Tom Andriola 0:07
Hello and welcome to Gradually, Gradually, then Suddenly – a blog and interview series with leaders to discuss current issues on how data and technology are reshaping our world. My name is Tom Andriola, and I’m the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Data at the University of California Irvine. My guest today is Dr. Michael Dennin, Dean of undergraduate education and vice provost of teaching and learning here at UC Irvine. Dr. Dennin is a physics professor with many interests and well known for popularizing science for the public, including many TV appearances. Michael has dedicated himself to enhancing the undergraduate experience for Irvine students focusing on excellence and social impact. Michael, welcome.
Michael Dennin 0:48
Great to be here. Tom. I’m excited to talk about this.
Tom Andriola 0:51
So UC Irvine is one of the national leaders in using data around the student experiences to help guide the student to success in their educational goals. Can you talk about the Student Success initiatives that are aligned and what has allowed Irvine to become a leader in this space?
Michael Dennin 1:09
So I’m going to jump to the second part of that, Tom – what’s allowed us to become a leader off the bat. And I think it’s leadership from the top. Our Chancellor is committed to this. But also, UCI is still in many ways a young, flexible university. And as much as, as every place has silos, and we certainly have our strong silos. When I took over this position, about four or five years ago, we decided to bring data together. No one put up barriers, or at least no one put up barriers to me. They mayhave been grumbling behind the scenes. But there was
Tom Andriola 1:49
You can be very persuasive. Mike.
Michael Dennin 1:51
Right. Well, there was an embracing early on of the fact that the I think partly because everyone recognized the provost and Chancellor are in charge and if they say we have To share the data, we kind of have to share the data. And we Yes, we have to do it safely. And we have to protect it. And we have to make sure we do all the right things. But I think that was in there as well, like people understood that we knew how to do that. So that was that was a big piece of it. And the other piece was explicitly going after, I think, right to some of the right structures from scratch. And that involves having a failed experiment. And I always like to talk about the fact that you got to get some things wrong and be willing to get things wrong if you’re going to learn and move forward. So we used a commercial product, it didn’t work for UCI, but instead of just ignoring that it didn’t work or saying data doesn’t work. We were able to immediately mobilize and say okay, what do we need to do? What is it we need? And one of the things we realized immediately, predictive analytics was the cool hot topic. And that was kind of the last thing we needed. I mean, we’re a top 10 University student. didn’t graduate and over 80% rate, that’s pretty predictive right there. You get to UCI, you’re going to graduate. But what’s your experience? Right? Is it a positive experience? Are you in the major you want to be in? Are you in the major you should be in. And we realized what we really needed. at the lowest hanging fruit was data in the hands of people making decisions. And so it was more about reports than it was about analytics to start with. And so we went after compass or comprehensive analytics for student success project, and immediately made it very engaging in the people we were going to serve. So the first customers were the academic advisors. We embedded them in the process, what do you really need, we had to meet with the different units. And that was just a big win. And suddenly people were excited, right? They had access to data they never had before, and their job got way easier. Next, we moved on to faculty. And then finally our big push right now, which is what’s most exciting to me is academic units at the scale. department, getting departments the data they need to make decisions about what they’re doing. And then once we had that kind of as an early when we could go to the campus and say, you know, you can’t really do data reporting if you don’t have good data to report on. And what you really need is the underlying student data warehouse structure. And that was a piece that was was really missing going in. And we have been building that we’re in the middle of building that, but we’re already starting to see the payoff from that. So those were kind of some of the big things that got us started. And we’re also working with and learning from our peers in this space of top research, particularly public universities. You know, Indiana, Michigan, Davis, UC Davis are people we both collaborate with and friendly compete against. Sure, sure. And some of it has just been from our side. They had administrative structure we have right from the beginning place this effort in a very good partnership between MIT offices of information technology, and myself as a functional League, from Vice Provost of teaching and learning. And that administrative structure has been one of our big advantages, I think, in this space as well as this free access to data.
Tom Andriola 5:15
Yeah, you know, one of the things I’ve spent a career trying to help organizations leverage the, you know, the power and potential of technology. You know, one of the interesting things in listening to your comments is about that kind of building momentum. And, and kind of inside the organization ownership, you talked about the failure of working with third party package in the beginning, you feel like that help the organization kind of, we have to own this, we have to define this as our own versus putting it out there that the technology works or the technology doesn’t work.
Michael Dennin 5:47
You know, I think that’s a very good point, Tom, and it really was, I’m gonna actually give a shout out to our chancellor Howard Gilman at this point. Not everyone in leadership is willing to kind of adjust whatever We laid out the evidence and he realized, okay, no, we need to do this a different way. For him to help us make that shift was a huge piece of this. And then, you know, the people on the campus said, okay, we can do this, we know how to do this. And we’ll learn from what was done, and we’ll build on it. And it’s also a huge testament to our academic advisors. So often I’ve seen you’ve probably seen this more than me, third party tools brought into an organization and the staff just rejects it out of hand because it’s different, right? our academic advisors tried their hardest to make this work. They really, they dedicated themselves to this. So when it didn’t work, we we knew it wasn’t because we didn’t get buy in to the concept. We knew it wasn’t because people didn’t want it. It just this product didn’t work for us. And it also meant we had the data as to what were the pieces that didn’t work for us and then the advisors when we were able to give them alternative, their immediate like yes, this is what we were looking for. This is what we need.
Tom Andriola 7:00
Yeah, I mean, it seems to work so much easier when there’s a poll happening from the end user community versus, you know, technology or even functional leadership like yourself feeling like you’re pushing this stuff onto people’s desks versus they’re at the at your door saying, I need this next thing. I need this next thing.
Michael Dennin 7:16
Yeah. And that’s where we are down, which is, which is kind of a nice place to be. Yeah.
Tom Andriola 7:21
Well, we are in a very interesting time. You know, Vladimir Lenin once said, there are decades when nothing happens. And there are weeks when decades happen. And I think that’s a great description of our world today. It just seems like we’ve been thrust into this massive, you know, ‘technology might be the only way we can continue to work’ phase. When it comes to things like instruction, assessment, maybe just higher education in general. What are we going to look back and take away in terms of what we learn from this period of time?
Michael Dennin 7:52
Well, the number one thing for me is that people who had rejected technology and remote teaching out of hand will now I’ve experienced it. And that is very exciting, because there is a lot of technology that I firmly believe we have not leveraged in the teaching space as well as it can be leveraged. And I regularly end up in discussions with my colleagues of technology as a tool, not a solution. It will solve certain things, it is a solution to certain problems. But I was in another conversation today where the old joke came up, you know, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You don’t want to just take technology and sort of hammer it out everything, but you want to use it where it’s better and and the number of faculty have said to me, Oh, so that’s what you meant by this tool or that tool. The simplest example of this, it’s just the act of being able to either quiz or survey your students before you walk into lecture. Unless you leverage technology. There’s no good way to know what your students are thinking before you start talking with them. And this sort of knee jerk reaction to technology has been I think problems But that being said, I think we’re also going to have good evidence of what we actually need to do in person. And this is not just in teaching, right? I think everybody is realizing now, you know, whether it’s business, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s teaching, whether it’s the entertainment industry is like, okay, there’s parts of what we did that require you to be in person and we get it now, but we can be more precise about that, and we can better articulate where that falls. The other thing is, I’m hoping people realize something else I’ve been saying for years, which is, there’s no such thing as the single college experience. UCI there’s, there’s 30,000 College experiences. You know, there’s nothing magical about four years. No one’s proven that four years is the optimal time to be in college.
Tom Andriola 9:44
Mike, that might be a tweetable moment right there.
Michael Dennin 9:47
It might be! I joke that it was basically I think designed way back in the middle ages to just make sure the second son of the noble stayed alive in case the first died right. Had to put him somewhere. But also, you know, there’s, there’s nothing really magical about in person. It’s how you design that experience. The key element of university instruction is the faculty and the student. And the fact that they interact with each other. And they interact with the material. Students with students, students with faculty, faculty with faculty, and then all of them with the material. And there’s just lots of ways to have that interaction. Now, spring, it was just about getting through. I think the next year is about finding the energy and the time to really do the kind of reflection we need to do so we take advantage of this when we come out the other side.
Tom Andriola 10:39
Can you talk for a minute about, in terms of that reflection, talk about it. You know, we recovered in spring, but now we’re reinforcing for fall. Can you talk a little bit about how Irvine is using the summer months around instruction, and you do have some very innovative approaches here that you’re taking this summer?
Michael Dennin 10:57
Well, I think the three kind of things we’ve done for faculty and around instruction. The most impressive was we’ve leveraged what we’re calling DTEI where the division of teaching excellence and innovation (DTEI) graduate fellows, and we have almost 300 of them and they’re graduate students, they’ll get over the course of the summer, 20 hours of training. They had an upfront kind of 10 hours to start them off. And then there’s continual training throughout, in basic core pedagogy, specifically focused on remote teaching, but just general good solid core pedagogy because there’s a lot that overlaps as a resource to faculty to help them think about next year’s curriculum. And if you think about that, that’s roughly three faculty to one of these grad fellows, which is an amazing support ratio. I’m really giving our faculty the time that the grad students can both be there as a source of advice and as a source of labor to be frank, so one to free up some of the nuts and bolts time for faculty to think about their pedagogy, but also to to be a sounding board and a place that’s had some training. To talk through what you might want to do in the immediate time of this year.
Michael Dennin 12:04
But then the second and third piece we’ve done is we’ve generated a whole bunch of online resources that have emerged from our research in online learning and teaching. Our goal of education, you know, has some of the leading researchers in the world on online learning and teaching. And we’ve leveraged that body of knowledge to really generate what I would call static online resources for our faculty to read and look at and compare. But we also made a short course it’s about 60 minutes that takes them through, what would you want to do is you think about your remote course. And all of this was done with the context of how do we maximize what you put into this year, you get to take with you when you’re back in the classroom. So how do you want to think about the fact that I have to go remote for a year? How can I make it most efficient? So things I tweak, change, improve, actually carry forward and make my in person teaching better and to me, that was a really, really important piece of what we were doing.
Tom Andriola 13:05
You know, there’s an interesting long term strategy potential out of this and all organizations, if you’re not in bankruptcy proceedings now, you have become by definition more agile, right? And figured out new ways in which you had interact with whoever your customer or stakeholder was. And now what you want to do is you want to kind of freeze that new capability and figure out strategically how you combine it with the old capability and how you differentiate from your competitors. And so if we put this into the learning context to one may call this, you know, hybrid, right, we could be on one end of the spectrum all the way back in the classroom in a traditional setting, and we could be or we could be remote instruction, with all these online resources you talk about, or somewhere in between. Where do you see universities being five years from now having gone through this experience and developed all of these new muscles that didn’t really exist before or didn’t exist?
Michael Dennin 14:01
Well, we have to be hybrid. And I think the best analogy that faculty need to remember… It was a long time ago, but you know, at one point in life, humans invented the printing press. And faculty are very comfortable publishing books, and sharing books, and seeing them as this resource that works well in the education space. We all assign books, we all expect our students to read books. We utilize this, you know, prior to that the reason historically you have lectures is no one had a book and I had to go stand up, I would give my lecture, my students would write it down, or they wouldn’t have notes, right? They wouldn’t have a book, it was very expensive to get multiple copies of books. And we just were missing that with technology. We weren’t taking that step. Right. These tools were given to us and we weren’t leveraging them to their most efficient use. And I think part of it was Tom, when you look at it, books worked, that was a good transition. Then we had television and that was going to revolutionize education. It didn’t quite work the way you wanted. Then you had VHS tapes. They didn’t quite work the way you wanted. I remember having to get my first research talks. I videotape things. That’s what we did. We watched a movie and trying to find the 30 seconds of the video, you wanted to show an audience on a VHS tape, when you had a 10 minute talk, let’s just say was very stressful.
Tom Andriola 15:20
Yeah.
Michael Dennin 15:21
And you certainly couldn’t replay it. That’s trivial now, right? Right. Not only can I do that easily, I can index video, I can comment on video, I can edit video, anything you want to do with video, you could almost do now that you could do with a book, right? And we’ve got the bandwidth to send it to people. It’s just a different world. And to not use that, I think would really be the equivalent of saying, well, we’ve got the printing press, we’ve got these good books, but we’re gonna still just rely on people taking only their own notes. And that’s it. So that’s a big change. I think the hardest one for faculty is acknowledging that the world now functions with technology. As one of my colleagues said, I now own a smartphone. He’s a chemist, he goes, if I was learning chemistry, again, the things I need to know are very different in a world with a smartphone than in the world that I took chemistry. And I don’t know if we’ve caught up to that. That’s going to be a harder sell.
Tom Andriola 16:17
Sure, absolutely. Absolutely. So I think you know, I also do work in the healthcare industry in addition to education, and we have something in healthcare called Exponential Medicine, where we really bring together subject matter experts across the biomedical and technology spectrums, and we talk about the convergence of technologies and how it’s reinventing health and medicine. This is an exponential moment for the industry in healthcare. So let me put this into into your world. Is this an exponential moment for the modern day university what we’re going through right now?
Michael Dennin 16:50
I think it is, because we have to rescale a lot of our processes and recognize where technology is allows us to do that a lot of what we do is really not because it was the best pedagogy around, but it was the only way to scale it to the hundred or 200 or 300 people we had in our class, right? If you’re going to have a 30,000 person university and serve the population of California, you need universities that are scale. And then when you do that, you need to think about education at that high scale. And I think the only way we’re going to do that is by bringing together people to think creatively about how to apply these technologies to do things at a larger scale. And I want to be very clear to all my colleagues who are now freaking out, right? It’s not about removing faculty, and doing it that way. It’s not about lowering quality or lowering standards, but it is about recognizing that we have brand new tools. And a simple space is assessment and the way we report grades, right, you know, we started the conversation about data for student success, and I’ll just bring it back to that. Our students graduate after four years and basically, the thing they have to show to a company is an average GPA. You know, if the company has time, they’ll look at the transcript and see the individual grades. This is about the coursest averaging of what you learned over four years and experience that you could possibly imagine. And in a world of big data and AI, why this is still the way we would communicate to the outside world what someone did in our university just doesn’t make sense to me. But to solve that, and rescale it, we need to bring everybody together, the way you described is happening in health.
Tom Andriola 18:32
Okay, last question of the day and everyone always gets the same last question. So you’re not being singled out here. So I have this this concept I called the 1% model, right? And the 1% model is really about doing a couple of small things that add up in the long term to big things. So UCI is a is a leader in the Student Success Initiative using data in innovative ways that many colleges and universities or not. If you’re listening to this out there somewhere, you know, in the United States or even the world, and you’re just getting started with this road, what are the two or three tidbits you would want them to walk away with and start thinking about?
Michael Dennin 19:15
You know, the first is the easiest, don’t be afraid of data. You know, we’re thinking of making t shirts, a group, I was at a meeting with wanting to make t shirts that say, “I have data and I’m not afraid to use it.” And it’s scary, because when one, might learn stuff about yourself, you didn’t want to know. Right? That’s one side of it. The other side is you might accidentally reaffirm biases you shouldn’t because you don’t look at the data the right way, right. So you have to acknowledge data can be dangerous, but you can’t be afraid of it.
Tom Andriola 19:53
What you’re really talking about transparency, right is like opening yourself up for analysis, potentially criticism and the need for change.
Michael Dennin 20:01
Yeah, the scariest comment I heard once was somebody said early on in the process, well, what if through all these Compass reports we discover someone’s actually teaching badly? Like, I don’t get the question. You know, we help them teach better. I mean, when, what else do you want me to do? So that’s one. And I think the other thing is, you know, as you move into the data space, when you talk about simple little things, find those small easy wins, you know, find those things where somebody is, you know, really interested, like, at a very basic level at our university, people needed to know how the athletes were doing. And they just didn’t have a data report where they could just pull up and search on athletes. It sounds silly, they had to look up every student in their unit and check if they were an athlete and make a spreadsheet. You know, hopefully no one else is as far behind as we were at that point. But what is that, you know, that piece, we’re helping them get at the data they’re using already, but in a very, very slow and cumbersome way. If you can solve that one problem for them, now you’ve got an ally in this space to really help you move the whole thing forward. And that’s going to be different at every place. But that’s the other piece of it is find that find that pain point for someone around data and then fix it for them because it’s usually fixable.
Michael Dennin 21:19
And then the final piece, I think, for faculty, I would say is, is don’t be afraid of change. Changing what we’re doing doesn’t mean we’re trying to lower standards. I make the comment for faculty, you have to remember success is like not a limited quantity. It’s not like only 10 students can be successful. And then once those 10 have used up all of our success, we have no more to give. Right? It’s actually one of those few things out there that everybody could be successful. Right? That is an achievable thing. Not everybody will be successful at the same major in the same way in the same style. Just because that’s who we are. We’re humans, we’re individuals. As I said, there’s thirty thousand college experiences. But we all can be successful by appropriate definitions. And so that’s what I would tell faculty to keep in mind as you go down these routes.
Tom Andriola 22:10
Fantastic, fantastic. Our guest today, Dr. Michael Dennin. Mike’s got a lot of great talks out there on the internet catches TED talk on winning versus success at universities. And if you really want to have some fun, look them up on the science of superheroes. Michael, always a pleasure. Thank you for being with us.
Michael Dennin 22:27
A lot of fun, Tom. Thank you.
