The Higher Ed RevolutionHow Digital is Resetting The Relationship Between Students and the Academy.

Myself

● Digital strategist at York University, 2012 - 2016.● As of Aug 15, senior digital specialist at the Ontario College of

Teachers.● Taught social media marketing at George Brown College in Toronto,

online and in class.● Lecture on digital / social at Toronto universities & colleges.

○ Seneca, Centennial & George Brown Colleges.○ Schulich School of Business and the Faculty of Graduate Studies,

York University.○ Ryerson University’s continuing education and ADaPT programs.

● Co-founder and organizer, Social Media Cafe Toronto.● Speaker at such conferences as #PSEWEB, PodCamp, etc.● All opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the views

or opinions of any of my employers, past or present.

Change is coming

●The velocity of change is increasing:○ Communications are instantaneous and personal.○ Information and interaction is becoming public, while conversation is

becoming private.○ Short-form content is taking over.○ Visuals and video are pushing text aside.○ Attention spans are shortening.○ Experience is becoming virtual.○ MOOCs, online learning, courselets and other

approaches are encroaching on the traditions of the ivy-covered halls.

Communications aren’t becoming instant

They already are instant.Students expect instant responses for a wide range of questions

and interactions.Not only from professors but from the institution itself.

Admissions department.Registrar.During issues & crises.

The bureaucratic nature of universities & collegesMeans they react about as quickly as an ocean liner.

The difficulty in messaging as fast as students want.“Why do I have to hear it from 680 News

before I hear it from you?”

Students expect a response now

30 years ago the 24-hour news cycle was noteworthy.Now we have the 24-minute information cycle. If we’re lucky.Students expect responses in minutes.They expect answers on the channels of their choosing.Which channels do they want to hear it on?

(Hint: not via email.)

Well, they can wait!

Based on the old understanding that we conrol the messaging and the timing.

We don’t control either of those anymore. And students shouldn’t have to wait.

In a crowded marketplace, customer service and online conversation are key brand marketing and differentiation points for a university.

If you don’t give students the information they want or need, they’ll just go elsewhere to find it: Reddit / Yik Yak / Red Flag deals.

If you send them away, you lose the chance to engage that student, and they may get incorrect information or get exposed to negative conversation.

Channels of choice for students in 2016

Ancient historyEmailPhone

Old schoolTwitterFacebook

New schoolInstagramSnapchatYik YakGoogle+

(Just kidding about G+)

Not even I use email anymore for customer service

Example: when I have a problem with my social software of choice (Radian6, Sysomos, Hootsuite, Sprout Social) email means I have to go hunting for contact info, and that’s probably changed since the last time I talked to anyone there.

Twitter is faster & easier, and someone else may tweet a solution even before the company does.

Recommendation

Acknowledge the channels where your audience wants to interact with you.

Be there for them.Systematize it: social software.

Open a caseCategorize it

LeadInfluencerCritic

Assign it to someone for resolutionTriage / escalate / close the case

Innovation at the speed of light

Pokemon Go

Poll in the room:Who has has tried to leverage it institutionally?

What have you done?Interactive poll -> Pokemon Go is:

A fun game.An engagement / marketing opportunity.A safety issue.A distraction.

Pokemon Go

It’s a Rorschach test for institutions.Interesting fact: you don’t have to like it.You don’t even have to ‘get’ it.You just have to know that it’s drawing people to places like

your campus, and that represents both an opportunity and a risk.

Pokemon Go

Opportunity: drive foot traffic to campus.In-person visitsCheck-insContent sharesAll this ladders up to…

EyeballsExposure

RiskPeople getting hit by cars.Potential for luring.Strangers on campus.Wasting time & effort on a children’s game.

How might you leverage the phenomenon?

The Hudson’s Bay Downtown Toronto will give you 20% off purchases if you catch a Pokemon and show the screen cap to the cashier.

Mountain Equipment Co-Op, and outdoor outfitter in Toronto is using it in advertising in-story for energy bars:

“Hunting monsters? Don’t forget to recharge!”The point of all this is to not get trapped into judging a

novel approach or a new platform, just because it’s different. Consider the opportunity, not the novelty.

Remember the Rorscach test: there will be more Pokemon GosIn the future. How will you react to the opportunity?

Corporate communications...

...can no longer be corporate.Nobody wants to interact with an institution.They want to interact with a person.Interactive poll: if you’re an 18-year-old trying to figure out where to apply

to university, who do you want to listen to and interact with?

Option A

Option B

The sad truth

A frightening number of institutions choose option “A,” sometimes by default.

Hip, with-it individual that I am, I am nonetheless 45 years old.If you wanted someone to effectively reach out to 18-year-olds

at York University in Toronto, Canada, who would you choose to do the reaching out?

Getting snappy

The previous question has application to how to develop a Snapchat presence.

Snapchat

Hands up: who’s using it?I started the institution on Snapchat about a year ago.

Mainly for behind-the-scenes toursWalking around campusPride-building events such as convocation, the Pan Am games, etc.

Now we’re turning it over to the students, to:Animate the experience of being on campus, from a student

perspective.Bring the place to life. Depict it as a fun, dynamic institution.Interact with and engage with existing students.Answer questions and interact with prospective students.

Welcome to the age of publicity

Everything we do seems to be public, whether we like it or not.It seems like nothing is private anymore.

Email communications.Private messages.Issues & crises.

As soon as there’s a crisis, it spreads impossibly fast over social media.

There is no privacy or confidentiality at that point.Which is why active monitoring is more important

than ever.

So why is conversation becoming private?

Snapchat is still primarily a one-to-one medium.WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, one-to-one messaging

apps, are two of the most popular apps in the world.Evolution of millennial / Gen Z usage:

Still on Facebook, but not to interact: to research, and to maintain a public persona.

Don’t really tweet.Instead, they’ve shifted to Instagram, Snapchat and messaging apps.

We have only ourselves to blame

This shift to private conversation should come as no surprise, when we realize what we’ve been doing with digital communications.

Social / digital channel usage ing the 16-24 demographic starts out with content like this...

Then we come along and message like this...

And then we wonder why people do this...

What would you do?

Would you stop paying attention to institutional accounts, if that were you?

If you were bombarded with institutional, promotional messaging, would you take your conversation elsewhere?

If you’re at all like the 16-24 demographic, you would.

But that’s not all

In addition to the shift from public to private, a shift from text to visuals & video is happening:

Social media, Part I:Friendster, MySpace: updates, walls

Social media, Part II:Facebook, Twitter: updates, images

Social media Part III:Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat: images, videoFacebook says that in a few years, it expects almost all the content on its

network to be video.Social media Part IV:

Virtual realityAugmented reality

Content is also becoming shorter

Twitter ushered in the age of 140 characters.The sweet spot in length for posts is actually shorter: 80

charactersAnd not just on Twitter: on all channels.Social was never the place for long, boring corporate content.

It’s even less so now.Long-form content still exists, but it’s transformed:

VideoLive streamingPodcasts

Everything old is new again

All of this goes to show you a few things

It’s never about the technology.It shouldn’t be about the institution.It’s about the content.More and more, it’s also about the engagement.

What’s the future for higher ed, digitally?

The future, now:Drone tours.Virtual tours.Augmented reality.

The future, in the future:Virtual reality.

How you connect with students is changing

●Dawn Bazely at York○ twitter.com/dawnbazely○ twitter.com/yorkuscientists○ Integrating social into the curriculum○ Engaging

■ Ada Lovelace anniversary■ Women in STEM

An even bigger shift

●Blackboard, Moodle and other Course Management Systems / Virtual Learning Environments make it possible to never go in.

Question: what’s the value in showing up here?

●We tell ourselves that students want the “in-class” experience.

●But do they really?●The in-class experience is more valuable for certain

types of classes than for others.●Less so about the in-class experience of being one

among hundreds or thousands, listening to a textbook recitation.

The future, now

MOOCsCourseletsMicro-certificationsCredit by examination

Good source of information on this

Eduvation.caKen Steele

MOOCs

Massive Open Online CoursesCourseraKhan academyUdacityedXEtc.

I started taking a course through a MOOC

●Data Science through Johns Hopkins on Coursera.●I also started an intro to stats course at York University.●Guess which course I finished?

The Coursera one

●(Ok, one part of it so far)●Why?

○ Online met my needs.○ 90-minute commute to York.○ A survey course is no different from reading a textbook and

doing the exercises, for me.■ That means there’s no difference between a survey / intro

course and an online one, as far as delivery is concerned.○ Online was self-paced.

Where does it all end?

●Will universities start folding en masse?●Will education move mostly online?●Will evidence-based accreditation replace class time?●Will STEM replace liberal arts & social sciences?●Will skills training make education itself obsolete, or at least

less desirable?●What effect will private training institutions have?

Talking about change

Remember: technological change is never technicalThe barriers and challenges to change are almost always…

InstitutionalOrganizationalPersonal

The technology itself is almost never the barrier. It’s usually...Institutional resistance.Risk aversion.Policy & procedure.Leadership.

It’s a lot of things that have nothing to do with technology.

All this change, but where to start?

As you’re pondering how to embrace these technology shifts, culture changes, etc., I’ll leave you with this:

Q: How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?A: Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.

Change

Embracing new ideas, new technologies, new approaches starts with a willingness to at least consider - and usually to embrace - change.

Thank you. Please keep in touch.

Markfarmer.net

Twitter.com/markus64

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/markfarmer64