Flood the Zone: University of Virginia’s New Strategy to Scale Experiential Learning for Every Student

Hey, everybody. This is Darren Francis from Signals in Higher Ed. And joining me today is Doctor. Kemi Jonah, Vice Provost for Online Education and Digital Innovation at the University of Virginia. Welcome, Kemi. Great to be here, Darren. Thank you. Yeah, excited to have this conversation. You know, we've been doing a series on experiential learning really for the last four months, and now it's taking shape with really bringing in some of the voices from within the institutions, and I'm looking forward to getting your framing on the impact of experiential learning at University of Virginia. But I think first, it would be great to just highlight a little bit of your background. I mean, before University of Virginia, you came from a university known as the gold standard for co op and experiential learning, Northeastern. Talk a little bit about how that maybe shaped the way you've thought about the work that you're doing at UVA. Sure. Well, again, appreciate the opportunity to be here and talk today about issues that I think we're both passionate about, and I know your audience is also very passionate about. So Northeastern, when I started in twenty sixteen, I was overseeing the bachelor completion portfolio in the College of Professional Studies, which, you know, are working adult learners, median age thirty four, you know, veterans, single moms, the kind of post traditional audience that we all know about. And despite being, as you said, at the kind of home, the headquarters of experiential learning in the US, right, Northeast University with the great co op program, I quickly realized that, you know, my learners couldn't avail themselves of co op because it meant, you know, going someplace for six months, working full time, and then, you know, returning to school. And you know, as great as co op is, it didn't serve, you know, my students, at all, basically. And so I really started thinking hard about, well, like, first of all, that doesn't seem fair. Right? Northeastern promises experiential learning and to deliver experiential learning to everybody regardless of, how you come to the university. And, I started looking for answers for how do we do that in a way that is equitable for all our learners and provides the flexibility that students need. I loved when we spoke last, you mentioned your term, like kind of flood the zone philosophy. Right? And I think it gets at what you're saying, both the scarcity and equity components at, you know, an institution other than Northeast, right? So maybe talk a little bit about where that comes from, what are you flooding the zone with? What are you thinking about that starts to move the needle for more students? Sure. Well, I mean, just to back up for a second, I mean, even at Northeastern, you know, as great as co op is, if you peel it back a little bit, you know, there are still challenges in terms of making it really an ideal experience for students. Right? So at Northeastern, everybody does typically two co ops, sometimes three. Right? And so if you think about it, that you really you know, to have only two bites at the apple is even if, you know, they go great, is is a pretty limited and high risk choice. Right? Because, you know, if one of those doesn't go great or it's not the kind of experience that you want, now you're down to one experience left. And so, you know, even then it really feels to me like a very high stakes fraud choice for students, whether it's just because they don't know what they want or because they thought they were signing up for x and they got y when they did the co op. Right? And so that was another forcing factor, which is, you know, as great as co op is when it works well, it even for the students who can avail themselves of it, those traditional residential students, it's still not perfect in all respects. So, you know, what can we do to help students make more informed choices? Right. Even if they do get to do a co op or, you know, an internship as it exists in many other schools, which are traditionally a summer internship, you know, to make that pay off better, to make the students more ready to hit the ground and get the most out of that experience. Right? And so all of that contributed to kind of the thinking that I brought here to UVA about two, two and a half years ago. That's when I really started leaning into thinking about digital solution, which here we've been partnering with Riipen to deliver a variety of different kind of experiential learning models. And that's where the sort of flood the zone idea came from is, you know, even in an ideal situation, if you're in a traditional undergrad, which, again, we're leaving out a big popular part of the population, getting that great experience is not a slam dunk. Right? And being ready to get the most out of it, even if you do get it is not a slam dunk. And so, the flood the zone strategy for me has just been like, let's try to give students as many different kinds of opportunities as possible, not just one size fits all co op or one size fits all summer internship, full time paid, you know, in person typically. Right? Sometimes that means picking up and moving and renting apartment in Manhattan, which is not cheap or easy for all students, right? And also frankly, you know, getting even getting an internship is fraught these days. Companies are disinvesting from those experiences. You know, there's, you know, hundreds of applications per internship. The numbers are dropping by ten to twenty percent a year in terms of postings, twenty to thirty percent if you're intact. Right? So those are long odds for students. And so we really need to have a lot more options that are a lot more flexible for students to start, you know, dipping their toe in in low risk ways, experimenting with, you know, trying different kinds of, companies, different kinds of experiences, different roles, without kinda having to bet the farm on one big experience. Is it when I think flood zone, I think, you know, literally just putting as many options in front of students as possible. But are you finding that there's a natural scaffolding effect where you start with a certain type of experience at the beginning, you end with this other? Like, there a natural ideal order or progression that you favor at this point? I am not yet at the point of feeling confident that we know exactly what a progression looks like for all students under all circumstances and in all majors, right? That's a pretty arrogant kind of mindset. And so instead, try to think more, Darren, about like, can we create opportunities that are low risk exploratory opportunities? And I think broadly the kind of work that everyone has been doing in experiential learning, I mean, I'm really pleased to see, you know, greater attention, greater recognition of the value, all the things that, you know, you have been championing on your show and in your conversations. But where I think we've kind of dropped the ball is in the idea of early exploration, low risk exploration. Right? We've always been focused on just like, get the co op, get the internship, get more of them, whatever. But nobody's talking about like, how do you figure out what you are interested in? How do you particularly from less advantaged backgrounds, explore careers and fields that they have no prior experience in. Right? And so that low risk exploration is something that I've been really focused on trying to expand, and that's sort of a part of the flood the zone ideas. Just, you know, provide enough opportunities that are low risk, low cost for students so that they can fit it in their schedule. They don't feel guilty if something happens and they, you know, can't do it during the summer. We have a lot of students who, for example, student athletes who practice or, you know, and work out during the summer. They can't do traditional internships. We have a lot of students who go home and have to do caregiving for their families, students who work in their family businesses back home. A million and one different reasons, students who are traveling internationally. And so, you know, just a lot of opportunities to fit it into your schedule around, you know, very busy lives for for students or working adults who are students and to, you know, let you feel comfortable exploring different kinds of things, building up to a deeper and richer experience. So this is not really a replacement strategy, but a augmentation strategy. Yeah. No, that's important. And I really like the emphasis on the low risk exploration, at least the framing of it. I think it makes a lot of sense. It's something you can introduce into a lot of different student contexts and provide real value, just in the exploration itself. So other higher ed leaders that I've talked to as they've been exploring this come down on different they land on slightly different conclusions around curricular versus co curricular. And I think it probably has more to do with their unique student population than anything else. But I'm just curious at UBA, when you think about you're trying to really scale this, you're trying to create the equity that can otherwise be missing from some of these experiences. How do navigate curricular versus co curricular at UVA? Or at least how would you like to? Well, it's a great question. And as you suggested in your question, you know, the people have different kind of preconceived notions about, you know, which way to tackle it and which one might be better. But again, you know, you know, North Star is flood the zone, right? So it's all good. We should try to do all of the things, not just pick one and ignore the others. And so, you know, curricular is great, but it can be slow to adopt because you have to sort of go door to door to each faculty member and do the work of trying to kind of carve out space in their course and integrate it and whatnot. And when it works well, it can be very powerful. Right? So I'm a huge champion of trying to do that when you can. But, you know, I mean, even at a school like UVA, I mean, there's, you know, thousands of courses every year, right? And so, if you were just like, say peeling off ten percent a year, that's still gonna take you ten years to get through it. Then students are still gonna be left out just by random schedule selections and whatnot. So big fan, definitely do it. It's slow, it's hard work. Not every faculty member understands or values the idea of plugging experiential learning in. And, you know, I'll make a broad generalization, but sort of like humanities much slower to sort of recognize or, you know, value that than, like, engineering faculty might be. Right, or business faculty. Right? So it's it's a a kind of a jagged frontier, if you will, of of of, you know, engaging faculty around that. And so, you know, that leaves a sort of co curricular category. And again, that's where, you know, at least up until now here, we found good success, which is, you know, students are kind of chock full with their schedules. After class, they, you know, they have their clubs or sports or other things. And, you know, their schedules are crazy. And so providing sort of asynchronous, flexible opportunities both during the term, but in particular, and we can talk more about this later, during school breaks where we found a lot of uptake, right, during winter break and summer break so that students who want to can opt in when, you know, they're not kind of running flat out during semesters. I want to talk to you a little bit about some of these different places that you see innovation on the ground, student clubs, career academies, etcetera. But before that, you said something in our last conversation I thought was interesting was where faculty are starting to see something like ripen as a backstop insurance policy courses, right? And basically, they come up short on projects, that's a pretty interesting use case in and of itself. Is that a wedge that could eventually lead to deeper integration in your mind, or is it truly just backstop potential there? No. I think, you know, the the example we were talking about is master's in data science capstone course, and we partnered with the faculty there, you know, who was already running essentially, you know, an experiential capstone with employer partners. And, you know, what he needed was just a little help making sure that, you know, he had enough projects for everyone in the class, you know? And so, you know, maybe he had seven and he needed ten and he's like, can you just help me with the last three? You know? So that was not an issue of like convincing a faculty to do it, that he was already there and it was just providing that supplemental help. I think, you know, the short answer is yes. I do think Darren, that it can be a wedge because, you know, you know, when you stop and ask yourself, well, what like, why are faculty not doing this in droves? Right? Like, we know students want it. We know employers value it. You know, having an internship type experience is is always number one on the list of things employers say that they're looking for. I think a c and u just came out with a a new report called the agility imperative. The number one thing is apply knowledge to the real world and teamwork and oral communication. Those are the top three, right? And so you're like, well, duh, that's exactly what you get from these sorts of projects, right? But the reason we don't see more of it is it's really hard to do, right? I mean, it's like legitimately hard to do this stuff. And I think we need to just acknowledge that. Why is it hard? Well, even if you believe in it and you wanna do it, finding employers is hard. Even this faculty member was like, yeah, I wanna do it, but I don't have enough. So it's high risk. And you know, one of the things I really loved about bringing Riipen in as a partner is that they act as a force multiplier for the faculty to help them find appropriate employer projects. Right? So that takes that burden and risk, kinda off the table. And then secondly, managing the whole experience is very fraught because you've got, you know, five, ten, twenty student teams all running in different directions. And you're like, how do I know if it's going okay? And I need to ensure that it's a good experience for everybody. And so managing it after you do find employers also hard, right? And structuring and keeping everybody on track. So there's all these little pain points that I think it helps faculty start realizing like, oh, okay. It's gonna take care of some of the things that create friction for me as a faculty member. I think you've given really great examples of flood the zone here. I mean, the early experience exploration side of things, all the way through capstone types of scenarios, you're hitting nicely on the friction and the opportunity to really enable faculty at the right points. But let's talk a little bit about your discovery around student clubs. I thought it was really interesting that and I don't know, maybe you could just explain the story, but I feel like you had said that effectively they wanted to come in and take ownership of these types of projects. But can you talk a little bit about your observation of student clubs and the opportunity that you see there for experiential learning? Sure. No, it's a great, really great kind of story to tell. And again, this is one of those things that, to be completely honest, I did not see coming. This was not on my bingo card at all. But one of the advantages of doing a flood the zone approach is that you bump into opportunities that you didn't see coming just like this. And so last year we ran what we call the UVA Career Academy, both during J Term, which is our winter break and during summer vacation last year. And we reached out to students, you know, via different club activities, you know, the data analytics club, women in computing club, association for computing machinery, etcetera, etcetera, society of women engineers. And we recruited them to be part of some of these career academies, which essentially pair up sort of online Google courses with a ripen employer experience together. And, you know, they had a great experience and we sort of asked ourselves, well, okay, this is great. We went from, you know, about fifty five students in J term to close to ninety students in the summer. So almost doubled. And, you know, I stopped and asked myself, well, like, okay. We keep doubling. How is my office gonna keep up with this kind of demand? It's a lot of work to run these programs. And so we, you know, came up with the idea of, like, talking to the student club presidents, the leaders. And we asked them, like, well, you know, we saw so many of your participants, your club members really enjoying this experience. How about if you ran it for your own club? Right? And we would hand it off to you. We would backstop you, of course, with some of the technical support, but it would be your job to sort of promote it to your club members. Yeah. You know, designate someone to run it and manage it, do the team assignments. And they really resonated to that idea and rose to the occasion because they were looking for activities that were relevant to their club that would engage the club members together, which is exactly what these team projects do. And because it built up, you know, resume worthy experiences, which they also want. And so all of that together really kinda unlock this idea, which we're piloting this year with, I think, four clubs to let them kinda take the driver's wheel and run with it, again, with our support behind the scenes as a mechanism for scaling this, both, you know, in terms of lowering the administrative costs that we bear centrally and empowering the students to kind of pick and choose and run it in the flavor that makes the most sense for them. So analytics club, obviously, they're gonna want analytics projects, and the computing club might want software projects, etcetera, etcetera. So far so good. And, you know, we're it's still a first path. So I'm not ready to, you know, put a bow on it yet, but really encouraged and would certainly recommend your audience and listeners who are thinking about how do you do this at scale without incurring massive central administrative costs to really think about engaging those student club leaders with a tool like this. I'm optimistic that it's gonna really pay off. That's great. I mean, the student club is sort of infrastructure for scale. Free infrastructure for scale. That's the best part. It's free infrastructure. Yeah, Yeah. And and they get a lot out of out of it. So, I mean, I know it's early, but what makes a club a good candidate? I mean, are there obvious choices that are just, you know, from your perspective? No, I think any club that, you know, has at least some career orientation to it, right? If it's just like, let's go out and go hiking in the woods or something, that might be a different story. But, you know, anything that, has, you know, a career oriented flavor to it, think is a good one. But look, the other thing just to say, even though it's sort of obvious is without kind of an underlying platform like, the Google courses or the Riipen platform to do the matching, find the employers, and do the administration, this would not be possible. Right? So a platform like Ripen really unlocks the ability for a student club leader with no special training to do what is arguably a pretty complicated undertaking, and completely lower the barriers to entry for something like this. So a tool like Ripem, you know, like good infrastructure, enables scaling. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's clear that you need it on the faculty side to sort of lower the burden and the risk of adoption there. You need it on the student club side. And on your side, right? Because to your point, if of the hundreds of clubs that are career aligned all of a sudden say, Yeah, yes, please. What do you do? Yeah. Love it. Yeah. But again, from an innovation perspective, Darren, right? Like, if we stop and think about, like, would this idea be possible without the technical infrastructure? The answer is absolutely no. Right? No individual club could probably manage to recruit enough employers, do all the stuff by hand. Right? Manage all the complexity. It would just be a nonstarter. Right? So that's kind of a you know, if we step back and take an innovation lens on it, which I know, you know, you've been a big champion of, these kinds of tools can unlock innovation in a variety of ways. And this is just one example that, again, to be completely frank, did I did not have on my radar screen, but, you know, sort of figured, well, why not? Let's give it a try. And if it works, you know, great. We we can really reach students and really implement that kind of flood the zone idea by getting it closer to what the students actually want. Double click on your your student athlete scenario. I know you you mentioned it briefly before, but I hadn't really thought about it. Like you're you you Well, talk about why the student athlete is a good candidate for this kind of experience and and then what you're finding working with student athletes today with experiential learning. Sure. Yeah. The student athlete thing again was not something we went looking for. We kind of stumbled on it as we were having conversations across grounds, which is what we call campus here. And, you know, in talking with the sort of academic liaison in athletics, you know, we we really understood pretty quickly that, you know, student athletes, I mean, as busy as a regular student is, a student athlete is, like, ten x as busy. Right? Because they're doing twenty plus hours of practice on top of everything all the other students are doing. And, you know, but they're also incredibly disciplined, good at time management, you know, typically very competitive and ambitious. And just like any other student, you know, they have aspirations for their career that, you know, in most cases does not involve becoming a pro in, you know, whatever sport it is. And, you know, at the same time, the schedule commitments that they have precluded their participation in traditional summer internships because they practice and work out, you know, almost all summer or they're traveling to meets or they're playing in other kinds of leagues just to keep up their fitness and skills. And so we quickly realized that just like all the other student scenarios that we talked about earlier, Darren, that they too were sort of wanting an experience and experiential learning experience, but were not able to do it for, you know, pragmatic reasons. And so, you know, even, you know, one of the options we gave them was a two hour synchronous session here as one of the credit bearing options this summer. And even that was too much for a lot of them because if it falls right in the middle of football practice, you're not going. You know, that's just like that's how it is. And so providing students with both, you know, synchronous but also this sort of flexible asynchronous opportunity really unlock for them the ability to have the kind of experiences that they really want to build up their resume with business related skills and experiences while they're still doing all the you know workouts and practices and things that they want. Alright. So we've we've covered several interesting elements about how to effectively scale through your flood the zone strategy here. And I have to just acknowledge that that you've been doing this at UVA for how long? A year? About two years now. Yeah. Two years? So two years in, there's been a lot of experimentation, a lot of, you know, direction. I'm encouraged at the speed in which you've been able to do that at a large R1 institution. But where are the natural points of friction that people might not think of when thinking about trying to scale this from your perspective? Well, that's it's a great question, Darren, and really cuts to the heart of, you know, the challenges in meeting student interest and student demand for these kinds of experiences. So, you know, this might be a little bit of sort of inside baseball, but but since you asked, let's let's peel back the layers. You know? So one of the things that I discovered here and, you know, every institution's got a little bit of a different configuration, but but I think generally this is probably true. You know, the career center here sits under student affairs, which sits outside of the academic side of the house, which, you know, rolls up to the provost at most institutions. You know, so so just there, you've got the career center, which houses most of the career connected work based learning kinds of opportunities, not in the same organization as the academic side. So right there, can already anticipate how hard it might be to weave together, you know, as you said, like the curricular integration parts of this challenge, right, which is another reason why going cocurricular can help because then, you know, you don't have to deal with that. But anyway, so organizationally, you've got just the facts on the ground, is career center over here, academic side over here. That makes things problematic just because there are different budgets and different people calling the shots and all of it, even though we're all working for the students, of course, but just to put it out there. Then at UVA, especially, but probably in most other universities, you know, there are sometimes career centers located in the schools and colleges themselves. So the business school has their own career center. The engineering school has their career center. And, you know, so now you've got different career centers sprinkled around and some students are going to the school based one and others are going to the central one. And then you just got more chaos in terms of, like, who's running the show and, who's actually the person that you'd have to go to to to scale this thing out, to the particular students. You know, there there are some advantages because if you, let's say, go to the business school engineering school, they're probably closer with their faculty. And so the chance that they could engage with the department chairs and others to kind of make this happen is better. But, like, you've gotta figure out, like, well, how many career centers are there and who are you supposed to talk to to get this adopted. Right? And, you know, and then, you know, finally, the, you know, the issue around, just the multitude of platforms and tools that the career centers often have is what I call, like, a petting zoo. Right? Because they're just like all these things. They don't talk to each other. Students are kinda overwhelmed by like, oh, there's one tool to do my resume and there's another tool to get my internships. And then there's practice interview tool. You know, it's just like there's a, you know, probably a dozen of them. Right? And so when you try to introduce something new, everyone's like, well, yeah, we already got twelve of them. Like, why do we need another one now? Right? And why is this one better than the other ones that we've got? And then, of course, the students, either they don't use any of them or they don't even know. So, you know, those are just the kinds of, you know, landscape of challenges that you have as you try to go in and scale, you know, something like this and try to make it, you know, available. And so again, for me, at least it pushed me to try to do both, you know, the curricular parts as best we could, but just to, you know, go direct to student where possible either by running the Career Academy kinds of things by ourselves or by engaging student clubs so that regardless of where the students were and which school they were in and what the status of, you know, the career center adoption was, that we could try to make something happen for them sooner rather than later. I'm also curious, just from your experience, I've seen this at a few institutions where when going curricular, there's often existing interdisciplinary course codes existing out there that you could plug in these types of experiences for credit. How does that kind of is that is that a reality at at a UVA, or is that or would that be more challenging from your experience? Well, no, we we actually the provost office has its own course code, which we use rarely, but sometimes, and specifically for something like this, where we try to do kind of an internship wraparound for credit so that students who do need the credit can have that experience. But again, we run into at least here, but in probably almost every university, the kinds of, internal barriers around whether how many credits you're allowed to take outside of your school. So, you know, here, if you're in arts and sciences, out of a hundred and twenty, I think you can take twelve credits outside of arts and sciences. Right? And so where that interdisciplinary courses or experiential courses listed actually matters because if it's outside of your college or school, then it doesn't count towards your major or your degree, which maybe doesn't matter for some students, but does matter for other students. You know? And so you just get tripped up on stuff like that, and it slows down the ability to let all students avail themselves of it. Because otherwise, you've gotta have, like, the same exact course listed in every major school or college so that it counts for everybody. And then you're just, you know, going to ten different departments for approval, and it gets to be Yeah. A drag. Right. Yeah. It's kind of reverse engineering, something that wouldn't necessarily help you scale, but might be an interesting point of entry for a pilot or something. That's right. Yeah. I I'm struck that the last conversation I had, by the way, was with Doctor. John Rindy at Slippery Rock University, which is in Pennsylvania. And, you know, regional comprehensive university traditionally has, you know, a bigger challenge with retention. And yet they have really good retention. I think eighty six or eighty nine percent for for a a regional is is is pretty Fantastic. Yeah. And they really attribute it to, I think, a similar flood flood the zone strategy there. I should trademark it. Yeah. Yeah, you should. You should. Because I think there's what I was expecting to try and uncover was really discreetly different strategies at a larger R1 versus a regional comprehensive. And I don't know that I'm seeing that. I'm seeing the why being different, maybe, in some cases, but also the why is also overlapping. So it's really it's enlightening to me that, you know, that both types of institutions can have similar levels of success, similar challenges around, you know, the curricular versus co curricular. But there's definitely a what you're doing at UVA, to put a broader point on it, widely applicable in the market, which I think is great to see. I wanted to, while we have a couple minutes left, hit on just a couple of things. But one was that I think when you and I spoke last, we talked a little bit about experiential learning as authentic assessment. And I've been introduced to the term authentic assessment, not being an academic myself, but understanding it to be that in an AI world, we're starting to question the value of different types of assessment. And so I wonder if this is just another one of your learnings that you weren't expecting, but could you talk a little bit about your view of and maybe vision for experiential learning as assessment? Yeah, it's one of these things that I think, Darren, kind of history snuck up on us, right, while we weren't looking or expecting it. And so, you know, experiential learning, you know, as you and your listeners know, you know, it's been around for a long, long time, well before AI showed up on the scene in the way that we're experiencing it today. And certainly, you know, well before the sort of crisis of confidence that we had in, you know, student work reflecting student thinking and student learning, which is really what we're grappling with right now is, you know, does a does a paper reflect the thought processes that we always assumed it did, or whatever the other, know, kind of assessment deliverables that that we're talking about. And when you look at, you know, kind of what is the heart of an experiential learning experience, whether it's in person or virtual, you know, is tackling a real world messy problem typically that often does not have one single right answer all the time. It's contextual and it depends. It has multiple constraints that push you in different to make different trade offs and choices like the real world. It often involves working in teams collaboratively. It involves sort of negotiating scope and time and other factors with the employer who might be a member of the c suite or other executive or manager who is much more senior than you are but at the same time might have less technical ability like when we do our analytics projects. Right? We have students coming back to the the chief marketing officer and saying, well, like, yeah, I understand you want, like, this kind of report, but your data is not adequate to answer it. So let's talk about what questions we can answer with the data. Right? Which is an incredibly sophisticated thing for a sophomore undergraduate to have with a chief marketing officer. Right? And so, you know, all of those skills giving and receiving feedback. Right? Is another incredibly important skill. All of those things in my view are both, you know, consistently rated as the most valued skills that employers are looking for. You know, no matter what survey or what year, they're always in the top ten. And secondly, they're the most AI proof in my view, because it's virtually impossible to imagine how you could fake your way with AI through that kind of an employer project in a team with your fellow students and friends who know you and know how you talk, and are working on deliverables with you all along the way so that they see the process, not just the product. Right? That, you know, is being you know, the deliverables being put in front of, you know, an experienced senior person who presumably can tell, you know, good from bad and, you know, can challenge your assumptions and your thinking in a way that was gonna force you to think on your feet and defend your methods and your process. All of those things to me speak directly to this idea of the kinds of hand wringing and I think legitimate worry that, you know, we have around how do we design these experience, you know, academic experiences and authentic assessments to avoid the kinds of concerns, either rightly or wrongly around AI substituting for student work. So I'm just I mean, I've been a big fan of it all along as we've been talking about and have been working on it, you know, probably for, eight or ten years since I was at Northeastern. But, you know, AI kinda snuck up on this conversation. And when you step back and ask, well, like, what are the kinds of solutions that we might look for to address the cons legitimate concerns around academic integrity and other things in the area of AI, we don't have to look a lot further than the kinds of practices that we're already doing in experiential learning and that we have already built up a lot of knowledge and infrastructure and experience about how to manage those at scale. So like I said, it was one of those serendipitous insights, but I think is something that everyone needs to take a hard look at because some of the answers are right here under our noses. That was probably the biggest eye opener that I feel like I've had in this conversation on experiential learning was just how much, a, we need to do more to scale it, b, it actually can have a broader application from an academic value perspective than I think we would have originally thought about. So this is exciting. Well, I have one last question for you. It's sort of self serving for the solution provider community, the vendors that are out there. But I think you'd have a sensitivity to this. Someone wants to work with you. What do you wish they understood about how decisions get made and about what actually moves the needle when they're having a conversation to explore their solution at your institution? Yeah, it's a great question, and it's obviously something that my office spends a lot of time actually trying to figure out. And in fact, the office was created to do digital innovation and to tackle that exact challenge. And so, the playbook that we've adopted, Darren, in which, again, people are welcome to replicate or to challenge, is to engage with new partners, new vendors, in sort of a pilot experience together, where we both recognize that it's gonna take a while for us to find whether there's traction here at the university, where that traction might come from, because it sometimes comes in unexpected places, who the internal champions are, and find a place that will give that new tool or technology a permanent budget home. Right? Because often, as we talked about with the career center, you're gonna have to display some other tool in the budget in order to carve out room for your tool because budgets are tight. They're either flat or down. And so, you know, you're gonna need internal champions who are really raising their hand and saying, we want this, we need this, we know how it's gonna work. We've tried it with our students and our advisers or whoever career coaches and they love it. And and that's what we try to do over a one to two year kind of pilot and discovery period. And going in with that kind of mindset, finding a partner, ideally, like my office internally that, you know, whose charge and mission it is to do that innovation to help the vendor navigate internally because that is really complicated and confusing. Even if you're a seasoned higher ed veteran, it looks, as you said, different at a regional comprehensive than it does at an r one and so on and so forth. And so having the patience and the timeline, which I recognize is challenging when you're under, you know, quarterly or annual revenue pressures to really figure out is this a good fit versus trying to front load that entire thing upfront and try to get to a contract on day zero before you have even tried it anywhere. In my view, it is a lot harder sell. And, you know, so you have to be willing to go on that journey of discovery together. And as we talked about in the case with, you know, Riipen, who's been a great partner for us, you know, I've been challenging them pretty hard for two years now, almost two years to think differently about how we might deploy and kind of, you know, eventually we ended up calling it flood to zone, you know, but really that represented this idea that like, we're not just gonna try one thing, we're gonna try ten things and we're gonna see which of those ten things really gets traction and with whom. And that's how we're gonna figure out whether this thing is working and delivering value. And I can't do that with a piece of paper or statement of work or contract on day zero without doing that journey together. Well, I'm glad that you took the time to talk about it. I think an office like yours, absolutely, you're at the forefront of dealing with the newer technologies and having a strategy for it is so important. You know, we we really believe in working with a lot of the start ups and the scale ups that a lot of the the legacy systems and solutions, they have their place. But when it's coming to actually doing innovation, you need innovate innovation partners that you can align with early. We talk about the the concept of co readiness with institutions as opposed to selling. Right? Because it's really you know, selling is an old concept of let me convince you of something that you don't already know. And establishing co readiness allows for a space to be created with someone like yourself, where we can explore innovation together on your terms in a way that de risks the institution, but also gives the vendor a path to true partnership. And that's, I think, what's key and sometimes missing when we have these sort of vendor institution relationships that are not as sensitively portrayed as you do. So excited to see that you have an approach to this. Makes total sense. And your Riipen partnership is obviously a good testament to that. It sounds like they're doing some great work with you. So excited to see where this goes. Hey, thanks so much for taking the time to be on this show today. I hope that our technical difficulties didn't get in the way of any of it, but our great editors will figure that out. But thanks again for taking the time, Ken. We appreciate this. My pleasure. It's been a real privilege to spend time with you, Darren. I appreciate the thoughtful conversation and the work that you are doing to kind of advance our thinking across the board. It's really needed in this day and age. So kudos to you. Thanks.