Gone with the Silos

Welcome to Educast three thousand. It's the most transformative time in the history of education.


So join us as we break down the fourth wall and reflect on what's happening, the good, the bad, and even the chaotic. Here's your hosts, Melissa Lobel and Ryan Lufkin.


Hey there. Welcome to Educast three thousand. I'm your co host Melissa Lobel.


And I'm your co host Ryan Lufkin. On today's podcast, we're excited to have well known EdTech market analyst and a friend of ours, Glenda Morgan with Phil Hill and Associates.


Morgan, welcome to the show.


Thanks. It's great to be here.


So like I said, I consider you a friend. We've known you for years now. But for our audience, give us a little bit about your background.


So, yeah, I think of myself as somebody who helps universities or higher ed institutions, vendors, and investors make good decisions about EdTech. And I've been doing that for about eleven years. But prior to that, I worked in higher ed for a long time. I landed on a university really for the first time in February nineteen eighty four. And I as I walked around, I swore to myself that I would never leave. And I I did leave, but I stayed a long time.


I was a faculty member for a while, then I became a university administrator, ended that career at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, then went to work for Gartner as an EdTech analyst. And then in twenty twenty two, left, took a year off, and then went to join my old friend Phil Hill to help him provide good advice to universities, vendors, and investors. Phil and I have been working together actually since two thousand five. We did a a sort of strategic planning around the learning management system at the Cal State system. So we've known each other a long time. So yeah.


I always value your perspective even when we have spirited debates about things. So you you yeah. Honestly, you keep me honest and thinking in the right way.


So I love that.


I agree as well. And just pushing the industry in this space to think differently and think on impact, and we're gonna get there in a little bit. But but one of the other questions that we love to ask our guests, Morgan, is a favorite learning moment. And given your all of that history that you just shared, I'm hoping you'll be willing to share one with us. It can be you teaching, you learning, you observing something. But would you please share a favorite learning moment with us?


So actually, it's it's one I shared in the newsletter lately recently, but it really is my favorite learning moment. I grew up in this tiny little well, this small town in Zimbabwe on the eastern border of Zimbabwe. You know, sort of a really obscure sort of place on the Mozambican border. But it was an amazing place in many ways.


We had really amazing teachers that sort of really set up a a basis for us. And my favorite one well, one of my favorites I actually had about ten favorites. But one of my favorites was my biology teacher whose name was Mrs. Browning.


And she was an extraordinary woman. She later on, actually, after she retired from teaching, she went on to get a PhD in botany. But even at the time that she was teaching me, she had several genesis of orchid named after her.


Oh, wow.


Because she, she and her brother had discovered them. And partly because where I grew up was in a really weird geographical place. It's right at the bottom of the rift valley in Africa. So it's got this interesting climate. But we used to all, you know, we used to always our biology lessons were double periods, and we still try to get her off the topic. Like, Mrs. Browning, Mrs.


Browning, you know, tell us about your holidays was her favorite one because she had these you used to call these amazing holidays.


And it was only when I was in my 30s and working full time in education that I realized that we'd not ever once ever gotten her off the topic. Amazing. Whenever we thought that she was telling us about her holidays, she was teaching us biology.


No. Because she would tell us about, you know, she'd been to the Namib Desert and so she would talk about all the insects that would sleep at an angle so that the dew would condense and roll down into their mouths as a way of conserving water and getting water in the desert or about the Galapagos or about these different kinds of places she had been. And, you know, she taught us for three years going up to her O levels because we wrote British exams. And never once in that three years did she assign us homework.


But all of us passed, every single one of us, which was kind of extraordinary.


And it was partly just because she was just such an amazing teacher. And I got to write to her actually once I realized what was going on. I tracked her down in London and wrote to her and I said, I didn't realize you were teaching us biology all this time. I think it really shaped how I think about teaching in in a way. It's it's got to be this sort of like, it's gotta be fun and it's gotta be changing the way you think.


Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. Well, when we started talking about having you on the podcast and just what we would focus on, I mean, there's so many headlines about what's happening in education, especially in the United States. You've spent years analyzing TransMedTech.


So how would you describe the current state of of higher education specifically? But, like, what's changed most over the last few years, few months, everything that's going on right now?


I just came back from Oslo. And, of course, if you go to Oslo, you have to go see the screen.


Uh-huh. Yeah. Yes.


Uh-huh. Oh, yeah.


But watch and and that's what I think of when I think of fire.


A lot of emotion. Yes. Yes.


But apart from that, apart from sort of like the trauma and and the change and the, you know, the stuff that's going on, you know, I think there's just been just it is kind of an extraordinary time. One, you know, just greater acceptance of online learning, you know, just and how rapid it's been, you know, thinking back to it must have been two thousand and seven, I was working at George Mason, and I was actually hired to get some online learning going within a particular college there. But in between when I was hired, when I arrived, they changed deans.


And the new dean said to me, this online learning thing isn't gonna take off.


Yeah. It's the the Internet, is that thing still around? Yeah.


Like And, you know, here we are in twenty twenty five and it has become very established.


You know, there's still issues and things, but I think very few people would not acknowledge that it's gonna be part of the future and and things like that. So I think that's different. I think the urgency of change is different in a way. There was you know, obviously, there's still pushback every day. In the Chronicle, there's somebody writing about how, you know, we should resist this or or whatever. But, you know, I think there's now an acknowledgment, a broad a much broader acknowledgment of the urgency of change.


The focus on workforce, I mean, we were all just at ASU GSV and just over the past several years, that's just been such a huge thing. And and I think that's, you know, a really positive thing. It obviously has to be carefully done, but I think it can be a a hugely positive thing. And, you know, I love the, John, what's his name, the British educational guy who, you know, always sort of said, you've got to think about the difference between education and training. And if you don't know the difference, think about whether you want your kids to have sex education or sex training.


And he loved that.


It's John it's John Daniel. Yeah.


But I think it's been a travesty about how higher ed has neglected that workforce connection over the past several years. So I think it can be a really positive thing. It has to be done well, but that's the thing. And the big thing and the one that I'm most excited about is student success because, you know, it's been around for a long time, but we haven't made a lot of progress always. And now I think people are starting to realize, well, for some good reasons and for some very instrumental reasons, but I'm excited about that.


I would love to lean in a little more on that, Morgan. So student success is is I've having been in a similar life career as you in higher education and education in general, people use it in all sorts of different ways. Right? And it means all sorts of different things. How are you seeing or how are you defining student success in higher ed in particular? And how do you see what are some things that institutions should be doing to measure student success?


I don't have a nifty pithy definition of student success, though.


The conjoined triangles of success or something like that.


Yeah, a two by two or sort of something like that. Though, in these situations, I've always tended to go with Justice Potter Stewart's thing about I know it when I see it. You know? Yeah.


That's good. I mean, yeah, I get that.


But I sort of have a holistic approach to student success that we've got to consider the whole the whole of the student and the whole of their journey, right from K-twelve into higher ed into the workforce, you know? We can't sort of separate it and say, okay. We're just gonna focus on this little slice, and we're just gonna focus on this little aspect of it. You know, what their grades are or something like that.


We have to think about what their whole journey is. You know, what kind of choice do they make to come into college and what kind of college do they choose, what their mental health is, what their financial situation is, and how they make that transition into whatever they wanna do next. And are they happy about it? Are they gonna be successful?


Are they gonna be okay? So we have to sort of think about that whole that whole student journey. And it doesn't make for a nifty definition, and it doesn't make for a four by four or an iron triangle or whatever.


Yeah. Yeah.


But I'm working on it.


I love that because I think so often educators are very focused on the course and that the student's experience in the course. And you might have somebody really concerned about their experience in a program. Right? But very rarely do we actually consider that longitudinal experience across certainly across, you know, full, even higher ed experience versus k twenty.


Yeah. No. Absolutely.


Yeah. So, obviously, AI dominates most of the conversations in education right now, but but what other kind of edtech trends are driving change? What are you seeing there?


As I sort of stop to think about that, I think maybe I should start a new newsletter and call it the ADHD analyst.


You know?


It's like, I'm not right back to the queue there and everywhere.


There's, like, I I maybe I should focus, you know?


Yeah. Yeah.


But, you know, obviously, student success is one, you know, writ large.


A weird one which probably people aren't expecting is e portfolios. You know, I think we're gonna see them sort of pop up as a way of sort of proving that learning and as part of that whole rethinking and this is probably music to your ears coming from Instructure.


Rethinking how we represent knowledge and education and all of those sorts of things because, you know, that that has to change.


Because, you know, I swear that Socrates himself got a transcript with, you know, like, a weird course number and a grade on it.


Exactly.


And it hasn't changed since then.


Yeah. What would Socrates' LinkedIn profile have looked great, right?


Don't check me.


I think that should be the next meme.


If you don't set one up in the near future, I'm going to be disappointed.


Yeah. And my father-in-law is actually trained as a classicist, so I've got some help handy.


Nice. That's awesome.


That's awesome.


But I think the micro credentials and skills are, you know, those sort of trying people trying to think about that. And there's a lot of, like, poking around and trying to figure out what works and and throwing spaghetti at the wall to mix lots of metaphors. But I think that is a sort of huge thing. I think we're also in the early stages of a trend of people trying to rethink assessment. I have a weird personal history of that because at Gartner, we needed somebody to cover assessment in higher education.


And I kept trying to dodge that one, You know? But I think it's a very necessary thing. And, you know, we were sort of partly I think it's been accelerated by AI and the need to come up with a different way of assessing things. So I think that's sort of another sort of trend. You know, I go back and forth about mixed reality or ARVR.


I swear, at one point, there were more articles education than there were actual projects.


Yeah. I think you and I have talked about, you know, Second Life and the whole, you know, that environment where schools were standing up, whole islands and things like that. Yeah.


Yeah. I taught in Second Life.


Yeah. Yeah.


Yeah. One of my, favorite moments in higher education was at a conference where a community college president was talking about Second Life and how they built an island in Second Life.


And one of my friends put up her hand in the question time and asked the college president why she looked like a hoochie mama. It's That's so sad.


That is a valid question, I guess.


Yeah, and part of it was just because it was difficult not to in Second Life to be a woman, you know, like Yeah. Those avatars which raised some important questions. But those, I think, are some of the ones, you know, and, of course, the continuing changing of online. I think just budget crunch is just such a huge theme everywhere, you know, wherever you go. And so people are gonna have to think about how to do things differently and cheaper in in a way that hopefully doesn't sacrifice student learning or or the quality of that experience.


I would love to build on that to the the budget crunch. Like, all of the things that you shared, I cannot agree more with around you go to institutions and you talk about student success is important and they nod their head and they're like, yes. It is. Right?


And the whole the whole learner, yes. I bought into that. And then they can't execute. Right?


Like, they just don't. And budget crunch, I think, is part of it. But what are some of the other challenges or or obstacles that institutions are facing in order to do all the things? Because I think they would nod your head.


They're gonna listen to this and go, yes, Morgan. Spot on. We need to be doing these things. We need to be thinking about micro credentials.


And then you get, like, one department to do something and the institution isn't aligned or for whatever reason, and then nothing happens. So where are some of the challenges or obstacles there?


Obstacles they're facing?


So how long do we have? Is this one of those four hour, like, a choir?


This will have to be the condensed dance. Yes.


You know, I I think there are lots of problems. And just to Bill and I, mostly me at this point, we're gonna launch a new a new newsletter called on student Success. You know, we have a newsletter called OnEdTech and and we've got On Student Success coming. And this is the first time I'm sort of making a a public announcement of that, and I've gotta get busy and and launch that. But but there are lots of things.


I'll be covering them in detail in the in the in the in the case later.


But but one is, you know, people sort of obsess. They become too attached to the technology and to the data, and they act as though those are magical. I sort of think about it as the air conditioner model of of student success where, you know, you're hot. Let's go plug in an air let me go down to the big box store, buy or buy an air conditioner, plug it in, and problem solved.


You know? And so they think that if they get a a student success CRM or they collect a bunch of data, it's gonna be the same. We do that, problem solved. But actually, it's just the first step.


There's gotta be action afterwards.


And one of the smartest things ever said to me about student success was Phil de Biglio, and I asked him he's from Georgia State, the CIO there. And I said, so what do you attribute what you've done at Georgia State? And he said, you know, it's one percent data, one percent technology, and ninety eight percent commitment to action over a period of time Yeah. And just iterating on that, you know.


So people miss that other ninety eight percent, you know, and they just think and part of it is often, you know, we're trained to think of data as the new oil or the new soil or, you know, whatever, the magic thing or and then also as technologists, we obsess about tools. But it's gotta be you've gotta do that follow, and you've gotta keep correcting, you know, to iterating. There are other issues. One of those is also, like, so much of our student success tradition here in the US, not so much abroad, I would say, but in the US, it's focused on backwards looking data.


So things coming into the SIS and rather about how students are being in the moment and how they're learning. So it's that backwards data, and it's also premised on a on a deficit model of students. You know, if I'm not succeeding, it's something to do with me rather than something to do with the school or the institution. So it's that deficit model rather than trying to figure out what another big issue is, you know, student success does touch so many things.


You know, it's advising, it's academic affairs, it's the faculty, it's it's housing, it's it's whatever. And, you know, in universities, we operate in silos. We're very siloed, you know, how we think about it. You know, if you ask the average person where do you work, they won't say the University of Utah.


They'll say I work in the economics department or something like that rather than that. And so we've got to sort of figure out a way to get people to play nice across those silos and to really work across them. And sometimes the technology makes that hard, you know. I was just at an institution where they were talking about how they use Salesforce in their online and EAB Navigate in the rest of the campus, and they have to cop and copy and paste things back and forth across those sort of two different things.


But the silos are important. And another little project that I'm working on with a friend is we're creating a board game to actually help universities think through what all is required for student success and how to actually get that collaboration going and to start a low stakes conversation across these silos. The working title for it is Silo Smashers, the students alone escape.


Oh, I love that.


I see.


You know, that's a sort of way to do that.


So those are sort of some of the big problems that I see. And, you know, it involves a lot of long term complex thinking, which we aren't always good at, I think.


Yeah. Breaking down that human barrier aspect is I've experienced that personally ten years ago when I was at Ellucian. You know, we were really focused on success products, and the biggest challenge we had is who owned it on campus? Who where was the budget to pay for this initiative and organize this stuff? When you got all the stakeholders in a room, could you make any decisions? You know, or did it just freeze and, you know, you had analysis paralysis.


So And to that, you know, part of where my interest in in student success comes from is especially when I was a gardener, I'd had a lot of client calls, you know, about, oh, we're gonna buy a student success CRM or something or a student success system or some sort of technology, and easily half of them would fail.


You know, I got to asking people later on, like, did it move the needle? And once, one time in eight years did they say yes. And most of it was the people part of it. It's that they hadn't gotten all the people around the table. They hadn't gotten to get the buy in, to get the usage, and and things like that. And there was one particular time when I got a call from a client who said, yeah. We think you're buying this system, and we haven't told the department yet.


So I said, normally, I can predict that, you know, at least half of go to fifty percent chance of failure. In your case, I can guarantee that you're Guarantee is a hundred percent chance of failure.


Yeah. Yeah. Wow.


Well, so the the other aspect of, you know, the flip side of that coin, it really is the fact that students are all different. Right? Students are going through different journeys.


Right? As you've done the research, what strategies have proved most effective at at closing kind of those equity gaps and and improving student outcomes, especially for the underrepresented or underserved students? Because I, you know, I think in some way, the current environment, you know, are are struggling even more so than than usual.


Yeah. I was hoping you wouldn't get to that Yeah. To the positive side of things. What what is working? You know, I I see little glimmers of hope. And there's a woman whose institutional affiliation I'm forgetting now, but I'm gonna steal the phrase. She had, there's no silver bullets, but there's lots of silver buckshot.


Okay.


And it's going steal that.


Yeah. It's going back to that idea from Georgia State that you need lots of different things because it's that complex student journey and that complex student. You know, they've got lots of different challenges that they face. It's not just one thing.


It's not just that they're first generation or or whatever. And so I think you've got to sort of do lots of different kinds of things. I also think, you know, we talk about changes or success at scale. And in the last sort of couple of weeks, I've really started to really question that.


You know, I have written about the ASAP program that is going on at a bunch of different community colleges, started in New York and and, you know, is being run now around the country. And I've criticized it for not being scalable. But if you think about it, things like Georgia State are also not scalable. I mean, they went from having a very small number of advisers.


They hired fifty six new advisers right at the start of that process. So they really invested a ton of money on new advisers, which involved money. You know? So I think we need to think about scalability as involving the expenditure of money.


And maybe on the other side, you save some because you're saving money on students dropping out and having to re recruit them. You're saving your students money because they're actually gonna get a degree and not have to leave before they graduate and and be stuck with debt and things like that. So I think we need to rethink the whole concept of scale. But I think there are lots of sort of starting to be practices around there, but I think sort of starting to really think about it holistically and approach all those different kinds of things.


And that is the one of the positive things that I like about the ASAP program as well. You know, so they gave them transport cards and those sorts of things to help them actually get to college. I mean, I remember years ago speaking with the president of Maricopa County Community Colleges and he used to and, you know, he said to me, his students were one flat tire away from dropping out. It's those little things, you know.


It's it's the accretion of lots of little things and finally that one thing that sort of breaks the camel's back.


Yeah. Well, and I also think it's important to acknowledge how far we've come, you know. Oh, yes. Yes. When we went to college, we had the positive. We had the weed out courses, right?


We had we had look to your left, look to your right, one of these students is gonna be here at the end of the semester.


I want to go back to college so that I can be in a classroom where somebody says that. Maybe don't they don't say that anymore, but I wanna stand up and yell because you suck as a teacher.


Because you're not a graded teacher. I mean, that's the thing. Like, why was it always on the student if they failed? And, you know, those courses tended to be incredibly large and not scalable to the individual educator and not really engaging and, you know, and so, yeah, I love that we've we've moved beyond that now.


We have really come a long way. And, yeah, we do need to celebrate that. Students dropping out is no longer seen as a sign of rigor. It's increasingly seen as a sign that the university is failing, and that is a massive shift. And, yes, we should celebrate that.


Yep. Agreed. Agreed.


Yeah. Well, speaking of things to celebrate or metrics in general, and and you alluded to this that we tend to look backwards at our metrics. Do you have a couple of key indicators or metrics that you like that you recommend to institutions to be tracking as they're trying to focus on more holistic student success?


Yeah. You know, I I think we need to look at some of the more learning related metrics. And so not just whether I'm first generation or or whatever. Just for some clarity, I am first generation.


I'm the youngest of five children. I'm the only one to finish high school, really. And so I always joke that I got a PhD because I had felt I had to get a whole family's worth of education. But, you know, I think sort of what are the things that indicate somebody is actually engaging with the material?


And what are the signs that they're struggling? You know, so things like, you know, are they in the library late at night? And what does that mean? You know, it could mean that they're really engaging.


It could mean that they're having problems at at home or sort of something like that. You know, and there's a real danger of becoming creepy in that. But, you know, if you think about it, you probably get an email once in a while or a phone call or something from your dentist saying, Hey, Ryan. It's time to come in for a cleaning.


Like, he's talking about your dental the quality of your breath and your hygiene. It's nothing more personal than that.


Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.


And you appreciate it, you know? And so, I think we need to figure out what is creepy and what isn't creepy. And I do really appreciate the way that, you know, Instructure has really been careful about thinking about the kinds of data that they do. And that's really important for the sector as well as just for Instructure and your clients.


But I think sort of trying to find those indirect things that talk to the student in the moment. So I know I think it was UC San Diego that looked using some sort of big data approaches and found that Hispanic women students struggled if they lived within one hundred miles of the campus. If they lived on campus, they were fine. If they lived further away from campus, they were fine.


It was that middle point. And it's because they kept you know, they, they followed up with some qualitative kind of work, and they found that they kept being pulled back into family stuff that was pulling them away from their work. So I think we need to find those kinds of measures that point to so it's a mix of qualitative and quantitative, but I don't have the answers yet. That's what I wanna spend the next couple of years in on student success working on.


I mean, that honestly, I talk about my own kids a lot on the podcast because it's interesting to be able to, like they both use Canvas. They're both at different levels of the education experience. So they're my guinea pigs in the, you know, like, my my test subjects. And but I think it's interesting to to look at just the student behaviors and the way students learn, the more microlearning, more mobile.


They're on their phones all the time as opposed to watching the TV. They'd rather lay in their beds than watch a movie on their phone. Right? How do we make sure that these the tools and those, like, student success initiatives are keeping pace with that changing behavior?


That's where I think we need to really do different kinds of research into how people are doing it. I had a sort of transformational experience. I went to training the library at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign sent me to Nancy Fried Foster, who's an anthropologist who who really did a lot of work with libraries studying space primarily and about how students use space, but she used participant observation and participatory design. And so I went for a training workshop with her, which, one, was kind of amazing.


It's another one of these great learning experiences because it really shaped how I have done workshops ever since because, you know, she really talked for a very short period of the time and the rest of the time we were doing stuff. You know, so we were videoing, interviewing faculty members, you know, doing actually watching people and sort of things like that. But so often we shape things around how we do them. So we had this one, year she's done a lot of stuff with space and I have also done some stuff with space using her methods, but we also had this thing where we had some faculty members actually trying to use a library website to find some things.


And there were two librarians with them. And the faculty member, you know, we were meant to be understanding how they use the website. So as they were using the website, I mean, these two librarians were the nicest human beings on the face of the earth. They were wonderful, but they just couldn't stop themselves from saying, no.


Don't do that. Use the control of my computer.


True librarians.


True. All of us. Because, you know, we you know, last year at InstructureCon, I remember talking to you about the the Blackberry movie that you had just watched and I just read the book. Yes. And there was a great moment when I was reading that book where they were saying about how part of where Blackberry went wrong was they assumed people wouldn't want to look at websites and to read on their Blackberry.


I was reading it on my phone as I read that statement.


Yes.


Yeah, Well, and and we see the same thing with students who were they're accessing the LMS on their phone more than the computer, and they're typing long form papers. And I've had professors say, no students gonna go type a ten page paper on their phone. I'm like, but they are. And that's too often they are.


They're actually verbally dictating it. Right? That's what they're doing now. And yeah. Yeah. I'll give an example too.


I was I was just in an institution last week and, you know, they were talking about we wanna understand we wanna detect where students are using AI so we know we can determine whether or not we want them to use AI. And I'm like, actually, what you should be doing is take a look at where students are using AI and what does that tell you about your teaching practices and their learning process. Right? Yeah.


It's this Yeah. Frame of mind shift. Yeah.


Yeah.


Yeah. Sort of like the the cheating or the plagiarism problem. You know, if people can do your required assignments with AI, it doesn't it's not a problem with the students, it's a problem with your assignment. But it's really hard to actually make that argument sometimes. Yeah.


And teachers are time poor and they need the resources to be able to make those shifts and a lot of them just don't feel like they've got the time or the resources to to make that jump. And so, how do we support them in doing that and evolving that process?


Yeah. That's my that's when I talk about assessment, I I I usually tell one of my favorite light bulb jokes, which is how many sociologists does it take to change a light bulb? The answer being none because it's not the bulb, it's the system that needs changing.


One hundred percent. Yes. I love that.


Well, in the spirit of that, and I'm sure we'll get to read a lot about this as as the newsletter and and your research comes out, but crystal ball time. If you have a crystal ball, where do you see the future of student success going in the next five years? You've alluded to a few pieces of that. Like, where do you or maybe where do you see it going and where would you like it to go? Yes.


Yeah.


I really try to be positive, and I am a fairly cheerful sort of person. But, you know, I used to joke when I was at Gartner about how everything I wrote about landed up in the trough of disillusionment in the in the hope cycle and never escaped.


You know?


So I am hopeful.


I think it'll become much more of a a focus for institutions and much more of a cross across sort of sectoral, you know, within the different silos and sort of working together.


It'll become data informed rather than data driven as it sometimes is now, I think, and that's good. You'll see a lot more of sort of qualitative data coming in either through a CRM or other sorts of ways, but I think we'll sort of see that come in and shape and and be much more focused on that student journey. You know, mapping student journeys will become a growth industry in the next in the next little while. And so I think that it'll be shaped around that. I realize it's somewhat underspecified, but, you know, things turn out differently than we expect. And that's why I'm always leery of being a futurist. I describe myself as a pastist.


A pastist?


I like it. Oh, yes.


One of the things I hope, and it's not necessarily a formal student success initiative, but as AI leads to more the ability for students to personalize their own journey, right, that helps keep them engaged, keeps them on track. Like, that provides some of the relief to some of these challenges that maybe then there's less interdiction required by the school themselves. Yeah.


Yeah. More agency and all of that.


Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think also finding a way to provide students with structure in a way. Years ago when I was at Illinois, I had an NSF grant and working with a bunch of people, Alan Wolf, Patsy Moskal, Chuck Tubin.


You know, we looked at student use of digital learning materials and we found that half of them were what we called ambivalent learners. They didn't have a plan, they didn't really enjoy learning and things like that. The other half were great. They either had a natural passion for it, or they were like engineer or business students, you know, who like knew they had a concise amount of time and they had to like get stuff done. But the rest was sort of wandering in the desert a little bit, you know?


I've been there. I've wandered in that desert. Yeah.


I used to scare children by telling them I was in the twenty seventh grade, which was unfortunately true.


There's twenty seven of the easiest.


I still hadn't made it to the next class, you know?


But I think finding a way to provide that structure. And also, you know, I think in some of the conversation about personalization, we tend to think of that as making the student alone. And so much of learning is social. And so we've gotta use AI to make it help it be more social in a way that works.


That's a great point. Yeah.


I love that. And I think that's a really great point to end on. Everything in this conversation has been really interesting and inspiring, and I really appreciate your time. I know Ryan does as well.


And we're excited for this newsletter to come and more research, and would love to keep checking back with you, Morgan, on what have you what have you learned lately? Because I think this is an area where educators, particularly higher education, is really struggling, but has the right heart and the right intention. Right? We wanna move forward.


So thank you for that.


Said when we started, you always provide such a great perspective on this stuff. I and it's always fun to chat with you, so we will have you back on the podcast for sure.


Oh, yes. I I think we should record a podcast actually in in the Cotton Bottom.


Yes. Oh. If if for our listeners, the Cotton Bottom is, is an old it used to be a biker bar not far from our offices here in Salt Lake City. It's straight out of my pine trees, little old, log cabin with, you know, rabbit from the nineteen forties, logo. And, yes, it's a great spot.


We should actually do a live incredible garlic burger.


And an incredible garlic burger. Yes. There's a there's a man that drives by, periodically with a dog on his motorcycle, which I always find fascinating and slightly distracting. So we may have to do a live podcast from there.


Yes. Yes. And thank you so much again for this, Margaret. Pleasure.


Thanks, Margaret. We'll talk soon.


Thanks for listening to this episode of Educast three thousand. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and drop us a review on your favorite podcast player so you don't miss an episode. If you have a topic you'd like us to explore more, please email us at instructure cast at instructure dot com, or you can drop us a line on any of the socials. You can find more contact info in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Educast three thousand.