Episode 32: Youtube vs. Higher Education with guest Dan Anderegg

President Scott Wyatt and Steven Meredith talk with guest Dan Anderegg about the educational opportunities that exist on YouTube and other sources and how they can be used alongside, without replacing, higher education.

Full Transcript

Steve Meredith: Hi again everyone, and welcome to Solutions for Higher Education, a podcast featuring Scott L Wyatt, the president of Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. I'm your host, Steve Meredith, and I'm joined in-studio today by President Wyatt. Hi, Scott.

Scott Wyatt: Hello, Steve. This is a beautiful day, and this is a fun topic we have.

Meredith: Yeah, I'm actually looking forward to this. So, for our long-time devoted listeners—I'm talking to you mom…no, I'm just kidding [Both laugh]—for the people that have joined us before, they know that typically at this point, I will ask you to introduce our guest, but I'm going to take the honors today, and that's because I chose the guest. We've chosen as our topic YouTube vs. Higher Education and just generally a perception that there maybe is a death of expertise or that...anyway. That's the topic that we're going to hit around today, and our guest, joining us by phone from Salt Lake City, is one of my favorite people to talk with and a great friend. His name is Dan Anderegg. Dan?

Dan Anderegg: Hi, it's great to be here.

Meredith: So, you and I haven't actually known each other all that long, probably three years, almost four years now, and I met you because your name was given to me by somebody that I trusted as I was looking to build a curriculum in music technology here at Southern Utah University. And I contacted you and you had a very, very impressive resume. And so, what I'd like to do first is I'd like you to tell us a little bit about your resume. You're a trained composer, it's not what you do as your day job right now, but tell us a little bit about who you are.

Anderegg: Thank you. So, you're right, I am a trained composer. I actually started getting my Bachelor's in Piano Performance though. I went to the University of Utah and decided to go into a master's program in Film Music Composing at University of North Carolina School of the Arts, which was really an eye-opening experience for me. I meant from a remarkably classical, almost bordering on conservatory-style music education at the University of Utah and jumped straight into what would be may considered somewhat heretical by higher education standards at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Very focused on practical application. After that, I went to an internship with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in L.A.

Meredith: Now, that was a big award, right? That you were…

Anderegg: It was, yeah.

Meredith: It was a competitive thing that you got to work with the Emmy folks.

Anderegg: You're right. That's right, it was a competitive thing. I applied—they actually run an internship program for a couple of months that it spans many, many areas of television production, and I happened to just be the one that was awarded the one for music, which was an awesome experience. I can't think of a better onramp into television and film music in Los Angeles straight out of school. I was writing music for Danny Lux, who composes for Grey's Anatomy, so he was throwing cues my way to write, and lots of other shows. Many of them aren't as recognizable as Grey's Anatomy, but it was an absolutely, wonderfully eye-opening learning experience where I learned the business, I learned the things that you learn in somewhat of an apprentice-style on-the-job moment. And that turned into, from the internship, I was hired and worked there for a couple of television seasons. So, then, we had a little bit of…

Wyatt: So, Dan, just a small comment. So, you as the composer of the music in Grey's Anatomy, that means that we've all got some connection with you, because we've all heard some of that music.

Anderegg: [Both laugh] There you go, great. We have degrees of relationship of one. [All laugh]

Wyatt: There you go.

Anderegg: You're right. So, it was a great experience. Really, I loved it. I loved the craft of it, absolutely, but got to a time where my family and I decided to make a career change basically for more balance for ourselves. And I was able to get a job with an online education company called Pluralsight.com doing some editing work. They're a video-based training company, and I think the interesting there is that I started to recognize my desire to, not transform, but really add some value into education and some practicality into a lot of the things that as a student myself, I wanted to learn. So, the timing for Steve and I to meet was fortuitous and perfect and that led us to working together on this degree and really trying to apply some of our own philosophy to what maybe is really timely and applicable today.

Meredith: You probably only meet four or five—less than ten, anyway—colleagues in your life with whom you share an obviously philosophical kinship that is so strong that you bond almost immediately, and that was…I won't say that you felt that way about me, crazy guy calling you from Cedar City out of the blue, but I felt that way with you almost immediately because, as you say, we had had similar backgrounds. Lots of classical training and then we dared commit the heresy of being involved in commercial applications of what we were learning. And I don't share much about my life, but that was actually a big aspect of my late teens all the way through my forties, was being thought of poorly sometimes in some traditional musical fields because I actually, I was actually singing on Xena Warrior Princess or on a Disney film or whatever it was. That I somehow was selling my artistry and my creativity and my training short. I always figured that I should make a living as a singer with whoever would pay me, but that's because I'm kind of funny and entrepreneurial that way.

Anderegg: Let me butt in there—I absolutely felt the same way. It was as if we were, without even trying, we were understanding each other as we were talking about what we were creating. It was wonderful.

Meredith: So, you and I went through this process of creating a new Master's Degree in Music Technology, and that's not the point of this podcast, although I will say, check us out at suu.edu/musictechnology. Anyway, seriously, search "SUU music technology" and find our master's degree. One of the things that you and I did from the very beginning is that we had the conversation of, "What do we want the curriculum to look like?" and "What are the hard questions that people are going to ask us?" And one of the questions that we came up with right off the bat that, ironically, no one ever did ask us as we were getting the degree approved and so forth, was this, "If a student were to present themselves to us and say, 'Why should I pay you graduate tuition for three semesters when I could learn everything that you're going to teach me on YouTube in a series of tutorials?'" We felt like we needed to have a ready answer for that, and I…one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show today was because of your background with me in that, but also of your background with Pluralsight, which is a for-pay commercial training organization. And how do we answer those questions in a world where people feel like they are one WebMD visit away from being a doctor or one YouTube tutorial away from being Frank Lloyd Wright, or whatever. What extra value does higher education add that you cannot get through a YouTube tutorial?

Anderegg: So, I will try and let you speak. I have so many thoughts. [Laughs] But I honestly, when I was contemplating this and contemplating my master's, I realized that, yes, I was in a classroom, it was very practical project-based, we were writing music every single week, and somewhat in a group peer-reviewing ourselves and our peers, but I realized I thought, "OK, what about texts? What texts did we use?" And I realized that I…our texts were videos. They were YouTube videos in the classroom and other videos that were curated by a knowledgeable, experienced professor. And that's part of why I thought, "Maybe my master's was really unique" is that I will admit that there is a wealth of knowledge—whether it's YouTube or a paid for service like Pluralsight or anywhere else, there's so many places online you can find this information—whether it is paid for or not, there is a wealth of knowledge. and I could learn information—it's just at my fingertips—about anything. I could learn quantum mechanics. Someone has put the information online. But, curating it, because there is so much of it, the quality of that needs to be curated by somebody who actually understands the subject, and then, beyond that, there's a mentorship element to it that teaches you application. So, you know, I can read, if I want to learn photography, I can read and read and read all about lighting and how to use lighting and then go experiment with it, but who's going to tell me who's right or wrong in an environment that I'm going to learn it in a safe way? Unless they go out there and get a bunch of gigs and take people's money and get the lighting really wrong and have a whole bunch of really mad customers, I'm going to learn from that, but it's a really painful, painful time.

Meredith: And you probably are out of business before you get the lesson all the way learned.

Anderegg: Right, you know, word of mouth. There's no way I'm going to get more clients in that city. So, I really feel like the benefit there is curating the right content. Finding the content that teaches the right thing without misinformation. There are a lot of people that put stuff online that have learned it themselves or learned it from another YouTube tutorial, and they may just not know a couple of pitfalls because they haven't run into them yet. But a trusted mentor, who's curated it, and guides you through the process of implementing it into your own art, or maybe you're not doing art, is invaluable. Absolutely invaluable. And that is prolonged after you receive your actual degree piece of paper and walk away from school. I'm still in touch with professors who I worked with in higher ed, and like I said, our texts were watching clips of videos on YouTube and discussing them and critiquing them and rescoring them and I think that's really the value and the difference between just hearing and knowing the information and really, truly implementing that into what I do.

Meredith: So, that's an interesting thing. The idea of the "curated list." And, as you know, in our program and I'm sure this is true for faculty across the country, we don't actually see YouTube as an enemy per se, we just want to make sure that we help choose the right videos so that the information is accurate, right?

Anderegg: Right.

Meredith: And so that we can provide context for why that is. I'll give you a great example from an earlier experience that I had. So, in a previous place where I worked, we were asked to create a video "mockumentary" about our president who was celebrating 30 years of his presidency at this once college, and President Wyatt's face is going, "30 years??"

Wyatt: 30 years…

Meredith: [Laughs] Yeah. Nobody should ever be subjected to that. Anyway, I was working with a video editor who was young and every excited. Now, these are back in the early day of Avid Media Composer and Boris and I'm throwing out things there that were…that are kind of still around, but they were brand new and exciting things. And as I was working with this young person, I said, "I need this to be in documentary style, so I want just to have a lower third with the person's name. We're doing 'man on the street' 'woman on the street' interviews, and it's all supposed to look serious and like a news cast, but it's all very tongue-in-cheek. So, what will help make it funny is if it looks like a news cast and you just bring up this little name plate with the person's name and what they do and then it fades back up. So, it will come up, be up for four seconds, and then it will go away." So, she went to the video editing suite and came back and was so excited to show me her work, and we saw it and the letters came cartwheeling in, literally. They would tumble in because it was some new thing that one of the software programs would do. And I said, "No, no. I don't want to actually really pay too much attention to what this is. It doesn't need to be drawing attention to itself. This is just the name of the person, you know, in documentary style."

Anderegg: Yeah.

Meredith: And she went back and came back, and it was wrong, went back, came back and it was wrong, and it occurred to me after the third time that we were not having the same conversation because I kept saying documentary style and she didn't know what I was talking about.

Anderegg: Right.

Meredith: And so, it was one of those moments where learning a tool is a great thing and it's one of the things that YouTube actually doesn't really well. You can figure out how to start something up or how to open up a file or how…but it doesn't teach you the context of how to apply the tool as well.

Anderegg: Right.

Meredith: And in this particular case, this was the tool doing the editing, not the editor using the tool.

Anderegg: Right.

Meredith: And so, when I see people who do that, I know almost immediately what their background has been. Their background has been a YouTube tutorial, because they lack the breadth of experience and the breadth of context that's necessary to accurately and effectively use that tool. They've just learned how to switch it on and to make it do a few tricks. Does that make sense?

Anderegg: It does, absolutely. There's a history behind that tool. It's just as if you were learning music history or another type of applicable history, software development history, there's a history behind even that lower third. Even those letters coming in, right? And the theory of applying them is somewhat historically performed, right? It's comical that they cartwheel in, right?

Meredith: Right.

Anderegg: It belongs on a Kids Incorporated or Mickey Mouse Club, right?

Meredith: Right.

Anderegg: And, yeah, absolutely. Any of these tutorials I look at as possible texts in place of the popular model before. When I was a freshman, I had a teacher who wrote his own textbook and he sold lots and lots of copies to his students [Laughs]. And I look at them as if they are the text, and so they work in compliment with the actual instructor. But the instructor's the one who has to provide framework, the learning model of how those are applied, what is applied, and when is an appropriate use case to apply those things. You're right, the tools are so powerful today, so much more powerful, that they, given the advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning…Facebook has ways to literally edit videos together for you. You just plug in some pictures, or it even searches your photos and creates these little montages for you, and eventually, editing is going to be a function of AI, right?

Meredith: Right.

Anderegg: But will that be as good as a person with the historical performance knowledge or historical application knowledge or any of that? I would think not right now.

Meredith: Yeah. In my case, Zuckerberg finds the four most random photos that it could possibly find on Facebook and says, "Here Steve!" "What? I don't understand that video at all!" [All laugh]

Anderegg: "I don't remember that picture."

Meredith: Which is why I don't ever post them. Exactly.

Anderegg: "Why am I eating something in every one of these?"

Meredith: [Laughs] That's right. Well, in my particular case, if you could see me, you'd know. [All laugh] Anyway, President, you and I have actually had a podcast on this subject where we've talked about open source texts and we've talked about really reducing the cost of higher education for students, and so, YouTube, as Dan just pointed out, YouTube fills that role very well. There are things that we used to have to create or could only be found in textbook that are now available 24 hours a day 7 days a week, very often in beautifully produced fashion, that tell you as much as a textbook chapter or more and actually show you how to do something. And in that way, I think YouTube is actually a great improvement over a standard textbook.

Wyatt: Yeah, and I keep thinking that it's been fun to listen to the two of you talk back and forth a little bit about some of these skills—techniques that are important in order to accomplish some task—and then learning some of the background for it in the broader context. Universities are more than simply teaching skills to accomplish certain tasks, and that's one of the things that I've just been thinking about as well. There's a lot of character development and socialization and mentoring and helping build connections and leading a student from developing that broader context. You know, when I was in law school, we didn't learn one thing about how to be a lawyer.

Meredith: [Laughs] Yes.

Wyatt: We learned about how to think like a lawyer.

Meredith: Right.

Wyatt: And then build connections between law school and employers and internships. It's interesting to think of the purpose of all this, it's fun.

Meredith: So, has law school evolved in…

Wyatt: Law school has evolved quite a bit.

Meredith: Yeah.

Wyatt: I did have an internship in law school, but I remember in my first year, somebody asked the property instructor, professor, because he was talking about something from ancient English common law, and somebody said, "What's the current rule in Utah?" and his answer was to look at him quizzically and say, "Uh, why do you care about that?"

Meredith: [Laughs]

Wyatt: And as students, we all thought, "Are you serious? That's all we care about. What's the law that applies today."

Meredith: Right.

Wyatt: And his answer was, "I don't know why you even care." And it took me years to figure out his point. His point was the laws change every day.

Meredith: Right.

Wyatt: The technology changes every day, and unless you have a broad understanding of the principles and concepts and the history of all these things, then you're going to try to learn something and you're going to learn it, but then you're not going to know what to do tomorrow when it changes. So, what we were learning to do at law school was we were learning how to think like a lawyer. We were learning how to learn to learn, and we were learning how to research and find things that are challenging to find.

Meredith: In our particular case in the Music Technology program, we've focused somewhat on that idea of what it means to be a thinking and learning and earning musician. And so, we've tried to bridge the gap that exists traditionally between theoretical knowledge and actual hands-on creation. And I think that's another one of those things that YouTube actually does fairly well. You mentioned socialization—one of the things that coming to a university does is of course now you've all of the sudden got 10,000 friends. But, Dan and I teach in an online only discipline, music technology, and so one of the ways in which we get over that hump of students not being in the same room with the teacher is we have discussion forums and other things. And one of the best ways to create conversation is to have students watch a shared YouTube video where they will—Dan I think is actually brilliant at this—he'll find some topic about which there is a documentary film or something, and then he'll curate a discussion about it in his class. Dan, how did you come about that? You're not a traditionally trained teacher in the sense that you went to an education school and all that…was that self-learned? Did you just think back about what would have been more effective for you?

Anderegg: That is a great question. So, interestingly, I feel like that was the learning model of my master's degree, was the sources were never just an instructor at the front of the class telling me what they had learned or had come to know. The sources were always a third party—whether it was a documentary or a video or an article or something—it was so much so that I honestly feel like it was a facilitated discussion more than a lecture ever. And everything was done in reaction to something we had watched or listened to or read online, curated by that instructor. So, I think that was just the model that I was thinking of how I had learned to find answers online. Which interestingly, President Wyatt, you mentioned that the law changes all the time, right? And you're teaching people to think like lawyers…the major struggle is teaching people to be able to research and solve their own problems once their gone when they don't have a professor just to quickly message on Canvas or online or in an email or something. And so, often times, I find myself in the situation where I am asking students, when they have a question, I'm asking them, "Where have you looked?" before I give them an answer. Because they've got to be able to walk away and have confidence that they can leverage the tools to find the most updated information. Which is why sometimes I'm leveraging online resources way more than any text in another form because the time to market is so short, a lot of the times it's more up to date that something I can find inside of a library, right? It takes whatever length of time it takes me to record and then upload a video for it to be live for everyone to see. So, I think the model that I just kind of found that I learn best in is examining sources and then discussing them with other people. And I was hoping that students find that same model to be the most effective. So much that I often like to get them stuck so they have to go research something before they can continue.

Meredith: I will tell you as Dan's department chair that his classes are exceptionally highly rated as a result of that. I think the students are…I get phone calls sometimes from Dan's students saying, right at the beginning of the semester, saying, "He's not giving us the answers!" [All laugh] "I know he's not, and I'm not going to either." And, yeah. So, I whole heartedly agree. President, not many people know this about you maybe, you not only are a teacher here at SUU, you teach an Honor's Forum about the Civil War, but you're also a student.

Wyatt: Right, yeah.

Meredith: And in an online program, right?

Wyatt: Yeah, it's a mix—it's online and face-to-face combination.

Meredith: Have you found that delivery method that uses this multiple source…

Wyatt: Well, let me back up a step. So, several years ago when I was working at my prior school, I was just looking for somebody to have great conversation with so I could have a more disciplined effort in reading. I had things I was very interested in, but I felt like I was missing something. I could read a book, but there wasn't a group of people to sit around and talk about it with, and it's that discussion that really makes it so exciting. And where I have my impressions of what I'm reading, then I get somebody else's and somebody else's and then kind of an expert who can help us see all this. So, I signed up for a master's degree from a private liberal arts school in Ohio, Ashland University, and it's a really neat program because it allows a person to just fly back for a week, spend a week there in intensive study, and then come home and do reading and then fly back for another week, and I've been doing that for a number of years. And then they modified the program to have some of the classes be online, but they're live. We're all seeing each other. The program is a program that allows us to see every student in small classes. But, I think that this idea that I can just grab a book and grab a YouTube tutorial and learn everything I need to learn about American history and government…that was never as successful as sitting down in a group and talking about it.

Meredith: Yeah.

Wyatt: YouTube vs. university. It's just…you can get some skills and specific pieces of information, but you can't weave it all together and fully understand it.

Meredith: That's right. You lose the connections to other things, you lose the context, and you lose the depth of understanding. I was sharing with Dan and President Wyatt the fact that I had spent this last weekend assembling a tool chest on wheels in my garage and that it had been a gift from my wife for Father's Day and we…

Wyatt: That was last week, right?

Meredith: Yeah, right. [All laugh] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah, I'm now two months behind. "Sorry, honey." Anyway, I was struggling a little bit with it and frankly had followed the directions and had run into a couple of dead ends and couldn't figure out why my picture didn't look like their picture and so forth, and so, I jumped online and here was a funny guy in Tennessee that was putting together the exact same thing and had gone to the trouble to make a video of it. And he was hilarious and kept saying, "Now, don't follow the instructors here. You'll run into trouble if you follow the instructions." It was perfect for me. It was ideal, and within 30 minutes, all my problems were fixed, and I had a tool chest on wheels. But, I didn't really know how to use the tool chest, I didn't know why I had the tool chest, I didn't really know anything too much about the guy that had taught that to me or why he had chosen that particular tool chest, and so, a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here and a lot of stuff that you deal with every day, Dan, is…it's providing context and connection.

Anderegg: Absolutely.

Wyatt: Yeah. And I, let me throw in a little side story here. So, I visited a mine, a pretty sophisticated mine in operation, and the question that I asked as we were standing in the maintenance shed—shed is understating this place, this huge maintenance shop for a very successful mining operation—and I said, "What can we teach people that are coming to work for you?" And I had my own expectations that, "The skills."

Meredith: Sure.

Anderegg: Right.

Wyatt: "A whole series of skills. I need to hire people that can do this and do this and do this." And that wasn't even the answer. The answer was, "Every single person I hire I want to be a potential manger." It just shocked me. He didn't say a word about welding. He didn't say a word about any of these other sophisticated operations that people needed to do, and it was a high-tech mine. It was a really high-tech mine. GPS buckets…

Meredith: Wow.

Wyatt: Three-dimensional quarrying…this mine, they were able to map the entire reservoir and so, the bucket could be operated by GPS to hit the precise point that maximizes profits. This is super sophisticated. He didn't talk about any of those things. He just said, "Every person we hire, we want to be a potential manager. So, would you please make sure they learn critical thinking skills and problem skills and oral communication skills and written communication skills." All the kinds of things that are really difficult to learn on YouTube. They're the kinds of things that you learn at a university in classes and with mentors…

Meredith: That's right.

Wyatt: People that can actually read what you're writing and say, "Let's talk about this for a minute" or "That was a great argument that you just made verbally, but let's go back and think of it in different ways." Very personalized kind of thing. The soft skills.

Anderegg: That's absolutely right, actually. And I hear that day in and day out. In my job at Pluralsight, I'm a curriculum manager right now, and we talk to a lot of enterprise customers who say that exact same thing—whether they're in mining or health care or anything else—they have a craving for people that have the soft skills that they can be emotionally intelligent in how they deal with other people or customers or coworkers or managerial reports…that is definitely a huge part of the discussion that you sought out when you went to that school, President Wyatt, is being able to view issues from another point of view and discuss them intelligently and not in a condescending way, and you're right, that is an absolute skill that is in really high demand.

Wyatt: Yeah. We're seeing this in a lot of places, aren't we?

Anderegg: Yeah.

Wyatt: It's not limited to just one industry, it's everywhere. It's so interesting to see how that works. And another skill that employers that I talked to are desperate for are teamworking skills. "Please don't send me somebody that hasn't had multiple experiences working on a project with a team, because once I hire this person, they're going to have to work as a team." And so, you don't learn that you YouTube. YouTube is a one person and one computer experience.

Meredith: That's right.

Wyatt: Employers are looking for a multi-person team who know how to work together and complement each other, be patient with one another, because they've done it.

Anderegg: Right.

Wyatt: Right? Yeah.

Anderegg: Yeah, Top Ten List of How to Be a Team Player on a YouTube video is not the same as experience working on a project with a team. [All laugh] Absolutely.

Wyatt: And we've all done this in college.

Anderegg: Yeah.

Wyatt: The team projects were always our most frustrating thing, because there's always one person that didn't do any work at all.

Meredith: That's right.

Anderegg: Right. [All laugh]

Wyatt: But those are the kinds of things we have to learn to be successful in the workplace.

Meredith: You know, as I've been listening to this, I hearken back to something that I think we've mentioned I a couple of our podcasts and it is from a book by a man named Jeffrey Selingo, and it's actually what got me thinking about this and got the President and I talking about this podcast. Selingo talks about a trip that he made to IBM training. Anyway, long story short, the man that had been in charge of training for new IBM employees, and they spent almost a billion dollars a year in getting their employees to think like Big Blue, you know? And he said that they had gone from hiring "I-shaped" people to hiring "T-shaped" people. They still wanted people that had great depth of knowledge and understanding, but they couldn't use people who were just the world's best at one thing. They needed people who had that set of soft skills, they had the ability to not only have a really deep knowledge in an area, but also cross-training, cross-knowledge that allowed them to be really important members of a team. And that, again, that's the kind of thing that we're talking about that is a skill that's developed in a university that's not developed in a tutorial.

Wyatt: Well, and sometimes, it's a…I hired a chief information officer, the person who ran all of our IT at a college, and he had not gone to college for that subject. But the fact that he went to college, earned a bachelor's degree, earned a doctorate, and along the way, had educational experiences and learning, led him to be qualified to run an IT department. But it was the master's degree and the doctorate degree that gave him that breadth…

Meredith: Right.

Wyatt:…Of understanding that he could work with others and solve problems and have the critical thinking…anyway, it's interesting. A lot of people end up in careers that were not their major in college.

Meredith: Including all of us right now.

Wyatt: Including all of us. [All laugh] That's right, yeah. I wasn't a…I didn't major in higher ed administrated.

Meredith: That's right. And I do teach music, but most of my job is not that anymore.

Wyatt: But, it goes to speak to the fact that the specific, technical skills are very different than the broad understanding that we've been discussing today. They're both important.

Meredith: They are. Hey Dan, in your day job with Pluralsight, what do you find is the biggest challenge that you have in keeping that balance between practical application and theoretical knowledge? In other words, your primary focus in this job is on training for corporate customers. How do you envelope all of those things that they say they want? So, "Yeah, I want them to learn to how use this tool, but I also need them to be a team member. I need them to be…" How do you do that in an online situation?

Anderegg: Great question. So, Pluralsight, I'm lucky in that they are very open-minded as to what they consider worth teaching. But, they also really know who their audience is currently. And so, as far as the enterprise customers go, we allow them to really select and decide which courses they might, through the platform, prescribe to their particular employees. Now, the majority of the content is technology based, so it's like software development, IT ops, data professional type stuff, and I find that the hardest thing is the soft skills, because they're experiential. We really can nail the information when it comes to coding in this language or setting up this server or whatever it is that you have to do. That we can nail, and we can actually create interactive courses that allow them to do projects, you know, whether it's coding in the browser or something and get immediate validation and feedback on whether they've done it right. So, they get the practical application of the skill itself. The learning development leaders at the different companies though, it's really in their hands that the human touch there is…it's in their hands to do what happens next. You know, if there's a mentorship relationship, that has to happen at the company. So, it's not much different really. There's still the human aspect there that has to give them that guidance and growth and ladder in the company and all of that. We do have content that tries to enumerate soft skills and enlighten people to things they may not have considered before about emotional intelligence or even management skills and things like that, but verifying those, I can't create a project that says…that verifies or validates whether or not someone has empathy. I can test on whether or not they can code in a language. Do you know what I mean?

Meredith: I do.

Wyatt: Yeah, this is why, as an analogy, this is why parents and a child are so important and you can't raise a child by sending them to YouTube to learn the skills.

Anderegg: Exactly.

Meredith: That's right, that's right. Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining us today.

Anderegg: Thank you, it's been a pleasure.

Meredith: You've been listening to Solutions for Higher Education, a podcast featuring Scott L Wyatt, the president of Southern Utah University. We've been joined via telephone today by Dan Anderegg, who is an adjunct here at SUU in music technology and also a curriculum guru for the Pluralsight folks. Visit pluralsight.com if you want to know more about that. President, thank you so much for letting me have Dan join us. I thought that was a very stimulating and interesting discussion.

Wyatt: Agreed.

Meredith: Thanks for listening everybody, we'll be back again soon. Bye bye.