2026 EDUCAUSE Top 10: Why Human Connection Matters

Sophie White: Welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White, I'm a content marketing and program manager here at EDUCAUSE, and I am one of your hosts for today's discussion.

Jenay Robert: I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE and I'll be your other host

Sophie White: And we're so excited to have with us two special guests today. We have Mark McCormick and Crista Copp. I'll be introducing them, and then we'll jump into the discussion. So, I'll start with Crista. Crista is our newest member of EDUCAUSE. She recently joined EDUCAUSE as vice president of research after enjoying a career of more than twenty-five years in higher education technology and being a part of the EDUCAUSE community for nearly as long. Before joining EDUCAUSE, she served as CIO at Mount St. Mary's University leading strategic tech initiatives across two campuses. Her career spans senior roles at Loyola Marymount University Arts Center College of Design and California State Long Beach. Crista holds a doctorate in educational leadership from UC, Irvine with an emphasis on higher ed technology. So, thanks for being with us Crista, and welcome to EDUCAUSE.

Crista Copp: Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. And that's like the fourth time I've heard my introduction today and I'm like, who is that person? She sounds cool.

Sophie White: You can add more fun facts or else if you want, favorite ice cream . . .

Crista Copp: Vanilla ice cream, so you can put whatever you feel on it at the moment. So it's very versatile.

Sophie White: Oh, great. Yeah, I agree with you. I'm a vanilla-based fan.

Crista Copp: Especially vanilla bean, right? It's got to have the bean.

Sophie White: Love it. Okay, I love that. Mark McCormick serves as EDUCAUSE Senior Director of Research and insights. Mark oversees EDUCAUSE's portfolio of original research products over the past eight years before coming to EDUCAUSE. Mark served in leadership and research positions for professional associations and nonprofit organizations in higher ed, K–12 education, youth development, performing arts and community development. Mark holds a doctorate in community psychology from Vanderbilt University.

Mark McCormack: Right here in town.

Sophie White: Right here in Nashville where we are. Yeah. Great. Do you have a favorite ice cream flavor? If we're asking this to everyone now?

Mark McCormack: I was thinking pralines and cream, Baskin and Robins, but I too enjoy a good bowl of vanilla ice cream.

Sophie White: Great. Can we get some ice cream now? We're not, there's nothing to do with ice cream and this conversation, but let's talk about the Top 10 and making connections.

Mark McCormack: Top 10 ice cream flavors

Crista Copp: Should we make a flavor for each one? Oh, see, now I'm going to actually do that because my brain's getting . . .

Sophie White: I'll just start by saying that the printer jams joke really got me. So, for anyone who's watching this later, we are recording this on the same day as we had our EDUCAUSE Top 10 general session, and Mark was going through the Top 10 from ten to one, building up the suspense and then said, we take all the data from our community and identify these Top 10 issues. So you told us that the number one issue was paper printer jams and it was like a mic drop. Everyone just laughed.

Mark McCormack: And it's kind of my style of humor. If you know me, of course, I have to infuse a joke or something in there, but John loved the idea and everyone else was like yeah, go for it. Do it. It'll be a fun moment. And thankfully it went over well. What I wasn't anticipating, though, was I've heard from several people that that's like actually yes, like printer-related issues and we've heard people talking about reintroducing, was it Scantron printers? And because of, I guess AI-related concerns. And so there are actually some relevant printer related things going on.

Crista Copp: I think we should just, oh wait, I probably can't say that. Get rid of all the printers as a CIO.

Jenay Robert: We've assembled on a whole new area of research though.

Crista Copp: Yes. Okay. So we need to do some research maybe on what some of the larger technical issues are rather than. I actually thought it was funny though because we endeavored to add one joke, but next year we're going to go for two jokes.

Jenay Robert: Stay tuned. You heard it here first folks, right?

Mark McCormack: Yeah. Every year there's going to be a new faked top issue. So see what year

Sophie White: A meme Top 10 and a real for everyone to expect. Okay. Can you tell us, was there anything from this year's Top 10 that stood out to you as an interesting finding or data point that you want to start by discussing?

Crista Copp: Well, you go for this.

Mark McCormack: Okay.

Sophie White: Yeah.

Mark McCormack: Of course. Part of my writing the report, part of my job is to not just look at each individual issue. That's important as well, but to take a step back and try to look at the list as a cohesive whole. How does all of this hang together? What's the bigger story that's coming out of this? And for me, and I should preface this by saying I didn't come up with these issues; that this is all community sourced, community-based, it's from our members. But in taking a step back and looking at all of it together, it really came through loud and clear for me that human dimension to the work that we're doing, to the work that our technology leaders and their teams are doing. And that this idea of making connections came out of that. And one of my mentors and advisors in grad school, guy by the name of Paul Dokecki, he was a jazz drummer, and he loved talking about the idea of jazz music as a metaphor for balancing structure and individual capabilities. And it just hit me, I was looking at all the data together, thinking about this idea of making connections and that jazz metaphor came through and it fits so perfectly what I was seeing the data and what was coming out in the Top 10. And so you'll see in the report this little playful thing I do with jazz music as a way of talking about this tension and this balance between, on the one hand, you've got to have structure, tempo, key. You've got to have that in place, but then you've got to make space for individual creativity and that kind of wild spirit and individual capabilities. So, at the outset of the project, none of that was in the back of my mind. It all just emerged out of the process of analyzing, looking at the data. So a surprise in that sense. And it wasn't a forethought that I had.

Crista Copp: So, I came to EDUCAUSE ten weeks ago. And so the process for the Top 10 was already well underway. And so I got to kind of get the backstage tour really quickly as we ramped up for today. And I think what initially surprised me was that we didn't see language about budget concerns in the same way that I thought we would've or even policy changes. And just keep in mind, this stuff did happen between, correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, basically April and July. So some of the underlying where we're at in this moment weren't in individual topics, but we certainly saw those as you kind of peel back the onion a little bit and you say, "Oh, there's some budget concerns within this particular thing." But that was surprising to me that in past years we've seen IT funding as a top thing, and you don't see that as a top thing, but it underscores everything that's on there. And so I was kind of surprised that wasn't there, but it is there. You have to recognize that there's sort of this, okay, this is where we're at in this moment. This are the things we're trying to move forward, but we have some additional constraints with those. And in the same vein, I would say AI also underscores everything. So even though it is named as three in three of the areas, it's actually in all of 'em. Right? There's no place in there that AI isn't impacting it.

Jenay Robert: I think you're both touching on something that I really appreciate about the Top 10 in terms of the format and the thoughtfulness that goes behind creating this report is that it reflects both the simplicity of the situation, Top 10 issues. You have a nice simple list, but also the complexity behind every single one of those things. And I think Mark,  you did a phenomenal job just really articulating that in the writing of the report. I remember reading an early version and seeing that musical piece and thinking Mark's actually a genius. He's my boss.

Mark McCormack: Have to say little insider Easter egg or whatever. Originally I was playing with an idea tied to The Neverending Story, the movie. Oh yeah, that was in there somehow, but it didn't quite pan out. But

Jenay Robert: Maybe we can do that, like a video or something post we could figure out, oh yeah, add that music to the, sorry.

Mark McCormack: Us writing on Falco.

Jenay Robert: Totally post-production, right in there. I love it

Sophie White: And the making Connections piece has really stood out to me in the way that it was written to just things like the Human Edge of AI, the title of that one and the number one issue, Collaborative Cybersecurity, I thought was really powerful. And I love the videos that you shared from the various panelists saying, multifactor authentication is important, but what does it mean for the end user? How do we think about the stakeholders needs? I guess for our higher ed community, thinking about how to make connections in maybe more technical roles who are looking at the Top 10, how do you bring this spirit into day-to-day work? If you're in a technical role, you're thinking about how to implement the technologies, but you want to make sure that we're bringing these human connections into our roles, what does that look like?

Crista Copp: I think that's really interesting given the last couple sessions that I've just been at. So the young professionals had a Top 10 session where they were literally talking about, okay, how do we put these into our jobs? How do we make this actionable? And I love the language that they're like, the Top 10 is for everybody, so shout out to the young professionals. That was the Top 10 is for everybody. It is about what leaders are looking at, but there is something in there for everybody to see, oh, what's the place where I can do something that's actionable? And so I just love that. And then in the last session we were just in talking about just do the next right thing. And what that looks like in your area, in your purview might be very different from the next person, but in your area you have an obligation to do the next right thing to get us to where we need to go.

And hopefully you have some great leadership that's moving you toward that area. But even if you don't, you can be a leader wherever you're at after spending sixteen years at a Jesuit college, the Jesuits firmly believe that leadership is from wherever you are. And if you are a gardener, your lawn better look the best, and you better be the most efficient. So it does not matter what your job is, you should be the best in that. And I think that's true, especially in IT. It does not matter if you are the database administrator or an instructional designer, but you have the ability to make change and to make things stronger and better where you're at. And so again, just having the last couple sessions, I've just really energized around just do one thing, and I think there is enough in the report to help lead you to that one actionable thing.

Mark McCormack: And I think the values, the ideas that really come through in the report, like collaboration and listening, partnership, relationship building, those aren't exclusive to the CIO or the top levels of leadership. Those are values and commitments that can be expressed throughout the institution and the ways we show up to our work and ways that we agree we're going to work together, aligning to the institution's overall mission and values and commitments. That's something that can be spread out through the entire structure of the entire organization. So my hope is that a lot of those ideas and those values ring true for anyone reading it, whether you're a CIO or it's your first day on the job and fresh out of college and you're trying to figure out what you're doing. It's a good roadmap for anyone else.

Jenay Robert: This sort of tying everyone together with this mission-like position, it is something that comes up on Shop Talk from time to time. I think we've talked in the past about how no matter who you ask at a hospital, what their job is, at the end of the day, everyone's job is to save lives. And I think in higher ed, similarly, no matter who you ask at one of our institutions, our job is to help our students achieve their goals and make the world a better place for the greater good. And so I think you're really touching on that idea of no matter where you sit, you can work toward that mission if you understand it.

Mark McCormack: Yeah. I was in a CUPA-HR session earlier, CUPA-HR just did an employee retention survey and that includes IT professionals, so looking at what are the factors that keep our staff, our employees engaged at the institution versus I'm looking to leave, I don't want to be here anymore. And the top factor they found was satisfaction and well-being. And that includes this sense of engagement and purpose in your work. And to your point, Jenay, that belongs to everyone at the institution. The CIO isn't the only person who gets to have a sense of engagement and purpose in their work. That belongs to everyone at the institution.

Crista Copp: I think that's a reminder to CIOs though, that part of their job is to share that with their team and not to separate the team from what the mission is. And I think it's sometimes easy to silo and higher ed is very, there's a pyramid, right, of hierarchy. And I think that as a leader in an organization, it is critical to make sure that everybody feels like they are a part of something. There's a lot of tons of motivational research. People are not motivated by extrinsic things as much as they are by intrinsic things. And so yes, you can give somebody more money, which many of our higher ed can't, but bonuses and all of the fun little things you come up with are not going to be the things that motivate people. What motivates people is the intrinsic good that they feel. And again, I see that there's this underlying current about where's our humanity and how are we identifying what we can do to move humans to a greater good? Yeah.

Jenay Robert: Selfishly, I actually want to ask about, you called it out, Mark, when you were talking about the Top 10, you were listing out the Top 10 joking, this is not the first AI item we're going to see on the list. And so I've seen a little of the behind the scenes. So, can you talk a little bit about that process of like, okay, this could become an all-AI Top 10 if we're not careful. How do we navigate this? What did that feel like for you going through the process?

Mark McCormack: Yeah, do you want me to start? Yeah, so just to walk you through the process, and you already know this, but we begin with interviews with institutional leaders. These could be presidents, provosts, CBOs, but we start with that larger institutional picture. And we specifically tell them in these interviews, we're not expecting you to talk about technology. We just want to know the bigger-picture level. What are you focused on right now at your institution? And then with those data, we go back to our panelists and we ask them, okay, here's what your leaders are telling us they're focused on right now and is important for higher ed. Help us think about what technology can do to help address these things or mitigate these things or what's the role for technology in all of this? And I think that does a couple of things. It helps us start with a wider view of higher ed. We're not just starting out, Hey, what's the key technology you're focused on?  And everyone's immediately going to go to AI. So it gives us a wider base to start with. And then I also, I think it gets our panelists thinking a little bit outside the box like, oh, my leader was talking about this, and that's not, I need to think for a minute about how our team is addressing that or how that connects to what my team is doing. So I think that sets us up with a wider range of topics and things that we can look at. But we do go through that process of refining some of the data because we do find that there are overlapping topics and we might start with forty things and we realize, well, these three things are saying the same thing about AI, so we're going to combine those into one issue. And you go through that process of reviewing and refining to try to avoid what you're describing, which is all the options are just AI-related.

Crista Copp: I do think though, oh, sorry, go ahead.

Mark McCormack: I was going to say, but at the end of the day, and I joked around about this with the printer paper jams, we really do leave it up to the voting of the community. We don't tip the scales. So, whatever the Top 10 is going to be, that's what it's going to be.

Jenay Robert: We could have had an all-AI Top 10.

Mark McCormack: We could have. And so there's always that element of waiting, what's it going to be? What's the Top 10 going to be? You have your things you're rooting for secretly, but you can't do anything about it. You can't touch it.

Crista Copp: I do think though, I don't know if it'll be two years or three years, I'm not good at predictions, but that AI as a separate entity will fade away. Right? So again, as I mentioned, AI underlies all ten of them, right? So at what point do we stop talking about it with AI appended to the thing? So when do we get back to just talking about teaching and learning technology? AI is embedded in there, data analytics, AI is embedded in there. So I think we're really in that moment of the hype of the word and the technology. We're in the hype of the technology, but we will see that shift, right? Because the word internet is not in any of these, right? And yet none of these would be possible without the internet. We use the internet in every single one of these. Also, the word "reading" isn't in any of these, right?

Mark McCormack: Or printers or print.

Crista Copp: So just we move to an assumption that that's within the thing, and we're going to get there with AI as well. So don't how long that will be. And it'll be interesting to see as everybody gets more comfortable or uncomfortable, but you just adjusted to that will start to, I think, move past the hype of it.

Mark McCormack: Yeah, there are, just to kind of tie it up a little bit, there are some things that we identify in those interviews and through the data collection process that are really cool ideas that never make the final report. And I feel kind of sad about that a little bit, and it makes me think maybe aspirationally about the future of this project, maybe there's a way to elevate some of those things.

Crista Copp: The honorable mentions.

Mark McCormack: Yeah, literally, I almost had an honorable mentions section in the report. I literally had to, because there were two or three things. It was like, I really don't want to let go of this. I want people to know about this or see it, and it just didn't make it. So maybe that's a future thing.

Sophie White: And you share any of what those are. If not, it's okay.

Mark McCormack: So one favorite one I had, and this came up very early on in some of the institutional leader interviews, was the idea of the institution's local community and making connections out to your surrounding community as a way for the institution to enrich its relevance to its students and key stakeholders as a way of enriching its programming and its offerings for its students. And it came up somewhat consistently in some of those early interviews. And I thought it worked so beautifully with this idea of making connections because ultimately it, it's about more than the connections we're making internally within the institution. We're also connecting outward to our communities, to industry, to other partners around our institutions. And so it just a beautiful idea that, and the community voting just didn't make it into the Top 10. It almost made it into that honorable mentions section at the end.

Jenay Robert: Well now it's on Shop Talk, and when you're here for do it.

Sophie White: Thanks for sharing that. I agree that is a beautiful connection to the theme of making connections. I'm curious, thinking about AI underlying all of these topics, the internet underlying these topics, what do you think the Top 10 this year says about the role of technology leaders at the institution? So how technology, technology leadership affects the operations of the institution and its mission, its strategic vision, all of that, because it feels like that's changing every year with AI. And I'm curious how you think this fits in.

Crista Copp: What made a good CIO ten years ago, or a tech leader ten years ago or twenty years ago, are not the same skills that a leader needs today? Now, you need really a facilitator of conversation. And as you look across this list, this is not someone who is just implementing a CRM or implementing an LMS or implementing, it's not about the implementation of these big systems. It's now how are these systems all talking to each other in a way that we don't even need humans to actually respond to questions. We can have an AI bot that will respond to questions that's taking information from the SIS and the LMS and CRM. That language is very, very different than the technical language of, okay, how big does our data center need to be? What's our WiFi on it? And while those things are super important, and we still need those things, we need leaders who are not so embedded in that world that they can step out and actually talk. It's hard. It's very hard. And I like to say I'm a recovering CIO because I think it's a pretty accurate description. It is really hard to make sure that you are covering all of your bases and you are standing in front of the president and getting the president to agree to things that they don't understand. In a previous conversation we were talking about, if you really want data governance, the way that you do that is the provost and the president have to say, this is actually important. You have got to get that buy-in from other leaders who are like, "Hey, we're going to sit at the table and decide what does an enrolled student mean? When we call from a data governance perspective, when we say 'an enrolled student," what does that mean?" And you need people who are dedicated to doing that and don't walk away until it's addressed. So leaders today, they need to be communicators, they need to be able to juggle a lot, and they need to be willing to get the best people for the job. And I definitely think that there's a lot of workforce changes. We could talk about that from your session, but there's a ton of workforce changes, not just the AI skillset, but we need different types of people, different types of responsibilities, different types of, and in order for us to address all of this,

Mark McCormack: I liked how that came through. This idea came through and the number one issue, Collaborative Cybersecurity, and the video clip that we showed this morning, Fred Cas, one of our panelists, talking about something like multifactor authentication years ago. It might just be something like, "Hey, do this. You have to do this. It's required, and it's a technical solution." And now the frame of mind is much more, "Hey, implementing this has an impact on the user and their experience and the work that they're trying to get done. So how can we listen to them understand that the points of friction or frustration with this solution, but also from our end, articulate to them, here's why this is really important and why we're doing this." So they feel bought in and they understand and support that thing you're trying to implement. So I love that focus much more on the partnership and the listening and that relational touch that's so important.

Crista Copp: And our leaders need to be able to cultivate that at our institutions.

Sophie White: Yeah. I noticed your slide on one of the issues said that technology leaders need to be chief listening officers, which I thought was really great. Just to think about your role as to listen and adapt and learn from what you can from your stakeholders, and then translate that.

Mark McCormack: Yeah.

Sophie White: So those communication skills are so important.

Mark McCormack: I'm glad you noticed that. I came up with that. I was proud of that.

Sophie White: Oh, great. Well done. I noticed that. I noticed printer jams.

Crista Copp: I appreciate the fact that you were taking

Jenay Robert: Notes this morning. Crista, you led a great panel discussion, really kind of giving us that flavor, what's happening at institutions and where our minds are in translating things into action. I know we're close to ending. Yeah. We're almost out of time, but maybe you could leave us off on some thinking about that translating into action piece.

Crista Copp: So kind of already touched on that a little bit, but I mean, I hope EDUCAUSE is providing enough information for you to be able to take that next step and to be able to find that actionable moment for you. These are 10 areas that if you were to put in a Venn diagram, they all have overlaps attached to them. All of this is very interconnected, and each institution needs to think about what their priorities are, what their goals are, and where they're at, given their maturity in any of these, because it's very different. You may be really mature in one area and not in another, and then flip flop for the next school. And so I think it's really important for institutions to use the Top 10 report as a guide to say, okay, these are the things that other people are going to be putting effort on, but we as an institution need to be sort of gauging where we are and where could we move forward. And so as we move forward, I'm really hoping that EDUCAUSE is your engaged partner in helping you find that actionable step and connecting you to other people in EDUCAUSE that are doing the same thing. Anything to

Jenay Robert: Add, Mark?

Mark McCormack: Just on that last point, and we actually end the report on this note, connect with each other. If you make one connection after reading this report, find the people in this community that you need to connect with, to share with, learn from who are dealing with the same challenges and opportunities. I mean, for me, that's, that's the value of EDUCAUSE as a community is each other and being able to make those connections.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. We see that so strongly at our annual conference where we're recording this and every day in our community groups. So if you're not familiar with EDUCAUSE community groups, check them out. Connect dot EDUCAUSE dot edu. We'll put it in the show notes. It's another great first step to find some community. Yeah.