Bonni Stachowiak: Today on Episode number 368 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Kelvin Bentley joins me to talk about defining our future.

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Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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Bonni Stachowiak: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

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Today, we have the privilege of welcoming Kelvin Bentley to Teaching in Higher Ed. He has over 19 years of experience in the field of online education as a faculty member, administrator, and consultant. Kelvin currently serves as a digital learning consultant for Success Academy Charter Schools. Kelvin has written recent articles on digital learning for publications that include EDUCAUSE Review and Inside Higher Education, and he and members of Tarrant County College Connect Campus were recipients of Blackboard’s 2017 Catalyst Award for Inclusive Education. Kelvin earned his Master’s and PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Delaware. Kelvin, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Kelvin Bentley: Thanks, Bonni. Thanks so much for having me on today.

Bonni: As we get to know each other and the listeners get a chance to know you, I think it might be helpful for you to share a little bit about, not just your Twitter username, but I think you use it in other places too. What’s the backstory on your username?

Kelvin: Sure. Growing up as a kid and teenager, I really got into watching sci-fi movies and TV shows. One of my favorite sci-fi TV shows is from the BBC. It’s called Doctor Who. The human race that he represents are called Time Lords. When I was watching though, there weren’t really any Time Lords of African descent, so I was able to select @BlackTimeLord as a Twitter handle. Luckily, it was available and so I held onto it now for probably since like 2007. I think it’s around the time that I joined Twitter, so it’s been about almost 14 years now.

Bonni: I feel like that Doctor Who reference is something that resonates with so many people, and then of course the ways in which historically marginalized populations get left out of entertainment. [laughs]. It’s kind of like a one-two punch where I imagine you get a lot of people.

Kelvin: It’s a great show. I grew up watching Tom Baker who is a very popular Doctor Who actor. I think he was in the role for seven years. I was just hooked and then I was excited when they brought the show back more recently and continued to be a fan.

Bonni: Oh, that’s great. Well, today you have the challenge, at least I consider it to be a big challenge, of helping us to imagine a little bit beyond where we currently can, what the future of higher education is going to look like. I don’t know about you, Kelvin. Do you feel a little bit reluctant to say, “Once we’re out of this whole thing–?” Because too much of the time, it that seems like we’re rushing things. I don’t think it’s quite going to turn out that way, like we turned on the light switch one day, “It’s over. Let’s have a party.” I don’t know. Do you hesitate saying, “When we’re out of this.”?

Kelvin: Yes, I hesitate as well because if it’s not a pandemic, it could be something also critical like another type of pandemic. It could be even issues with our environment, with global warming and other things going on in the world that distract us. I think they’ll always will be pressure points. They may not always be at the scale of a pandemic but I think the writing is on the wall. I think we really have to use this opportunity of the pandemic. Use it as an opportunity to really reflect upon what we’ve been doing in higher ed across the modalities in terms of how we teach. How do we become more learner-centered? How do we actually get faculty to help us get there along the way?

There’s just lots of moving pieces. This is I think the best time for us to do a perpetual spring cleaning of higher ed. Regardless of what’s maybe causing us to re-examine what we do, whether it’s the pandemic or something else, I think the time is right for us to really re-imagine the work. Also, just be reminded of how important it is to do this because we’re impacting the livelihoods of people. We’re trying to fill various gaps in terms of skills and jobs as well as just making someone more well-rounded as an educated person. There’s lots at stake and we have to do our due diligence to do our part to make improvements in what we’re doing.

Bonni: I captured a couple of things that you said, so I’m going to start with just re-examining what we do. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you want to challenge us to say this is an area where I think instead of just trying to rush, and it’s not even really rushing past it, it’s almost rushing behind us. Because I see people wanting to just press the reset button. What would be an area that comes to mind for you of just, “Wow, let’s not press the reset button on this. Let’s not go back to how things used to be. Let’s re-examine it.”? Let’s start just by where do we need greater self-awareness drawing us toward more of this learner-centered approach?

Kelvin: That’s a great question. I think it can involve small things but things that will still require big conversations, right?

Bonni: Yes.

Kelvin: I’m a very big proponent of making higher education much more transparent, not just to external stakeholders, but just within an institution. Even within academic departments, we’re not always aware of what one hand is doing versus the other across people. I think we need to have a way to bring our instructional skills our toys, so to speak, to the table so that we can prepare. How do we actually teach Introduction to Psychology? How do we teach Sociology courses or Math courses? Have everyone report in and share what do they do, what types of textbooks do you use, what type of real-life examples are you leveraging? Such that there we can really do a better job of unpacking what’s actually going on in our institution right now.

I think we get really busy. Once the semester or once the academic year begins and continues, it’s very hard for us to take a retrospective approach and really just understand what actually happened during the year. I think the pandemic is really, in some ways, forced us to really re-examine: How do we teach? What are we teaching? What could we be doing differently?

My hope is that those conversations will not just be focused on figuring out how to do this online or remote instruction, but just in general. It gives us a chance to really dust the cobwebs away. We get a Swiffer and try to figure out collectively what are the good practices that are already out there, and what can we do to scale those not just within disciplines but hopefully across disciplines, across academic departments and community colleges and universities? Again, it’s really encouraging faculty, giving them the space to be very transparent with each other.

For institutions to find ways to be transparent with each other in ways where they’re not going to be threatened, because I think schools are reluctant to do that because they see each other as competitors when really we’re in this together. Our learners need us to be much more mindful of the work. Ensuring those good practices and then collecting data around are they still good practices or are there other things out there we should be paying attention to? Those are the conversations we need to have.

It starts with just people having these conversations at their own institutions and then growing it from there. It’s some small moves but it does require patience and time and trust, because unfortunately, there’s lots of fear from faculty, from administrators about perhaps sharing too much when really I think we need to flip this and say, “Well, how can we share much more to the benefit of our students, the learners that we’re serving?”

Bonni: We just wrapped up a Course Design Intensive. The program as a whole, it was over a span of three weeks, and it definitely lived up to the intensive. The part about it that wasn’t intensive was just the part where we ask them to make a screencast that just showed a– Just give us a tour. Give us a tour of what it is that you created, and the amount of joy that people experienced having this opportunity to make their work visible and then, of course, we got permission that we can share it within our broader university community.

It brings people joy when you give them opportunities to share the work they’re doing, and then it just becomes infectious. It was incredible because, I mean, this has been such a difficult time so to give people an opportunity to really celebrate what they’ve been discovering, to have the chance to be more transparent in the ways that you describe. I also appreciate how you began.

This is small. I think sometimes we make a bigger deal out of it. If they don’t want to do it, they don’t want to do it but just give an invitation to the opportunity. You might be surprised and delighted at what you find by just a small invitation. But, as you sad, it’s actually an invitation to have these really big important conversations that we don’t often stop and take the time to do.

You talked about reexamining what we do. We can do these small things, have these small invitations to share our work, and then see what happens. The second thing that you said, Kelvin, to reimagine the work. What’s something that comes— I’m sure there’s a million things, but what’s something that comes to mind for you as you start to think about how might we be reimagining the work?

Kelvin: I’ve had this conversation with different colleagues and I think it changes slightly with every conversation, but I think just given for example my background is more in the administration of online learning courses and programs over the past almost 20 years, I kind of come from that space, but I think about it, it’s also very broad. For example, we are– for lots of different reasons, especially because schools receive federal money, they support financial aid for students, we’re bound and shackled by the credit hour which is a very archaic way of measuring.

Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire talks about this. Credit hours are very good about measuring butts in seats, but doesn’t really measure or tell us anything about how much students learn or what competencies they’ve mastered. My hope is that we can, again, maybe come up with a parallel system because it would be, to your point earlier, you can’t just stop the ride abruptly and then start a new thing. My hope is that we can have a parallel system set up such that schools will have an opportunity to pilot and then hopefully scale more competency-based courses and programs.

Courses and programs that are defined by, again, measurable competencies that learners can demonstrate mastery of or some level of competency of, and then they move on to the next course or even the next set of competencies. That’s what I really hope that we can actually get to. Our model is very addicted to how things are now because of the federal regulations. That’s where we’re at.

Schools, of course, need the training, the education around what competency-based education is. Lots of schools have their own definitions of those, but if we can move in that direction, I think that would be great. I think we definitely need to leverage appropriate adoption of technologies, whether they are adaptive learning platforms or even using success coaches, folks that will intervene to reach out to students when they need that extra push. To also almost be kind of a social worker in a way. Because as we know learners, whether they are nontraditional or the new traditional students, adults students, we all have many things going on especially given the impact that the pandemic has had on us.

Having some more structured outreach to learners to help them achieve their goals and their learning credentials, I mean, I think that will continue to be important and hopefully more resources will be provided to students to make all that happen.

I think we need to just do also a better job of reimagining our learning experiences. There’s lots of good research out there about learning science and about how we learn material. Many of us who teach, we’re leveraging perhaps tools and resources that are not designed really to help students learn the material. Our lectures are still perhaps way too longer than they need to be. They need to be smaller and chunked.

Those are some things that readily come to mind, but I think a lot of it too is like data collection. I don’t know if we really do a great job, other than giving students a course evaluation survey at the end, basically ask them what was your experience like. I think we need to leverage other data, better data to make hopefully more informed decisions that will help us improve the pedagogy, hopefully help improve our student services and the access to the student services around the student schedule so we can’t make everything on campus. We don’t have to make everything online either, but we’re going to have various options for folks so that there’ll be a nice menu of student services as well that works for students’ very busy and hectic lifestyle.

Bonni: One of the great challenges, of course, is that when we start to look at what competency-based education models might look like, when we try to make things more measurable, there are those who talk about then, “What about the learning that you can’t plan for? What about the learning that is unexpected or the learning that emerges in the moment?” While I don’t tend to fall on that side, I tend to be someone who I think my background is naturally probably– If anything, I’ve been too much of a planner. If anything, I’ve been too much of a trying to measure things. My dog is not in this fight.

I do think these are really important conversations to have because I think binary thinking isn’t going to help us. If we were to say that there is a way to go too measurable, too scripted, too defined, what would you want to caution us against? Do you know what I mean? Where would we say you’ve gone too far and not recognizing that learning is messy and unpredictable and sometimes you get a group of people together and you learn things none of you ever could have planned?

Kelvin: Yes, that’s a great point. I think we have to, in order to protect this idea of learner-centered approaches or learner-centered teaching, I think it always goes back to us finding a way to find out what needs to change in our perception of the competencies and then how we measure them, or the resources that we put in front of students to hopefully help them acquire the knowledge, skills, dispositions, that they’re going to need to be successful in their lives as well as in the world of work. I would just caution us to not forget the learner and really figuring out maybe through focus groups, talking with employers as well, what skills, what competencies are the students truly mastering? What is the shelf life of those things Are there other types of learning experiences we can provide in a program that will really help someone be ready to take on certain types of jobs, or to be just prepared to take on those jobs later on?

Again, bigger conversations. I think schools like Western Governors University and others are really doing a good job of that. The employers of their students, they think very highly of their students. Their school of education is very strong in terms of their certification exam scores for their students for certain programs. Not that WGU, their model is going to work for everyone, but I think there are some lessons learned from some of these larger providers of competency-based models that I think we need to have deeper conversations with. Southern New Hampshire as well and others. Capella also has the FlexPath model.

I think there’s opportunities to learn there but the voice of the student, the students learning experience, how the learner is being perceived out in the world and making sure that we bring that information back and then that will help us, I think, either add new competencies to our courses and programs or maybe do away with some, so that we have to always be in this mindset of things change, and our programs have to change perhaps more readily than what we’ve been doing in the past, kind of waiting a year or two to make changes. Maybe there’s an opportunity for a more agile approach for certain courses and programs to make them stand out and memorable to the student.

Bonni: I love the ideas that you’re describing as far as being more agile. I’m always trying to translate because I’m thinking, “Oh, gosh. How long would it ever take us at my institution to get to something like competency-based education?” We don’t have to wait until the federal guidelines catch up with us. We don’t have to wait until our particular institution our particular program were to get to something like that. We can really shrink it down. One of the things I have found just really rich and helpful in my own teaching is just, and there’s many people who have written about this and studied this, but just being more transparent about why we’re doing stuff.

In my Business Ethics class, I added in– I was very hesitant and I added in Mike Caulfield’s SIFT Framework. This is a framework that helps people be able to evaluate the sources they’re reading, as opposed to some of the outdated ones that aren’t keeping up with today’s media environment. I was really hesitant because you’d go, “Well, Business Ethics. How does that relate to news information literacy,” And you go, “Well, I was having them bring Business Ethics news stories into the class. In 2020, I wasn’t liking what I was seeing about some of the stuff around the business aspects of COVID.” It was disturbing, but what I found to be so helpful is twofold. One is the transparency with which they had to do a lot of work. It was a high flux class and a lot of it was asynchronous, a lot of work, but we started at the place, why are we doing this?

It wasn’t just why are we doing this as a class? You mentioned being student centered. How do you get your news today? What do you like about where you get it from? What works for you? What’s not working? Is there anything that you would change about it? Whatever it is that you’re teaching, to have a place where we might meet them in. Sometimes, the person’s not going to know if I took a class about something that I knew nothing about. Then that’s where we have to get really creative to be–

Maria Anderson, when she’s been on the podcast before, talks a lot about making sure to incorporate opportunities to explore. If I don’t know, but I know today, but if I didn’t back in the day, if I didn’t know why I’d be interested in statistics, well, my goodness gracious, just imagine all the places, the data sets you could introduce me to and go, “Which one of these gigantic data sets is something that’s relevant to you in your life and that you’d like to know more about?” Guess what, statistics helps you do that. I know I’ve been talking a lot. I’d love to hear your reactions as far as how do we shrink some of this down before we can get to competency based across our program or across the institution, other ways that we might be able to shrink these great ideas down a little bit?

Kelvin: I mean, I think, for example, some schools and their faculty could again take on small things like credentials, certificates where the workload is not as much as trying to find an entire 120 credits Bachelor of Science program in X, or Bachelor or Arts program in Y. It’s, again, taking those baby steps to talk with colleagues at other institutions that are doing the work, really being mindful of lessons learned. That’s why I really like organizations like the Competency-Based Education Network. Charla Long as the executive director of that organization, along with their board, has just done a great job of providing opportunities for schools that are already doing this work to create resources to help all of us who are still trying to figure out how do I actually build bright assessments that measure the competencies?

Then even before that, how do I define something that is measurable? Then how do I actually structure my SIS system, for example, to track students as they move from the completion of one competency to the next, when our current system is still based on credit hours and other other processes that are along the two compared to what we can do now with measuring competencies?

I think it is, again, just taking those small steps and just having conversations with peers at other institutions. Again, going to conferences either online or face-to-face to have that deeper dive. Also, rewarding faculty. If we’re going to engage in this work, definitely executive sponsors like a provost or a dean or a program director need to find resources to give the faculty as well as staff members opportunities to talk with their counterparts at conferences or by Zoom or other means.

Then maybe course releases and things to actually rebuild certain courses. It could be a really great professional development opportunity for faculty, but institutions have to provide the resources to really help their faculty do this work because they’re, of course, super busy with research other activities. We have to also make it worth their while as well, but also be very strategic. Maybe the low-hanging fruit are those certificates or credentials in very high popular areas like maybe an IT or perhaps in nursing. There’s definitely movements already there. There might be certain disciplines that lend themselves very well, but I think it behooves us to, as you mentioned, do this, start doing this work now because at least within the online learning market, it’s getting super and super crowded.

It’s not enough to say that you have this cool online learning program. Of course, the elites will still have very strong brand recognition, but everyone else, this is going to be much harder to say to the folks, “Hey, take my course online,” when there’s literally thousands of other schools that are doing it. Then maybe hundreds that are offering it at a better price point. How will you stand out? I think leveraging CBE courses and programs is one way to go, also very strong student support services as I mentioned. That will also help folks hopefully get to the finish line faster as well.

Bonni: To that end, I wanted to explore a little bit more of the idea you shared of us thinking about student support in terms of social work. I was just talking to a friend of mine who teaches in Psychology and also is a therapist. We were discussing the differences between the profession of social work and the profession of Psychologist. Of course, on the podcast a lot, it’s come up before, we’re not supposed to be therapists for our students. Yet, I do think that just this idea of helping people be able to navigate things, what we were talking about by the way, I wish he could have been there, Kelvin, it was a great little barbecue. You could have came over, [chuckles] but it was just that a friend had recently, they had the family had to move the mother into a home.

Just how difficult that was, the mother has Alzheimer’s and just what a difficult challenge that was. We were like, “Where’s the instruction book?” They didn’t get the little book, like when you drop your kid off at camp, they’re like, “They might miss you for a while, but really these are the kinds of things that we’ll do to help them not miss as much while you’re gone.” [chuckles] Then our experience, we just haven’t found the social work for these monumental parts of our lives, or even back to the pandemic, like where’s the booklet Kelvin for how to do thing. It’s a pandemic. [chuckles] Could you expand a little bit around the ways in which you could see a model of social work coming in to help our students being able to navigate their college experiences a little bit better?

Kelvin: Well, I’m a big fan of the provost at Western Governors University. Her name is Marni Baker Stein and Dr. Stein has done– She’s had conversations and podcasts and conference presentations about WGU’s community of care. Of course, their model is different because the community of care also takes the faculty role and unbundles it, so there’s many touch points.

It’s not just the person teaching the course, it’s also faculty who serve as almost like program directors as well as success coaches. I think schools do have to figure out what is your community of care? Do you have a case management approach to tracking students and also not putting all the burden on the faculty? If I’m teaching an admirable psychology course to a bunch of psychology majors and nursing majors and other majors, and my class is like 200 students, let’s say. At some of the larger colleges and universities, myself, I’m not going to have the time to do that.

Of course, my TAs are probably not really the right people either. How can I provide leverage to the university or the colleges advisors, or maybe success coaches who at least can be there when when problems occur? Really, at the course level, it’s all about grades and non-attendance and those types of things, which then can be funneled into an early alert system that advisors and students success coaches can then access. I think institutions have to, again, think about the resourcing. How can they actually have successful coaches, let’s say, with a caseload of, I don’t know, 50 to 100 students or more, and then reached out to those folks proactively sharing– to your point, not necessarily trying to be a therapist to them, but reminding students of when services are available. Reminding them perhaps what online services are available.

Because, again, students are really busy. I think the pandemic has really increased this focus on online therapy. Tele-health. I think more and more schools are going to invest in that to give them the scale to do success coaching at a level that is helpful, not just around career counseling, but mental health issues and physical health issues. Of course, that takes time and money, but a lot of it is also just, again, kind of mapping out what would that look like? Who’s going to be responsible? What type of follow-up can we provide? Those are some of the things that I think about. Because I’m an online learning person, in the past, I’ve done little things like how can we actually build an online tutoring program? We were telling students, “Hey, you can take all these courses online but you have to come to the campus for a tutor that breaks the whole model.”

I tried to do it from that standpoint and taking those steps, but the approach for a community care approach, it needs to be much more comprehensive in finding ways to again leverage data to make improvements in the services. Even things like online tutoring now, there are companies like tutor.com where even faculty can find out what are the money points that their students are bringing to tutoring sessions.

Sometimes, there’s a big wall between what happens with tutors and what happens in the classroom and so if we can either make those walls leakier where data can be shared, that can help us with our community of care approach in terms of helping those students by giving the faculty the data that they need to maybe do course correct or to do special digital office hours or online learning office hours where they focus on those money points.

Bonni: I love the work of Sara Goldrick-Rab and, of course, so many of her team and researchers on the Real College Movement, and even just something as simple as putting a basic needs statement in our syllabi which, to me, when I first heard about it, seemed purely informative, a very important informative, but I didn’t also understand when I initially heard about this practice that it also reduces the stigma.

“Oh, because this is in the syllabus, it means I’m not the only one who’s sitting here hungry and doesn’t have enough to eat. There’s enough people because if there is enough people that they put it in the syllabus, probably it means I’m not the only one.” I love that we can accomplish both aims in both being transparent about the information but also helping people feel that it’s okay and there are supports for you. I just love that. Anytime we can do more of that, I think so helpful.

Kelvin: Sara’s work is great and your example just even reminded me of a real basic thing, like who doesn’t like extra credit points? So could you build into your course an opportunity, whether it’s for credit or for extra credit, for students to even evaluate the services. You give them the information about what’s available, and even if they don’t utilize it, have them even send you a description of their perception.

Do you think this would have been helpful for you if you needed the services? What’s missing? Because we see different snapshots of our student body every semester, it would be great to give students an opportunity to tell us, are we on the right path in terms of meeting their needs?

Bonni: I love that. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I just wanted to quickly recommend there was an article that came out. The authors are Martha Burtis, Matthew Cheney, Robin DeRosa, Hannah Hounsell, and Natalie Smith and it’s entitled Chronic Illness is a Part of College Life. One of the things I’ve been reading a lot by the members of the disability community who I follow on social media is a lot of talk around, “Hey, everyone, if you were able to provide these accommodations to people in mass, and as quickly as you did during the pandemic, why are we not hearing enough conversation about these things continuing and just becoming a normal part of higher education?”

One normal part of higher education that I know I need to continue to expand my imagination around is this idea of chronic illness, and both from a standpoint of our students so that I can continue to become more student centered, but also our colleagues. It was just a really helpful look. They each share different stories, how this has impacted their lives, how it’s impacted their classes, students, all kinds of things. It’s a really nice resource. I encourage people to go and to read it, and ironically, I’m realizing now I didn’t make the connection while we were talking.

It’s a blog that’s posted on the Hope4College and that is the organization that Sara Goldrick-Rab. It’s on their medium blog posts. I’ll send that to everybody in the recommendations, and Kelvin, what would you like to recommend to us today?

Kelvin: I have so many.

Bonni: You got time.

Kelvin: I’ll be quick, but I have a couple. I mentioned the Competency-Based Education Network. I would highly recommend listeners check out their webpage. It’s a great resource in the sense that it allows you to meet folks who are, again, engaged in this work at a lot of different levels. Again, they’re going to be people from schools like WGU and Southern New Hampshire, and others that have been doing competency-based education for years, as well as many who are just getting started as well, so it’s in-between.

There’s usually an annual conference. This year is actually literally in my backyard almost. It’s in near downtown Austin. I live in Northern Austin, Texas, so it’s definitely worth checking out and the conference will be in November, but to find out more you just go to www.cbenetwork.org. If you can’t come to the conference, that’s okay. There’s also some publications there that will help you have a better understanding about what competency-based education is all about, and so that’s one resource.

Also, I’m very interested in where things are moving in terms of resources for faculty that hopefully many faculty will take part in. I’m very interested in adaptive courseware, and there are some good examples of institutions that are leveraging tools. Like Wiley has a tool ZyBooks, and that’s Z-Y-B-O-O-K-S, and so ZyBooks is a great resource. Many schools use their resources to help educate folks on everything from computer programming to math concepts, and it gives students an experiential learning experience grappling with these types of materials. It really replaces a traditional textbook with this adaptive learning platform. Definitely check that out.

Then I would also keep your eyes open. There’s a startup company called Argos Education. A colleague of ours, Michael Feldstein and others, are developing or have developed an adaptive learning platform that faculty will be able to create their own adaptive learning courses and it will provide a marketplace for them to sell and or adopt other institutions’ adaptive learning courses as well.

It’s just getting started but set your Google Alerts for Argos Education. You can also check out Michael Feldstein’s profile on LinkedIn. There’s a little bit more information there when you look at some of his recent posts about Argos. I just wanted to let faculty especially know about that, because that could actually be an interesting way for faculty to customize some of their own adaptive courses to help students in particular disciplines.

Bonni: Oh, that sounds incredible. That sounds great. Lots for us to experiment. By the way, a side note, I recently was on a recent episode. We were sharing about a little tip having to do with Google Docs and I got a text from our friends saying, “Oh, my gosh, I didn’t know that. You just saved me so much time.” I am going to quickly because you just brought it up and we’ve got the time.

I’m going to really encourage people to set a Google Alert for topics that you care about. Like this. I mean he was kidding, but also probably knowing Kelvin, not kidding. That’s how we can keep up with this information. If you’re worried how will know when it comes out? You can set up a Google Alert. You can do it on your own name. You can do it on your university’s name. I mean you might not want to depending on how big your university is, but you could trick it out a little bit to just get the information that you want. Use all your Boolean logic or you’re putting things in quotation marks to make sure you get just the information that you’re interested in.

I do find that I recently did that for my university and laughed at myself. Why did it take me this long to do this? I think you should take him quite literally and follow that up a little bit. I’m going to add that to my recommendations too. Anything else that you wanted to share?

Kelvin: People can easily follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I’m very blessed to be connected to great folks like you Bonni and others who are also sharing information. Sometimes, I just wish there was a better way for us to aggregate data in a way such that we can make higher ed a little bit more transparent. With Twitter, it’s a little bit harder because it just depends on what you actually see, and they’re all there are definitely programs to help with some of the aggregation but it’s still challenging. There’s just so much going on right now that we don’t know about that we need to know about.

Bonni: Those opportunities when people are able to make whatever it is that they do a little bit more open and available, and then have places where you can have those conversations, but boy, it’s both when we’re not able to do it. Like you said, it’s a challenge but it’s also the most remarkable opportunity. I mean I suspect your experience is very much like mine. If you do have a question and you ask it before you know it, you’ve got even more than you even knew to ask. When you have these kinds of communities built up, people are incredibly generous.

Kelvin: Yes, they are exciting times and I think, again, people are realizing we’re going to get through the pandemic, we’re going to get through other challenges, but in order to do it, we need to be more transparent, more collaborative to move higher education forward. My hope is that will happen more than it’s happened in the past.

Bonni: It’s been such a delight to get an opportunity to talk with you today, Kelvin. I appreciate you contributing to the Teaching in Higher Ed community, and this is just a drop in the bucket compared to how generous you are with your time and talents. I just enjoyed getting to learn from you today. I’m excited for the episode to air.

Kelvin: Me too. Thank you so much, Bonni, it was a big pleasure to talk with you and surprised that we didn’t actually have an opportunity to do this even sooner, but I’ve enjoyed listening to your podcast and just honored to be a guest today, so thanks.

Bonni: I feel the same way. In fact, I’ll put a link in the show notes, because I forgot about it until now, but we were a part of a holiday special, which you can listen to it even when it’s not a holiday, but I think we were maybe wearing some costumes. There might’ve been some holiday hats or sweaters or something involved. [laughs].

Kelvin: That’s right. I think I had a big Christmas Elf or something that I was holding up at the screen, but that was a lot of fun. Looking forward to hopefully meeting at a conference in the future face to face as well.

Bonni: Oh, absolutely. It has been a delight, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Kelvin: Thank you.

[music]

Bonni: Thanks once again to Kelvin Bentley for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, it was episode number 368. You can head over to teachinginhighered.com/368 to view the show notes and recommendations. If you want to receive them in your inbox once a week, you can subscribe to our weekly update and that weekly update has the recent episodes of show notes recommendations, but also other recommendations that go beyond the ones we talk about on the show, quotable words, all kinds of good stuff. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:42:31] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.