Episode 28: Gone with the Silos

[#1]

Melissa Loble (00:01.566)
Hey there, welcome to EduCast 3000. I'm your co-host Melissa Loble.

Ryan Lufkin (00:07.374)
and I'm your cohost Ryan Lufkin. On today's podcast, we're excited to have well-known ed tech market analyst and a friend of ours, Glenda Morgan with Phil Hill and Associates. Morgan, welcome to the show.

Morgan (00:19.69)
Thanks, it's great to be here.

Ryan Lufkin (00:22.072)
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.

Morgan (00:29.376)
So, yeah, I think of myself as somebody who helps universities or higher-ed institutions, vendors and investors make good decisions about ed tech. And I've been doing that for about 11 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 1984. And as I walked around, I swore to myself that...

Ryan Lufkin (00:40.739)
Mm-hmm.

Morgan (00:57.302)
I would never leave and I did leave but I stayed a long time. So 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 2022 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. and I have been working together actually since 2005 when we did a sort of strategic planning around the learning management system at the Cal State system. So we've known each other a long time and so yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (01:52.014)
Yeah, I always value your perspective even when we have spirited debates about things. you, honestly, you keep me honest and thinking in the right way.

Morgan (01:57.002)
Yes.

Melissa Loble (02:02.173)
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 going to get there in a little bit. for one of the other questions that we love to ask our guests, Morgan, is a favorite learning moment. given 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.

Please share a favorite learning moment with us.

Morgan (02:34.346)
So actually it's one I shared in the newsletter lately, recently, but it really is my favorite learning moment. And 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 basis for us.

And my favorite one, one of my favorites, I actually had about 10 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 because she and her brother had discovered them and partly because...

Ryan Lufkin (03:26.154)
wow.

Melissa Loble (03:26.399)
Wow.

Morgan (03:30.164)
So 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. we used to all, you know, we used have always our biology lessons with 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 a favorite one because you had these, you used to go on these amazing holidays. And it was only when I was in my thirties and working full time in education.

that I realized that we'd not ever once, ever gotten her off the topic. Whenever we thought that she was telling us about her holidays, she was teaching us biology. You know, because she would tell us about, you 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...

Melissa Loble (04:02.236)
amazing.

Morgan (04:27.316)
these different kinds of places she had been. you know, over, she taught us for three years, going up to 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.

Melissa Loble (04:41.702)
Wow.

Ryan Lufkin (04:48.323)
Yeah.

Morgan (04:56.802)
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, but I think it really shaped how I think about teaching in a way. It's got to be this sort of like, it's got to be fun and it's got to be...

Melissa Loble (05:02.772)
Yeah?

Morgan (05:12.308)
changing the way you think.

Ryan Lufkin (05:13.752)
Yeah, 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 Trans and EdTech. So how would you describe the current state of higher education specifically, but like what's changed most over the last few years, few months, everything that's going on right now?

Melissa Loble (05:14.015)
and

Morgan (05:40.726)
I just came back from Oslo and of course if you go to Oslo you have to go see the scream Edvard Munch and that's what I think of when I think of higher education yes but apart from that apart from sort of like the trauma and the change and the 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

Ryan Lufkin (05:46.89)
huh, huh. It invokes a lot of emotion, yes.

Melissa Loble (05:47.571)
Yes, yes.

Melissa Loble (05:55.187)
Yes.

Morgan (06:10.23)
you know, just how rapid it's been, you know, thinking back to it must have been 2007, 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, online learning thing isn't going to take off. It's

Ryan Lufkin (06:32.972)
Yeah. The internet is that thing still around? Yeah.

Melissa Loble (06:36.031)
Yes. Yes.

Morgan (06:37.014)
Yeah, and you know, here we are in 2000, 2025 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 going to be part of the future and things like that. You know, so I think that's different. I think the urgency of change is different.

In a way, was obviously this little pushback every day in the Chronicle, there's somebody writing about how we should resist this or whatever. But I think there's now an acknowledgement, a much broader acknowledgement of the urgency of change. The focus on workforce, mean, we were all just at ASU GSV and just over the past several years, that's just been such a huge thing. I think that's, you

really positive thing. It obviously has to be carefully done but I think it can be a hugely positive thing. I love the John, what's his name, the British educational guy who always sort of said if 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 six training.

Melissa Loble (07:56.338)
Mm-hmm. Love that.

Ryan Lufkin (07:58.606)
That is good. Yeah.

Morgan (07:58.778)
It's John Daniel, yeah. But you know, I think it's been a travesty about how Higher Ed has neglected that workforce connection over the past several years. So think it can be a really positive thing. It has to be done well, but it's a 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.

Melissa Loble (08:01.171)
Yeah.

Morgan (08:24.138)
And now I think people are starting to realize for some good reasons and for some very instrumental reasons, but I'm excited about that.

Melissa Loble (08:35.527)
I would love to lean in a little more on that Morgan. So student success is, I've having been in a similar length 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 education in particular? And how do you see, what are some things that institutions should be doing to measure student success?

Morgan (08:43.819)
Yeah.

Morgan (09:05.344)
So I don't have a nifty pithy definition of student success, though. Yes. Or, you know, 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? But.

Ryan Lufkin (09:10.478)
the conjoined triangles of success or something like that.

Melissa Loble (09:13.733)
Hehehehehe

Yes.

Ryan Lufkin (09:27.17)
Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, I get that.

Melissa Loble (09:27.571)
Yes. Yes.

Morgan (09:31.784)
I sort of have a holistic approach to student success that we've got to consider the whole of the student and the whole of their journey right from K-12 into higher ed into the workforce. We can't sort of separate it and say, okay, we're just going to focus on this little slice and we're just going to focus on this little aspect of it, what their grades are or something like that. We have to think about what their whole journey is, 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 want to do next. are they happy about it? Are they going to be successful? Are they going to, you know, be okay? So we have to sort of think about 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. But I'm working on it.

Ryan Lufkin (10:29.676)
Yeah. No, but I love that because I think so often educators are very focused on the course and that the students 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, know, certainly across, you know, the full even higher ed experience versus, you know, K-20.

Melissa Loble (10:29.992)
Yeah.

Morgan (10:48.363)
Yeah.

Morgan (10:53.812)
Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely.

Ryan Lufkin (10:57.068)
Yeah, so obviously AI dominates most of the conversations and education right now, but what other ed tech trends are driving change? What are you seeing there?

Morgan (11:02.389)
Yeah.

Morgan (11:09.69)
As I sort of stopped to think about that, I think maybe I should start a new newsletter and call it the ADHD Analyst. know, because it's like here, there and everywhere there's like, maybe I should focus, you know. But, you know, obviously student success is one writ large. A weird one.

Ryan Lufkin (11:17.784)
hahahahah

Melissa Loble (11:18.001)
hahahaha

Yeah. Yes.

Ryan Lufkin (11:23.69)
Yeah, yeah.

Morgan (11:35.348)
which probably people aren't expecting as e-portfolios. I think we're going to see them pop up as a way 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 that has to change. I swear that Socrates himself got a transcript with like...

Ryan Lufkin (11:38.755)
Yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (11:48.653)
Yeah, yeah.

Morgan (12:04.831)
a weird course number and a grade on it and it hasn't changed since then.

Melissa Loble (12:06.367)
Exactly.

Ryan Lufkin (12:06.702)
Or, yeah, what would soccer cheese's LinkedIn profile have looked like, right? if you don't set one up in the near future, I'm going to be disappointed.

Melissa Loble (12:10.385)
Yes.

Morgan (12:12.724)
Yeah, actually, don't tempt me. I think that should be the next meme. Yeah. And my father-in-law is actually trained as a classicist, so I've got some help handy. But, you know, I think the micro-credentials and skills obviously are, you know, those sort of trying, people trying to think about that. And there's a lot of like...

Melissa Loble (12:17.609)
Yes.

Ryan Lufkin (12:29.758)
That's awesome. That's awesome.

Melissa Loble (12:29.853)
yes you do.

Morgan (12:41.472)
poking around and trying to figure out what works 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. And 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. know, like, no, I don't want to do it.

Melissa Loble (13:05.644)
Hahaha!

Ryan Lufkin (13:05.784)
Haha

Morgan (13:09.898)
But I think it's a very necessary thing and 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 sort of trend. I go back and forth about mixed reality or AR VR.

Ryan Lufkin (13:20.034)
Absolutely.

Morgan (13:35.324)
I swear at one point there were more articles about it in higher education than there were actual projects.

Melissa Loble (13:41.247)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ryan Lufkin (13:41.548)
Yeah, I 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.

Morgan (13:49.236)
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'd 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 in Second Life.

Melissa Loble (13:49.363)
Hey, I taught in Second Life.

Melissa Loble (14:10.985)
NNNN

That's amazing.

Morgan (14:15.892)
You

Ryan Lufkin (14:16.354)
That is a, that's a, I mean, valid question, I guess.

Morgan (14:20.008)
Yeah and in part it was just because it was difficult not to in Second Life if you're a woman. know like those avatars were you know which which raises some important questions but those I think are some of the ones you know and of course the the 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 going to have to think about how to do things differently and cheaper in a way that hopefully doesn't

Ryan Lufkin (14:24.124)
yeah, yeah.

Melissa Loble (14:24.189)
Yeah? yeah! Yes.

Morgan (14:49.564)
sacrifice student learning or the quality of that experience.

Melissa Loble (14:53.407)
Yeah, I would love to build on that too. 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 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 obstacles that institutions are facing?

Morgan (15:00.01)
Mm-hmm.

Morgan (15:08.171)
Yeah.

Morgan (15:13.45)
Yeah.

Melissa Loble (15:21.639)
in order to do all the things. Cause I think they would nod your head. They're to listen to this and go, yes, Morgan's 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 what are some of the challenges or obstacles they're Yes. Yes.

Morgan (15:39.106)
So how long do we have? Is this one of those four hour podcasts like acquired? Yeah. You know, I think there are lots of problems. And just to, Phil and I, mostly me at this point, we're going to launch a new newsletter called On Student Success. You know, we have a newsletter called On Ed Tech and we've got On Student Success coming. And this is the first time I've sort of making a public announcement of that. And I've got to get busy and launch that. But.

Ryan Lufkin (15:40.942)
This will have to be the condensed answer, Morgan.

Melissa Loble (15:59.082)
Amazing.

Melissa Loble (16:05.503)
Ooh.

Morgan (16:08.478)
you know, but there are lots of things and I'll be covering them in detail in the newsletter. But one is, 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 student success where, you know, you're hot, let's go plug in an air, let me go down to the

Melissa Loble (16:14.153)
Yeah, great.

Ryan Lufkin (16:14.594)
Ha

Morgan (16:34.986)
the big box store buyer buy an air conditioner, plug it in and problem solved, you know. And so they think that if they get a student success CRM or they collect a bunch of data, it's going to be the same. We do that problem solved. But actually, it's just the first step. There's got to be action afterwards. And one of the smartest things ever said to me about student success was Phil Ventimiglio. And I asked him, he's from Georgia, Georgia State, the CIO there. And I said, so what do you attribute

Melissa Loble (16:44.733)
Hmm

Morgan (17:01.012)
what you've done at Georgia State. And he said, you know, it's 1 % data, 1 % technology and 98 % commitment to action over a period of time. And just iterating on that, you know. So people miss that other 98%. You know, 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...

Ryan Lufkin (17:09.294)
Yeah.

Morgan (17:28.372)
magic thing or and then also as technologists we we we obsess about tools you know but but it's got to be that you've got to do that follow and you've got to keep correcting you know to iterating the other but you know that 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

Melissa Loble (17:54.623)
Hmm

Morgan (17:56.65)
you know, 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 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 student success does touch so many things. You know, it's advising, it's academic affairs, it's the faculty, it's...

Melissa Loble (18:09.602)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Lufkin (18:11.522)
Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (18:24.034)
Yes, yes.

Morgan (18:25.108)
It's housing, it's whatever. And, you know, in universities we operate in silos. We're very siloed, you know, how we think about it. If you ask the average person, where do you work? They won't say the University of Utah. They'll say, I work in, you know, 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,

Ryan Lufkin (18:43.49)
Yeah. Yeah.

Melissa Loble (18:44.223)
you

Morgan (18:54.262)
the technology makes that hard. You know, it's 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 copy and paste things back and forth across those sort of two different things but the silo is 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 student success game, as a sort of way to do that. those are sort some of the big problems that I see. it involves a lot of

Melissa Loble (19:36.048)
love it.

Ryan Lufkin (19:37.154)
Yeah, I love that actually.

Morgan (19:49.288)
long-term complex thinking which we aren't always good at I think.

Ryan Lufkin (19:52.856)
Yeah. Well that, that breaking down that human barrier aspect is I've experienced that personally 10 years ago when I was at Ellucian, you know, we were really focused on some student 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've got all the stakeholders in a room, could you make any decisions, you know, or did it just freeze and you had analysis paralysis? So, but, but a lot of the other, yeah.

Morgan (20:18.314)
Yeah. I've got a, can I tell you a sort of story about that? know, and to that, you know, part of where my interest in student success comes from is, especially when I was a Gartner, I'd had a lot of client calls, you know, about, we're going to 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

Melissa Loble (20:22.879)
Please.

Ryan Lufkin (20:23.16)
Yeah.

Morgan (20:46.908)
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 things like that. And there was one particular time when I got a call from a client who said, yeah, we're thinking of buying this system and we haven't told the department yet.

Melissa Loble (20:49.375)
No.

Ryan Lufkin (20:51.724)
Wow.

Ryan Lufkin (20:57.314)
Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan Lufkin (21:13.006)
hahahaha

Morgan (21:13.814)
So I said, normally I can predict that half, know, at least half of you, you've got a 50 % chance of failure. In your case, I can guarantee that you will fail.

Melissa Loble (21:17.779)
Yeah.

Yes, yes

Ryan Lufkin (21:20.92)
Guarantee is 100%. Yeah, it's a failure. yeah. Well, so the other aspect of 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 closing kind of those equity gaps and improving student outcomes, especially for the underrepresented or underserved students? You know, I think in some way in the current...

in the current environment, you know, are struggling even more so than usual.

Morgan (21:57.61)
Yeah, I was hoping you wouldn't get to that, the positive side of things. What is working? You know, I see little glimmers of hope. And there's a woman who's institutional affiliation I'm forgetting now, but I'm going to steal the phrase. She had, there's no silver bullets, but there's lots of silver buckshot. You know, and it's going back to that. Yeah, it's going back to that.

Ryan Lufkin (22:01.909)
Ha ha ha ha!

Ryan Lufkin (22:06.253)
Yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (22:19.246)
I'm gonna steal that, I like that.

Melissa Loble (22:20.255)
Okay.

Yeah.

Morgan (22:27.346)
idea from Georgia State that you need lots of different things because it's that complex student journey and that complex student, 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 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 change 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 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 advisors they hired for

56 new advisors right at the start of that process. So they really invested a ton of money on new advisors, which involved money, you know. And 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.

Ryan Lufkin (23:25.39)
Wow.

Melissa Loble (23:26.483)
No

Melissa Loble (23:34.3)
Yeah.

Morgan (23:52.586)
because they're actually going to get a degree and not have to leave before they graduate 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 one of the positive things that I like about the ASAP program as well. 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 said to me, his students were one flat tire away from dropping out. It's just that sort of, it's those little things. It's the accretion of lots of little things and finally that one thing that sort of breaks the camel's back.

Melissa Loble (24:22.684)
video.

Ryan Lufkin (24:24.813)
Yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (24:34.787)
Yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (24:45.912)
Yep, yep. Well, and I also think it's important to acknowledge how far we've come. When we went to college, we had the weed out courses, We had, look to your left, look to your right, one of these students isn't gonna be here at the end of the semester.

Melissa Loble (24:46.815)
Yeah. Yeah.

Morgan (24:51.41)
yes, yes. Mr. Positive. Yes. Yes, yes. And I want to go back to college so that I can be in a classroom where somebody says that. Maybe they don't say that anymore, but I want to stand up and yell, because you suck as a teacher!

Ryan Lufkin (25:07.372)
because you're not a great teacher. mean, that's the thing. Like, why was it always on the student if they failed? And 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 moved beyond that now. Yeah.

Melissa Loble (25:08.627)
Yes.

Morgan (25:23.318)
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.

Melissa Loble (25:35.081)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Lufkin (25:40.76)
Yeah. Yep. Agreed. Agreed.

Melissa Loble (25:41.152)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of things to celebrate or metrics in general, 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?

Morgan (26:06.794)
Yeah, you know, I think we need to look at some of the more learning related metrics. And so not just whether I'm first generation or whatever. And 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...

Melissa Loble (26:29.343)
I love it.

Morgan (26:33.522)
of education but you know I think sort of what are the things that indicate somebody is 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 that they're having problems at home or sort of something like that so I think we you know and there's a real danger of becoming creepy in that

Melissa Loble (26:49.658)
Mm-hmm.

Morgan (27:03.402)
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, you know, the quality of your breath and your hygiene. It's nothing more personal than that. But you appreciate it, you know. And so I think we need to figure out what is creepy and what isn't creepy. And, you know, I do really appreciate.

Melissa Loble (27:12.422)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Lufkin (27:17.048)
Ha ha ha ha ha!

Melissa Loble (27:17.403)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Lufkin (27:20.492)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Melissa Loble (27:21.308)
Mm-hmm.

Morgan (27:29.45)
the way that for instructor 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 instructor and your clients. But, you know, I think sort of trying to find those indirect things that talk to the student in the moment. 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 a 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 followed up with some qualitative kind of work.

Melissa Loble (28:14.897)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Lufkin (28:15.66)
Interesting, yeah.

Melissa Loble (28:18.152)
Okay.

Morgan (28:23.278)
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 want to spend the next couple of years in on student success working on.

Melissa Loble (28:26.879)
Mm.

Ryan Lufkin (28:40.578)
Yeah, 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 and the, you know, like my test subjects. But I think it's interesting to look at just the student behaviors and the way students learn, the more micro learning, more mobile, they're on their phones all the time as opposed to watching the TV. They'd rather lay in their beds and watch a movie on their phone, right?

Melissa Loble (28:41.085)
Yeah.

Morgan (28:45.515)
Yeah.

Morgan (29:07.306)
Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (29:08.11)
How do we make sure that these tools and the student success initiatives are keeping pace with that changing behavior?

Morgan (29:15.36)
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. went to training the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sent me to Nancy Fried Foster, who's an anthropologist 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.

Ryan Lufkin (29:36.91)
interesting.

Morgan (29:43.51)
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 she really talked for a very short period of time and the rest of the time we were doing stuff. So we were videoing, interviewing faculty members, actually watching people and sort of things like that. But so often we shape things around how we do them.

Ryan Lufkin (30:06.104)
Yeah.

Melissa Loble (30:10.717)
You will.

Morgan (30:12.766)
We had this one, she's done a lot of stuff with space and I have also done some stuff with space using her methods. 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, we were meant to be understanding how they use the website. So as they were using the website, mean, these two librarians were the nicest human beings on the face of the earth.

Melissa Loble (30:34.207)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Lufkin (30:39.192)
You

Morgan (30:40.202)
they were wonderful but they just couldn't stop themselves from saying, no don't do that, use the controlled vocabulary. Well, but true, true, all of us, because you we, you know, last year at InstructureCon, I remember talking to you about the Blackberry movie that you had just watched and I had just read the book and there was a great moment when I was reading that book.

Ryan Lufkin (30:44.748)
RAAAHAHAHA

Melissa Loble (30:45.407)
it's funny.

Ryan Lufkin (30:47.512)
Two librarians. Guides, yes.

Melissa Loble (30:52.201)
Yeah?

Ryan Lufkin (31:01.442)
Yeah. Yes.

Melissa Loble (31:02.443)
yes.

Morgan (31:09.406)
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 sentence.

Ryan Lufkin (31:16.792)
Yes, yep.

Melissa Loble (31:19.825)
Yes, yes, I love it.

Ryan Lufkin (31:22.094)
Yeah, well, and we see the same thing with students who are, 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 10 page paper on their phone. I'm like, but they are. that's too often they are. Yes. Yeah. Yep.

Melissa Loble (31:37.652)
Yeah, they're actually verbally dictating it, right? That's what they're doing now. And yeah, yeah, I'll give an example too. was just in an institution last week and, you know, they were talking about, want to understand, we want to 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?

Morgan (31:41.803)
Yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (32:03.756)
Yes, yeah. Yeah.

Morgan (32:06.312)
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's sort of like the cheating or the plagiarism problem. If people are using AI, if people can do your required assignments with AI, 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.

Melissa Loble (32:07.423)
frame of mind shift.

Ryan Lufkin (32:09.475)
Yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (32:24.92)
Yeah.

Melissa Loble (32:25.104)
Exactly.

Melissa Loble (32:29.256)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Lufkin (32:29.378)
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 make that jump. And so how do we support them in doing that and evolving that process?

Morgan (32:44.084)
Yeah, that's my, that's, I, I, when I, when I talk about assessment, 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.

Ryan Lufkin (32:58.414)
100 % yes

Melissa Loble (33:03.17)
I love that. Well, in the spirit of that, and I'm sure we'll get to see, we'll get to read a lot about this as the newsletter 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. where do you, or maybe where do you see it going and where would you like it to go?

Ryan Lufkin (33:28.963)
Yeah.

Melissa Loble (33:29.085)
Ha

Morgan (33:29.398)
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 hype cycle. never escaped. So you know I am hopeful. You know I think it'll become much more of a...

Melissa Loble (33:43.015)
No.

Morgan (33:57.76)
focus for institutions and much more of a cross 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

Melissa Loble (34:11.836)
you soon.

Morgan (34:27.19)
come in and shape and be much more focused on that student journey. know mapping student journeys will become a growth industry in the next little while and so I think that's it'll be shaped around that. So that's sort of mostly which I realize is somewhat under specified 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.

Melissa Loble (35:00.548)
I like it. yes.

Ryan Lufkin (35:03.053)
The one thing too is that 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, keep 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, you know. Yeah, yeah.

Morgan (35:13.824)
Yeah.

Melissa Loble (35:26.301)
Yeah, learner agency and all of it. Yeah.

Morgan (35:26.421)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I think also finding a way to provide students with structure in a way. Years ago when I was at Illinois, had an NSF grant and working with a bunch of people, Alan Wolf, Patsy Moskal, Chuck Jubin. We looked at student use of digital learning materials and we found that half of them were what we called

Ryan Lufkin (35:34.69)
Yeah.

Morgan (35:50.962)
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. The rest was sort of wandering in the desert a little bit, you know. I used to scare children by telling them I was in the 27th grade, which was unfortunately true.

Ryan Lufkin (36:05.218)
Yeah.

I've been there. I've wandered in that desert, yeah.

Melissa Loble (36:16.959)
Yeah.

Morgan (36:20.608)
But

Ryan Lufkin (36:21.006)
There's 27 of these, yes.

Morgan (36:25.366)
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 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 got to use AI to make it help, help it be more social in a way that works.

Ryan Lufkin (36:29.022)
you

Melissa Loble (36:29.535)
It's funny.

Ryan Lufkin (36:40.834)
Yeah. Yep.

Melissa Loble (36:41.108)
Mmm.

Ryan Lufkin (36:47.64)
That's a great point. Yeah.

Melissa Loble (36:49.119)
Wow, I love that. And I think that's a really great point to end on. And inspiring, 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 learned lately? Because I think this is an area where educators, particularly higher education,

Ryan Lufkin (36:53.162)
Hahaha

Ryan Lufkin (37:05.698)
Yes.

Melissa Loble (37:17.725)
really struggling but has the right heart and the right intention. We want to move forward. So thank you for this.

Ryan Lufkin (37:22.843)
And like I said when we started, you always provide such a great perspective on this stuff. And it's always fun to try it with you. So we will have you back on the podcast for sure.

Melissa Loble (37:31.119)
yes, for sure.

Morgan (37:31.658)
I think we should record a podcast actually in the Cotton Bottom.

Ryan Lufkin (37:35.502)
Yes, for our listeners, the Cotton Bottom is an old, it used to be a biker bar not far from our offices here in Salt Lake City. It's surrounded by pine trees, little old log cabin with a rabbit from the 1940s logo. Yes, it's a great spot. We should actually do a live. And an incredible garlic burger.

Melissa Loble (37:54.207)
and an incredible garlic burger. Yes.

Ryan Lufkin (37:58.51)
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.

Morgan (37:58.624)
So good.

Melissa Loble (38:05.126)
that's amazing. Love it.

Yes, yes, yes. And thank you so much again for this Morgan.

Morgan (38:14.343)
my pleasure. It's been a real pleasure.

Ryan Lufkin (38:17.186)
Thanks, Morgan. We'll talk soon.