 Welcome everyone. I think it's rate at 930 as you heard. The recording is just starting. My name is Brad Wetherick. I am the new associate provost. I was just acknowledging that there are others on this call who might be in other parts of our province or other parts of our country. So I wanted to acknowledge that the lands that you're on, I'm actually joining you from Halifax, which is Chabukduk in McMaggy, which is the ancestral and unsuited territory of the Mi'kmaq peoples. And I'll actually be moving to the Okanagan in a few months. Before we jump into the panel, I just wanted to mention that this is day 14 at UBCO, but I spent the last eight years as the executive director of learning and teaching at Dalhousie in Halifax. And it's been, you know, this has been one of the most unique and exciting and interesting years, but also one of the most anxious and troubling and difficult years for faculty and students across the country at every institution. And this panel to hear the perspectives of faculty and students and their experiences during learning and teaching during COVID is really exciting for me. I think, you know, it is really interesting to reflect on the lessons that we've learned throughout this year and to think about how these lessons might inform the future of teaching and learning on our campus and in our system of post-secondary education moving forward. Without further ado, I wanted to turn it over to our host for the panel, Tanya Fornaris is the interim academic lead for the Center for Teaching and Learning at UBCO Okanagan. She is one of the many people that were involved in the planning and creation of Celebrate Learning Week. So over to you, Tanya, to introduce the format and to introduce our panelists. Thank you so much, Brad. So for our session, our session today is going to include six panelists. We have three students and three faculty parents from across both campuses, meaning that the students were in the courses of these faculty taught, so that would be kind of a nice way to share experiences. We will start with the students and they're going to share kind of some of the positives, some of the challenges they've experienced, and then also kind of their advice for faculty moving forward as we move into beyond COVID-19, even though we're still kind of there. This will be followed by a visit from our MoveU crew to give us a little short break and then we will hear from our faculty members before moving into a Q&A session. A few housekeeping notes before we begin and some of these you may have seen in the chat already. So the presentation portion of the session is going to be recorded, not the Q&A, and the comments, however the comments in the chat will not be reported. Now we've enabled Zoom closed captions, so please feel free to turn these on if you'd like and you can do this by clicking the CC button at the bottom of your Zoom screen and you have the flexibility to turn it on and off as you wish. And if you require any technical assistance during our session, our CTLT's event coordinator, Elisa Herman, is available to provide you with support. So without further ado, we will have our first student, Kavita, begin her presentation. So over to you, Kavita. Yeah, thank you so much. So I am a BA in Economics. I just graduated. So it's an interesting graduating online and I was in Professor Graves' Econ class last year. My biggest positive, I think, from learning online has definitely been being able to re-watch lectures. I think it's kind of a dream come true almost in terms of studying to be able to hear things again the way that your professor explained them the first time. So I found that really, really helpful. And even just being able to rewind when you're listening the first time, sometimes just to really make sure that you've understood something, I found that really, really helpful and more so than I expected to actually to be able to go back to things. I think the biggest challenge from my perspective was just by the very nature of the fact that final exams had to change because of the pandemic, I think I personally found it more difficult to know just expectations of final exams in terms of if they were a different format, kind of how much to be writing. I think one of my finals, I was writing like 20 pages and I was like, I have no idea if I should be writing this much. So I think just, it's a difficult thing to address almost, but I think I'm hopeful that in the future, because we've now done this once or twice, there'll be a few more past days that people can look at or just more of a sense of what to expect from final exams. And then the consideration that I wanted to mention, I think as a fourth year, this was maybe slightly mitigated. But I definitely noticed it was much more difficult to form new connections online, particularly, I think, even when you had breakout rooms sometimes you meet someone like once on the screen and sometimes they're just a name. And it's, I think it's more more difficult to connect in a meaningful way that means you'll actually connect outside of class. And so I cannot imagine my experience from a first year perspective. Yeah, that's that's kind of what I wanted to share. Great. Thank you so much. We will now move on to our second student so Sam, over to you. Good morning. My name is Sam Zamel. I'm majoring in Earth and Environmental Sciences, and it's going to be my second year at UBC. As my first year was spent entirely online, one of its biggest benefits was being able to record lectures and see the organized Canvas modules, having everything laid out helps a lot with visualizing my workload and my time management. Although the asynchronous material was beneficial, there are classes such as labs or tests that had to be held synchronously. As I am 10 to 11 hours ahead of the UBC time zone, the adjustment period was a tough barrier that I struck with and did not have an easy solution for. An aspect of student life that impacted me more than I thought it would where the recorded lectures and how beneficial they were as in person classes often had students rushing to get down all of the important information before the teacher progresses. Sometimes a lot of information could just pass right through your head. I would have said being able to set my own pace for taking notes and rewinding and digesting the information helped a lot, especially when reviewing before tests and finals. Yeah. Great. Thank you so much Sam for sharing those experiences. And then we're going to move on to our third student, Aiden. Oh, alright. Hello everyone. My name is Aiden Quach. I just finished my third year at UBC. I'm double majoring in honors history with international relations as well as in Chinese language and culture. So one big positive that I discovered during this online learning experience and I guess like experiment has been that online learning has been an opportunity for us to build and expand on what it means to be a learning community and what it means to have a cohort. So for example, within the Chinese language program this summer I or last summer I took a class with Professor Wang who you guys will hear about later. We had a small, small class but we were able to have like a group chat outside of the outside of the classroom space where we could like play video games and we could actually build a sense of community. Even though it's a little bit different than what we would normally be looking forward to doing like in person like study groups or so on so forth. I still found it quite useful to have that kind of support network in the classroom. And I think that a lot of that comes down to students reaching out to each other and trying to find the space and make the space to have those opportunities. So one thing that I've noted as well is intercultural and international experiences have been enhanced or been made possible because of the online learning environment. So for example, in the Chinese language program, we were able to have one to one language partner sessions with people who were, you know, speaking Chinese in like other parts of the world in other Chinese speaking regions of the world. And I thought that to be really powerful, especially because we were able to discuss most of the time in Chinese but for some of our lower level students we could discuss with them in English. We could talk about intercultural competency and intercultural connections that we had even though we were like I guess spread apart because of distance and that was really powerful. Especially like towards the end of the term when we were discussing in class about the rise in anti Asian racism and just racism in general so I found that to be a very powerful tool for change and for dialogue. A challenge that I found was that oftentimes I would be living sleeping and learning in the same room from right early in the morning at like 7am all the way to 6pm in the evening. So especially in the first term like in the middle of November, you would wake up and it would be dark and then you would sit in your room and then by the time you were finished class, it would be dark as well. So I did like I personally felt that midterm slump and feeling a little bit like hopeless and feeling like everything was temporally all the same. And I guess a consideration I would have and something that I've learned through this online learning experience is finding the time to get up and move. So whether that means taking like a 30 minute break to like get out a yoga mat or to do some push-ups right beside your desk. You got to find time to move because sitting in your chair for three to six hours a day really hurts your back. And I guess along with that I would also say use your student and faculty benefits. So you do have access to a chiropractor to mental health services such as counseling. So I do capitalize on those. I definitely use those as a crutch throughout the term this year. That'll be all. Great. Thanks, Aiden. And I just really want to thank our students for joining us today. It does take extra time and prep, but we really value them being part of this because I think it does enrich these types of experiences throughout celebrate learning week. So thank you so much to our students. And as Aiden talked about, he made a great point about us having, you know, sitting in our chairs and being kind of there we go, you know, kind of being stuck in the same room for too long and maybe not getting up and taking those breaks. And I think it's really important that we start to normalize this a little bit more and maybe encourage each other to engage in these kind of short breaks. And, you know, I think we can also that we know that we should do these things, but we don't always do them. And so we invited the move you crew here to kind of provide some structure and to hopefully motivate you to start engaging these activities. So I'm going to pass it over to Diana now from our movie crew. Thank you so much, Tanya. Hi everyone. Thank you for inviting me we'll get started right away with some standing exercises so if you could please stand up and move your chair aside making sure that you have enough space around you. And when you're ready, start marching on the spot feel free to turn off your camera if you're not comfortable, or turn it on. And yeah it's up to you. So let's get started with some marching. So as we're doing this I would like to take a moment to acknowledge that everyone has different physical abilities and some movements may be more difficult for you. So if that is the case, please feel free to modify and stop if you feel any pain. So a few more seconds here, get our blood flowing. Awesome. Now we're going to do shoulder circles so stand up straight, hands at your side. You would want some space to move your arm. So you're going to have, you're going to bring your arms back and up making a big circle. So you're moving your arms back. And we're going to keep going. When your hands are over your head make sure that your thumbs are pointing towards the ceiling so you're making two big thumbs up. Feel the movement and release the tension in your upper body. Breathe and move at a pace that is comfortable for you. We'll do one more. Awesome. Now we're going to do lumbar side stretch. So you're going to bring your hands together over your head. Keep it as close to your east as possible. Roll your shoulder blades back and down and lean to one side. I'm going to hold this for a few seconds. Make sure that your hips are not twisted and they're facing forward. And breathe into the exercise back towards the center, reposition. And now we're going to lean over to the opposite side. Feel the stretch on the side that we're stretching away from and release. Shake it off. Now we're going to do lumbar extension. So you're going to put your hands in the small of your back. You can bend your knees a little bit, tuck your chin in in your chest and slowly bend backwards. Focusing on arching in your lower back. So for this move, you might feel some discomfort, but it shouldn't feel painful. We'll do about five more seconds. This actually stretches your spine and release. Now we're going to move on to our lower body. So hands at your hips. And you're going to bring one leg back in a reverse lunge. Go as low as you can go comfortably and then stand up and switch legs. So we're going to keep switching legs. And to add a stretch to this, you can put your hands behind your ears and twist to one side as you go down. Let's do two more. And finally, we're going to do slow march. So again, hands at your hips. You're going to bring one leg up in a 90 degree angle and switch opposite. And we're going to keep switching. So just like the name, we are slowly marching on the spot. And to add more stretch to this, you can wrap your hands in front of your knee and bring your knee closer to your chest. Like so, hold for a few seconds before you switch. If balance is an issue, feel free to do the other version of this exercise. Awesome. That is all for today, everyone. So we're the Movie Crew and you can book us for a classroom meeting both at UBC Vancouver and UBC Okanagan. Just Google Book the Movie Crew. Again, thank you for joining me and enjoy the rest of the event. Thank you so much, Diane. That was wonderful and helps me feel a little bit better already at 10 to 10 this morning. So really appreciate that. And as Diane mentioned, you can, if you're Okanagan faculty or Vancouver faculty, we have these resources to have students come into your classes for moving breaks or meetings. So they've recently joined the Board of Governors at UBC. So I think the more and more we do this, the more we'll normalize the importance of really kind of taking those mini breaks and kind of helping us refocus and taking care of our bodies. So we'll go back to sharing my screen and we will move on to hearing from our faculty members. So our first faculty member up is Dr. Jonathan Graves and over to you, Jonathan. Hi everyone. Yeah, that was very refreshing. I think my lower back really thanks you for the little break. Yeah, so I'm Jonathan Graves. I'm an assistant professor of teaching here at the UBC Vancouver campus. I work in the Vancouver School of Economics. So when I was thinking a little bit about this, I tried to sort of focus on what I thought was kind of unexpected. So the practice that I thought actually was surprisingly good or the one that I didn't sort of anticipate as being effective online was actually the different ways that we were able to engage with students when doing lectures. In particular in my class, I used chat as well as you know video conferencing and stuff like that. I thought the chat actually was surprising at how well it worked. It helped me to sort of engage with my students in a way that I hadn't anticipated and particularly students who sort of would not traditionally feel comfortable speaking up in class. There was a lot of students who gave me feedback and said they really like the ability to sort of, you know, take a pause, think about it and then sort of compose a question as opposed to sort of having to volunteer and put up their hand. I mean, this is sort of like live stream style discussion and that worked, you know, much better than I had originally expected. So I think that was sort of my takeaway from that was really it was about the online environment facilitated different ways of engaging with students and when we were able to use as effectively it brought more students in to the teaching environment and gave them sort of a better experience. On the other hand, my sort of lose it practice, the thing that I didn't think, you know, was very successful online was just assessment in general. It wasn't that all assessment was bad or that, you know, it was always, you know, completely impossible. It was just assessment online was extraordinarily more complicated. It means, you know, final exams, it means essays, it means activities that we do in class, it was just everything where we had to evaluate and to perform evaluation on students either in a formative way or in a sort of summative way. It was just really, really complicated. There are all sorts of new considerations that, you know, you had to think through. And there are a lot of problems, you know, traditional things that we've developed really well that we know work really well that we know help students learn just flat out failed online stuff like different certain types of exam questions and things like that. So we know this was a lot of problems for us for faculty members, a lot of students also highlighted it being, you know, extremely stressful, extremely, you know, worry inducing anxiety, provoking there was a lot of challenges for everyone around this so I think it was really assessment that posed the biggest problems for me as a faculty member and for my students in trying to build, you know, a strong classroom, we're all learning and helping one another out and I think that kind of actually really those two things together kind of brought me to my like think about it my consideration it was really the big lesson I took away from this. You call an experiment before it's more like a sort of forced experiment. It was really online learning and teaching online is not just like in person learning that you do online it doesn't work like that it really has to be designed and planned and thought through from you know the very beginning to the very end starting from like what do we want to learn or what do we want to teach. How are we going to do it and how are we going to assess it all that has to be like almost completely rethought. And that's really really difficult it's really time consuming and that's something that I think when I look forward to like you know what we're going to do in the next year. What's going to happen that's really where I think I would like this conversation to kind of go is to think about you know, how are we going to design things that take advantage of these kinds of experience as opposed to trying to move things online because I don't think that works and I think it's. That's a big piece and in particular, the organizational element I think online was probably the most important thing for me is that you had to really organize classes you couldn't be as flexible as you were in person and that's something that really changes the learning context of a lot of situations. But yeah, that's those are my thoughts. That's it back to Tanya. I will pass it over to our second speaker so Dr Tamara Freeman. Hi there Tamara Freeman at the Okanagan campus. And actually what I love to what I love to do is follow Jonathan slide because I think I, I have a unique perspective from from the course that it first year chemistry at the Okanagan campus. There are lots of big classrooms 400 students in a room, but for this year for online, it was an idea to put all 700 approximate students into a single class. So, looking for online solutions for 700 students in a classroom exactly as Jonathan pointed out, you cannot just take classes and put them online. Lots of learning uphill slopes for me to try and design a classroom. My regular class is active based lots of activities in class and communication and breakout rooms. So this brings me exactly to what worked and what didn't. What works for me, not the assessment piece, but the feedback from the assessment, the electronic grading tools. What I loved about those is that we could build really detailed rubrics. So students were getting with 700 students in the classroom. We were able to show students exactly what they did right and what they did wrong. They had the details of what we were looking for. So there was feedback from the assessment pieces that we hadn't been able to provide with such depth before TAs give check marks and they can try and write comments, but it's not nearly to the extent that we were able to do with these electronic rubrics. So I think in terms of that piece, that would be something I would love to see students write their exams. We upload the exams for them and then then we can get these links detailed rubrics back to them. What didn't work as planning as I had done over the summer, everything I planned fell through. There was no ability to have breakout rooms in my classroom. We sat there for 10 minutes waiting for Zoom to chug through and put students into room. My chat with 700 excited first year students on the first day of class moved so quickly that my lecture TA was like, stop! So unfortunately, all those really exciting tools that we had to try and engage conversation in the classroom had to get turned on in class. There was no way to manage it within the classroom that we had created in Zoom. We did find alternative tools using live question and answer through Piazza platform, the discussion board, where the comments moved permanently, which was a great alternative, but not the tools in Zoom. And I think the big piece that I've come away with after this term is because we're a little bit more personal. A lot of you are at home right now and we're seeing into the lives of people a little bit more clearly. I think the piece that struck me the most was this compassion and inclusive course design. So for Sam specifically with her 10 to 11 hours ahead, I know laboratories were a difficult piece. We did have synchronous laboratories, but I built in extended timeline built in activities that I just wanted students to complete for the sake of being there. But whenever someone was late, whenever someone needed after time, forgiveness, there was passion. I'd like to think I'd do that in a regular semester, but it was more personal. The pain is these students, technology problems, personal problems dealing your learning at home. And I think that's the biggest thing is that passion and inclusive. Okay, thank you tomorrow. And then we're going to go on to our kind of final faculty panelists. So Dr. she and wine, if you could share your thoughts and lessons learned. Hi everybody, my name is Tian I working the department of patient studies faculty of arts. I felt that what I'm going to say echoes a lot of the things that have already been shared by students and our two faculty panelists. For me, one very effective teaching strategy, I mean, I said two things, but the the common theme here is flexibility. In this very unexpected situation we all need some flexibility. Flexibilities for me doesn't mean random stuff or students can do whatever they want. But I listed two examples in my classes that I've been using. The first is the flexibility in the type of work format for submission. Now, I think a lot of faculties are under the impression that this new generation of students are super good this technology. They would be able to do anything with technology maybe better than us. From my experience, this may be true for a lot of students but not necessarily true for everybody. So instead of forcing everybody to do everything online, when they're submitting homeworks, I give them the choice of, you know, you can take a picture of your hand written homeworks. You can do this on this online platform. You could do recording as different forms. So that's flexibility if they want to stay away from the computer and hand write their homework and take a picture. That's probably the downtime from computer. The other flexibility, which is actually bigger, not a minor submission type, is the flexibility in deciding their own learning goals. This is not something that's tied to the pandemic or online teaching, but it's something that I've started to try last summer because, you know, as we all know, it's all new things. So I was unsure if I placed a lot of percentage on one assignment types, would that be bad? Would that be good? So this is giving myself some flexibility. So I told students, you know, I'm going to set aside 10% for you to decide where you would want to put it. You have to give me some reasons, argument, we have to do an in-person chatting to, you have to show me, for example, this is where I feel I need to work. I feel I need to work more on. So I'm going to place this 10% on this assignment group. What this does, I realized, is that we're putting power back into the students' hand. They're not feeding, being pushed or forced into working on something. If they feel that they need to work more on their spoken language, then they could choose to move that onto some recording homework or practice homework. So I guess that's my major takeaway. The one thing that really, really didn't work is we all know when we first started online teaching, we were told that, you know, students need constant reminders. So maybe it's not a good idea to give them one big deadline instead to put things into little chunks and give them to keep them on track. So I took the advice. I separated my big assignments into smaller ones of, you know, two minutes each and marked full deadlines. There's no increased total amounts of work, but then the work are just little chunks. I had the best interest of the student at Art. This is not a punishment, but it turned out to be a huge punishment. Students did like that. It's really hard for them to, with a billion things going on, it's really hard for them to keep track of the little assignment. So I had to go back to the regular way of, here are the module for today. There are 10 different things I know, but they all have a big deadline at the end. I would recommend that you finish this first. I'm not even going to go so far as in making one module item, the prerequisite of the next, that's going too far. I'm going to say I suggest that you do this first. It's ordered first. I suggest you do this before you do the other one. So I guess that's something that I'm going to avoid. The last one actually echoes with the three student panelists and the two faculty panelists. The major takeaway, not the inspiration is the use of videos. We have them as language instructors. We have the videos, but we sometimes show them in class. We ask students to watch them after class. After the pandemic, we're starting to use them very actively and incorporate that in our teaching in a very active way. Not just the videos of the dialogues or the textbook, but grammar videos explanation so that we can do a more flipped classroom model. Whereas, for example, a computer was saying, you know, a grammar video explaining things that you can watch it at your own pace. You don't have to be rushing and taking notes. If you don't understand something you can pause, listen to the explanation one more time, go back, rewind, do whatever you want to. So we're going to continue doing that. In addition to the videos, actually, one more thing is that we also have online notes that we share. Students can add to the notes. It's a collaborative notes that everybody does. We're in between Jonathan's chat and Tamara's chat that didn't work. So it's an online big synchronous document that students can put their answers on. It's semi-structured. They have their lines to putting answers. So I thought that worked really well too. Even in face-to-face teaching, I plan to ask students to bring their computer and join me synchronously when I'm talking they're putting the answers. The last thing that I want to say is that the pandemic really, the online teaching unexpectedly provided me with an excuse to take risks. Our learning has been going, our teaching has been going. There's really no incentive to make changes. We took the chance of eliminating all our midterm written exams and final written exams and replace them with projects. Based on the feedback that we receive now, students love them. They complain about the workload, but it's usually self-inflicted. They wanted to work more on their projects. So our goal right now is to convince them that they don't have to spend that much time. Instructors love that because they can really see what students can do outside the exam paper where it's dictated by the instructors. So I guess with that, that's what I want to share with everybody. And thanks for listening. Thank you so much. And it was just a wonderful way to, I think, bring some pieces together from all of the panelists. So I really appreciate that. So before we move into kind of an open Q&A session, I thought it would be helpful to maybe take some time to think about the various things that have come across in many ways. And, you know, I think there are some consistent ideas and thoughts within this panel, but also from other conversations I've had with students or faculty members throughout the year that hopefully will help us all prepare as we move forward from this experience. So one, of course, is the accessibility and organization of learning materials and really communicating that clear communication with students about what they should expect, whether that's for the weekly kind of activities or for a final exam or midterm exam expectations. And as I mentioned, this is consistently what I've heard from students. And I kind of said, you know, the courses that are well organized on Canvas, as Sam talked about, or, you know, where the instructor has taken the time to really clearly communicate those expectations that made a world of difference to me, it really decreased my stress. And it's that uncertainty as we can all, I think, appreciate at this time that causes a lot of stress about what's going to happen and what's coming up. Students have been challenging, but yet they've also presented opportunities. And so, you know, they were great for some and really challenging for others. There's no one solution, unfortunately. But I really believe that the earlier we can think about, you know, our learning outcomes, explore the kind of just different ways that we could have students demonstrate their learning. And of course, and then work to implement a plan, as Jonathan also said, it does take time to really think about this. It's not just taking what we did two years ago and just putting it into the online environment. And so I think we do collectively have to reflect on that and work on that a little bit to help improve the teaching and learning. Engaging students is really important. We know that, but it can look different ways. And I think this is where that flexibility can also make a difference. So what works for one person is not going to necessarily work for others. And I think that goes for faculty and students and to remember that some of the things you hear today. You know, you may be really inspired by but might not work for you and that's okay. If you don't have to adopt every kind of success story. So it's really about reflecting on what you want and then, you know, being flexible and kind of implementing what's feasible based on your own course and your own context. But we do have to provide, I think that flexibility for students to whether that is around the way, you know, they might submit something or maybe it's around deadlines or maybe it's around those small takes, you know, small kind of steak assessments. And we had a great keynote speaker on Tuesday, Sia, who shared a lot of really important insights on the importance of the reasons why we should be flexible in the teaching and learning environment, and how we can do this. And so if you missed that, I know the recording and all the resources that she shared in advance are going to be available on the CTLT Wiki site. So I encourage you to check those out if you missed it. As she said, it's okay to take a risk and try something new. I think actually that's often we tell our students take risks, try something new. It's the way you learn. It's the way we grow. And I think as faculty, we need to do that too and take some risks and challenge ourselves. It can forever change the way we teach something. Maybe we never go back to final exams for some courses and we have final projects, you know, or vice versa. I mean, I think that's kind of where we need to take those risks and figure it out. And this is where that flexibility can also help us. Students have remarked, I know that they have enjoyed some of those low-stakes assessments. So yes, we might have taken a risk, but maybe we kind of went too far. And too much of a good thing can also be bad. So maybe it's like, you know, managing, maybe it's one low-stakes activity per week or one every two weeks just to kind of keep them on track, but we're not overloading on those types of daily or weekly activities. And I think the last thing I'd like to share is just the importance of caring for ourselves and others. You know, this is really important, but as humans, we often know what's really good for us. I'm from a School of Health and Exercise Sciences and I will admit that I don't always make my physical to be recommended guidelines every week. So I know those are super important, but I don't always do them. And I think we just need to kind of encourage each other and support each other to do those things that help us care for others. And for ourselves, and that will be more effective in the classroom. And we say to our students that they need to take care of themselves to be able to demonstrate their learning. And I think we need to do the same thing as faculty members. So I'll leave it at that as a summary. And then we will kind of go to questions, but I will stop share so we can kind of see more of us on the screen.