A Culture of Curiosity and Collaboration at the University of Notre Dame

Jack Suess: Welcome to the EDUCAUSE Integrative CIO Podcast. I'm Jack Suess, vice president of IT and CIO at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Cynthia Golden: And I'm Cynthia Golden, associate provost and executive director of the university Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. Each episode, we welcome a guest from in or around Hi everybody, I'm Cynthia Golden and I'm here with my colleague Jack Seuss. And we are live at EDUCAUSE with the Integrative CIO podcast. higher education technology as we talk about repositioning or reinforcing the role of IT leadership as an integral strategic partner in support of the institutional mission.

Cynthia Golden: Hi everybody, I'm Cynthia Golden and I'm here with my colleague Jack Seuss. And we are live at EDUCAUSE with the Integrative CIO podcast.

Jack Suess: So today we're going to be talking about teaching and learning. And this is something that is really exciting to me because the pandemic has really put a renewed emphasis on thinking about how we support and how we teach our students.

Cynthia Golden: And so we're really excited to have two guests with us today from the University of Notre Dame or Notre Dame: Jane Livingston, who is vice president for IT, and CIO at Notre Dame. And Ellen Mangione-Lora, who is a teaching professor of Spanish. So we're really thrilled to have a faculty member with us for this discussion. So would you each like to tell us a little bit about your background, kind of how you got to where you are, Jane?

Jane Livingston: Sure, sure. I've been the CIO and Vice President for IT at Notre Dame for the last three years and in change. I'm in my fourth year. Before I was at Notre Dame, I was the CIO at Florida State University in Tallahassee. And before that I spent 14 years at Yale University, and before that, Vassar College. So I am one of these unusual people who have a dance card of different kinds of institutions that I'm going through. I still have a couple left to fill in, but, you know, I feel like it's been really excellent to get to serve the community in a variety of different roles and a variety of different institutions.

Elena Mangione-Lora: And I have been at Notre Dame for 26 years, so my dance card is mostly Notre Dame, but before that I had three other careers. So I worked in management, hospitality management for Marriott, actually had a nice career with them, learned a lot about systems thinking and developing the potential in people. So that, and my tech side was developed when I left the Marriott to open my own translating business and got offered a job when I went to buy a computer, a job in teaching applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, WordPerfect at the time. It's been a while. And then I taught English in Japan for a year to figure out what I wanted to do. Landed at Notre Dame for Spanish literature and stayed to teach.

Cynthia Golden: So you're a teacher at heart?

Jack Suess: Yeah. Well that really excites me. I didn't know all those items about your background and the fact that you're a faculty member. When we saw this, we thought we don't get a lot of faculty members at the conference. And so we really wanted to understand what attracted you to come to the Edge of CAUSE conference and what are you seeing and how do you think you'll take things back?

Elena Mangione-Lora: Well, the one thing is that Jane and her colleagues have created a real culture of curiosity and competency at Notre Dame. So we have a fantastic group, Notre Dame Teaching and Learning, our Kingdom Center for Teaching Excellence, our ODL, I don't even know what that stands for. It's online something.

Jane Livingston: Distance learning.

Elena Mangione-Lora: There you go. Sonia Howell. So they support faculty through offering things like digital sprints over the summer, little projects that lots of support. I feel like the person who goes with the IKEA box and says, here are my ideas, build me something fabulous. And they do. It's just been so incredible. Alex Ambrose at the Kaneb with the e-portfolios as alternative, alternative assessment. So yeah, so that culture is sort of what brought me to EDUCAUSE and the kinds of things. Well, I've gotten to see a few vendors, got to see the talk by Brené Brown today, which was absolutely marvelous. And so I'm excited to learn more and more.

Cynthia Golden: Is there something you're specifically looking for while you're here?

Elena Mangione-Lora: Yes, the humanity of it all, really. I do some work with XR and AI in my own teaching and I think that the thing that I keep trying to remind myself of is these are the learning outcomes, this is the intention, these are the tools to get us there and not to lose sight of the humanity in it. So even though the tasks that the humans have to do are a little bit different, the humanity of it doesn't change.

Jack Suess: Well, that sort of gets to the roots of being a Jesuit institution in some ways of thinking about the long-term humanity and all of that. So that's a fabulous answer.

Cynthia Golden: Yeah. So Jane, I think some of us who are responsible or have been responsible for supporting teaching and learning and technology on campus might be interested in the array of services that Elena just mentioned that you have. And so I think that if I'm right, your IT environment has a center for Teaching and Learning and an office of digital learning. And so could you describe what those are and how they work together on your campus?

Jane Livingston: Sure. I mean, I think that lots of research institutions have kind of carved off the teaching and learning a little separately from the more administrative perceived administrative side of central IT. So we have a little bit of that, but we work very closely together and very collaboratively together. So we have the Office of Information Technology, which is my unit, and then there's the office of, or it's actually not the office, it's Notre Dame Learnin, and in that is the Office of Online Education and the CAN Center for Teaching. My team has a group in IT called Teaching and Learning technologies. They manage all of the kind of platforms stuff, Panopto and Zoom and all of the things that support Canvas, all the things that support teaching and learning. And we work very collaboratively with our colleagues over in NDL. And in fact, one of my directors, directors, Steve Varela actually sits on the leadership team with them and they have weekly meetings.

Jane Livingston: It's very important for me that we have a kind of really cohesive approach to supporting the whole university because when you start separating it out completely and it gets siloed, you lose the ability to kind of connect the dots with other kinds of things that might support the curriculum that are considered more administrative service oriented things. Like we have NDStudios, which is a video studio streaming service. We support sports a lot and the church as well, but we also support education and teaching and learning. And so it's really important to have those kind of connections I think are really important to offer to the academic side of the house, as well as all of the other things that are so important to teaching and learning Google Docs and the kinds of collaborative environments that we all use every day.

Cynthia Golden: How about your budgets? Do you work together on funding all of this?

Jane Livingston: Yes, we do a lot of collaborative things. Budgetarily. I would say that one of the things that I actually helped to start when I first got to Notre Dame was what we call the Academic Innovation Hub. And really it was a way for us to kind of two things. One was to kind of get a handle on all of the software requests that were in support of academic teaching and learning and research that were kind of getting funded and promulgating everywhere, the proliferation of LTIs and requests for things that connect to canvas and other things of that nature. So that was one piece of it. But the other piece of it was really to help faculty innovate in the classroom and to have a mechanism through which we could actually assess and do pilots and fund these kind of fun things that faculty wanted to do, but put some guardrails around it so that we could assess it and see how good it was and how scalable it was, and whether it was going to be something that we wanted to take through for eventual enterprise funding. So then it would feed into, so successful pilots then feed into our annual funding process.

Jane Livingston: It's still new, but essentially we put in money in the OIT, the Office of Information Technologies, the Hesburgh libraries put in money, and the NDL put in money. All three of us together are funding that program and it's a recurring every year funding source.

Elena Mangione-Lora: It's been really incredible for us because, well, you mentioned Steve Varela and he and I teach a telenovela production course together. And as part of that course we are piloting Praxis Pria, which is sort of closed database, an AI assistant that you feed resources to. And it's been very interesting. We'll have plenty to report on later, but just being able to adopt some of these things to do some of the kinds of things that students demand of us in preparing them for careers, it's just awesome. Well, thank you for that.

Jack Suess: So Elena, you're starting to talk a little bit about how you're thinking about using technology in the classroom. I think one of the other things that I'm hearing from you and I think is something we often miss is how do we create communities of practice? How do we get faculty working with each other? Could you talk a little bit about how you're seeing that happen for yourself and what you're seeing elsewhere in this?

Elena Mangione-Lora: Well, it starts with good leadership. So having that vision, I didn't even know that was you, who was doing these innovation hubs, but awesome. So it starts with good leadership and allowing space for the dreamers or the tinkerers or the people who want to play sort of a sandbox space and support to do that. When AI first came out, and it was a sensation

Cynthia Golden: Not that long ago

Elena Mangione-Lora: Not that long ago, just about two years, yeah. We immediately put together a lean into AI for teaching and learning work group, and the first thing we did was to invite students to talk to us about how they were using ai because of course the reaction was the cheating, the academic academic integrity. Yeah, exactly. And the students were saying it was sort of the least thing that they were using it for. So what we were hearing is that they're using it for all these cool things, and we can be in dialogue about those things, adapt our teaching to open things up so that we're all more successful. But yes, so to answer your question, I sort of came about it the long way, leadership, space, resources.

Jack Suess: As a follow up to Jane, one of the things I've noticed at our institution is, so we have something called the Robowski Innovation Awards process, which offers two to $5,000. My own department has these learning analytics community of practice awards, which are 2,500 - small amounts of money, but it really makes a difference to the faculty who can get small amounts of money to be able to hire someone, do some innovation. Are you doing similar sorts of things where they're not really large amounts where you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Jane Livingston: Well, these aren't large amounts. I think it's actually kind of the same thing. It's just we're not calling them awards necessarily. We're there's a process you go through to apply for it, and you either get it or you don't. But I would be surprised if we didn't have some award type things going on in the NDL space that I may not be aware of. So I don't want to speak too far out of school, but I wouldn't be surprised by that at all.

Cynthia Golden: And when I was at the University of Pittsburgh, we had an advisory council on instructional excellence who gave out similar awards that were a couple thousand dollars, but made a big difference. And one of the things that went along with the award was a requirement that you present. And so it was a really great way to get the word out to other faculty.

Jack Suess: Well, and I bring that up because I think that this kind of activity is one of those sort of good practices. I won't call it best practice, but small amounts of money that can sort of stir innovation with equity and pedagogy and teaching and technology are really the cornerstone of learning in the future that we have.

Cynthia Golden: So Jane, we touched on this a little bit already, but in thinking about the IT organization and the other organizations that support technology, how do you get input from the faculty and from the students? What are the channels that you have?

Jane Livingston: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's an ongoing journey. We all know this. I mean, sometimes they want to give you their feedback and sometimes they're less enthusiastic about it. But we try to do it qualitatively and quantitatively. We have surveys, obviously, we have incident response. If you have something go down or you report something broken, we have a point of completion survey that gives us some data on how satisfied people are. We have a biannual, every two years we do a survey of our services. I wish it were better and different, but it's a bit of data. We also do focus groups. And one of the things that I felt really strongly about when I first arrived was doing a little bit of the voice of the community exercise where this was largely focused on support for technology and research, the one that I did. But I think you get tons of great data through just conversations with people and really, really trying to understand what are the problems people, what are the challenges?

Jane Livingston: If they had a magic wand to wave, what would they change? Understanding those kinds of things I think is really helpful. We're doing some user experience testing. We've got communities of practice on so many different topics now, teaching and learning and other. And I think that those all provide us a great method for collecting the thoughts and hopes and dreams of our community and what they're experiencing and how they experience the using of our technologies that we support. So I think it's a never ending journey, but it's definitely something you just have to keep chipping away at.

Jack Suess: So Elena, you're teaching foreign languages. I assume that this is part of a required sequence for some of the students, probably not all are thrilled to be in your class. How do you go about motivating your students and what are some things that you've sort of learned as part of this to try to be bringing everyone in and sort of helping them to see the excitement of learning a new language?

Elena Mangione-Lora: That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked it because yesterday, as I was sort of thinking about some of the things that we might talk about, I listened to for the, I don’t know, fifth or sixth time, a podcast called Creative Edges. It's an episode as part of the NPR podcast, the Hidden Brain. I love that. I love that one too. That's such a good one, right? Well, this one is a 2018 episode, and it's about creativity at the edges, and it talks about the fact that creativity is augmented when there's self-reflection

Elena Mangione-Lora: And self-reflection is the foundation for intercultural competency, which is part of learning the language. So we have the nuts and bolts of language, grammar and vocabulary and these kinds of things, but all at the service of communication and interaction, the humanity of it really. And there are AI tools and technology tools that you can practice with. It can prepare you for that, but there's nothing like a real conversation. And so we do a lot of conversation. First six minutes of class, we talk to each other, we make mistakes. I will ask students to look something up if I forget the grammatical gender of a certain word. So setting a tone for curiosity and learning. And those are pretty universal things. They happen to happen in a foreign language classroom, which requires vulnerability. It requires support of each other. It requires a desire to communicate something that you have to offer. And I was - so far so good, you'll have to ask the students about that, but we seem, it's funny, there's this honeymoon period of two weeks, then it's like, oh boy, it's time to roll up our sleeves. Then we work on the relationship and by the end, we're good again. But it's sustaining the goal and the mission, the humanity, the space to practice that’s how we motivate.

Cynthia Golden: So maybe a corollary to that question is how do you motivate faculty? Because this has been a kind of crazy few years, and a lot of people had technology thrust upon them whether they wanted to or not. But I guess I'm kind of curious about how you all might be thinking about that.

Jane Livingston: Well, I mean, I think the challenge to using technology in the classroom is really kind of twofold, right? On the one hand, it's time. Everybody is busy. They have to learn new things. Sometimes it's like being creative and thinking about it differently than you've done it before is both fun and exciting for the right kind of professor, but also intimidating and can be challenging. And time is hard. We all have lives and other things that we're working on. And then I guess the other thing I would say is that in most cases, most faculty are subject matter experts. They're not necessarily technologists. They don't see themselves as technologists, and they don't feel like that should have to be their job. And sometimes I think there's a resistance that isn't… And honestly, they're not incented necessarily, and having small incentive financial incentives, awards to give them to play, I think is really important because otherwise, where are the incentives? Because a lot of times you don't get rewarded for being an innovator in the classroom in your tenure process. And so you end up, I think anecdotally, I would say, with people who are early in their career and want to innovate because that's who they are. And then the people who are later in their career because they've seen it, they've been there, they've done that. Now they want to play. And so I think for me anyway, that's what I love to see in faculty is the willingness to let go of fear and play.

Jane Livingston: You have to be willing to just fiddle with it and see how it will work for you. And that patience, I don't think is for everyone. And so I think that's what I would say. I think those are the challenges that people have. How do you incent them? I mean, I think the best way to incent them is by experience, like having people who are doing things that are cool and creative and innovative and giving joy and really improving the educational outcomes for your students. When you're a faculty member and you see other faculty members who are doing those things, it's a great reminder that you could do that too. And so I like to provide opportunities for faculty to share those kinds of successes.

Cynthia Golden: I was going to say, I think you're right. When you can show the impact on outcomes, that makes such a huge difference, such a huge difference.

Jane Livingston: Also, it's not just about the tech,

Cynthia Golden: Right? And also, sometimes I think if a department chair or a dean can get really engaged, they can also set the tone, be very influential. Yeah,

Jack Suess: I was going to say, we find that often we'll have faculty give presentations, and the most interested will be other faculty in the department who didn't realize they were actually doing that. And then they're starting to talk to one another and share and really try to be innovating together. And so promoting those ideas and spotlighting them are just so important

Jane Livingston: Because they learned from each other. They don't, I mean, I would say it's really important to find your tech people, as you were saying. If you can come into a room and say, I'm trying to do this cool thing. How do you help me figure it out? And you've got people who are there to help you with excitement and enthusiasm and with grounded learning outcomes behind all of that, that's an amazing place to be. Find your people. But if you're not one of those people, don't be afraid to go out and try and find them.

Jack Suess: So I'm going to ask an obligatory AI question,

Jack Suess: But it's two sides of this. And I'm really curious, Elena, that. So one, we've seen AI in our language for a few years now, DuoLingo, Babel, other sorts of tools that are coming into play at the same time, as I look at some of the generative AI opportunities, I think it's going to really have a big impact on adaptive learning over time, that if this is going to be a game changer, and I'm sort of curious how you all are thinking about ai, and both of you could answer this, but I'm also curious from a language standpoint, do you see AI helping? And it may be that it can help remediate, but you still need people to be talking with because you're going to talk differently when you're interacting with a person than when you're interacting with a machine.

Elena Mangione-Lora: Yeah, it's such a rich question. And so I would say that, again, to sort of go back to what we were saying before, that interaction with whether you're recording your voice on little cassette tapes like we did in the late nineties, or interacting with an app, which I'm exploring now, it's called Make You Fluent, and it's this very youthful, beautiful avatar that corrects your grammar and gives you pronunciation pointers, and sort of talks to you and anything in between. It's not talking to a human being. And so, well, a little parentheses in August, I started taking an Arabic course, Arabic 1 0 1, to be a learner again, and to see what are the challenges, what is it to start fresh and panic when the teacher calls on you and you're like, oh my gosh, what is that letter or these kinds of things that there's a role for that panic, for that emotion to be able to read people's faces, to empathize, to share.

Elena Mangione-Lora: That's never going to be substituted by AI, I mean languages. I've been dealing with machine learning, machine translating, AI based on neural systems, blah, blah, since 2009, 2017. I mean with Deep L when it first came out, the role of translators has sort of shifted these kinds of things. So we've kind of been grappling with those questions for maybe longer than some of the other disciplines. And so I think that keeping in mind sort of the outcomes and the tools to get there and those things change and to, so take a deep breath every so often and say, okay, what do I got? And where are we going? - is the way to go. It's what we did during the pandemic with Zoom all of a sudden. And it's like, okay, here's a new tool and do the outcomes change. I mean, that sort of reflection is really important. But anyway, so the tools change. You could do more things with them, but the outcome, I think, are

Cynthia Golden: You teaching most of your classes in person face-to-face

Elena Mangione-Lora: Right now, all of myclasses are in person. And then there's some asynchronous classes where students have to do creative work collaboratively. But yeah, so yeah, creating community, which is really the first step in a language classroom that was tough during the pandemic, but it was priority one, and we managed to do it. Made it work. Yeah. Were you going to say something?

Cynthia Golden: Was that the second half of your question? You were,

Jack Suess: Well, I think as we were thinking about this, are there other examples outside of languages where you're thinking about how AI or other technologies can potentially impact the classroom at Notre Dame? I know you've all been thinking about it, but I wasn't sure if you've started any project.

Jane Livingston: I mean, everybody is thinking about it, right?

Jack Suess: Yeah.

Jane Livingston: I think that AI is, so what we've done on campus is that we pulled together a task force last year on generative AI to think about the impact on the classroom, on research, and on the administration. And we came out with some recommendations, and we are now implementing those recommendations. So we're in the process of doing that. So for teaching and learning specifically, a lot of the focus has been on supporting faculty. In going back to the academic integrity, fear, I think there's a lot of fear around ai. I think there's a lot of fear around technology in general. This isn't new with ai. It's just a new flavor of fear and maybe a new intensity of fear. So I think for me anyway, what is super important that came out of our, we called it the GAIT committee. It had to have some motion forward, GAIT - Generative AI Task Force.

Jane Livingston: We recommended a series of improvements for teaching and learning, series of improvements for research or initiatives to undertake for research and initiatives that we were going to undertake for the whole academy. And so I would say for the teaching and learning, the biggest pieces were to run communities of practice, think about disciplinary guides for individual faculty areas, how is AI going to change the way we assess student work? And that varies very much from discipline to discipline. So there's, I think, an enormous amount of challenge out there. And again, time is a challenging element in all of this because the technology is moving so fast, and we don't have as the infinite number of humans to throw at the problems to be thinking through because it does take a thoughtful approach, I think, to engaging with, if you take the humanities, which I think have been particularly beleaguered over the last few years in that how are they reinvigorating themselves and thinking differently about their future in general and how does that work?

Jane Livingston: And then you throw AI on top of it. And I think that they are, they're really like, we need to help them figure out where the next steps are. And so we have an ethics group on campus that is participating in this, which I think is really important and helpful because I think so much of that fear really does come from the privacy angles and also the singularity angles. Everybody is worried about the existential crises, but really, I think that there are so many great things that we can pull out of the new technology that will help students in the classroom, that will help faculty think differently about the way they're teaching and the way the students are learning. I don't have any things specific to say beyond the fact that we're all working on all of these things. From the administrative perspective, we are doing a literacy campaign and we're running a bunch of workshops with faculty and helping them think through their disciplinary impacts in a variety of areas.

Jack Suess: I think it would be, if you said you had solved the problem, I'd be worried that you'd be surprised, right? You probably haven't solved the problem. No, nobody has. I don't think this is everybody. This idea of having the conversations of getting groups talking about it, but recognizing that we also have to be thinking about the fact that AI is going to be an important part of work going forward. And so how students learn to be using it correctly, effectively is part of what I think some of our tasks are that we have to be thinking about. And it sounds like you're being really thoughtful about how you work across the disciplines. It's going to be a little different in every discipline

Jane Livingston: And leveling the playing field. Because I think that we do have, I mean, in society at large, but in every institution, there's a lot of variability and people's experience with what does generative AI mean? Like you talked to the sciences and to the STEM folks and they've been doing machine learning for 25 years. It's been going on for a long time. Why is this so exciting and new to them, it's not. But when you go into some of the other disciplinary areas, it really is just, it's like a brave new world.

Elena Mangione-Lora: I do think that sometimes we get distracted by catching people cheating or these kind of things instead of focusing our energy on adapting, which is what we are training our students to do in a changing world. And so modeling that I think is really, really important too.

Jane Livingston: And to be critical consumers of information. I think that's one of our biggest goals as higher education institutions is we're training future citizens and future humans to participate in society. And you want them to have the critical skills, critical thinking skills to help them do that.

Jack Suess: Well, I think that is a perfect message to wrap up on. This has been a great discussion. Thanks you so much for joining us and being willing to come and share your resources.

Jane Livingston: Thank you so much for having us. It's fun to be a pair of people here today. It's very good. Thank you so much. Thank

Cynthia Golden: You. And thanks for being our first faculty member on the program, so that's exciting. Thank you.