How Higher Education is Creatively Responding to COVID-19 Outbreak: A Conversation with Dr. Katie Linder

The last several weeks have been nothing short of historical. COVID-19 has radically altered the way each of us lives, works, and learns in what feels like the blink of an eye. And while this moment in time has been, and will continue to be, filled with incredible challenges, it has also birthed remarkable opportunity for higher education. On this week's episode, Zach Busekrus sits down with Dr. Katie Linder, the Executive Director for Program Development at Kansas State University Global Campus, to discuss how higher ed is creatively responding to the new reality the coronavirus has ushered us all into.

Dr. Linder is a prolific writer, collaborator, course developer, and podcaster (among many other "ers" and "ors"). A few weeks ago, she spearheaded the development of the Keep Teaching Community, which is a free resource for higher education professionals looking for community, information, and creative solutions in this novel era of distance learning. Dr. Linder shares thoughtful responses to the following questions (among several others!):

1. What schools or specific programs within schools are responding well to this crisis? 
2. Will you explain what inspired you all to create the Keep Teaching Community and how educators can best leverage it for support during these times?
3. Can you describe a framework for how educators should think about delivering content, evaluating work, and offering support during this time?  
4. What positive opportunities do you believe this "coronavirus crisis" creates for higher education (specifically, as it pertains to recruiting this fall's class)?
   

1. PODCAST EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
2. 
   
3. Zach: Hey, everyone, before we get started, I want to take a quick moment to pause and to thank you. Thank you for being here. Thanks for tuning into this conversation as you adjust to a new normal. Thank you for being a part of this growing engaged community of enrollment marketers. I am so proud of what we are building here and I am moved by the feedback, the editorial contributions and the support that so many of you have provided. We are going to need each other now more than ever before and I want you to know that Enrollify is here. We are listening. We are thinking hard about how to provide value during this moment. I want to especially, thank our partners who make the work we do here possible. We are really selective in who we pick to sponsor our conversations. I encourage each of you to check out what they have to offer. Request a demo, download an e-book, or engage in an exploratory conversation with them. These are exceptional people who really care about bettering the enrollment marketing space.
4.  
5. Today's sponsor is no exception. Blackthorn.io, a Salesforce app exchange partner, is the most beautiful, simple, yet powerful native Salesforce events platform on the market. Due to the Coronavirus, their team has spent the last couple of weeks working tirelessly to update their solution, and now admissions departments and other event planners can connect tools like Zoom directly to their existing event processes, which makes online recruitment easily manage entirely in Salesforce. If you use Salesforce or CRM and you need ideas on how to move your recruitment and admissions events online, please go and read Kristen Hick's latest blog post at blackthorn.io/blog. 
6. Zach: Hello and welcome to the Enrollify Podcast. My name is Zach Busekrus and I am the host of today's episode. Today I have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Katie Linder, who is the Executive Director for Program Development at Kansas State University Global Campus. Welcome to the show, Katie.
7. Katie: Thanks, Zach. I am so happy to be here with you.
8. Zach: Katie, can you just give us a quick overview of who you are, what your role at KSU Global Campus looks like, and, you know, maybe just a Cliff's Notes sort of overview of your career to date.
9. Katie: Sure, so like many of your listeners, I know people in higher ed. can come from a lot of different backgrounds. My background is my PhD. and my Master's Degree or both in Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. I came out of the humanities, but then I very quickly went into faculty development. I directed a Center for Teaching and Learning at Suffolk University in Boston. Then I went from there to direct the Ecampus Research Unit at Oregon State University and I was there for several years. Then now I am at Kansas State University global campus, and I have been in this role for just seven weeks. It is a relatively recent move.
10. Zach: Oh, wow!
11. Katie: Yeah, so it has been really, fun to kind of get to know all the people on campus through this experience. My work is mostly been centered on supporting faculty and teaching and learning settings across a range of different modalities. Like some of my books have included 'The Blended Course Design Workbook'. I also have one on 'Managing Your Professional Identity Online'. Then most recently, 'Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers'. I do a lot of work around faculty development and support.
12. Zach: Fantastic. Are you relating with students at all in this role or is it primarily just a kind of faculty liaison sort of role?
13. Katie: So the world that I am in now is I work primarily with faculty and departments to think about kind of strategic direction for online program development and course development. I have instructional designers who report to me and my unit.
14. I also have some program coordinators who work with the colleges and think kind of from a strategic standpoint. What are some different courses and programs that might work well with their curriculum that we would want to move online? And then we also do some work with non-credit as well. So, yes, I am primarily working with faculty and administrators, leadership on campus. Then we have another unit within Global Campus who liaises more with our students.
15. Zach: Fantastic. Well, so today we are here to talk about some of the ways in which schools are responding creatively to the COVID-19 outbreak. You know, it seems like the expected return date for, "business as usual is changing by the hour". I am just curious if you can give us some examples of schools or programs or institutes within schools that you think are responding really well to this crisis that we are all living through right now.
16. Katie: That is a really, good question. I guess I would say I do not want to call any school specifically because I think we are all kind of doing the best we can and some people, for that means they're doing really well in a particular area and they're kind of catching up in another area. I would say that I think institutions that already had a strong online portfolio or institutions who had dealt with academic continuity issues in the past, such as those who were disrupted in the last couple of years by wildfires or other natural disasters, I think those institutions have a little bit of an advantage in this situation. They may have more infrastructure around online learning support.
17. They may have more policies around academic continuity because they have kind of already gone through this. That said, I think we are dealing with a situation that really is unprecedented for a lot of us and so there is a lot of logistics that we're all kind of needing to figure out for the first time and those logistics can be very campus specific and very regional based on kind of your student population is. I would say, I guess in general that institutions who are rapidly responding, who are communicating clearly and consistently with all of their campus stakeholders, they are doing a really, great job in a very difficult set of circumstances.
18. Zach: I am curious, just as a quick follow up to that, one of the things that we have seen kind of going around specifically on social media over the past 48 hours is a lot of OPM "“Online Program Managers kind of running ads and doing outreach, saying, you know, we are here to help. Again, do not want to call it anyone specifically here but I am just curious, kind of from an academic standpoint, right. From what you are hearing at KSU or just kind of through your faculty contacts throughout the field, how do people feel about online program managers or other vendors kind of stepping in and using this as an opportunity to sell additional services? Is that sort of support welcomed right now or what is kind of the academic reaction to that?
19. Katie: That is a really, good question Zach. I think that there is a pretty, wide spectrum of reactions. Also, I would add it to the mix that because many of us have had conferences cancelled recently in this kind of online teaching and learning space, the vendors who would have gone to those conferences are also reaching out and trying to follow up and the timing for that, you know, isn't fantastic given everything that's going on. I would say that for people that are vendors that we already have kind of trusted relationships with or that we've already been working with and they're coming to us and saying, you know, let us expand your licenses or, you know, let's create a situation where you have more access on your campus or we're giving you kind of a longer contract or something like that. I think that is a different kind of situation than a new vendor that we have never worked with that is reaching out and kind of trying to solve a problem for us. It is not that, you know, we do not have those problems to be solved but anytime you work with a new vendor and you are scaling that vendor, you need to test the product. There's various things you need to do to kind of get it up and running at scale and their security issues to think about. There is accessibility issues to think about and so it's challenging to kind of bring something new into the mix when we're all a little bit in crisis mode. I think it really depends on that prior relationship, what the kind of really, distinct need is on a campus. I would definitely say, you know, that it is not like I don't ever contact anyone, you know because I think there are certainly campuses that really do need some of these services. It is a little bit hard when we are putting out different fires all over our kind of portfolios on our campuses to have these e-mails coming in at the same time. It is kind of one more thing to juggle. So I think it depends, it depends on what your needs are and what those relationships look like.
20. Zach: Sure. So late last week, you and your team, I do not know exactly the date of this official launch. I saw an article that you were featured in last Friday but sometime late last week you and your team launched an online forum for educators around the world where people can ask questions and share ideas about facilitating instruction remotely. Can you explain what inspired you all to create this space and how educators can best leverage it for support during these, again, challenging times?
21. Katie: Absolutely. So this space actually launched a week ago today as we record this. It was on a Tuesday morning and a couple of weeks ago, before that point, I think we were all kind of scrambling to try to find resources that might help us respond to those situation. I saw a lot of things being shared on Twitter and various listserv that I belong to and there was some overlap in what was being shared, but they weren't really being collected or curated in any way that seemed kind of meaningful or that a large group could have access to some of these resources. I had used the platform, Mighty Networks in other projects and thought that it might be a good fit for this situation. Basically, it allows you to have conversations within a you can have a public community, you can have a private community. In this case, this is a public community and it allows us to post resources, hosted live events, bring people together, organize information, you know, relatively quickly and easily, and really just provide support for people at scale. We were interested in kind of connecting people on our campus to people on other campuses, because this is a situation where I think we can all support each other and realize that this is bigger than just our own institutions. We created this space it is called 'Keep Teaching Resources for Higher Ed.' and basically just invited anyone in who could use the support. We have faculty in there. We have some educational developers in there. We have some human resources folks in there. I mean, pretty much anyone in the higher ed. space that really is looking for some guidance and some support from colleagues. Now we have over 1,200 people in there and growing every day.
22. Zach: Wow!
23. Katie: So it has been a really, fun community to engage with. I think people are being so kind to each other and trying to provide as many resources as we can and it is allowing things to not get lost in the mix. We know that academic continuity it can happen again. You know, like I mean, we are all kind of dealing with it now. I think there is a good chance that this community will remain kind of open and available for people for the next time that we have a situation or an institution has a situation where they are really scrambling. I just looked around and said we all do not need to be recreating the wheel. You know, like we can be sharing resources in a way that really feels supportive and tries to relieve some of the stress that people are feeling during this time.
24. Zach: Sure. Is there a particular content topic or is there a particular thread that has been especially helpful?
25. Katie: So I think that one of the things that we found, especially from faculty, is they are coming in from very different disciplines and saying, how do I teach art online? How do I teach you know labs online?
26. You know, there is a lot of conversation among people trying to figure out kind of the ins and outs of doing that and so we have created groups that are specific to those kind of disciplined groupings that would allow people to come in and share resources and support for each other. I think that, again, we are kind of looking around and seeing on the listserv like these are the questions that keep coming up over and over again.
27. Rather than kind of recycling all those resources over and over again via email, we can pull them all into this community, tag them in that group and say, here's where you go. You know if you are looking for resources on this topic, go join this group and kind of filter through the resources that are there. So that's one of the bigger issues I've seen are things along those lines. The other thing I would say has been really, popular and you may have seen this kind of floating around the internet, various spaces is people are starting to curate information and really, helpful ways through like spreadsheets and other types of documents that are crowdsourcing information and we pulled a lot of that into this community as well. Those are really, popular I think for people who are trying to just, get large amounts of information that is crowdsourced in a relatively quick timeframe.
28. Zach: We will jump right back into the conversation after a quick message from this episode sponsor.
29. Sponsor's Message Begins
30. To say that the last few weeks have been crazy might be the greatest understatement of 2020. In a way, the whole world has stopped and yet enrollment marketers are still expected to successfully seat a fall 2020 class. The good news, we are also living through one of the greatest moments of innovation in history and where there is innovation, there's always hope. I have been chatting with a number of our listeners on LinkedIn over the past few days, and the question I get asked over and over again is how do I successfully move live recruitment events online?
31. Folks have been asking me about whether webinars or Facebook live streams are better. What promotional tactics they should be using and what the best tools for online event management are. As an enrollment-marketing technologist, I have seen my fair share of event management apps. Most of them are clunky, glitchy and do not truly integrate with your CRM or SIS even if they say that they do and that is why I love Blackthorn.io.
32. Blackthorn events is the best native Salesforce events platform on the market. If you are an enrollment marketer using Salesforce as your CRM and or SIS and you are looking for an end-to-end management solution for your recruitment and or on campus events, Chris, Kristen and the entire Blackthorn team are your people. We are living through a moment that is nothing short of historical. COVID-19 is fundamentally changing the way that we attract, engage and delight new students but the show must go on. Let us start reimagining your event marketing strategy by checking out Blackthorn Solutions at blackthorn.io.
33. As Tony Robbins would say, change is inevitable, but progress is a choice. You can choose progress by signing up to learn more about how Blackthorn is helping schools like yours change well. Visit blackthorn.io. Fun fact, Tony Robbins is one of their clients. Again, get started. Request a demo at blackthorn.io.                                        
34. Sponsor's Message Ends
35. Zach: Taking, just a quick step back here. I am curious to just, hear your thoughts as somebody who has been in this space for a while, has experience kind of teaching in a remote context. Can you talk to us a little bit about the dos and don'ts of remote instruction? Again, I know that this will vary quite dramatically based off of an individual's context but can you describe a sort of framework for how educators should think about delivering content, evaluating work and offering support during this time? Are there just can kind of a couple of dos and don'ts that you have gathered over the years that would be worth sharing with our audience?
36. Katie: Sure. So I think there is actually a really a ton of different successful ways to do remote instruction. There is definitely not one-way that is, you know, the right way but I do think that one of the key things is to create an environment that can be really, flexible for learners. We are still meeting remote learning environments to be accessible for students with disabilities. We also needed to be open for students who don't have great internet connections or who are working from a mobile device. We have some students right now who do not have their course materials because they had to move off campus really, rapidly.
37. We just need to keep in mind that students cannot go right now to a campus library or a Starbucks for Wi-Fi or they cannot borrow a computer maybe from their roommate. You know like they're in a very different situation now than they were even just a couple of weeks ago. So I think what we provide to them has to be just radically flexible and that's tough. I mean, that is a creative act of teaching is to really, figure out how to do that but I think that is a really, fundamental thing to consider. I would say it is also really, helpful to remember that the learning we are offering in a remote environment is really an approximation for what we would do in another classroom setting.
38. So because we're in a bit of an emergency situation and we know things are just rapidly evolving and it's really hard to keep up with that. Instructors may not be able to follow best practices. I have heard some people describe remote instruction as a kind of lifeboat approach. You know, this is not the time to be trying the coolest tools and like really trying to figure out the best practices and where the research says we should, you know, do certain things a certain way.
39. We really need to keep our expectations for ourselves and for our students reasonable, knowing that this is a stressful time for everybody. So really, connecting in with that humanity of understanding that we are all a little bit stressed out we are trying to be flexible. We are here to support each other. Those things, I think, are really, important when it comes to this kind of remote instruction.
40. Zach: One of the questions that I've seen floating around a lot is the question of whether or not you do something like a recorded lecture that then gets sent out and students have something like 24 hours to engage with the content versus having people kind of log in and, you know, do some sort of live Zoom course or something like that. Just curious. Maybe in the online forum, have people been discussing which approach seems to be a little bit more popular, a little bit more doable, or a little bit more scalable? Again, considering this context that we're in.
41. Katie: Yeah, I think so a concern for a lot of people, especially thinking about that flexible environment is we now have students who may not be in the same time zone as the original time, their classes being taught so thinking about the synchronous sessions could be a little bit tougher for them. There is also some issues.
42. I think we have still yet to see the capacity of some of these online services and especially with a synchronous, you know what they can do. We do need to remember that the whole world is going online right now. It is not just higher education institutions. It is businesses. It is K-12 in some cases and that is really going to test the limits of what these companies can do. I think that that piece, you know, it requires a little bit of a backup plan. So I think that in some faculty's minds, the synchronous option may be the easiest just because it is the closest approximation to what they were doing at the same time we need that kind of plan B in case, for whatever reason, students can't do that live video.
43. Maybe it is because they do not have Wi-Fi, they do not have a way to connect, or they are in a different time zone. I can expect that some of our students may be trying to do jobs even remotely because they have more flexible schedules now than they did before. So, you know, all of those things are going to kind of come into the mix in terms of the things we need to be concerned about. For us, we are starting to kind of encourage a little more asynchronous engagement for our faculty because we want them to just be thinking really carefully about those different options for our students.
44. Zach: On a more positive note, what opportunities do you believe that this coronavirus crisis creates for higher ed.? A lot of our listeners are people who are enrollment marketers, so they're working in higher education, admissions and marketing. Most of them are kind of at the director or V.P. levels.
45. They oversee graduate admissions or undergraduate admissions or they are overseeing enrollment management as a whole within the context of their institution. I am just really, curious to see what to hear what your thoughts are on the opportunities that this moment really creates for us and specifically, if you can speak at all to this about what sort of opportunities it creates from a recruitment standpoint.
46. Katie: I would say that I think this situation has given us all a chance, kind of first of all, to really test our infrastructures in a range of ways across campus. We are going to have more robust support structures. Faculty are going to be more aware of different teaching tools. Students are going to become more resilient through this experience and offices across campus are really going to know the core elements of their work and be reminded of the priorities that really matter for them during this period.
47. I do think it has offered us all a reminder of what our core educational mission really is. Why are we here, especially when we all have to band together in this kind of all hands on deck kind of situation? I think that that can be leveraged in some ways for marketing purposes. I mean, if we were to think in that direction. I would also say, though, that I think that this is a time when we are really, going to get to know our students incredibly well.
48. We are going to hear about their challenges. We are going to hear about the things that are really, important to them when it comes to their educational experiences. We are going to have to comfort students that are grieving the fact that they will not have a commencement when they graduate. You know, all of those things I think will bring us closer together and I think when it comes to working with students and recruiting students and really understanding what their needs are and whether our institution is a good fit for them, we need to know them.
49. We need to deeply, understand what their motivations are. I think we are going to get a front row seat to that for this experience. It is not always going to come to us in the most positive ways. I think we are going to hear some complaints. I think, you know, we are going to all have to kind of be flexible as we're dealing with the situation but it is good data to help us see what they really care about and how we can be responsive to that.
50. Zach: Yeah, I love that. I love the idea, too, that maybe through this experience, one of the things that both faculty and recruitment staff will have a much better understanding of who are the right fit students for these programs, who are the right fit students for our institution.
51. I think higher ed. as a whole you know, before the coronavirus has been in a you know, as a sort of crisis in and of itself of trying to understand its value proposition and specifically at the graduate level, who should we be attracting? What program offerings do we have that are the right fit for a particular audience?
52. Perhaps as you are suggesting here, through this experience, we will all have a much better sense of the right quality of student that a particular institution is, you know, is the right fit for is looking for. You know, from a recruitment standpoint that can help dramatically reduce the cost to acquire said student, if you have a better understanding of who exactly it is that you are going after so I appreciate that.
53. Katie: Yeah, absolutely.
54. Zach: So considering, again, this current reality that is just it's seemingly impossible not to continue to talk about if there were three things that you could mandate or strongly encourage is probably a better way of expressing this that our listeners do after listening to our conversation today. What would those things be?
55. Katie: Really, great question Zach. I think I would start by saying, just given my experience in the last couple of weeks, open up your email and send a note of thanks to somebody who is really positively impacted your work this week. This is an area where I think we all need to be showing so much gratitude.
56. I think about the individuals I have worked with to update our website in the past several days. You know my team that has had to be really, flexible. There is so many people who are making this work in a really, difficult time so I would say that's number one. Number two, I would recommend that people go take nap. We have all been sprinting and this is a marathon situation and we really need to be rested and recharge for what is to come. I have heard a colleague saying, you know, they are working 21-hour days.
57. You know, they are really pushing hard and we need to keep our immune systems up. We need to be understanding that this is a longer-term situation than just this week and last week. You know, we really need to be taking care of ourselves. I think, third, I would recommend that people find something that really helps shift their brain to off mode once the workday is over, especially now that we are all working remotely or a lot of us are working remotely. I think a lot of thing asked of us right now, and we need to be able to power down at the end of the day so that we do not burn out both physically and cognitively.
58. So whatever it is that allows you to kind of step away and, you know, really power down, I think is going to be really useful. We are all going to get through this. We are going to need to do it one piece at a time. So just, make sure that you are taking care of yourself as you are going through it.
59. Zach: I love it. I have two final questions for you. The first one is just for again, our listeners. Are there any resources that you would recommend that people tap into, whether it is this online forum? 
60. Katie: So there is a few things that immediately come to mind. Of course, I definitely would recommend that folks come into the community because it is a really, supportive environment. It is free. It is a place where we are all kind of coming in together to get our work done and I would love to see folks there. There is a couple of books that I have also been recommending to people, there's one called 'Working Virtually', and it's a few years old now but it does get into a lot of the kind of key things you need to think about if you are taking your team remote or you're doing it from an institutional level. I can give you all the details to add it into the show notes.
61. It is a book from Stylus Publishing and I am just not remembering the author's name right now, but we can include that in the show notes. It goes through a lot of the logistical pieces, but also so many of those pieces of moving into a remote environment. Then the other resource that I have really, been recommended to folks is some of the work by Pema ChĂśdrĂśn, she is a Buddhist nun, and she has a wonderful book called 'When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times'. I think that one of the things we can't kind of lose sight of is people are dealing with not just stuff on the work side and the professional side, but really some scary things on the personal side, too.
62. And depending on what people, family situations are or if they do know somebody who's ill or hopefully you know where we're not experiencing too much of the mortality rates here in the U.S. but of course, people are going to start to know people who are dying from this. You know, this is serious stuff and I think that we need to acknowledge that humanity and the human side of what we are dealing with here. So even just talking with people about how are they coping with some really, difficult things on the personal side as well as the professional side. I can also give information to link that book in the show notes as well.
63. Zach: Yes. Fantastic. We will be linking all of these great resources into this show notes. We will also be including them in the announcement e-mail that we send out to folks. My final question for you is, is what, if anything, gives you hope right now?
64. Katie: I would say Zach there is a ton that is giving me hope.
65. Zach: Good!
66. Katie: There is a lot of things, you know, all over the world, you know, as we're watc