[Panel] Today’s Learner Journey, Reimagined

Alright. Hello, everybody. I'm back. I'm like a bad penny as the British would say. I just keep turning up. It's great to be here.

Panel, can I Alma and Leo, you wanna come up and join me? A big round of applause, folks, for our panel. Yay. Oh, I heard a wolf. Please grab a seat. So if we could just go back one slide if we can.

There we go. Thank you. How are you both? Oh, good. That's good. Earlier is very interesting.

Thank you. Did you recognize the need to be adaptive? Yeah. Yes. Why don't we just kick off doing just a little bit of introductions? They've got to know me already, but Leo, why don't you introduce yourself to the audience? Yes. Hi.

My name is Leo Valdez. I am with Holy Angel University as its officer in charge president. Thank you Alma. So, I'm Alma Delacruz, I'm the senior vice president of FEU Roosevelt, and FE Roosevelt is a very new acquisition of the Far Eastern University. Wonderful.

And, we're gonna have a fantastic panel conversation around today's learner journey reimagined, and then I'm gonna get up for a few minutes at the end just to weave in some of the comments from Leo and Almer into a little bit of a call to action around the student journey in a GenAI world. Does that sound okay? Alright. Very good. So why don't we dive right in because we've got some really good good questions. The first question, and Alma, I'm gonna come to you first, if that's okay.

So when we talk about the learner journey, what does that really mean to you and your institution, and how has that sort of concept shifted over the years as learners' needs and expectations have evolved. Can you bring that to life for us? Yeah. So I joined the institution in twenty eighteen, this far eastern this F. Roosevelt. So at F.

E. Roosevelt, you know, the learner journey goes beyond completion of a degree level, a completion of a grade level because we also handle basic education I at Uruzweld. And it goes beyond the completion of a degree program. It encompasses the whole experience of a student, which means this we take care of their academic, social, emotional, and even their well-being. So what we do at FU Roosevelt is that we make sure that we create safe spaces and supportive learning spaces for all our students.

And this transition, this learning journey from the past transitioned over time, and it was actually more pronounced during the pandemic time. And over time And as I said, especially during the pandemic, we showed or we learned that learning is not a linear thing and it's rather a unique experience for all our students. So I think that change during the time of the pandemic, and it's a great realization that learning cannot happen in a linear way anymore just like before, but the learning is unique to a particular student, a particular class. Yeah. What I really love about your answer, you've used a lot of really deeply human emotional language to describe what the student journey needs to be about.

Later in my remarks, I referred to it as sort of helping them belong in the institution. So tell me a bit more about how important you think that is. So even in a very in a digital ecosystem that we adopt because of the advancement of technology, it is still very, very important that the students, the teachers, and everyone in the schools are connected, and they have emotional connections, They should feel that they are really very supported, and that these safe learning spaces for them are available. Yeah. I'm so glad to hear you you say that.

You know, I'm the university that I ran as president, the last one was ninety thousand undergraduate students, and one of our biggest challenges was to help students feel like they weren't just a number, that this was a community, that they were at home here. That word safe that you used, we really wanted to make sure that they could bring their genuine self to the university. They could be themselves, and it takes a lot of work to do that. Yeah. And and and not only for our on-site students.

We also make this make sure that even our students who are attending online feels that they are in a safe learning environment. Even they are present virtually, they can still feel that they are safe, they can express their thoughts very well, and they can do things that they will not be actually judged, and They are not, you know, there is cyber bullying or bullying inside campuses nowadays, but we make sure that our students feel safe. Yeah. Whether on-site or online. Leo, your thoughts on the student journey, how it's changed, shifting expectations? What are your thoughts? I think when we shifted to mostly online during the pandemic.

That was like a a portal that we went through that we couldn't come back from. The moment that changed Everything changed about the the student journey. The student was no the learner's journey was no longer only about the acquisition of of and learning of different things, but more about their personal well-being as well. And I I think one of the things that you've talked about was how so many people had changed because of of the pandemic and that there was a need to understand where they're going and imagine talking about that school with ninety thousand students, you've got ninety thousand journeys in there. Yep.

You sure do. You can't just Take a look at each one of them and talk to each one of them because that scale is very difficult to to deal with. So a lot of things have happened and mostly it's on the emotional side. And that's why one of the priorities normally in our school as we were getting in and out of the pandemic was to make sure that socialization was an important component of of the learning and not necessarily just content. It was more about where are you right now? How do you feel? We have a word for that.

It's como stahan. And the moment that you start asking the question, where are you now? Then there are a lot of answers for that. They're all varied. So there must be a way to scale up and understand how each person is different, and how how their journey has changed because of that. But that's only one one dimension.

What a beautiful answer about the student journey. Like, yes, I had ninety thousand students, but actually that's ninety thousand different journeys. And one of the things I'll talk about is the need to have that three hundred and sixty degree view of your students and how technology can help with that. But actually, your provocation is yes, but Martin, it's going to be ninety thousand three hundred and sixty degree views of the student, and how can you scale that? How can you provide that. A really wonderful provocation.

While I've got you, Leo, where do you see the biggest gap between how we've traditionally structured education and how learners today actually wanna move through it? I I think when we take a look at education as it was prior to the pandemic, it was always the same kind of teaching. It was right down the middle. You were teaching to a group of people who were in a bell curve and, you know, you were really teaching to the to to the top of the bell curve. There are people who could learn faster, slower. There are people who had different ways of looking at things.

I mean, adult learners are that way. And so the educational system from a teacher led point of view was no longer as as applicable to the student as it it was as as it is today. We know that students have realized that as we take a look at individual journeys that they have different ways of learning and they have different preferences as well In their learning styles. So I think one of the things that we have to start dealing with is how do we make sure that we are providing education that is meant for all in the classroom. Understanding that there are going to be those who are moving ahead faster and those who are lagging behind.

How do you make sure that those who are lagging behind are still considered? I'll just give you an example of what we are trying to do. And we have a program called, three angels. You know, we're Holy Angel University. So we have a three angels program where each student has a support system. Three angels as we call them.

One could be a peer, another one is the instructor, and another one from student student affairs And guidance. So as long as you've got those three and then, of course, you're gonna have more in in the future, it is possible then to take a look at each person as much as possible. From from their point of view rather than from the instructor point of view, which is just instructor to student with very little modification for what's going what they're what's going on with them. I love it. I love the concept of of three angels.

It was Father's Day in Australia on Sunday, and I have three daughters, so I had my three angels with me on. Sunday, which was very nice. Changing expectations. What are your thoughts? What are the gaps, Alma? Yeah. So for for me, the thing of the past is actually, as Leo has articulated, is that we always thought before that one size fits all.

If they are all in the classroom, the assumption of the teachers that they learn at the same pace. But the realization is that or the gap, I think, is on the rigidness of the structure before. And that we actually have now realized that there should be flexibility in the learning modalities and that we have to make sure that there is adaptive technology that will allow the students to move at their own pace so that we are assured that none of the students who cannot finish things up as fast as the others are left behind. Yeah. And at the same time, the others who can do it faster are not held back as well.

So I think the gap is on the rigidness, but it can be resolved by adding more flexible modalities and integration of more adaptive technologies in the teaching and learning. Yeah, and as we'll talk about, the promise of generative AI to create the personalization, the adaptiveness, the ability to scaffold content that matches to my learning style. Isn't it wonderful, though, that we're now allowed to openly talk about neurodiversity in the classroom as well. The fact that not everybody thinks and and absorbs information the same way. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but I think it's wonderful that we as educators are asked to challenge ourselves around not just the middle of the bell curve, but leaving nobody behind.

I think it's a much better place we're in now. Yeah. Okay. Super. Leo, back to you.

Can you share a real world example where your institution has really shifted a process, a practice, or a policy to create more flexibility and adaptability that Alma was just describing. Give us a concrete example if you can. Okay. We have we have an online learning system, which is strongly based on the capabilities actually of Canvas. It's, I I guess, if you want to look for it, it's part of our video case study, which you can find in instructure dot com.

And one of the things we did was to ensure that we use features such as Blueprints and Templates. The templates are for common look and feel. The blueprints are for consistency. But then we included certain policies such as developing your courses, developing course content, one semester or one whole year in advance. So once you've put them all into, Canvas' modules, then they're available to the student at any time.

Fantastic. Then they can see what's coming up ahead if they're in a rush, or they can go back to previous, material if they're falling behind. So the pace of the student is being supported by the technology. And as we do that as well, because we've already developed content, then there's no need to do planning, you know, lesson planning for the classroom. What we just said what we just told them was since the lesson's already planned, it's already up there, then focus on student engagement in the classroom.

I think it's a wonderful example. When I was president of the Open University in the UK, and there we had two seventy thousand students, nearly all working adults. And what we learned and we've been operating since nineteen sixty nine, and what we've learned is humans, particularly adults, crave structure. They love being able to look ahead and see what's ahead. They love having clear expectations about where they are and where they're going.

It shouldn't be a mystery. It shouldn't be opaque. I just love that example because our brains relax. Even if we're behind, our brains relax because at least we know what we've gotta do to catch up. I think that's a wonderful example, a concrete example.

Alma, what have you got for us? Yeah. For us, so what Leo has mentioned, we also have that in Canvas as we are early adopters of Canvas. We started in twenty sixteen even before the pandemic. But beyond academics, what we did at FU Roosevelt, and we started it during the pandemic, is we put in the onboarded the student support services. So we had what we call e guidance and wellness.

We also had the e health and fitness, and even the e library. And the e guidance and wellness allowed us to reach out to our students, our staff, our teachers, and we have to find out how they are doing in terms of their mental health. And this was this was very useful to us during the pandemic. And even the e health and fitness, it made it possible for us to track our students who have contacted the the virus then and guide them to restoration of their health. The eLibrary was made possible with with our partners who provided our ebooks, like we partnered with Cengage MindTap and McGraw Hill and World Book Online.

We have thousands of books, and we were able to put all of these on board Canvas. So this is our on top of all the academic things that we do, so that the students can actually see what's in in their class, what are their assignments, their tasks, etcetera. We made sure that we also look after our students by providing this student support services online. What I love about that is that you are thinking just as deeply around me having an emotional connection to the institution digitally as you are as if I was showing up on campus, and I think the more that we embrace the lifelong learner, micro credentials, alternative types of students, the more we are going to have to pay attention to connecting emotionally, and people say, well, you can't do it. All you need to do is to watch young people emotionally connect through digital devices, and you'll understand you absolutely can do it, and there's a good way to do it and a bad way to do it as well.

We're gonna jump to the last question because I'm not sure if we'll have time. So, Leo, if you had the power to rewrite just one core assumption that's baked into our current education system, something that maybe we take for granted and, about learners or learning, What would you challenge? So you get to challenge just one thing to make a big difference. What would you challenge? Okay. I got this ans I got this idea from also from your presentation, the last column where it says, I win, you lose. Yeah.

We have to change our attitude towards Winning and losing. Our attitude towards those who who pass and those who fail. There's always this idea that those who fail, they just sort of disappear. And those who pass, like, for example, when we have our our students who our our graduates who go into board exams, and then they pass the board exams, they're celebrated. They they're invited back.

We give them a a wonderful dinner. But in the dinner, it's almost like saying losers not included. Wow. Okay? Fail failures not included. So failure is an interesting concept that we have not supported as much in the learning journey.

Because one of the things that we keep celebrating are the winners. There was a an article by rapper about a decade ago for a family that had five Five valedictorians. And it was so well received that they repeated the same story a year later because they were getting all the hits. What that was just celebrating was All the winning. And I think that if we take a look at just winning, then the people who are who are there will normally think, I think I'm okay already, so I don't need to grow anymore.

Meanwhile, those who fail have room to grow. So we have to change the thinking of failure as failure leads to despair or You know, it It's I I I think I put down a word here. Failure is not Defeat. Okay. Failure is an opportunity to learn resiliency.

So in essence, I think we learn more from our failures than we do from winning. So we have to change that thinking in our educational system that we keep celebrating winning only and not look after the people who are Left behind. And so it's just like as I spoke about before mistakes. You can't have the right outcome or in an adaptive world if you can't celebrate reward mistakes. We have to start rewarding failure because every step forward, even if you stumble at that step, is a step towards resiliency and making the world a better place.

So I think that our mindset needs to shift around that. What a beautiful answer. What what would you change with your magic wand? For me, if I have if I can because I have just mentioned we are highly regulated, But if I can change one thing, I would change the mindset that classroom seat time is not equal to learning time. So, yeah. So because we have realized that it's not the amount of time you are seated inside the classroom that actually equates to learning.

The learning happens because you are allowed to grow as a person, and you're allowed to learn at your own time and at your own pace, and you achieve mastery because you are You do this at your own time and pace, and you are happy doing it. So, I believe that it should be measured not by the amount of time you sit inside the classroom or you sit inside, you sit listening to the lecturer, but rather it should be measured by the competencies that you acquired, and the the assessment should not be the actual standardized assessments that we know Yeah. But should be authentic assessments, assessments that you enjoy, and this can be evidenced by portfolios, simulations, among others. And so if I will have the power to change it, I will change that It should not be equated. The the sitting time should not be equated to learning.

I could not agree more. Know, the only reason why we've spent so much time talking about generative AI and students teaching. Do you know why we've spent all sorry, students cheating? Do you know the only reason why all the headlines have been about cheating? It's because our assessment sucks. Right? It really does. It is just not fit for purpose.

So what a beautiful way to sum up our panel on what the ideal student journey needs to look like moving forward. Ladies and gentlemen, will you give them a big round of applause for you. Away you go. You. Thank you, Alma.

Thank you, Leo. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, Alma. Alright.

So we're just gonna get my slides a bit bigger on the screen, and we're going to take right off. Alright. A wonderful panel. And now Harrison and I get to wrap up the afternoon once the music slows down so I can hear myself think. Very good.

Thank you. Alright. So just a little bit of rapid fire thoughts from professor Bean on the application of generative AI on the student journey. And don't worry, we'll make sure you get these slides like we will most of the content today, so just relax. But I guess I've got a little bit of bad news for you.

Today is the slowest day of the rest of your working life, And that is because the reality of the pace of disruption, innovation, and generative AI is just going to continue to speed everything up. And the one universal reality everywhere in the world for teachers at all levels and those that support teachers is that they are time poor. They're time poor. So if generative AI is going to speed everything up, and if we're already time poor, then we have a challenge, don't we? There lies, in my opinion, as I discussed with a couple of colleagues from the media earlier today, there lies the greatest value of generative AI in the short term to us as educators and the people who support us. That is to help us to continue to do what we love doing, which is to support our students to achieve their learning outcomes by freeing us up, freeing the humans up to have more time to do the things that we're passionate about and the world needs us to do, and that's the backdrop of my presentation.

And it's all because of this. You heard the commissioner speak about it this morning. Four hundred million users, active users, weekly active users of ChatGPT, and that was up from three hundred million at the end of two thousand and twenty four. It's morphing, changing, and growing exponentially every month and every quarter. This is a heat map that some of you may have seen me present before.

We have a tendency to only think about the promise of generative AI in education in learning and teaching and perhaps research, but it actually has application across the university in everything that we do in the student journey, and that's the way I want you to be thinking about it. It can free up people across the institution, professional staff, teaching staff, administrative staff, if applied correctly, it can free us all up to have more time in an economically constrained environment. You bet that we want to be able to speed up and be more cost effective to let the humans do what we need to do for our students. And it's so it's really about moving from experimentation to transformation. That's why Ed asked me to deliver the the session on leadership before.

The only way we get from experimentation to transformation is if we, the leaders in the sector, step in and actually create the disruption. And what's interesting is seventy five percent of knowledge workers are already using it. Of those, seventy eight percent are bringing their own generative AI to work. They're not waiting. They're not waiting to be told, use this tool, or you've got permission.

But what's really interesting is fifty two percent of our staff are reluctant to tell us that they're using it for the most important tasks. That has got to change. We have to legitimize it. We have to educate our people how to use it. We need to release them to use it, and we need to share and learn from each other about what's working, and we have to expect mistakes.

We have to learn from those mistakes, and we need to continuously evolve. And so when I think about the student journey, I think about three things. I think about enhancing teaching and learning. I think about it as effortless, seamless, delightful student services, and what you heard Leo and Alma talk a lot about on the panel, I talk about belonging. So let's quickly look at the promise of generative AI in each of those areas, and let's start with teaching and learning.

You know, teaching and learning and the application of GenAI allows us to provide instant academic support by answering common course related questions. It allows us to and by the way, this is all happening today. It allows us to launch intelligent tutoring systems. To offer personalized learning recommendations based on that unique student that Leo talked about, uniquely tailored to me, Martin Bean, one of ninety thousand unique student journeys. It allows me to automate routine tasks like grading quizzes, managing assignments, freeing us up for deeper engagement, and it allows us, most importantly, to identify struggling students early, allowing instructors to intervene with targeted support so we don't leave anybody behind.

When we think about effortless, seamless, delightful student services, Here's a quote from a report by KPMG. This was a quote they gave from me. No other sector except perhaps health care would allow so many dead ends in their service architecture. Our service architecture inside universities, colleges, and schools is awful. It's awful.

And when you think about people living in consumer grade technology and consumer experiences, no wonder they don't persist. No wonder they give up. No wonder they get confused and concerned about a lack of clear guidance and expectations that we talked about. With the six big shifts in that report, I think we're spot on. We need to move from compliance driven, and Alma, I know you feel this, that in your world.

We need to move from compliance driven to student centric. We need to move from supplier led, the way we wanna do things, to service led. We got we have to move from disconnected to digitally connected, insight poor to insight rich, fragmented to partnered, and move from a notion of high cost to high value. So here's the promise. AI, when it comes to student services, we can have virtual assistants handling common administrative inquiries twenty four seven.

We can use AI chatbots and agents to streamline enrollment, financial support, and course selection processes. And, of course, what do our students crave? Leo talked about it. They crave clear guidance knowing where they stand. So we can launch personalized reminders, ensuring students never miss deadlines, registrations, or key events, all available today. And finally, my favorite topic, if you hadn't noticed, belonging.

This is a study by Salesforce, another technology company, and they looked at the likelihood of a great university experience. Students who have a great onboarding experience, their first hundred days are thirty five times more likely to have a great student experience. Students who feel very well prepared for the world of work four times, students who feel they belong three times, and students with a sense of connection to the student and alumni community two times. Bottom line, feeling at home, feeling like an individual, feeling like I belong, feeling like I can be seen, it matters. It matters, and it doesn't just happen.

It happens through intentionality, and we can power it in a bigger, stronger, more economically scalable way with GenAI than we ever have been able to before. We can identify at risk students based on behavioral patterns that guides our proactive outreach. We can curate personalized events, clubs, networking opportunities based on their interests, both digitally as well as physically, and we can ensure students feel supported, seen, and valued throughout their journey. In short, ladies and gentlemen, what we need to be thinking about now is a three hundred and sixty degree digital view, and to Leo's point, it's not one size fits all. We need to be able to look at every individual student and what we know about them, and we've got to have a three hundred and sixty degree.

So those three angels know how they need to intervene to help those students be successful. Why does it matter? It matters because we need a comprehensive understanding of student needs. We need proactive problem solving, personalized support and interventions, enhanced student engagement, improve resource allocation, spend our time and money where we need to. We need that insight, those insights through products like Intelligent Insights from Canvas to allow for data driven decision making, and we need to be able to dynamically track progress and outcomes to ensure that as many of those students persist with us, we minimize those that that stall in their study, but more importantly, we don't talk about them as dropouts or failures. We talk about those people that have stalled that need our help.

So ladies and gentlemen, when we think about the student journey, when we think about what it's going to take to really create rich, flexible, dynamic, and engaging student experiences through learning and teaching. When we think about allowing students to be able to show up in our institutions and not have to fight against clunky, difficult, at times, conflicting support systems within our universities. And when we think about creating a university or a college or a school where every student and every member of staff can arrive in the institution and be seen and be their genuine self and belong. That is the great gift of generative AI. The only thing that stands between us and that world is all of us in the room.

It's the leaders. It's the humans. It's our ability to move from the tyranny of conventional wisdom, the way we've always done things, to a world where we leave none of our staff behind and none of our students behind. It has been my honor and privilege to be at CanvasCon with you here in Manila. I wish you all great success, safety, and happiness for the year ahead. Thank you very much.