Valary: Jack, you wanna help me out here. I’m giving Alice. I didn’t expect you to do all the topics today. But yes, we do. As she mentioned. We said, we have webin. The webinars are ongoing, and we will. Probably starting at the beginning of the year. I think it’s safe to say we will be dedicating a number of these Fridays to more focused topics within that space. So definitely communicate with Alex and let her know if there’s a you know we can.

Chuck: I know that we’ve talked here briefly about Pre. K. 12. Education and one of the policy webinars that we will have in the spring is going to be the Dean of the School of education at Drake University. Dr. Ryan Wise. He was the Director of the Department of Education in Iowa before he came to Drake, and so he’s going to be talking about some specific topics. That will soon be we that are forthcoming. But at the same time, you know, we we’re looking at. As Alex said. We’re looking at, you know. What are the opportunities or the I should say the policies that we should be speaking to at this point. We have talked as as you had mentioned the beginning. Valerie, around in Dl, a national distance learning week. That’s gonna be specific to AI. But we’re also gonna be looking at. What are some? We’re gonna have at least one policy conversation. At least, that’s the plan around that right now. And so I think it’s looking in, Alice. You brought up some good points, you know what’s apolitical, but at the same time, what are the things, you know. What are things that you would like to hear, or what are the opportunities for Usdla from the standpoint of representing different policies? That’s what we would like to hear from you, and I know Alex has done a survey has sent out a survey in the past. We’d really like to know. What? What would you like us to represent? We’ve we have represented. We’ve done some policy work around broadband in the past. We also did a we had a, and this was a number of years ago in Washington, DC. We did something around Nc. Sara, and so, either way, though we have a lot of opportunities for you to present your you know what are the things that you would like us to to discuss and bring to the forefront. And then we’re going to try and move forward with those.

Valary: We have people registering for National Distance Learning Week (NDLW) as we speak. Vicky put in the comments she sees a need to attend. So again, those dates will be November 6-10. I know many institutions out there have their own programming that they have that week. We are not, we are not we. We were the ones who led the charge for NDLW. But we are not the only ones who have events that week. So if your institution does have things going on that week, we would love to know about that as well, because we like to cross-promote that and let everybody know all the available options that are out there. Because others will be having other topics, and while AI is A is A is a big one for a lot of people. There’s a other, a lot of other big topics as well, so please let us know again. I’m speaking partially to my future audience. Cause I know many, many will be watching later, and if your institution, like, I said, does have planning then that’s great. If you have any questions, obviously just reach out to us. Alright so, and no worries, no worries, Vicki. Time has ceased to work properly since the pandemic. In my opinion, I have no idea when things happen anymore. It’s either before today or sometime in the future. That’s the only time I know