>> Hi, everybody, and welcome to Tech Happy Hour, Chief Information Officer and Vice President at The Ohio State University. Today, I'm joined by Liv Gjestvang, Associate Vice President for Learning Technology in the Office of Distance Education and eLearning. And we're talking about the partnerships, so Liv, welcome.
>> Thank you, I'm glad to be here.


>> So as everyone wants to know what we are drinking today. So would you like to explain it.
>> Sure, so we are drinking a Thai iced tea today. I think it's kind of a perfect beverage. It has a little bit of caffeine in it. It has some sweetened condensed milk that kinda makes it sweet, so it's a little bit drink, a little bit dessert.

And dessert's always a good thing to sorta throw in the mix.
>> All right, so you do the honors of doing the assembly.
>> Okay, richly brewed black tea over ice, sometimes there's some spices, there's some cardamom, a little cinnamon in there. And this is sweetened condensed milk that goes over the top and then sort of drips down into the tea and you get this really pretty mix from top, To bottom of white down to kind of caramel colored and then the rich brown color of tea at the bottom.

So I'm going to mix this up a little bit. It does a Guinness, it sort of works its way down, doesn't separate.
>> The Guinness of tea.
>> Yeah, it looks great. So is the key to drink it with a straw?
>> Drink it with a straw, I tend to kind of, I wanna mix it together a little bit here.

So you get a full effect of both there together.
>> You're going for the condensed milk.
>> I am, you know it.
>> I've never had one of these, you know that?
>> You haven't had one? Yeah, it's a good drink.
>> Whoa, that is good. That's sweet.


>> It's sweet, right?
>> Yeah.
>> You gotta drink it slow. It's getting warm out there. It's a nice kind of summertime drink.
>> No, it's definitely good though.
>> It's good.
>> I like it, I like it.
>> Thanks for bringing that. It's really good. Maybe, maybe top five of drinks like it.

Definitely not one. We have a clear winner in the clubhouse, and that one is knocked out yet.
>> I know that.
>> But this is good, this is really good, really good. All right, so we're gonna talk about the power of partnerships. Lots to discuss here. And we've talked about a few of these partnerships before on the podcast, and really interesting discussions of all types.

The Power Partnerships which is really relevant in today's technology world and the types of partnerships that were involved, can you just give examples of those and internal and external of what that looks like?
>> I think that the kind of work that we're doing around education and technology is really partnerships as a core part of all of that work that we do.

And so I think about whether we're working with people across our own teams, or working with people across the university or across the country or the world, we're really looking for opportunities to bring the best of what each partner works with into the mix. And so you've talked here about affordable learning exchange, about digital flagship, those are both initiatives that are really drying on a whole range of partners across the university.

They're not designed to reinvent all of the really excellent work that's happening across the university but really digital flagship for example is about pulling together a whole range of resources for students and faculty and the community and pulling them into a common device that everyone has access to.

So we're working really closely with first year experience. And we're working with student life and with the registrar and with UCAP, and with people who are developing resources that we can now put into a new piece of technology. We've done some really fun and interesting things we partnered with the John Lennon Song and Bass and center for the arts and Johnson Park Middle School many years ago.

And that was a project to connect with students, with girls actually, around songwriting and technology so they came in for a day and work with us and a team of songwriters that came through in a bus and produce the songs. So you know, those are some of the partnerships we're doing here with the university.

It causes is a national IT and educational organization that brings together professionals from all over the world. And provides training and conferences and leadership opportunities. Big 10 brings together other institutions like ours around academic work, not just athletic work which is what we think about. So to me, partnership is really core to all of the work that we do.


>> This is a two part question and I'm gonna ask you one way and then follow him and ask it a different way, with a second question. So what are some of the biggest challenges in partnership, and then what are some of the biggest benefits? Because I think that's, as you know from us working together for quite some time now, that I really value these things, right?

It's how we move things forward, if we work in silos.
>> We're stuck in silos, right?
>> Right.
>> So just a little bit about that. What you think, again, some of the benefits and challanges of those are?
>> So in terms of benefits, that you really always build stronger, broader, more meaningful programs when you bring a range of perspectives and a range of collections of expertise to the table.


>> In addition to building the strong programs, I think you also help create broader platform for success, because you have more people involved who then can bring in their audiences and help deliver the work that you do more effectively to a bigger community. So the work that really any team can do on its own is limited.

We bring a particular perspective and a particular set of experiences and approaches. And so to me, thinking about what other teams here at the university or kind of outside in the world, the kinds of work and perspectives and ideas that they have, bringing those together really gives you the opportunity to grow, to push yourself in an areas you and your team and your perspective may not be fully encompassing.

I think that in many ways the challenges are kind of tied to that, right? It's hard sometimes when you are used to working in a certain way, right? Or you're used to thinking about goals and directions in a particular way that when you bring different groups together you have to figure out how do you reconcile that, right?

It's not always easy to try to bring people with really different goals or different ways of working together to the table, to figure out how you build something that's really meaningful. I think it's through that process, actually, that the benefits come. It's through the process of working through different perspectives, different sets of expertise, that we really kind of land on a richer outcome.

That's really interesting. Do you think those things are the same or are there differences? You talked about internal and external partners. Do you have the same challenges and benefits with each one of those groups or do they differ a little bit?
>> So if I think about working and doing partnership work within Ohio State versus outside I think here we have a certain set of opportunities and that we are working in the same community.

There are a set of shared experiences. We share a strategic plan. We share a leadership vision. And so in many ways we have the potential to be more easily aligned when we're working here within the university. I think it still takes work and it's a commitment, because sometimes it takes longer and it can be more complicated.

When you're working externally with partnerships, for me as I've done more than external partnership work over the last five to seven years, I think that there are some really interesting ways that the curtain has been pulled back for me and some really different types of work or different types of priorities that may not be the ways that we have thought about our work here.

And so I've really, I think, personally and in terms of the work of my team, we have grown a lot from looking at other institutions and following some of the examples that they've set around interesting work that they're doing that we've been able to pick upon. The one-button studio is an example of that.

So Penn State build a one-button studio, and laid out a model for it. And we picked up that model, and added to it a little bit. And that was a great way for us to not start over from the very beginning. And there are models of work that we're doing that we're also able to share on a national scale, and that's exciting, too.

So the work we're doing around affordability and the Affordable Learning Exchange is something that we've talked about and helped provide training and resources around for people all around the country who are interested in doing similar work.
>> That's really cool. And I know that you personally play a lot of leadership roles and those partnerships and it's really recognized around the country of how we've been shaping that here at Ohio State.

So thank you for that. Can you talk a little bit of an example of a partnership that strengthened over time? How did it evolve? Where did it start? When I talk to folks, they don't even know where to get going with these things, right? That's a lot of what I hear, like well how did you have that conversation with so and so?

Or what did you do to get to that level? Talk through your experience a little bit.
>> No, that's a good question and I think there's some formal ways that these things get started when you have The Big 10, for example, is a formal group. And the academic alliance within that group sponsors teams that connect with each other.

But then when I think about where the actual interesting projects come from, it's almost always, I think, coming from some kind of a problem that someone has run into, right. And you put people in a room and start putting your heads together
>> And I've seen some really interesting and unusual projects come out of those types of conversations.

So the Big 10, for example, has a group of learning technology leaders. So people in roles like mine across the 15 big 10 schools. There was a group that had met many years ago. It dissolved. Came back together about two years ago. So we were kind of kicking up a new partnership across this group and it was a lot of work really figuring out how we were going to take people from 15 really different institutions.

I mean we share a lot of things in common but at the end of the day were different. And figure out what are some ways that we could work together. 15 of us across these huge institutions to create some projects that might solve problems that we all face.

And so we had talked for a while about this issue of affordability as something that many of our students are struggling with and concerned about undergraduate in government serve, working on, and we thought about how could we maybe leverage our huge, shared faculty population to author some open educational resources.

So that's where we started. You know, it's not an easy thing to try to get faculty together, who may or may not have worked together before, to write an entire textbook and then review it and vet it and do content editing. So we slowed that idea down but in the meantime, some of the teens on our campuses who were doing that work locally said, we're finding there's more and more open educational free content we can use, but where we're running into problems is the types of support materials that typically come in the textbook, like a quiz bank or a homework tool.

Those are not typically available when you're using free resource. And that can really slow down the pace of the action of those free text books because when you're teaching a huge course you need some of that support material. And there is a team that came forward from ALX that said from the Affordable Learning Exchange here at Ohio State that said what if we actually put faculty together to start writing quiz questions and we can create our own free and open quiz bank.

And author hundreds of thousands of questions that faculty could use in their assessments so that they could use free books and now free assessments. And this has the potential to save students across all of these schools hundreds of millions of dollars over time. So that's an example of a project.

And I could talk a little bit about how that got done and what the results were.It's been really exciting to see it grow. Have you worked past the idea, and I think this is where people get sometimes put off by partnership, but especially sometimes consortium partnerships of the high school team project, where one person does all the work.


>> Right.
>> And five people get all the credit, right? Because I know we've dealt with that. And how we've worked through that, right? And so-
>> Right, so I think what we've landed on is that in many of these projects, there is going to be a team that takes the lead.

And that's useful. With the affordable learning exchange, we brough a lot of experience in this area. So we said we're going to help think of a model. We're going to put it in front of this group. The groups going to vet it and through that vetting process, there was a lot of development and change that made this idea better.

What we couldn't do by ourself was bring together 15 faculty across 3 subject areas who were going to author 3,000 questions, for example. That's a hard thing to do within one institution. So we built the model, vetted it with the group. Then we really leveraged the scale to say, all right, all 15 of us are gonna go home to our campuses.

And we're gonna put out a call and say if each institution comes up with one or two faculty members who are willing to write 200 questions. And we put them all together. Suddenly, we have in our first pilot of this model, we've got 3,000 free and open questions, which is what we did.

And I think part of it is around accepting that, in some cases, not everyone's gonna be involved. Not everyone has something to give or something to get out of it. But what we've done is come up with a handful of different projects and just really seen people step up where they have somthing that they can give to bring that to the table.

And I think, often, it sort of works out that when you have a great idea and you have a great group of people who are willing to share at the table, you're able to kind of fill in the gaps and create something that is way better with all of you than any one or two could have done on their own.


>> That's really cool. Any unexpected benefits of partnership that maybe even surprised you? Yeah, so I'll say there's two things I'm thinking of, and one is we in that same Big 10 group we were thinking about classrooms and classroom design. And most of the work we're coming up for is what our teams are gonna do.

And in this case we thought, why are we the ones who are sitting around and dreaming up what kind of spaces students wanna be learning in? What could we do to really bring in the student voice more heavily into that process? So we're, right now, dreaming up this model called the student design challenge, where teams of students from across Big 10 schools could pitch a design for a learning space.

And the top teams on each campus would be flown to a location out of town where they would get to present their ideas to a team of academic and industry professionals and compete to get funding to actually build that space on their campus. So that was just kind of a fun way to say we could actually take a question that we have and throw it right back into the hands of our students and let them help solve them.

Question.
>> Across a lot of institutions.
>> Across a lot of institutions, right? The other kind of more personal thing I would say is that for me, finding and connecting with people who are working, even in different parts of the university or other parts of the country, doing similar work, has been a really interesting and rewarding experience for me, personally.

I've made a lot of friends with people who are facing similar challenges and some of them are at different points in their career than I am. So having people that I have been able to connect with and talk to and learn from. Both in terms of the ways they've approached their work over the last couple of decades, and maybe the ways they've approached working and having a family, or some of the other things that we deal with in life.

I think that's been a really nice surprise for me that the partnerships that I have had have been really valuable not just professionally but in really interesting kind of personal in growth ways, too.
>> That's really cool and I think you're incredibly humble about all of this because you are a leader across the country and, you know, when we do these things they put a sheet of stuff in front of me that were supposed to ask.

But one of the things that they put in front of me. Has the word meh in front of it.
>> But it's around this. In 2017, Liv, you were awarded the Rising Star Award for exemplary achievement in implementing digital technologies in supportive teaching and learning, for commitment to growing the profession, and promoting issues of diversity inclusion.

For cultivating an environment of collaboration, motivation, and collective success. And you should be thanked for doing that. Not just that this is a solution. I know you've been on numerous occasions, but I'll put meh in front of that and think I'm not gonna read it.
>> So thank you for that work.


>> Thank you.
>> And why you wanted to talk about these things was cuz of the active role that you play in leading all of these. But the fun thing is, there's a lot of good fun things on here that I could pick from. And usually only people have one.

We won't pick that one. We won't pick that one. We'll pick the one that says, I went to public math and science boarding school for high school, and I have a few good stories here. And you then say there is one that's probably the funniest.
>> I want to hear at least one good public math and science boarding school story.


>> Yeah, so this was kind of a magnet school across the state, Illinois Math and Science Academy, a lot of states have theses. They're actually, typically funded on a higher end budget. I was good in math and science and then I went to a statewide math and science high school, and suddenly, your perspective changes a little bit.

So what it was like to be really good at math or science in Rockford, Illinois was a little different when I was sitting there with the smartest kids in the state. So I turned my focus a little bit. While I loved math and science, really interested in logic, I spent a little more time in things like show choir and English.

I definitely sort of broaden my interest into the Arts because of just really realizing what it looks like to sit down with people who are incredibly talented in those areas. But it was an interesting environment. It was a very experimental space. There were no classroom ceilings, and the idea was that you could kind of hear what was happening in other classrooms while you were learning, so sort of like the early version of Mount Hall Open Workspace?


>> It's really interesting, the teaching environment, though-
>> That's a little tricky.
>> Okay.
>> There were multidisciplinary courses, science society in the future. I went and saw an autopsy. There's a lot of really just kind of interesting and fun hands-on learning that happened, which I loved. But when you live at a boarding school, you're kind of under relatively tight reins.

So we had to kinda come up with ways of how are we gonna sleep in without someone knocking on your door three minutes into class? And so my roommates and I had, there was a night, I don't know. It was snowing, we didn't wanna go in the morning.

And so we pulled out the plug to the alarm clock like half way out of the jack in the wall, and then opened up a paper clip so that it was a flat metal line, and then dropped it down onto the plug so you could short out the alarm clock.

We thought sort of-
>> Somewhat elaborate, like, yeah.
>> Blow the fuse. It did sort of blow up a little bit more than just, but it did blow out the fuse. Long content work we hang out in the morning, but-
>> Interesting.
>> Yeah.
>> I know this parenting very well.

I would love to hear their version on this.
>> As well, so maybe we can have them on the podcast guys.
>> Give him a call.
>> Give him a call and like I wish we had like call him right now.
>> We can call Ingrid.
>> Yeah, so Liev, thanks so much for joining me today.

Again Liev is our Associate Vice President for learning technology in the Office of Distance Education and Learning. I'm Mike Hoffer, Vice President and Chief Information Officer and thanks for having a drink and talking tech.
>> Thanks, Mike.