Top-3 Critical Concepts Why Colleges Can't Open and Finally Embrace AI Digital Transformation

By Thomas B. Cross - Author MindMeld - Merging Mind & Metal on AI

 Pretend for a moment you are a college President or Chancellor and you are faced with the toughest decision of your career and life - "to be or not to be open" for the fall. All businesses have similar issues but this focused on the major higher educational institutions. No doubt you will have a list before you of the "pros and cons" and the list may be quite long. You will also have received thousands of threatening emails and from my own previous real experience with college presidents facing these kinds of issues - death threats. Yes, that bad and what is ahead is getting worse every day. Here are some critical concepts to consider and you can add your own. 

1) Student safety -- will they or won't they wear masks? If the news is any hint, students would rather risk death than wear masks. As one student said, "you can't live forever." And, another student said, "live free or die." So, asking the students to wear masks will not work and asking the campus police to enforce this will only inflame the issue. And, yes even if they do wear them while on campus, they will likely rip them off when they cross the street and go off campus.

Now if that isn't enough for you to not reopen, I would go on but remember the new hashtag #dontkillgrandma that many students will be crippled mentally because they killed their parents, their siblings, cousins, friends and grandparents when they return from college.

If you can't fix this not just every three days but every day, keep the college closed and jump to Digital College Emerges for what you should be doing anyway.

2) Faculty safety - this one should be #1 because the core competency of any learning institution from K-12 all the way up is the faculty. They are the Nobel prize winners, scientists, researchers, authors and above all else the teachers of learning to the students. The pandemic is really asking everyone to look at what is the role of the college (I will use that term for university, community college, VoTech, military academy, etc.) except to move knowledge from "one mind to another." If teaching and learning is not the always and ultimate goal, then what is? More than a winning sports team, parties and hanging out, if you learn nothing then college is a waste of time and if you are in college reading this and you are not learning, then stop and do something where you learn every day for the rest of your life. Protecting the faculty is protecting the real IP-intellectual property of the college as they are going to do what for real what others think are science fiction. Protecting faculty is, in my opinion, vital to the real survival of the college now and in the future. 

If there is no plan to protect faculty, then you cannot reopen and jump to below and get going on the Digital College.

3) Facility safety - College campuses often have hundreds (CU-Boulder has more than 500) of buildings with some of them are hundreds to three hundred years old built long before electricity, internet, air-handling systems or even fire protection. The idea of fixing these buildings goes way beyond crazy because it is better to demolish them than fix them. Most college classrooms that are most suited for truly ancient times are more able to cope with this crisis. 

Dormitories are another kind of building into itself with common bathrooms and poor ventilation that will only accelerate the spread of the virus (yes its 30 feet not 6 feet here are two sources CBS (story on 200 scientists sign petition) and Techtionary. There are reports that some colleges will test every three days. Testing needs to be done daily and classrooms, research areas, and offices need to install "clean room" technology. nearly everywhere and that is certainly not viable where hundreds of people mix together in a classroom and then change to another room the next hour. One option is to leave students in one location and move the professors to minimize transmission, allow for contact tracing, and provide video recording of attendees. Cafeterias can move to "grab and go" or even better "dorm delivery." To say that staff services are vital is to recognize college staff should be trained, retrained, daily tested and their off-campus activities tracked. College staff, yet staff along with visitors, delivery, food suppliers, contract workers of all kinds including from painters to tree trimmers, street and other repairs should go through a TSA-like entry and exit system to contract trace their presence. Here's where this gets complicated: assaults, accidents, medical emergencies, overdoses, spills and any other special medical crisis event should have a tactile crisis team approach with special training, response, situation actions and removal procedures all of which would be recorded by multiple video bodycams or other devices. Next, have a plan for virus prevention and isolation "fire drill" style training? To keep everyone safe, all businesses and colleges need a RIP team approach to Respond-rescue, Isolate-investigate and Protect-prevent to evacuate people to onsite and external emergency management services (EMS) to report to public health and optionally contact tracing tracking systems. 

There is more but again it only gets more complicated - and if there is no plan to protect the facilities in all its forms, then you cannot reopen.

 Recommendation - Digital AI College - There is much more to consider, however, however, it is really doubtful you or anyone can get beyond these three critical concepts to re-open the college. It is hard to make a final recommendation but whether a college or business or other organization can answer all three successfully and continuously, then the risk is just too high to re-open. The best recommendation is to not re-open but re-think the concept of education altogether. In other words, if you were to start a college today how would you do it? You certainly would not build expensive concrete buildings, using large tracts of land, with complex housing, massive administration and many other business systems, procedures and unnecessary infrastructure. You would conduct an analysis of what society, business, government and others need to know now, five, ten and decades from now. Colleges today fail because they teach, in many cases, things the college thinks are important but, in many cases, not by employers who are ultimately the ones that put value to an education and the person being educated. If you cannot find a job after four, six or more years of very expensive education, then what was the value of the effort? College needs to re-think, re-assess, re-evaluate and re-build what they do before or if they can re-open at all. Indeed, even the most prominent colleges can try to re-open but if they fail the three reasons above, they will fail even farther beyond where college should be to fulfill what society needs now and in the future. It is time now for a digital transformation toward making colleges completely digital in the learning processes. Indeed, the evolution of educational pedagogy clearly indicates that classroom learning, even many labs are not making learning faster or with deeper knowledge transfer. It is time for artificial intelligence (AI) rather than a result or byproduct but immersed and integrated within the learning processes whether philosophy, education or business. AI takes many forms such as machine learning, expert systems, knowledge networking, virtual/augmented/immersive reality, game theory and others. AI like the chalkboard, professor or classroom extends the means for learning in often multi-dimensional ways and far beyond the scope of this discussion. Time is now for society to embrace, engage and explore more than moving students to classes. Time is now to "move minds, not matter."

If you want more please email me at [email protected] and consider my book on AI - MindMeld - Merging Metal and Metal.