To The Catalyst, an exciting and insightful podcast produced by Northeast Iowa Community College. I'm your host, Lasack. Together, we'll explore the people, programs, partnerships that make Northeast Iowa Community College unique. From student success stories to behind the scenes info about athletics, innovation and industry collaboration, each episode dives deeper into your community's college. Get ready for an inside look at the impact of community driven education at NICC.
Amy Lasack:All right, well, welcome to The Catalyst. Today's episode is titled Technology at NICC. As we all know, technology is changing everything, and higher education is not immune to that as well. It's affecting how students learn, it's affecting how faculty teach, how campuses operate behind the scenes. In today's episode, we're going to explore some tools, ideas and innovations helping shape today's college campuses in the future of learning.
Amy Lasack:I have two fantastic guests today. We welcome Steve Smith, who's our Executive Director of Computer Information Systems, and Jordan OConnell, who serves as the Chair of Liberal Arts at NICC and is also a doctoral student at Winona State University. Welcome, Jordan and Steve.
Steve Smith:Good morning. Thank you.
Amy Lasack:So let's just dig right into it. How is technology changing the landscape of education and what does that mean for NICC? And Jordan, we'll start with you and you can talk a little bit about the faculty piece of it, the teaching piece of it, and then Steve, I want to talk about the infrastructure piece of it with Awesome.
Jordan O'Connell:Yeah. You mentioned me being a doctoral student. It was the advent of ChatGPT that was the catalyst to borrow your phrase or your word there to go back to school because I knew that education would be changing so much once we wrapped our heads around these tools. We were really fortunate as an instructional design team at the college and all across the college to be aware of what was happening with large language models and these tools and the ways they would reshape education. So it's been interesting.
Jordan O'Connell:It's been a thousand days. I got an email from OpenAI ChatGPT the other day that said, hey, you've using ChatGPT for a thousand days. So to watch the ways in which our students are learning and, playing with these tools, the ways in which instructors initially were hesitant to think and consider about how much their lives have changed with these tools, to watch them really embrace these tools has been really, really interesting. And so these tools really have the capability of unlocking personalized education, personalized tutoring, personalized instructions in ways that our community is really, really acknowledging. So much of these tools are moving in this education direction.
Jordan O'Connell:Gemini is available to staff and faculty and our students, and there's a guided learning capability built right in. And so all of these changes you're describing, Amy, are pointing us toward a world in which it's never been easier to learn and it's never been easier to help our community grow as learners, thinkers, entrepreneurs. So it's really, really exciting time for education.
Amy Lasack:That's exciting. I want to make sure I come back to that Jordan about it's an exciting time or it's never been easier to learn because I think that's a really important piece that not everybody sees it that way. So Steve, but I do want to talk a little bit from your end. As fast as things are changing, it also means a lot of work on your end, a lot of money that needs to be found to upgrade these things. How do you juggle that from your seat?
Steve Smith:Yeah. I mean, that's since if technology has started being implemented in the classroom, it's probably probably as early as, you the sixties, really, for for some early computing, it changes so rapidly that you just have to be able to pivot to what is coming next and also trying to evaluate what is going to be the next thing and what's gonna have staying power, right? We don't want to spend too much time on something that is a flash in the pan. So as far as finding a five week budget, that's a constant challenge. I work closely with my boss who is the director of finance and now VP of finance.
Steve Smith:So so to to try and try and keep keep abreast of what's coming next and also planning planning for it out several years.
Amy Lasack:Yeah. So Steve As
Steve Smith:much as you can several years. Right? Because it
Amy Lasack:Right.
Steve Smith:It changes so quickly. You can't you can't you know, you used to be able to set up a, like, a five to eight year budget, and I don't think that's that's realistic anymore. You can make two to three as tops. You wanna be, just prepared for for anything, really.
Amy Lasack:Yeah. You just don't know what's gonna happen here in six months. But so so how do you stay on top of what the next what the trends are or what's going to be important that the college has to consider? What are things that you do to help stay abreast of that?
Steve Smith:I do a lot of, reading on the, on the interwebs, of, forums and sites and also listening to what my colleagues are bringing back from their conferences or discussions that they're they're talking with. You know, I'm I'm in a I'm I'm in what we I I I often call the unsexy part of IT in that, you know, we are we are keeping the lights on. We're keeping a really good, stable infrastructure that helps people learn. We're the canvas for the paint, right? So that's our mission there.
Steve Smith:And so to, then give Jordan and his colleagues, the opportunity to really paint as as metaphor goes.
Jordan O'Connell:Can can I jump in right there? That that's that's absolutely right. And COVID was, you know, a big test for United States, our community, Northeast Iowa Community College, but the groundwork that our computer information services department and Steve and his team laid for us to be able to have the dynamic conversations we're having about AI, like it was only because we were so adept at using Zoom, which the college supports, that we were able to have this sort of conversation randomly on a Friday about like, hey, have you heard about this Chatty Bitty thing that has enabled us to grow this big community, not just an AI Alliance led by Travis Hunt at the college, but broader communication in in my campus as well. Pathify, where we're really bringing people into the fold, so AI is not the scary thing. In Northeast Iowa Community College, it has gone that direction other places.
Jordan O'Connell:Right? But we are we're seeing past that at the college because of the infrastructure investments that the college has made. And so we're growing this community of people sort of realizing that future is not predictable in the way that we really want it to be, but it's really, really dynamic. It could be really, really empowering for us and our students.
Amy Lasack:I think that is really valid point Jordan, because one of the things I've been at NICC for a little over two years now. One of the things I was immediately impressed by was all the systems that we have in place technology wise to enable us to do some of these things. And it's really allowed us to jump ahead over the last several months as ChatGPT has really taken off and all of this, the different AI pieces. That very, very valid point. I do want to come back Jordan to your comment about it's never been easier to learn.
Amy Lasack:Agree wholeheartedly with that but I also think that it can be overwhelming because there's so many different things coming at you at the same time and for somebody who isn't ready for that, you might find them digging in their heels. So how do you combat that or how do you work with that?
Jordan O'Connell:That's the $10,000 question at the moment. Like the analogy of riding a bike comes to mind. If you are sort of intrinsically motivated, want to learn, when you're riding a bike, it can make sense to your brain to go slow, but like in order to stay balanced, have to speed up. Like you have to be willing to kind of like trust your intuition, trust that like if you're motivated by this desire to learn, know, we're D2L school, desire to learn, But like that is, like throwing yourself into it is key. And and and my advice to anyone with these, I know we're three years in, but like there's still a lot of people really on the sidelines with these large language models and then the technology that is sort of being built off of them.
Jordan O'Connell:They're so accessible that you really kinda can't go wrong. So if you're an NICC, if you're a student, staff, faculty member, opening up Google Gemini, which Steve and his team have as we're a Google school, it's a part of our ecosystem, it's a safe place to engage with an AI tool. It's a large language model built on human language, and so you can just talk to it. And so from another perspective, it's never been easier to engage with technology and like really, really advanced technology. It's really inviting.
Jordan O'Connell:It's a chat window sitting there kind of ready for you to kind of like ask a question. And this this morning, I needed to put my, you know, my spring or excuse me, my fall semester classes on my Google Calendar this morning, just a sort of routine task. I asked Gemini to do it for me and it put 128 appointments on my calendar, like Wow. And so it's worth the risk of not knowing what you're doing. You just have to like lean in and like fail fast and realize that you have so much potential and these tools are, again, a catalyst or a magnifier for what you're capable of.
Jordan O'Connell:And so I've just tried to kind of bring optimism to the conversation and trying to say folks just try it, and don't be afraid to talk about it too. I think it's really, really good that we're having this conversation and we'll continue to have these conversations with the community as well about their potential to just accelerate human progress, right? I think it's as significant as the printing press or the discovery of fire, these LLMs, seriously.
Amy Lasack:Yeah, I love having these conversations because I'm always learning different ways that I can use it too because that probably, the appointments probably saved you how much time
Jordan O'Connell:Right, and then it's small thing that compounds. So that's why leaning in and experimenting and realizing, and it's really challenging to look at kind of the status quo and the way the world has been. And we've spent sort of a gradual ramp with these technologies since arguably like the the introduction of the iPhone in, thousand two thousand and eight. But but America you know, I'm a history teacher by trade. We America has gone through so many periods of rapid technological change.
Jordan O'Connell:Like, we forget. We get really, really normalized to the modern comfortable experience we forget what we're capable of and so that's definitely my message to faculty staff and students like we are capable of so much more and the machines can can help help take us there.
Amy Lasack:That's great. So Steve for those that are listening that aren't tech savvy what does it mean when we say we need to modernize the college's infrastructure? And how does that directly impact either staff or students when they're in a classroom or in their offices? What does that look like from your lens?
Steve Smith:Yeah. There's as we said earlier, there there's just it moves so rapidly that, you need to stay on top of I don't wanna say trends because you don't wanna you don't want a necessarily list of trends, but you have to stay on top of what is coming. And so modernizing is what enabled us to, you know, pivot in COVID, for instance, and we'll keep enabling us to pivot for the next hurdle or challenge or not even a challenge, a good opportunity. Right? Mhmm.
Steve Smith:We might have an opportunity to to do something that technology will assist them, and so we have to be ready with our modernized infrastructure. So that's, again, just staying abreast of what is coming and what is fading away sometimes. So we often sometimes forget to think, well, what can we stop doing since this has taken over? And so try to keep abreast of that.
Amy Lasack:Yeah. And we talk a lot about modernizing the technology, but a big part of the work that your team does too is making sure that the college is safe technologically wise, right? And as we know, some of our sister colleges have gotten some cyber attacks. So what are some things that NICC does behind the scenes to make sure as we explore new types of technology that we're safe?
Steve Smith:Yeah. We kinda kinda in response to one of our sister colleges getting breached, we we we kinda really heavily invested into our cybersecurity infrastructure. We hired a information security officer, and they work, you know, around the clock to monitor things that are coming in, and that's kinda where a lot of the technologies can help is we only have one information security officer. And so, you know, relying on technology in those off hours to watch things and alert you when something new is awry is important. We are also, you know, we're also trying to deal with some ourselves.
Steve Smith:We're looking at a lot of fraud popping up because of the accessibility to be able to apply for FAFSA loans. Sure. So we're trying to combat that. We're using some AI in those situations to to try to figure out who is a who is a real person and who is a fraudster. So, we are implementing some of those as we speak.
Amy Lasack:Lots of different facets your team has to worry about, Steve. We're so lucky to have you in your team. Jordan too, how have these technological advances that the college is utilizing, how has that impacted the student experience?
Jordan O'Connell:Yeah, I think you're smart to bring up, some of the challenges, and I think challenges is a fair word with some of this. I think about the ways in which you can improve accessibility at the college. Students are definitely uncertain about the tech, and so we're definitely having a lot of conversations and so much of how we're able to stay abreast of these tools is to just continue to have like brave conversations, right, with with students, with ourselves, faculty about what's going on. And so students really kind of need to be brought into the fold, right? And we need clear rules and expectations about the use of these tools.
Jordan O'Connell:You know, I suggested, it's ever been easier to learn. There's this old problem, Bloom's Two Sigma problem, this idea that disadvantaged students, students that don't have access to a personal tutor or tutor at a time that works for them, they cannot achieve what a student with a tutor can. And these tools can be incredible tutors. Like, one of the tools available to learners right now is called NotebookLM. It's a retrieval augmented generation tool.
Jordan O'Connell:It only uses the materials you give it. And so you can have a robust conversation with something like a supplemental instructor using your instructor's actual materials right now at at one in the morning while you're preparing for a test. Right? Very, very safe. Very limited to hallucinations, which is a concern with these tools very, very early.
Jordan O'Connell:In some ways, tools are much more reliable than humans as teachers. Right? And so really, really dynamic, and and it can just allow us to if we had to change the way that we teach, we go back to our course objectives, course guides, think really, really critically about what education looks like post ChatGPT or post Gemini. We can have really, really personalized education where students can have not just a tutor available 20 fourseven, but a test that really reflects their interests and their passions. We're doing a lot of this on the DCS side.
Jordan O'Connell:We're personalizing education a little bit. We're thinking about competency based education where we're focused on achievement and demonstration of learning. We can bring all of what's working in industry over to the general arts, liberal arts area and really make education about the learner and not about the textbook now. And so there are definitely challenges. We're definitely in sort of a period of growing pain, but it takes conversations like this to kind of like map out what's next and everything will change.
Jordan O'Connell:And Steve and his team will definitely keep up because we need them to.
Amy Lasack:You used the term hallucinating. I actually learned what that term meant just last week and now I feel like I'm hearing it all over the place but it's so true that the people part of AI is still very important because you do have those hallucinating moments as you're working And through so I'm assuming as you work with students in your classroom, that that's a big part of how you're incorporating as you're teaching them how to use AI in a way that makes sense.
Jordan O'Connell:That's critical. And I remember being a student sort of in the fairly early days of the internet and just benefiting from faculty who took the time to address how to use Google appropriately, and putting the fear of God into me a little bit about plagiarism. Right? But like, so it served their interest and it served mine. And I think it's incumbent upon us to have a very similar set of conversations with 18, 19, 20, 21 year olds, whoever was in our classroom.
Jordan O'Connell:Right? Like, because this is so new and we're closer to it. We're the experts in teaching and learning. And so we can do the next generation a huge service by helping them navigate this technological landscape that's radically changed so much, both challenges, concerns, and the incredible opportunities both hand in hand. Same with Google, right?
Amy Lasack:Steve, with all the different buildings that NICC has and all the expansion and remodeling and things, what are some of the projects that you're most proud of right now that your team is working on, or what do you have coming up?
Steve Smith:I mean, certainly, the the Zoom infrastructure is we're pretty proud of that. We we moved to Zoom phone. We we kinda fully embraced the Zoom platform, and I think it it I think it's working pretty well for for everyone. It allows just different types of communication channels for people to get things done quickly. Coming up, boy, what is coming up?
Steve Smith:It's not sexy. We have some we have some battery backups coming. Our our uninterruptible power systems. So UPS is coming up this this summer to get replaced. That will keep our in case of a power outage, it'll keep our our our infrastructure running for a period of time that that will allow us to to shut it down nicely and not not violently, as well as let people keep working and finish what they were working out.
Steve Smith:So that's that's not sexy. We're also pretty excited about these these new meeting boards that we're we're rolling out in the in the they're basically giant iPads. So it it allows a different style of teaching, especially for a hybrid or a fully online course where where they can interact with the students in a in a different way than just a classic whiteboard. So those are those are two that come to to mind really, really quickly.
Amy Lasack:Yeah. That's pretty cool. I can't wait to see what those look like. Jordan, I know you're a part of the AI Alliance that the college has. Can you talk a little bit about what that group is and what that group hopes to accomplish?
Jordan O'Connell:Yeah, it's interesting that I think we've only had it for eighteen months or something like that. It feels like longer because we've been having so many conversations that just got formalized eighteen months ago. So we are, I went and talked to a community group one evening. We're meeting regularly to talk about threats, opportunities, challenges. That group, we're an offshoot of that group is, and Steve's a part of that too, we're looking at and we're already leveraging some chatbots, like through our website, right?
Jordan O'Connell:We're talking about more comprehensive opportunities in the future to really kind of like bring that immediacy, that experience of talking with a chatbot that really understands your specific context and can give you the right information at the right time, personalized for you through our website. So that's something we're chewing on too. I think our best contribution is sort of like helping kind of steer, like, conversations institutionally in terms of like policy cabinet, even like board decisions, kind of like leading the conversation, think is the the most important thing that that AI Alliance groups does, and it's the safe place where we can really kind of talk about Yeah. The pretty radical ideas. You know, I mentioned or I didn't I didn't mention it, but it was in the some of the show notes.
Jordan O'Connell:We I I quickly wrote a chapter for a book on AI and education with my dissertation advisor, like, a year ago. And as we were writing this thing, it felt so felt so abstract and so, like, future forward and so almost, like, sci fi, what we were writing about, the possibilities of what could change for education. It was so backwards looking. It is so outdated all of a sudden. And so the AI Alliance becomes this place where we can kind of say, Did your chatbot just remember something from eighteen months ago?
Jordan O'Connell:Does your chatbot do this because it's pretty incredible, and am I hallucinating? That's the question in the AI Alliance because it's a place where we confirm we are not hallucinating. We are seeing how much is changing rapidly, and it becomes a place to ideate, to experiment, to test tools out so that we can bring all of that our learners, our community, and really kind of lead these conversations in this really new, brave new world we're entering into here.
Amy Lasack:You reminded me of when I was a kid and I used to watch The Jetsons.
Jordan O'Connell:Oh, shoot. And, you
Amy Lasack:know, they had the video. Yeah. You'd have that video screen talking to people. And I was like, that would be so cool. And now we use it every single day.
Jordan O'Connell:Someone reminded me that in the Jetsons, like George Jensen, his job was to like basically push a button, which I think is basically what I'm doing at night is pushing buttons as I'm interacting with the chatbot and programming, and I don't know any programming languages, but now I can build software, which means anyone can, which means our students can, which means entrepreneurship is just an incredible opportunity right now. And as a business focused college, both in terms of on the credit and non credit side, we can really, really help local businesses, entrepreneurs, even larger businesses really think about what's next in interesting ways.
Amy Lasack:Steve, I know if we've got students out there listening that are trying to determine where their career goes, there are so many opportunities within the tech world. Can you talk a little bit about what sort of things people can consider and how you got into this field?
Steve Smith:Yeah. I I got into this field, by way of music. I was a a composer in that previous life, and I did a lot of computer music just as part of my studies. And so I kinda got into the zeros and ones of it all there and then and and just continued down that path is something that I could really latch on to. As far as for students, you know, I think, you know, Jordan mentioned that it it's it's easy easier now for anyone to write software, certainly not flawless software.
Steve Smith:So I think those those skills are of computer software, the logic, the the understanding of data structures, the the understanding
Amy Lasack:of
Steve Smith:the ins and outs of how things are going to connect together is important. That said, we are in the infancy of some AI tools like that that can write code, so it is a challenge to say where will this field be in the future, but I think it's still a valid field in just that the thinking and the logic you need to say, how does this computer interpret what I'm saying, and where does it go from there is important, and those skills are not going away anytime soon. I don't believe so. I think that's and then, as we mentioned before, cybersecurity, it's critical in this time. There are lots of bad actors out there, and there are lots of ways you could use AI to do do that bad acting.
Steve Smith:So that that is another realm or or field in which it I could I see continued growth.
Amy Lasack:Great. Well, if you're both game, I do have a little segment fact or fiction for us to to play along. The first question, Steve, I have for you. NICC's computer labs are only for computer science students. Is that fact or fiction?
Steve Smith:I think that's no. That is definitely fiction.
Amy Lasack:That is definitely fiction. Yeah.
Steve Smith:Yeah. They're all they're all good. You got the
Jordan O'Connell:graphic. Glad
Steve Smith:I answered that correctly. We yeah. Anyone with a NICC credentials can log into any computer lab and use it for whatever their heart desires. And in fact, we have some computer labs in the Piazza library, which is a part of the Dubuque library system. So it's those are even open as a public.
Steve Smith:So, you know, total total fiction.
Amy Lasack:Alright. Jordan, students are are already AI literate just because they use ChatGPT.
Jordan O'Connell:No. I I I have to help young people with their devices all the time, and I never I always enjoy reminding them that this old man is helping them with their technology. They need a ton of help. Need to help guide them for sure. We have much to teach them.
Jordan O'Connell:And no matter like where you're at too, like you can teach someone, you can help someone with the tech. If you played around with an LLM, help someone else. Yes.
Amy Lasack:That's great. All right, Steve, back to you. NICC offers resources both on campus and virtually to help students with tech issues. Is that fact or fiction?
Steve Smith:That is fact. Yes. We have, you know, what, 5,000 miles of supposed space to cover, and we have a small staff, but a very good staff, and so we have lots of tools. We have helped us at our three main centers, our three main campuses, Kalmar, Piazza, and Dubuque. And then we also are able to help our our centers, be it Cresco or OConnell or help me out the rest of them.
Steve Smith:So sorry.
Amy Lasack:There's a lot
Jordan O'Connell:of them. Yeah. So,
Steve Smith:you know, we can we can hop on a a Zoom call, for instance, and and do a share screen to see what's what's going on, and our our help desk staff is really great at at at helping those things. That's great. Alright.
Amy Lasack:So Jordan, back to you. AI will replace most college instructors over the next two years.
Jordan O'Connell:Oh, definitely won't replace. So that's fiction. I'm trying to think of like a caveat there. Like there there is no caveat. The answer is no, but but we do have to really, like, it is our it is incumbent upon us.
Jordan O'Connell:It's our responsibility as instructors to really wrestle with what this means for our disciplines, our domains, our programs, because we are we are not we are not building for the world of the past. We're building for the world of the future. That was always true. And it's sort of like surprising how much responsibility we have now. And so we need to we need to lean into that.
Amy Lasack:Great. Steve, how about you need to be a tech genius to succeed in online courses at NICC?
Steve Smith:No. I don't think so. I think Jordan mentioned that, you know, there are some students who who struggle with technology. You know? Part of that is due to the ease of which some of these user interfaces and user experience, know, you take the iPad that's there, the iPhone.
Steve Smith:It revolutionary. It had one, but, you know, that blew people's minds. But it was all because the interface was so intuitive and so well thought out. And that, you know, so that leads to some people not learning how to fix, you know, the thing that goes wrong with their computer. So and not everybody needs to.
Steve Smith:So there are resources to help the tech heavy courses, and, you know, certainly, it doesn't stop at the instructor. The instructors are very knowledgeable, especially the ones that are teaching tech heavy courses. So they can help, and if if not, we can we can assist where we're needed.
Amy Lasack:Jordan, AI adoption is a cross departmental whole college initiative.
Jordan O'Connell:Oh, yes. Every instance, I would say that's fact. Yes. Every instance will be different and that's so much of what the AI Alliance does is sort of have specific conversations and we're available. So if you're listening and you're at NICC and you sort of need some help, call in the AI Alliance, AINICC dot edu.
Jordan O'Connell:We'll come kind of brainstorm and try to help in that particular instance because every area will be a little bit different.
Amy Lasack:Alright. Steve, last one. Using password 123 is an easy and secure password for everyone to use.
Steve Smith:Correct. That is true. Yes. Please please do that. Yes.
Jordan O'Connell:It's 1610 now, then ICC. We need a 1610 for password.
Steve Smith:We will Yeah. And we're also looking at rolling out PaaS keys in the future. So we're we're trying to make it, you know, passwords and and multifactor authentication. We all know it's it's it's it's a pain, but it is necessary at this point. But we're looking we're looking for a solution to just try to make everything simpler and easier.
Steve Smith:So
Amy Lasack:Yes. So just to be clear, that is fiction. We don't want people to use that.
Steve Smith:Oh, yeah. Go go for it. Yeah.
Amy Lasack:Great. Well, we are
Steve Smith:That is fiction.
Amy Lasack:We are out of time. I want to thank both Jordan and Steve for having this conversation with us. I learned a lot. If there's one thing I'm taking away from today's conversation is that navigating technology can be overwhelming, but having experts like you two get us through that is really critical and we're thankful for having you on the team. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Steve Smith:Thanks, Amy. Thanks, y'all.
Amy Lasack:And thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of The Catalyst. Thanks for joining us on this episode of The Catalyst. If you enjoyed the conversation, make sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. Want to learn more about NICC and the many ways we support our students, partners, and community?
Amy Lasack:Visit nicc.edu for more resources and upcoming opportunities. This podcast is produced by Northeast Iowa Community College and hosted by me, Amy Lasack, with executive producer Tessa Hill, producer Travis Hunt, and graphic designer Ashley Konzen.