 Moving Duet Scholars Online. Hello, I'm Cheryl Burgstahler. I direct the Duet Center at the University of Washington, Disabilities, Opportunities, Internet Working, and Technology. And part of that program, we have the Duet Scholars Program, which is for teenagers later in high school that are working to transition to college and on to careers. My name is Scott Bellman. I'm the program manager at the Duet Center. Our Scholars Program offers a variety of college preparation activities throughout the school year. The most exciting time being during our summer camp, which we call Duet Summer Study. That's where students visit campus to live in dorms, learn how to navigate the campus and eating cafeterias, and take college classes as they learn about how to get ready for school after high school. My name is Naomi. I've been a Duet scholar since 2016, and it's been a really fun journey, full of great opportunities from Duet and connecting with Duet throughout the years. My name's Finn. When we did Duet in person, there was a focus on disability advocacy and also on STEM, like we had daily workshops. We would go to the facility where they monitor seismic activity. That was like the STEM element. And then we also have the disability element where we would learn, okay, here's how to get accommodations at college. My name's Alexis, and I was a Duet 2019 scholar. Well, being there physically, I was able to learn the ropes of how a college functions, traveling all over the campus, eating at the different places, sitting through several hours of class. And I also kind of learned to advocate for myself. A while ago, I had to do a meeting with, well, I arranged a meeting with the disability services at the deep end. I was able to get through it myself. So when 2020 hit us all with the pandemic, we were stunned, like the rest of the world, but we thought, well, this will last a week or two and we'll have our program because we were planning a program in 2020 to be on site, like the other ones. But very quickly, we realized this wasn't going to be over that fast. We had to convert totally online. It was clear the students weren't going to be safe in an on-site program. And so we got to work. I said to my staff is, well, who better than this team for going online? We're always about technology. I'm Tammy Tidwell, a program coordinator with Duet, and I have worked with Summer Study for almost two decades. The decision to move online, like most youth programs, was something that we knew was not going to be easy. My name is Kayla, and I am a program coordinator at the Duet program. I'm also a past scholar. I was a scholar in 2005, and right now I work with students who are in our scholars program, and so we assume is our primary way of communication and facilitation of all of our programming and students who felt comfortable talking out loud and answering questions. They could do that. Students who were more comfortable with text, they would write in the chat. And so we were able to accommodate different learning styles and communication styles, and in a lot of ways it made it more inclusive. And we were able to keep people safe, which of course was our primary concern at the time. We wanted to make sure that students still had some of those interactive pieces, like mock interviews or meeting with faculty. And what we found was those interactions were actually more focused because students were in a breakout room with the faculty or the mock interviewers and could really focus on what they were doing. And they got to be in the spotlight and really say what they wanted to say. Whereas in a normal situation, we would have an entire room of interviews happening at the same time, which is very loud and distracting. It was the same deal as the previous two years, but just online. So you'd have like the different sessions and instead of going somewhere, you just log on and your classroom would be the Zoom room. I think what I enjoyed most about the virtual program is in the lecture setting and the group discussion setting. I felt like it was a lot easier for people, for everyone to be able to get their ideas across. I felt like it was a lot easier for people to share ideas in that way. I felt like it was a lot easier for people to... that they didn't understand some of their water clarification. You could raise your hand, the virtual hand, or you could type something in the chat. I felt like the chat was helpful in terms of like, hey, I didn't understand this or what does this mean? You asked your clarification. You get more participation in classes and in activities if you turn on that chat feature, which made the virtual summer study exponentially more engaging. One of the most important things about summer study, whether it's in person or online, is building community, making sure that students with disabilities that are headed to college feel like they belong, feel like they have other people like them out there. And that is definitely something we still saw happening online. We see that students find out more about disability history. They find out more about their roots. They find out more about this entire community around the world of people who have experiences like they do. Hi, my name is Mimera. I'm a 19-year-old autistic student who is a scholar at Do It. In the virtual program, we didn't share videos about disabilities and how important it is to us. It was interesting to hear about how many of my friends persevered through their lives with a disability. We had to get pretty creative. We included activities such as game nights and movie nights and opportunities for students to talk about their hobbies and pets and share a meal so that we could still have that sense of community. My name is Andrea Mano, and I'm an assistive technologist with the Do It program. We wanted to build a community even before summer study. We had the scholars meet with us in small groups over Zoom before summer study. The groups were chosen based on the shared assistive technology and what we thought the scholars had in common. Allowing the students to attend virtually enabled them to experiment with technology in their own homes. And if the students wanted, they could have their parents involved too, which is always really helpful to have another set of eyes when you're learning something new. We also realized that there was an essential piece of what we do in person that we couldn't let go of, and that was making sure we had evening activities and fun things interspersed throughout. So during the day, we would take museum tours and go online and visit some museums around the country. And at night, we made sure we had movie nights and game nights where students can really participate and get to know each other and their senses of humor. And what we found was the movie night was actually, in my opinion, more fun online because normally people are shushing each other if you're in person watching a movie, but we watched movies and they could talk about the disability-related content that they maybe didn't really realize was there before or talk about their favorite characters or talk about what they didn't like about a scene or what they really loved about that movie. So in pet night, you can bring your pet, ideally in costume, by the way, and perhaps in a matching costume to yours. That's not something we would have done ever during an onsite program, had their pets come along. And so that translated into really funny, funny, funny activity. And as usual, the evening activities were optional. So some students that were experiencing some zoom fatigue or just needed a break or weren't interested in pets, well, they could easily plan their whole evening without us. My name is Sophia, and I became a doing scholar in 2021. I was able to meet people throughout the community, but mostly I felt like I connected with them more throughout the optional evening activities where I had more time to engage with the community. I think it was a talent show. I just showcased my origami, and that was just pretty fun because I got to see people's reactions to my crafts that I worked on during the pandemic. It made us feel like we were all one class or one family. It was very nice to see so many new faces. I think we were able to make plenty of friends, even though it wasn't in person. Well, I think I was able to build a sense of community just in front of how well-command and open the program is. What I enjoyed most about Virgil was probably the fact that it felt like do it. So even if we're not together, we're still together. And I was like coming back home, honestly. I just felt like I'm back home. Lessons learned. Well, we learned that you can pull this off. We've learned some things that we share with others who are in a similar situation that are moving an onsite program online or maybe even starting the online. One thing that we did the first year and continue to do is made our program a little bit longer. And so it's going three weeks rather than two because we wanted to avoid Zoom fatigue. We hear a lot about that. So we thought it was important that we keep the screen time a little shorter than maybe what we would want to. Do-It staff was very thoughtful about moving summer study online. And in being thoughtful in that way, they had a lot of staff in the online sessions. One staff could monitor the faces on the screen. One staff could monitor the chat. One staff could be monitoring email when a scholar couldn't get into the session. I think that's really helpful. And it seems like that's a lot of people. But you do need a lot of people in case something unexpectedly happens. Some of the things that were particularly successful that we hadn't thought about before was we were able to engage people from all over the state. And so it wasn't just the students that we were engaged with but also their families. We do involve the parents with the process of working with the scholars. And so we felt like we made a deep connection with that aspect of the student's life so we could know what the support system looks like and maybe how we could help them. But we also got to know the students in a different way as well. They were in their own environments and some of our students felt more comfortable. For other programs, thinking about going to an online program or even a hybrid program, some of the positives are that you can get mentors, people who've been through your program in the past. They can come from wherever they are. So if they're away at school or they're not able to get to campus on a certain day, they can still be engaged. It engages a bigger and wider community. We also had end of the day team meetings, which were essential. When we're in person, we can't pull all those staff together because there are staff working with the students and supervising. But online we were able to stay in touch with each other for a single day. What I realize is that the students who've only participated and do it summer study online have gotten a lot out of the experience. I see their growth in their IEP or 504 meetings during reunions and also in the emails that they send us. They've gotten a lot, they've grown a lot, and the program has still made a really big impact. I had a lot of flexibility because I was also balancing another summer program I was doing along with the summer study session. So I met with Tammy just to talk over a meeting about how I can kind of balance those two programs. If anyone asks me for some advice when they're forced into turning an on-site program into online, or maybe even optionally doing it, doing that transition, the first thing I'd like to say is just from the get-go, embrace and help your staff embrace the problem to solve. This is really kind of exciting. It's stressful too, but we've shown that it can be done, and you just need to do things one step at a time. For more resources about supporting Students with Disabilities, consult uw.edu-d-o-i-t. Copyright 2023, University of Washington. 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