#SenecaProud

Pat Perdue: 0:00

Hey, I'm Pat Perdue, and I'd like to welcome you to season five of the #SenecaProud Podcast. So much change. And now, we're post pandemic. Are we though? Kind of? Maybe? What's absolutely true is that the last few years have seen dramatic changes at Seneca College as well. The massive scope of the Au Large project, which has been underway for a few years now, has been transforming Seneca into a college that embraces the highest standards of equity, diversity, and inclusion, as well as sustainability and flexibility.

And this entire initiative is to ensure Seneca College is ready for the demands of the future. And with the popularity of AI and other new technologies, the future is becoming the present really quickly. And Senecans are leading the way in this brave new world, which brings us to season five. In this season; like all of our seasons, we have some amazing guests who are putting their Seneca one skills to work, and are making a real splash in their career and in the world.

Our guests join the pod to talk about their careers today, their experiences at Seneca and their future in this brave new kind of post pandemic, yeah, everything's normal now kind of world. So stick around because the next episode of Seneca Proud starts now.

And welcome to the Seneca Proud Podcast. I'm your host, Pat Perdue, and this is Episode One of Season five. Whoa, I kind of can't believe it. So, how have you been? We're kind of in a pandemic. Maybe? Maybe not? I've decided that I'm sort of not in a pandemic. I'm just aware that there might be a pandemic around me.

So what's new since we last hung out? There is kind of lots new. And of all the new, the newest thing of the new as I record this intro, is the launch into the public domain of ChatGPT. Have you tried it? I actually asked it about me just to see. So I typed in, who is Pat Perdue? And it replied, “Dude, you don't want to know.” Is that a good thing? It's supposed to be super intelligent, kind of. So what does it know about me that I don't know? I'm curious.

So ChatGPT is going to change everything. It's like a landing on the moon moment or the invention of the internet moment or McDonald's bringing back the McRib sandwich moment. Remember those? So good, McRibs, which brings me to my guest today, Seneca College President David Agnew. Not McRibs per se, but moon landing moments where there's a time before it happened and a time after it happened.

In this case, I'm going to say it's the Au Large project that's the moon landing moment. Au Large has contributed and will continue to contribute so much positive change to Seneca College. And in my conversation today with President Agnew, we get to touch on the progress Seneca College has made in that area as well as a recently published three year plan for Seneca College. Or perhaps I'll say Seneca Polytechnic, which will help set up Seneca College to be agile and ready for a really exciting future as we face literally and figuratively a world of change.

So, about Seneca College President David Agnew, I've told you about him a few times on this podcast, but one thing that you may not have known is that during the pandemic when everything was shut down, he came into the office literally every day when he was legally able to do so, of course.

There's a phrase that I often think about, it's 80% of success is showing up. The magic of that phrase is in the definition of showing up, it's doing what you need to do. And in the case of the captain of the ship showing up, meant sticking with the ship. Sometimes we try to define leadership. In this case, leadership shows up.

We join our conversation with President Agnew and I talking about what it's like to be back in a college that's relatively full of students and teachers and that thing called education is happening there again. Okay, here's my conversation with Seneca College President, David Agnew. President David Agnew, welcome to the podcast. It's so great to get to hang out with you again.

 

David Agnew: 4:37

It's always a pleasure, Pat. We have great conversations. I enjoy them. I hope your listeners do, but no, it's great. Great to be able to chat again.

 

Pat Perdue: 4:46

Absolutely. So, you're always busy, but you've all been busy. When we last connected, it was during a pandemic. And when we connected before that, I want to say it was during a pandemic, you were quite literally the only one and you would show up to work every day. And I think showing up is such a key phrase. Literally and figuratively, you were showing up. And now though, when you're in school, there's other people around. That's got to feel great.

 

David Agnew: 5:20

What the heck? All these people are here. What happened to the good old days? No, it feels fantastic because it returns that energy, that buzz, that excitement at the beginning of the term, the nervousness around midterm and so on. It gets you back into the rhythm of what we do because at the end of the day, we always say this very simple core mission; Offering a great education to our students so they can have great careers. And so students are where it's at and what it's all about. And it's great to see them back.

Now, not all of them of course. I mean, we've discovered in certain programs that if we keep it online suddenly, and we're talking about things like grad certs where it's a more mature student body. These are often people on their second or even third credential, they might be working, they've developed the study habits, they're invested in this. They're not skipping class. And so what we've discovered; of course is for the convenience factor, huge, but also kind of selfishly as an institution.

But I think it really makes a big impact in the classroom; virtual or physical, is our catchment area is now virtually the world. I mean, at a practical level, yes, it's not easy to study from a place that's got a 12 hour time difference, but man, you can go across Canada pretty easily. You can go north and south pretty easily. And yes, we do have students who are studying in some of those, signed up for those courses and programs from a long, long way away. So it's very interesting how it's changed our thinking about how we do what we do.

Again, always coming back to that core mission. So the quality control is extraordinarily important. The experience in the classroom, doesn't matter whether it's physical or virtual, has to be great and so on. But some of that flexibility has to be in us and willing to try new things, to take a risk, to experiment. And “let's try this”. Well, if it doesn't work, “we tried, okay, let's go this way”. And that's very important in this day and age. You don't become a leader and you sure don't stay a leader by standing still.

 

Pat Perdue: 7:45

We have a sense that there's been so much change in the last, I'm going to say two, three years, that it's almost hard to get our mind around exactly how much change has taken place and the fact that we are still very early days in fully understanding. I think how all of this change will settle down and where will it settle into, and what's going to ultimately emerge as a best practice or a best approach.

 

David Agnew: 8:14

No, I couldn't agree more, Pat. I mean that's absolutely right. I mean, again, it may change any day, but technically the pandemic's still on and people are still getting sick and that kind of stuff. We haven't settled into any kind of pattern and you know what? Maybe, just maybe, we won't ever. And so, when I talk to our employees about their work world and talked about having a flexible work approach, not a policy, because policy almost sounds like it's written in stone and you have to take it through a whole... an approach means we're going to try this and maybe we're going to adjust here, we're going to change that, and so on. And I've made it really clear, I think the kind of convenience and choice that we're offering students as much as possible, we need to offer our employees as well. But it kind of all starts with, well, what's the mission?

What's your job? Let's be simple. Let's use plain language. What's your job? Well, if your job is, I mean, again, just to be simple about it, if your job is to be a barista at one of our Starbucks or if it's a custodian, that's pretty simple. You're going to be here. If you're in faculty, well, your program is going to determine, and the needs of your students are going to determine what your kind of schedule is. Same with our service employees and our operations and administrative employees.

It's really what you're doing and where and how you need to meet your customer. So a great example of that is our new approach on student services. So we've established what we call the service hub, and we literally physically have ripped out all the counters. They're no longer, there's no Kunami system where you pulled a number and waited for your turn.

Shamelessly, I looked at the Apple stores and said, that's actually a very cool model of customer service, of excellent customer service. And any of you who are in the Apple world know that it's a pretty neat thing actually to go there because of the way that they serve you. And so the service hub is the physical manifestation of it. But that's one of nine ways that you can access the services through text, mail, phone, internet apps, chatbots and so on. And what we're really trying to do is, on the one hand, push the transactional stuff to self-serve. And that doesn't necessarily mean having students do it themselves alone. It also means changing some of our processes and rules so they can do it easily and efficiently.

And then when you need to interact with a person, A; you can do it through those different channels, including coming on campus, there's a great looking service hub that we designed here at the Newnham campus, others will follow. But we've also changed our service model. So now we have that kind of classic first level, solve 80% of the problems, but we have the experts and the specialists waiting if you've got one of those 20%, 15% that we can't solve at the first level, so you need some specialized assistance.

So part of that is really, it's all about trying to serve, improve the student experience. So it's that kind of flexibility that said, okay, let's break down the silos. Let's put the customer at the center of the experience and the center of the design and go from there. And that makes a big difference.

 

Pat Perdue: 11:42

We've touched on the three year strategic plan. You've mentioned that I'd love to spend some time talking a little bit about that. What did it take to inform the plan? And maybe if you're in a position to share some of the findings of the plan, I'm sure we'd love to hear it.

 

David Agnew: 11:57

Yeah, it's interesting. We kind of learned from our last strategic plan development, which was, you learn so much if you ask and you go out. And so we did a big consultation, employees, students, program advisory committees, community members, government. We basically asked everybody. And we asked them what they wanted from us, what they needed from us, what are things that we should be doing, what are the things that we should in some cases stop doing? It was an amazing listening exercise. I mean, not everything was categorized as a strategic issue, but man, it sure helps to learn and listen to that kind of stuff. Sometimes a bit painful, but it's not just good for the soul, it's good for the organization. So you know where you need to do some work.

So we did a big consultation and then pulled together the plan. What was amazing was the similarity, no matter who you were talking to in what they're saying. So we had the foundation of Seneca at large, and those are the three pillars of the more equitable Seneca, the sustainable Seneca, and the more virtual Seneca. So that was our starting foundation. We have our core mission, which is delivering a great polytechnic education to our students so they can have great careers.

We have our values, our core values, things like collaboration and diversity and respect and so on. Innovation's very important. Quality is huge. So when we thought about, well, what do we put in the window of a strategic plan? I mean, part of this was also one of the things that we learned from the pandemic was how important focus was. And as you know, we're a big place. In fact, we're the biggest polytechnic/college in Canada, and we're fortunate to have resources. We've got amazing people, but you've got to focus or else it's not going to get done.

So focus is really important, putting our core mission at the core of everything that we do. And so you keep coming back and asking that question, how does this support what we're here to do? And of course, one of the things that you do in a strategic plan is you kind of look at the landscape and you see how fast things are changing. You see what's happening in the world, how education's changing, how the student body is changing.

But you got to keep coming back to that core mission because that really informs, okay, how we might do this is going to change, but at the core, what we're doing is not changing. And when we think about doing new things, it's great to be spitballing, brainstorming, white walling, all that kind of stuff. But you've also got to be, white walls are actually tires. I meant whiteboard, but I also may be aging myself there. But at the same time, you’ve got to bring it back down.

So strategic plans are this interesting combination of kind of aspiration of inspiration, but also have groundedness in reality. And you can't, in an organization of our size and responsibility, frankly, to our students and our employees, you know, can't just say, “okay, we're not some startup in a garage” We've got responsibilities and we've got obligations to our students and to our employees and so on. So you've also got to ground it in reality and in our history and where we've come from. So what we've really put as our top priority in the new strategic plan is building on all of the work that we've done to make sure that every graduate coming out of Seneca is work ready, job ready, career ready.

So we've always been proud of what we've done in the sort of co-op internship placement, but we want to do more. And we want to make sure that virtually every student who comes through this place has some kind of exposure to the workplace that they'll be aiming for before they leave and we're not there. And so we want to get there. We want to put a big, and I gave you the example of a service hub. We want to put a big emphasis on student experience, and we want to put a big emphasis on employee experience to make sure our employees feel valued, that they have development opportunities, that they have kind of a sense of growth and development as they come through us. And that's partly selfish as an organization because it's a war out there for talent. And it's not just about recruiting, it's about retaining and developing and nurturing, and which all of course relates a lot to respecting and listening.

So, that's very important to us. We think there's a huge benefit in engaging our alumni more. I mean, they're this amazing resource out there. They're doing extraordinary things. They can add so much value to our programs, to our classrooms, to our graduates as employers. So that's very important to us. And of course, we're not, again, I mean, we build this on the foundations. We've invested a lot and we're going to continue to invest in the quality of our programs.

We've got an amazing digital strategy that helped us through the pandemic in a way that I think put us in the leadership of the system. And we intend to continue that leadership. We've got ambitious capital programs so we can continue to have great spaces for people to come to. Yes, great classrooms, labs, equipment, but also just great places to be. So we've got a health and wellness center that we've got on the books for Newnham. We're going to rebuild Garriock Hall up at King, really putting a lot of our resources into making sure that the student and the employee experience is terrific.

 

Pat Perdue: 18:02

That's amazing. And as we think about the core mission of Seneca College, great education, so they can get great jobs and things are changing. So fulfilling that promise with a world that is changing so much. Can you share with me a little bit about, how does one go about almost future proofing an education system or a student experience?

 

David Agnew: 18:27

Yeah, that's a great question. And in fact, it's interesting that you used that phrase. We had the president of Northeastern University speak to our employees when we had our kind of welcome back, our Seneca week back in late August/September as we were preparing for the fall term. And he wrote a book called basically ‘All about robot proofing students’, which is really just a similar exercise. So a few things. One, is we can never... I mean, this is why I always say, “we're not a training school, We're an educational institution”. So the education is broader than just how do you fix that? How do you fly that? How do you put that IV in? How do you survey that piece of property?

So it's about what we're, I think, appropriately calling ‘human skills’, not soft skills as some people say. Because I think that that's a bad name for them because there's nothing soft about critical thinking and communications and collaboration, the kind of things that we want all of our students to graduate with. Those human skills; partly because of course, that's what we're hearing from employers. Employers are saying, “we need your graduates to be ready to be fully engaged in our workplace. It's a diverse workplace.” So they have to understand the diversity of the world and different personalities and cultures and understand how to navigate through that.

The world's changing very quickly. We need people who are curious and being able to move with the times, to be hungry for more learning. We need, of course, people who can communicate. Not everybody needs to write an essay, but in fact, an essay's obviously not what you need. You need a really good email, you need a great PowerPoint. You just need to be able to communicate your ideas well.

You need to be able to talk to people in a way that they understand what you're talking about. So there's all those kinds of things that I think do help our graduates navigate a world that is not slowing down. There's no evidence whatsoever that the pace of change is going to slow down. As much as the pandemic, and we say this in the strategic plan, it feels like it's kind of picked us up and hurled us five, ten years down the road. Absolutely. But that was things like remote work and the switch to virtual and so on and so forth.

But I think as we're coming out of the pandemic, and I would never use the word ‘settling in’ because I don't think that's the right word in this day and age, as we're getting accustomed to that post pandemic world, whatever it is, we just have to understand that the world will continue to change virtually at that pace. And that's our new reality both inside and outside the institution.

 

Pat Perdue: 21:27

When I take a look at the three year strategic plan, what are some things that might jump out at me that might surprise me?

 

David Agnew: 21:33

Well, I think the one big thing that we haven't talked about is we really want to embrace our polytechnical identity. And so in fact, we capitalize the ‘P’ word as we say. So we're saying Seneca Polytechnic, and it's partly to express what we've been frankly working on for many, many years. I think it goes back to Steve Quinlan when he was president way back, used to talk about our evolution into a polytechnic. Certainly picked up. We were one of the founders of Polytechnics Canada, more than 20 years ago. And it really expresses that combination of academic rigor with amazing, practical applied learning in the institution that more and more degrees are being offered. Graduate certificates. We've launched our first co-taught masters. It's conferred by Niagara University, but our faculty are involved in delivering the program on our campus.

Applied research is growing and more importantly, we've got some amazing new research centers that we're opening. So it really is that broader perspective and frankly, as a differentiator to honor all the amazing work that our incredible faculty and staff do. So I think that might be a bit of a surprise for people. It also, honestly, I think conveys better who we are. And as international becomes evermore important and frankly solidifies itself as just a permanent part of our infrastructure and our student body and the activities and the work that we do, it conveys our, what we do, much better to an international audience as well.

 

Pat Perdue: 23:26

And thinking again about the future, there's something that is on everybody's mind as we talk about technology and innovation. And of course I'm talking about ChatGPT. If I have a coffee chat with a colleague who's a professor at Senec; we're going to be talking about ChatGPT, and I know our students are talking about that, what is Seneca's approach and what are your thoughts about ChatGPT and is incursion the right word of AI into just the things that we took for granted as a function of the student teacher experience?

 

David Agnew: 24:05

Yeah, no, it's really interesting. I actually signed up for ChatGPT a few weeks ago.

 

Pat Perdue: 24:11

You did?

 

David Agnew: 24:12

Well, it started as a trickle and now it's a flood of coverage of it, all the academic and sort of higher ed newsletters are full of it and of stories on it and either hand wringing or celebrations, depending on which perspective you have. So it is really, I mean, it's fascinating and if you haven't done it, it's amazing. You'd sign up for it, it's free, of course, this is going to kind of luring us in. It's free for now as they say, but you sign up for this on the website, very easy, just a couple things. And then you put a question to it or a challenge, and as we know, and I know this is the conversation you and your fellow faculty are having, you put in the latest assignment you gave them, and in literally five seconds, it starts typing out on the screen what you have asked it to do.

So, I've asked it to write some memos for me. And so you give, say, a sketch it out in a paragraph, literally five seconds, it starts doing it. And it's what I would call very serviceable writing. I mean, I used to write a lot. I was a reporter in the early days. I ran a communication department, so on. And it's a dream because it gives you that stuff that you can edit as opposed to having to stare at that blank piece of paper and start from scratch. Now you can edit it, put it in your own voice, put it in the institution's voice.

So what does this mean to us? What does it mean to the academic world? What does it mean to the faculty student relationship and so on. It's really interesting. I mean, one of the latest things I read was that a clever professor had it write the MBA exam at Stanford and it got a B+. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.

On the other hand, people have likened it to the introduction. They said GPT is to kind of writing as the calculator was to STEM. And as you know, I mean the world is going to fall apart if students could use calculators in their programs. And of course now it's quite standard, in fact, you're required to have in certain programs, to have calculators and so on.

So I don't think we have a choice, Pat. I mean, we have to embrace maybe the wrong word, but it's here, it's arrived. There's no stopping it. I mean, for heaven's sake, there's a version, I mean, experts in this area, and I'm certainly not an expert in artificial intelligence, tell you. Yeah, sure. I mean, they've just made it public, but this stuff is happening behind the scenes. Other people have paywalls that you have to pay for that kind of service.

So this is really just elevating into public view, right into the public square where technology and where artificial intelligence, robotics and so on are going to take us. There's a visual equivalent that will actually, I think it's called, is it Dali? That does a very similar kind of thing. I think it's a paid service maybe, but it's a very similar kind of thing, but on the creative sort of artistic side. So I don't think we have a choice but to understand it and to work with it and to continue, I mean, to use your words to future proof our students. Because if you can't add value, then your job is gone. If you can't do better than AI or that visual thing, then there's no sense in trying to compete head to head. You cannot produce a memo as fast as ChatGPT, you cannot, I don't care.

It types faster than you. And it's got a database that is, of course the world. So we understand it. It's got biases, it's garbage in, garbage out, all that kind of stuff. But this is a tool that's here to stay and it's manifestations are here to stay. And you're old enough. And I'm old enough to go back to the early days of the internet. And what we didn't see in many ways at that, in those first iterations of cell phones and computers and tablets and all that kind of stuff, was the extraordinary potential. And where we are today has... not many imagined where we would be today back in those early days of... well, what's the internet 50 years old now? So you can't beat this, so you got to join it. I think that's the way we gotta go.

 

Pat Perdue: 29:14

I couldn't agree more. And personally, I think it's super exciting. It provides a great challenge for us to come to the heart of, okay, what are we really doing in education and what's the essence of the thing that we're doing for our students?

 

David Agnew: 29:28

Well, if I can go back to our approach on the service hub, I'm not trying to make a perfect analogy at all to what AI is going to do, to frankly, many jobs and occupations and the way we work. But why would we have students lining up so they could get a paper form and fill it out and hand it back so somebody else has to retype it, try to read their handwriting, etcetera. So that's all gone, all that transactional stuff. So you could look at that and say, well, but somebody's lost their job because they're not typing in all those forms and so on. But no, you improve their jobs, you get them back. Now they're going to add value to the process, not just be something that as we know now, a machine can do.

Already people are using AI in the world of journalism, that it's writing routine stock reports. I could see it being used very shortly as, again, a first draft of communications that you then take over. I don't know if you saw the piece about Ryan Reynolds, the Canadian actor who has that cell phone company called Mint, and ChatGPT wrote a script for him. It's pretty good. And that's what we're saying about it. It's pretty good. It's not perfect. It's got biases. It's got all those issues. But you know what, for some tasks, and this is early days, this is going to go. Microsoft is piling billions of dollars into this. So fasten your seat belts.

 

Pat Perdue: 31:09

And as we think of the future and this whole conversation has really been about the future, is there anything that you would like to call out to say, Hey, here's something that we see other than AI, here's something that we see on the horizon for Seneca College that you are really excited about in maybe in the next year or in the next two years.

 

David Agnew: 31:30

Oh, sorry, you meant Seneca Polytechnic, but yes.

 

Pat Perdue: 31:33

Thank you. Yes, yes.

 

David Agnew: 31:37

My God Pat, I thought you were listening. So, I think we use the phrase in the strategic plan, ‘bespoke education’. And I think that we've heard a lot about lifelong learning for a long, long, long time. But I think when you combine the need and frankly, ChatGPT and the advent of artificial intelligence and all of its manifestations are a great example of that. When you talk about the need for everybody who's in the workforce now, to constantly think about how could the new skills that they need to acquire the re-skilling they need to do, if frankly, their careers at a dead end because they're making buggy whips and the internal combustion engines taken over.

So that bespoke education is going to be, I think, increasingly important in everybody's lives because what it's going to mean, and we've got lots of work to do to make this work for everybody, but it means that, everything that you've done and everything that you've studied has value, and it can build on each other so you can continue to grow and develop and have new, I don't know opportunities.

And I think that's really important to, if we can get to that level of flexibility, if we can get to that level of, frankly, openness around, wow, that experience that's worth a credit, sorry, excuse me. You've raised three children and worked a part-time job and so on, that's boy, that's meaningful. And let's see if we can compile that with these pieces. And then now we've been doing versions of this for years. But I think virtually for almost everybody, this is going to be the new reality. And I think the opportunity, and honestly, the job, if we want to continue that core mission is to serve that market really, really well. And I think that's a very exciting challenge for us.

 

Pat Perdue: 33:38

Sounds great, and sounds really exciting to be honest with you. And the next few years are going to bring tremendous changes and tremendous opportunities. And President David Agnew, as always, thank you very much for joining the podcast today. It's always a pleasure to reconnect with you and to hear what's going on at Seneca Polytechnic.

 

David Agnew: 34:01

Oh, man, you nailed it.

 

Pat Perdue: 33:02

You see what I did there.

 

David Agnew: 34:04

Okay, that's A wrap. Thanks so much, Pat.

 

Pat Perdue: 34:07

Awesome. Thanks so much, president Agnew.

 

David Agnew: 34:09

Thank you, sir.

 

Pat Perdue: 34:12

And that was my conversation with Seneca College, or perhaps I should be saying Seneca Polytechnic president, David Agnew. As you listen to that conversation about the direction of Seneca, what were your key takeaways? For me, the question of what our future will look like occupies a lot of my thinking. How well am I future proofing my own students? You may know I teach some classes at Seneca, and how well am I future proofing myself for that matter? President Agnew is asking the same question, but from the perspective of one of the largest postsecondary institutions, if not the largest in Canada.

And you might want to ask it of yourself, because as we talked about, this isn't going away, nor does it seem to be slowing down. So what can you do to help ensure you are future proof? It's worth thinking about. Huge thank you to President David Agnew for joining the pod, and more importantly, thank you for listening. If you haven't done so, subscribe to the podcast, so you'll get reminders of every new episode. I'm Pat Perdue, stay proud, Seneca.