S1:E8 Dr. Ray Pastore – Tech that draws students to campus

Tyler Jacobson  0:00  

Welcome to LabChats, a podcast from the team at LabStats. I’m Tyler Jacobsen, your host for today’s episode. Each week, we’ll sit down with technology leaders in higher education to get the latest buzz and insights while we discuss current events, trends, problems and solutions. Now, let’s get into it. 

With us we have Dr. Ray Pastore, E-program coordinator, associate professor at the University of North Carolina and also an author, game designer, gamer, tech junkie, programmer, streamer, designer and instructional technologist. So it’s safe to say that you know your way around technology and particularly educational technology.

Dr. Ray Pastore  0:39  

Yes. Yeah, that’s correct.

Tyler Jacobson  0:40  

Do you want to give any more introduction to yourself? I kind of pulled that off your LinkedIn profile.

Dr. Ray Pastore  0:45  

Sure, so you know, I’ve been involved in technology since I was four years old with Atari. And I’ve really been, as a kid involved in computer programming and game design and have been interested in it forever. So it’s no surprise that my career follows that path. I’ve been a professor of instructional technology, and now moving into eSports over the last 11 years. So you know, I really love the field, it’s what I do, you know, if you can take a look at my office, I have gadgets and gizmos from the 70s, 80s, 90s to VR headsets all surrounding me.

Tyler Jacobson  1:22

So that’s kind of one of the areas that I wanted to start with. I know that you’ve been in higher ed tech for about 15 years. 

Dr. Ray Pastore  1:29

Sure.

Tyler Jacobson  1:30

And it’s been longer than that since I’ve been in school. And I wanted to get a feel for the transition. When I was in school, if we had a computer and it could run the software we needed, we were happy. And we didn’t even know that there was a world beyond that. So from where you started, what’s the transition that’s taking place, and what are students expecting now that’s very different from what they were expecting in the past?

Dr. Ray Pastore  1:51

First of all, in the past…there was no such thing as a really cheap computer. In 2005, you couldn’t buy a computer for $200 that you can today. There were really only mid-range and high-end computers. Whereas now you can buy a Google Chromebook and expect to use that for your class. It’s a few $100. And it only runs specific software. So there’s been this trend in computers having a wide low and high range that we didn’t necessarily have 10 to 15 years ago that we do have. In general, in higher ed, when I was getting my doctorate in 2006-2007, a lot of the big talk on campus was “Hey, we don’t need computer labs anymore, because all students have their laptop.” And we kind of started to actually do that. And realized really quick that that was not a good thing at all that computer labs and the tech that they could provide actually provides a really valuable, valuable learning experience and something that the students can’t get themselves. So we actually started to digress from that mindset of “Hey, we don’t need computer labs” to “Actually, we do need something.” So you know, we started this trend of actually building up better and better technology for various reasons.

Tyler Jacobson  3:04

When you said they do need something, if they’ve got their own Chromebook, and they’ve got their own inexpensive laptop, what are they needing campus to provide?

Dr. Ray Pastore  3:12

Okay, let’s start with my students. So, you know, I polled my students and gave them a poll pretty much every semester from 2009 on. What I found is that they consistently have their own laptop. Every kid. I don’t think I’ve had a kid in class that did not have a laptop. So when we talk about kids, well, there might not be some students that don’t have access, they can’t afford it. I haven’t run into students at my university that can’t afford it. They all at least have a low-range Chromebook, or they’re using their iPad or whatever. They have something that they’ll consider…their iPad, their laptop, they have something. But what they don’t have, you got to remember those computers are designed for word processing and connecting to the internet. And that’s it. They’re not designed for using any of the software that we teach in our courses. They can’t run Adobe Photoshop, I mean, they can’t run basic stuff, let alone like high-end video editing processors. So every student in a tech field has to have a high end laptop or they need the school to provide that. We need some kind of internet which is usually campus wide Wifi. I know trends like Starlink, Elon Musk’s Starlink, and future trends are to have WiFi everywhere. But until that happens, the students don’t have that. They don’t have unlimited cell data on their phone. They need campus Wi Fi. So that’s another trend. But there’s lots of like tech beyond just computers and high end computers that we actually do need for a lot of majors. Pretty much everyone in STEM, which is the big thing colleges are pushing: science, technology, engineering mathematics, we really need a…game design, computer programming, any of the fields around that area. We need high end technology to do that. 3d printer… =I mean, I could just start naming tech like virtual reality, machines to run virtual [reality], like it goes on and on. And a kid doesn’t have a $3,000 computer. None of my students have a high end computer like that. None of them.

Tyler Jacobson  5:11

Yeah. And that’s what we’re hearing more and more is that, especially during the pandemic, when students were kind of chased away from campus. They had their devices, but they couldn’t run a lot of the software that they needed for their coursework. 

Dr. Ray Pastore  5:27

Absolutely. 

Tyler Jacobson  5:27

A huge challenge with that is, and I used to use the tagline of: “Can you run CAD on a Chromebook?” And the answer that is usually, “No, not really.” And so a lot of schools were forced into providing remote access to the on-campus tech, so the students could get access to the software to the computers that they had the processing power and the ability to run the programs that they needed. I’m guessing that’s going to be something they’re going to demand in the future is the option to log into campus tech remotely, because it kind of got used to it this year. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Ray Pastore  5:58

So yeah, I think that…I don’t think schools are set up for that very well, a lot of the software that they use for remote login is kind of laggy, and not great. And it’s because it’s not something they had really invested in because they haven’t need[ed it]. There hasn’t been this huge demand like they had this year. So I think going into the future, I think A). they’re going to invest in that software more. And (B), We are going to see those options that they can log in and use like a virtual machine, virtual server, that kind of stuff, to run software that they can’t on their computer. So I think that’s going to be a big need. I think big universities had a big eye opener this year, or, you know, 2020, 2019, when COVID hit just what they really didn’t have and what they needed. You know, we ran into that in my university in 2017. We had a large hurricane, Hurricane Florence hit our university, and our community was basically shut down for about three to four weeks. And our university realized that, wow, our servers actually…our whole university website was shut down. Because our servers were on campus, we didn’t have access to cloud servers or backups. And we realized all these tech problems that we didn’t have solutions for at the time that we’ve now solved. So you know, we’ve done a little better over COVID with the virtual schooling and stuff because we had been preparing for this because we run into it every year with hurricanes. 

Tyler Jacobson  7:21

And there were a lot of schools that were completely blindsided by that.

Dr. Ray Pastore  7:24

Oh yeah.

Tyler Jacobson  7:24

It was on their long term plan, but suddenly long term was today. 

Dr. Ray Pastore  7:28

Yes. 

Tyler Jacobson  7:29

And so they were scrambling. It didn’t matter if you had money to do those types of things or not, you had to do them and you had to do them today. I think that was a big kicker, a lot of schools to progress on something that was on their “10 year” plan. But now suddenly, it was on a “this fall” plan. They were blasted by that, that they were spending money they didn’t anticipate needing to spend just because that was the only way to get things functional. And so I’m hoping that some of that sticks around when students return to campus because I think they’re going to demand that. One of the other things that I know is kind of near and dear to your heart with the esports: is that part of the prestige of the university? Are students looking at that in determining which school that they’re going to go to? Is campus tech, something that’s going to affect recruiting?

Dr. Ray Pastore  8:19

Yes, it 100% will and let me tell you why. So first of all, lead in, I’ll start with eSports. I want to go into gaming in general and talk about the community aspect, which is really the heart of what you’re asking is that this community aspect that colleges need. So most kids, and about 70% of people in the United States stopped playing sports around the age of 13. 70%. So that’s all those kids that…every kid I know. I have three young kids 10 and under, I don’t know any kids that aren’t playing soccer or baseball, they’re playing, they’re all doing something. But 70% of them once they leave middle school and enter high school are going to stop playing whatever it is they play. But guess what? a significant amount of that 70%. And those kids playing sports will continue to do something which is play video games, and that number is growing and growing and growing. So what’s happening is what we’re finding in schools, in high schools and colleges is that having an Esports team, eSports club or a gaming community adds value. It creates this school spirit that a lot of these kids didn’t have. I’ve had kids, actually my students come up to me and say “Dr. Pastore before we had an Esports club at UNCW, I didn’t think this college was really right for me and I actually considered transferring somewhere where I fit in better.” And so it’s not so much even having like an Esports team as [it is] unifying that gaming community. And what that eSports team and club does is it brings all those people together. It gives them a sense of purpose. A sense of community allows them to make friends [and] makes them part of the university in a way that they weren’t. And the tech behind it is