Technology in Higher Education

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of a series of interviews. In this episode, we're going to talk with Jeff Dillon, founder of EdTech Connect, and we're going to talk about technology in higher education. This is a little bit different maybe from, again, some of the other things that we've talked about because we're going to get into an industry specific. But I think there are several things here that we can learn. We're going to talk a little bit about essentially an industry that has grown in the entire, during the lifespan of Jeff's career, talk about some of the things that he's looking at moving forward. This definitely gets into a little bit of discussion around what happens when you've just got too many options out there. So I think you'll find this very useful even if you're not necessarily in the world of higher education or looking at that and may give you some insights into what you can do depending on what your particular vertical is. So without any further ado, let's jump right in and let's get introduced to Jeff. So I do want to thank you for joining us today, for coming in and spending some time. We were talking with Jeff Dillon. He is a founder of EdTech Connect. Links to all this stuff will be in show notes later on. There's going to be probably a lot of links, so you definitely want to take a look at the show notes. And as always, I find it's best for someone to introduce themselves. Either you're reading copy and you may miss some content or you also sort of miss some of the personality of the people you're talking to. So I'm going to go right to you, Jeff. And if you want to give us your however long or short sort of introduction and background to yourself, that will be great. Thanks Rob. Thanks for having me. Sure. I would love to tell you my background here. I've been in academia for over 20 years, specifically higher education technology leadership. But really my roots go back to when I got my first job in higher ed in Arizona. Right before that, I was in the private sector. So I started my business called Canyon Webworks that was focused on tourism in Arizona. So in around 2000, web development, tourism was a great business. Jumped into higher ed. And in higher ed, as the first webmaster at my school, there was a lot going on. We were trying personalization. The web was new. But I always seemed to have a side gig going on. And so my side gig then was starting a site called foodcount.com where it was a nutritional based website like the Calgary County website so you could track your intake. So fast forward 15 years, I moved to California to step up my career and work at a public university here, a large public university, Sacramento State. And so that's where I'm now. I'm the director of web and mobile services at Sacramento State. But I'm actually going to retire. I'm retiring and I've started another business called EdTech Connect. And through my academic leadership career, I've realized that we don't have a good model to really talk about technology. We have guiding organizations that help us with that. But yeah, I'll talk more about EdTech Connect. And that's where I'm at now. As I'm leaving my job at the university and I'm going to do EdTech Connect full time. And so that goes right into this is excellent because you've been with this since the really since the birth of bringing almost any kind of technology into higher education. I mean, you go back a few more years from 2000. But even then it was there's some websites and stuff like that and email, but it wasn't really thank you. That's probably about 2000 where you really started seeing people saying, hey, we can do something with this. That's actually great. That leads greatly. It's a perfect question to lead into is now we're 20 years into it. Where do you where were there some things? I think the first question, where were some things that you looked at back 20 years ago and you said, here's a direction we can go in those actually still exist because things have changed so much is it's like how many of those things that you looked at and said, oh, this is going to be great. Actually, you know, existed versus things that developed later on. Well, that's a that's a great one that I do have a quick answer to is we we dabbled with personalization back in 2003. We thought we were on the cutting edge. This this vendor was pitching us this product and we got it. It was a company called Liquid Matrix. I remember how the name of the company. And so we implement this personalization product, basically saying, you know, the idea is that a prospective student comes to your site and let's say they're interested in chemistry or a science field. Well, we already have a bunch of stock photos that were specific to that discipline. And so they would see our our main home page and think it was it was more related to them because the content was the messaging, the photos. So but but what wasn't there yet was the AI. So personalization was there and we implemented this. And what we realized is we we couldn't keep up. We we it did not it did not work because not not because the technology didn't work, but because, number one, we thought we could just pick all these science photos and it would work. But no, the department had to decide which photos to pick because whatever equipment wasn't the right equipment. So if we delegate that to the department, they couldn't keep up with it. So we never had the we never had the content to match up with the personalized students who were who were telling us what they were interested in. So fast forward 15 years. Now we have AI. Now we can say, well, we know from this person's history or their profile kind of what they're interested in. And we don't if we don't have to manually match content to our audiences, we can actually implement some real some real real change. And we're seeing that now with with some AI things with with chat bots, for example. It's kind of a good place to start in AI for our university. So we know with the chat bot, students are sometimes embarrassed to ask questions or it's or it's midnight and they want to ask a question. It's just a basic question. So why don't we start with at least knowing those common financial aid, I.T. questions, advising questions, and students are expecting quick, accurate answers. And we have this fear in higher ed that we're going to automate everything and take the human out of it. But why don't we say the humans, you know, that personal counseling for things that need a conversation, not an answer. So that's really one place I think universities need to start. And a lot are getting it now. But but that's kind of a quick personalization is kind of needs AI as a base to really work. Is that just from the sounds like that's primarily from the content management side of it, because you said it's just you don't have time to to keep up and to go through all of the different permutations of customization. So instead you can get, you know, you can get a you don't have to be very complicated in your AI to be able to to sort of connect the dots and those. And particularly, like you said, in higher education, for somebody coming in and looking at a university, there's just a there's a nice finite amount of tasks that they're looking for. Like I said, it's you're looking at what kind of classes you schedule. What is your financial aid stuff? What's the cost? What's the the school calendar? What's some of the curriculum? What's the size? There's there's a nice, well-defined set of properties for a university and what somebody is going to care about as far as is coming in there. And if you miss one with an AI, then over time, you're going to see that, hey, like in a chat people keep asking question X. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Well, we'll go get a provide a decent answer for it. Yeah. And what have the another problem we have is an administration is a little disconnected from the student in that often they'll say, well, that's on our website. It's on our website. And, you know, when students don't use websites anymore, we do the research, they'll search and they may land on a website, but they're not going to start their session at a website for the most part. So, yeah, you're right on. So as part of that, as part of what you guys are looking at is not just the tech side, but sort of the so-called like the training side of staff. So it's not just, hey, it's on the website so that they have a different either a different set of tools or at least a different, I guess, mindset or attitude towards what's there. Yeah, it's almost a mindset. It's almost a mindset. It's a mindset to really understand that we need to ask our students what they expect or find out. We do not know how how they're using technology unless we ask them. So, you know, we search is huge. Search used to be a kind of a backup if your navigation wasn't set up correctly. That's how it was thought of. You know, well, if you don't go through the navigation tree, you know, you can always use search. Well, that's not the case. Search is the way we're finding things now. So that's just one huge example of you. I forget which university it was that just has a giant search box on their homepage. I mean, it's like the primary tool you see when you get there. But the bureaucracy to go through and get that through all the channels to say, you know, this is our priority is tough sometimes. Yeah. And that's that's actually a good point is I know a lot I've been on different university sites and there's so much, especially universities, full blown universities where you've got dozens and dozens of programs and departments and especially, you know, big state kinds where you've got, you know, the kinds where you're catering to 50,000 plus students and you've got all the different amalgamations of that. The navigation itself can be crazy because you're, you know, you like open a menu and it's got a hundred items on there. And it's just, it's much more effective to do a search. Almost goes back to almost the Google simplicity of just put a search box up. What do you want? Yeah. And now the power is in so a decade or so ago, every university was finding the CMS they wanted and implementing CMSs. And now we're taking a step above that. And there's a new category of software emerging called a DXP, which is where we need to be basically we're saying right now, higher ed is really struggling with we buy a search tool. We have a, a content management system. We might have an analytics tool. We might have an integration platform underneath it all. Okay. Now what we're doing is we're replacing those at certain times based on their maturity level or whatever's on the market and stitching them together on the back end. Rather than buying the suite of software together that works so we can leverage our search versus our CMS and have an integration platform that's already working on open standards to anything above it. So a digital, a DXP is really kind of the next step and gives us kind of that layer for, for that personalization. So you'll see that in the next, I think few years of these companies that are focused on different industries for higher ed, there's, there's really only a couple that are really doing a really great job at this, but that's kind of the next exciting thing I think to look at from a kind of a web director standpoint in the, in higher ed. Well, you mentioned analytics and that, which, and a lot of what you just talked about is, you know, is first and foremost in the world of e-commerce, you know, whether it's a, like an Amazon site or even down to, you know, Bob's grocery store that's got a little website, a lot of it's, and especially when you go to like, like these drop ship sites and things like that, it's all about getting people in and funnels and understanding, you know, doing AB testing, all this kind of stuff to make sure that you're, you have a site that's drawing people in and is directing them where they need to go. Are I guess sort of a two-part question. Is that something that schools have been cognizant of, I guess, in the past and, or do you see them, are they starting to see that that's something that they need to be looking at, that the web is a place that they can, they can go out for, for recruiting, but also for sort of alleviating some of the direct human stress of support calls and questions and things like that. Like you mentioned in, you know, having some bots that can sort of handle some of that stuff without having a 24 seven staff. Yes, yes, definitely. The student, student services side of the house is really looking at, I think technology as a, as a tool, as what they need to be doing. They just don't know how to do it. So they can't, we, there's, you know, the bureaucracy is really tough to kind of keep, keep, keep them aware of, of kind of what's out there because they go find a tool and it might not be the kind of a best in class tool. But one kind of example of how this is happening now is the admissions process in higher ed needs to change. Forget the fact that you have to have a 4.0 to even get into college. That the cost is kind of a secret formula that people can't figure out, but just the application process itself really should be able to be done in one, in one sitting, you know, and, and why don't we decouple the user registration process from the application? Because all we want to know is who this person is so we can start, you know, prospecting them and engaging them. So there's companies that are doing that too, where they're optimizing the admissions process because there's been a stat out there. And I think Mutara has done this, found this data that by optimizing the admissions process, by the couple things I just mentioned, you can increase your yield by 73%. So, so that funnel is there. If we just focus on kind of the process itself of applying to college, we can improve that, that funnel. So that's just another example of how we have to, and we almost have to really give these best of breed companies a chance because they've been doing this for so long and such, doing such a great job. But these last two years, you know, have accelerated our, our world by, you know, by a decade or two. So, so now it's, it's, it's all of a sudden it's all in our face and we can't really sort out what's what. And so that's kind of what I've done with, with EdTech Connect is help, help higher ed pick the right solutions. And that will do it for part one. It seems like a good place to pause. We will come right back and dive into our discussion, continue talking with Jeff in the next episode. Hopefully you're starting to see where some of these things are maybe applicable to you, even if you're not in the exact same line of business he is. And again, you know, get some, as always, it's worthwhile to take some notes and see where some of the experiences, the, both the successes and the failures of others can help you maybe guide you to get to a solution a little bit faster. And I think that'll wrap it up for today. We're not going to throw any challenges out here, anything like that. So we're just going to sign off and say, Hey, have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Or visit our site at developer.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of developer. One is the book, the source code of happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the developer site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Rodhead or source code of happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time we talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at develop an or.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.