 Many of you know their work and between them they've produced many seminal publications. So I encourage you to check out their inspiring CVs. I just want to say a little bit about here. So Bonnie Stewart is assistant professor of online pedagogy and workplace learning. She's examined digital infrastructures and social networks for institutions and society. Bonnie was an early massive open online course or MOOC researcher and ethnographer of Twitter as an academic environment. Bonnie currently investigates educators, data, data literacies of educators, as well as what it means to know, to learn and to be a citizen in our current information ecosystem. Dave Cormier is an educational activist, a systems change leader, an open education practitioner and researcher and a learning community advocate. He has spent the last 20 years trying to make education better while leading teams in K-12 and college and university environments. He has published on open education, rhizomatic learning, MOOCs and the impact of technology on the future of higher education. So please give a warm virtual welcome to Bonnie and Dave. Hey folks, Dave are you starting off? I'm Bonnie. I'm the Bonnie part of the team and I just wanted to say that it is a privilege to be here and thank you for being here. One of the things about sort of closing the conference out or being on towards the end of day two is that already many, many important conversations have been had around algorithms, around race, around students and we're kind of, I don't know if we're the highlight reel or the blooper reel but we are privileged to be here. I also don't know how many of you remember blockbuster video but certainly this conversation around crisis and care is one that a number of conferences have been taking up over the last, you know, few months and I think that that's really important so I also want to direct you to our colleague and friend Mahabali from the American University of Cairo who did a really great sort of very curriculum-focused conversation around this back in June in case you end up looking for more to watch and learn from, we're sending you there. Basically 2020, how we do one, it's a lot and I guess I'd like to open with a funny story. Back in April, Dave and I had been, you know, working in this field for 15 years or so and then suddenly the wheels fell off the bus and everything went online and it's very, very different for everything to be online than when you're the person who does the online things because suddenly you're talking to whole new audiences of folks. We ended up creating a couple of webinars basically for K-12 teachers because we wanted our kids' teachers to hear the message that we were putting out and we took 15 years of working in online pedagogy and digital stuff and boiled it down to three key things. Keep it simple, keep it equitable and keep it engaging and that, those webinars got picked up by our local paper. And so a funny thing happened because we were sitting at home one day when the newspaper called and said, hey, we're sending a photographer over, in fact they'll be there in five minutes. Could you two come outside and social distance from us but let us take your photo? And we said, well, okay, I guess so, that would be all right. But like literally I'd been in pajamas at this point from the waist down for four weeks. And so I threw on earrings, I threw on a coat and we went, stepped out onto our front porch and to create this memorable picture because if you don't know Dave and I, our partners live together, have two kids and so we envision that someday there will be a wonderful photo of grandchildren sitting around going, what did you do during the pandemic? And we'll be able to say, well, dear, we stood on our porch with our laptops, yeah, we may make this our holiday photo if we stick photos of the kids on the front of the laptops like stickers. But really the truth is we spent most of the pandemic as pretty privileged people. We own the porch that we were standing on. We have good and stable jobs in a moment when many people don't. We live in a country that has chosen to exert some level of public safety and embrace some level of public safety. So our situation in the middle of the pandemic while our photo is pretty funny is very much a privileged one and we've been pretty protected in the ridiculousness of that photo and this time. The reality about crisis is that it's very much not one size fits all. In the early days we were hearing, right, we're all in this together because it was truly like a global thing and many of us have not necessarily lived through something that feels like it affects every world. But we are not all experiencing the same things and all of the axes of difference in the world six months ago are only exacerbated today. And for those of us as educators, particularly thinking about how we bring people online to give the opportunities that education can give, that's important. And so if crisis is not one size fits all, neither is care. And so what we want to do today is talk about strategies for engaging in care and considering who gets included in our care from wherever it is that we find ourselves in this very, very strange 2020 moment over today. In order to have a little bit of collaboration here, I think that there are a hundred people in the chat room and if we start doing chat answers, things might get a little cookie, we're going to use metameter for this process. So just and this is something part of the pedagogy of care is just explaining this to people. I offer you two choices for participating in the metameter. I think the easiest one by far the easiest thing to do is to pull up menti.com on your phone and participate from that while you're participating on your computer, if that's the way you're set up. The other option that I think is a viable one is to split up metameter and sort of resize one window and resize it up there and get yourself ready to participate. This first participation is going to be super, super light. It's not going to be a complicated one, not complex either, but just a way to get it started and to get you comfortable. And towards the end of the presentation, we're going to do our best to kind of pull together all the wisdom in the room and see if we can't have some statements of care and approaches to care from everybody who's participating. So I'm going to go ahead and share the results part of this. So if you guys will go to menti.com and type in that number that you see on the screen, I will switch over to the results. So where are you coming from today? So if you've never used menti before, go to menti.com, stay in this talk, but go to menti.com and then type in the code 4970043. And this will give us a sense of who's in here today. Milton Keynes, Canada, rainy. I like that good. We've given you three words. So if you want to give us the town you're from and where you are in your house, got the Welsh flag in there. That's nice. That's appreciated. Dave says now pondering whether or not he got the right flag. Wow, Detroit. Hey, Detroit, we waved to you across the river. Hello, Swansea, Milton Keynes, Highlands, Alfast, spare room or spare room if you prefer for all of you fantasy fans out there. This is so cool. I don't care how many times I see word cloud. I am not bitter or cynical. I love them. There is no better way of pulling together this kind of information. I think Scotland's the winner though, home. Nice. Very good. That's so cool. It's so great to see people from all over come together in this way. We have 79 responses. That's 79 out of a little over 110. 82. Let's see if we can get to 90 before we head on Bonnie. I just want to make sure most people have got a chance to figure this system out. Maybe that's right out there who's actually being a splitter. Probably that Dave White guy too. You can't trust those guys. I saw them chirping in the chat room. I see you guys. Poor Dave. He's being called out. Do you want me to be homesick with all the Scotland? Sorry, Emery. All right. That's petering out from there. Why don't you keep us going, Bonnie? Thank you, everybody, for participating. Please keep that window open. We're going to come back to it again between three and six times, depending on how much time we have in the presentation. I hand it back to my delightful partner. Thank you. So I wanted to just sort of frame the idea of crisis because over the last five months, there's been a lot of talk about these unprecedented times. But the truth is there is crisis at many, many different levels and it ends up being something that is nested, right? We all have our own identity in terms of gender identity, racial identity, embodied identities in so many ways and the crisis impacts those particular identity factors differently. We all have family situations. Those of us who were home through the spring with kids, and our kids are 11 and 14. So reasonably self-sufficient. But I spent a lot of time sort of pouring one out for the folks who were home with very, very small kids, unexpectedly trying to hold down jobs or having to go out and hold down jobs without childcare available. There is the crisis that is sort of within academia and higher ed more broadly and the ways in which that is super differential at this moment and then the broader societies that we live in which are dealing with this moment of pandemic very, very differently. In a sense, we talk a lot about we, but I'm not sure that any of the we's are having a common experience of crisis and that's what we'd like to unpack a little bit. There's personal, right? So we decided, being Dave and I, about a week ago that our kids will go back to school in Ontario. Partly because our case load is low, partly because our government and its infinite wisdom here has decided that the online learning option would be 225 minutes a day of broadcast synchronous with no further details and that actually sounded worse than sending them in masks. But like I said, I've never felt less good on more levels about something that I still chose. There we are. That's personal, but at the structural level, there are, for example, a real, real sort of she-session is one of the terms that I've been hearing, a real spate of women who are not able to stay in the job market and that may not be a short-term change because of what this crisis has brought about. And so many of us are experiencing things at multiple levels at this moment. Some crises are small, but they are huge in the moment. I am currently teaching an intensive summer course for folks who are sort of former experts in their field, welders, hairstylists, TV and film folks, and they're all taking a Bachelor of Education-specific program for teaching in tech ed classes in high schools eventually. I have this lovely student last Thursday in this intensive program was our presenting day. Dude is the leader of his group. He is presenting. There is all this noise. I think someone has their mic on. I'm like, oh, hey, could everyone please turn off their mics while David is presenting because obviously there's a terrible banging noise. And the presenter is like, I'm really sorry. That's me. Literally my upstairs neighbor had a huge flood two nights ago and the landlord sent these guys in to take my kitchen down at 7 a.m. today. Not much he could do about that. He's got to present through it. He lives in a one-bedroom space and this is what was happening behind him. He gave me permission to take a picture. You're not going to know this fault for those of you who are teaching what is happening in the homes behind you. Some crises are much more systemic. Now, this is a U.S. example, but it's easy to point out sort of the dramatic U.S. disparities in how racialized and visible minority people are treated. But let us not pretend that the systemic racism and underlying bias and white supremacy that are part of the fact that a 15-year-old high school student was sent to jail for not handing in her homework is still not something that underlies many of the ways we see individuals in all of our societies, right? And that is super important. People are treated differently. And in this moment, that systemic crisis is ever more visible. And the consequences are obviously serious. Some crises are exacerbated by governance trends in academia. I love the... I don't know if any of you follow the Ask Dean's Parity Account, but hey, we're changing everything. Please don't be late posting online syllabus. And of course, we have seen the ways in which many institutions, particularly those underwritten by having students on campus, have tried very hard to send people back and then had to pull back at the last minute in some cases right after the deadline for refunds was over. These acts all create crises within people's lives, financial crises, work crises, et cetera. None of this is actually the problem of online learning, right? It's not online learning's fault that we're doing it, but the tech will not solve the problems either. The software is not going to take care of our problems. And in some cases, there are real issues with the software that we're using to take care of how we deal with going online during a pandemic. So many institutions, I know that yesterday Angela had talked about algorithms and accountability and all of those issues. One of the big ones is proctoring software, and I don't know how many of your institutions are considering using proctoring software. There's been a bit of a debate in Canada. I think we made eventually a choice to use a European software, but we are also encouraging faculty not to do direct multiple choice high stakes testing because literally some of the softwares rank students according to their suspicion level. And Ian Linkletter, whose permission I have to share this, was posting video the other night of the ways in which the software mentioned has a whole sort of 360 degree scan of what's in a student's space available. He took some video of that from their how to section, and then of course they took it down. To an extent, this is about trying to control and put the sort of cone of scarcity that higher ed has often served as over the real abundance of the internet. Once we move all of higher ed onto the internet, yes, our students can access easy answers to just about anything online. So we better figure out different ways to teach, perhaps, rather than try to create scarcity again. That's fault scarcity and test them on it because we've lost that control. And that in itself, I think, is a bigger crisis. Maxine Green talks about that tendency to move in schools towards defining objectives in technical or quantitative terms and not focusing on how and what it is that students become. And that tension is one that has become much more visible. Many of us have been talking about it. There has been critique of the neoliberal university for as long as I've been in the neoliberal university. But certainly at this moment, that tension is now being played out in every single classroom and for every single student and for those of you who support faculty in every one of those conversations. This makes the fault lines of our entire field visible. I am only two years from spending 15 years as an adjunct instructor. I am super grateful to be stable at this point in my career, but it takes a lot of work to teach online and probably everyone in this room knows it. And there hasn't been a lot of talk about how that needs to be rewarded with higher pay, at least in my experience, until this current moment when suddenly my senior faculty colleagues are realizing how much work that takes. I have real concerns about what happens to higher ed in the arc of this and we can all see the headlines, you know, higher ed in Australia, higher ed in the UK. In Canada, we are again privileged to be perhaps in a slightly less crisis mode, but the crisis is with us in all kinds of ways. So I'm going to send you back to Menti. Please use the code 4970043 and we will check on how you are doing in 2020. I thought that was transition money. I thought that went really well. Thank you. Though I was talking about myself. So what's your take on 2020? Anxiety about what's next? Powerful opportunity for change. Currently hiding under my bed? Yeah, I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. I think you can look at an opportunity for change and still be under your bed. I'm okay with that. All of the above option. And none of the above, Mary, and good point, we probably should have put none of the above as an option also. It's never going to make it past into the chat. Yeah, for sure. It's never going to make it past REB like this, Bonnie. Fair enough. All right, folks. Thank you so much for participating. We're 92 this time. We still got lots of participation, which sets us up nicely for the second half here. So I'm just going to do one last pass through the chat room. Just people saying nice things. What a lovely bunch of people we have here. All right. I'm going to go ahead and go back the presentation. We're going to take up the second half of this, folks, and talk about what we can actually do. So to engage in this situation, we have this crisis. We know that we're being confronted with different things in different spaces. The first step in this process is for us to do the kind of reflection we need to figure out where we're at. If you're not familiar with this national equity project in the United States, I heartily encourage you to go and check out their work. The link is there. Maybe Bonnie can pop it into the chat room for us. They have these beautiful sort of reflective slide pieces. And did you can work with inside your room? We have another slide of their work later on. But it can be a really useful tool to sort of start doing that self-reflection and figure out where you're at. Because it's very difficult for you to be able to understand other people's points of crisis. Really be able to feel where they're at. If you're not aware of where you are, what power you don't have, and what power you do have. And really that's what we're going to talk about here is talk about what you can change. Maybe give you some ideas and structure for what that looks like. And then at some point get you guys to tell us what we should all be doing. And that's really what we're going to end up doing. Because we know that we've got learners who are all over the place, right? Housing, financial stressors, health, childcare, tech stressors. I mean, I've been teaching, taught maybe a couple hundred faculty this spring and this summer. Work with people from a lot of different places. I'm sure you've all done the same. It's always a different issue. You've got people who are grieving. I have some a person I was working with recently who's transitioning. There's that burden of work or kids or society or whatever. We're all stuck in these different places. And I think doing that self-reflection, finding out what our power is, and then not forcing other people to get to the point where they're disclosing what their problems are before we start to care. That care has got to be built into the process. It's going to be part of the way we design, part of the way we work, part of the way we interact. So what we're going to do here is sort of talk about four different ways in which we can, we should be thinking about designing for care. The first of those is in your design. And this goes back to what Bonnie was talking about earlier in terms of that simple, equitable, engaging sort of tagline that we were using early on in this process, trying to get people to the point where they had something to hold on to. So by simple, we're not talking about giving people like simple A plus B things to do, but rather focusing in on the things you really want to get done. So one of the first points of conflict we saw with K-12 educators were looking at is they couldn't figure out how to cover the curriculum. I had a great faculty member conversation first time we taught our emergency introduction online course who said, you know, I've been trying to cover the curriculum for years. I've always known that they weren't getting it. I've always known that I was giving them too much and I did it to them anyway. Why have I been doing this? And he's been, he's a well respected faculty member, he's been teaching for 20 years, but at some point he realized that he was not focusing on simple goals that students could expect to receive, they could expect to engage in and expect to succeed at. And that idea of keeping things simple I think is a really important marker to have inside of our design. Equitable is something we've been talking about. You've been talking about through this whole conference, certainly Bonnie's introduction addressed a lot of those different issues of people's different place and trying to give people space to be able to do that. I think of the work that Carla Arena is doing in Brazil where she has curriculum that they're writing for the government and there's a radio program that's part of the curriculum and it goes write a video of the curriculum, of your radio program, do a video that actually gets sent in or do an audio or do a write-up based on a radio program you gave for people in your house and it has five stages of interaction, not in a hierarchy, but giving people different options and giving them different places to go so that everybody can participate from the place that they're at. Does it make it the same for everybody? No, obviously there are challenges all over but thinking your way through people's space, where they're at, a really simple one and this is something I feel super passionate about having been in a PhD course as a student this summer is people keeping video on. Other people's reality is not necessarily yours like Bonnie's student with the construction going on in the background. There's a lot of other pieces right? Exposing people's inner lives is something that can be really traumatizing for them and in some cases even dangerous for them so thinking your way through other people's reality making sure your design doesn't require things that of them that is not easy for them to give and then engaging. Every interaction I've had and I'm sure you guys have been the same everybody always brings a how am I supposed to engage my students? How am I supposed to be able to do this online? And I think of one faculty member who was sure that he would never be able to teach online who sure was never going to work he's been teaching his creativity course face to face forever I love me Barry but Barry went through the course went through some training talked about it and he got to the point where he realized that you know what you actually can be engaged on the internet. Like there's a possibility here this internet thing could work and I think keeping our mind towards engagement and where we can be in that for me from a design perspective I always try to never go more than seven minutes although I've just broken that rule right now before I actually have some kind of point of engagement so this tells me I should hurry on to my engagement slide. Being simple doesn't mean we don't embrace the complexity of our environment so I think there's a balance there between acknowledging the complexity of that abundant environment that Bonnie was talking about of the fact that the internet provides that information abundance which is a blessing and a curse but embracing that complexity also allows people of different backgrounds for to participate in different ways it allows people to do different things so I think that's an important piece to keep in mind and this is we talked about Mahabali earlier this is another piece that comes from her creating space where students participate with each other inside of your online course I think is a critical piece one way or the other your students will find ways to work together online they'll be in discord or in chag or in maybe some of them would be in facebook but they're going to find a place to collaborate and those places are going to be clicky people only going to get involved in that they care but if you just if they know each other and you're only going to be invited in in bits and pieces if you control the third space if you control that shared space if you provide that space and make it useful as part of the design of your course then people students can come together to be with each other in a way that doesn't exclude different people and different people depending on what they're doing inside their course I think that's a really sort of important piece that Mahab was telling us about I think it's something that needs to be into the design too so what we're going to do now is we're going to go back to the mentee we're going to get your feedback on what that looks like so how are you guys designing for care how do you guys advise people to design for care what does that look like in sort of the design the course design that you do so we're going to go back over to mentee and I'm going to move to the next slide there we go how do you design for care now this is a text response there'll be a minute here while people's make way over think their way through that answer I understand some people it takes a little longer to sort of think your way through but there's time for the extroverts to answer right away and for the introverts to answer a couple minutes later so how would you how do you how do we design for care what are the the sort of points of advice that you have wanting I just say you put up your microphone too much synchronous learning yes for sure it's in four hours so I can pop into and I wanted to say just this is not just because not everyone here obviously is necessarily teaching students but how do you advise others to work with students right what what kind of broad there's a lot of knowledge in this room about how to build and I think that I love that sync not too much synchronous was the first piece that came up I'm also seeing some of the same things that we're talking about in the chat right people first not just processes flexibility and flexibility is difficult I'm seeing you know some of my faculty colleagues who are working so hard to design fully online courses for the first time they have those courses designed let down to the last minute I have not got most of my syllabus done for two weeks from today partly because I'm trying to leave pieces of it open partly because I'm not as organized as some of them are but flexibility is harder when you build into something so start with empathy that's a great one check your assumptions and that goes to that personal reflection piece for sure for sure that students have said yeah and there's some co-design comments earlier I'll try not to do too much scrolling I know that can be difficult for some people clarity of navigation we have right now we're going through a project we're trying to allow students to choose to come to an early orientation class and they don't know how to even get into the LMS and don't understand that they're not going to be sent a link that they have to go through on their own we got 60 comments so far that's fantastic broad an idea of what constitutes success I mean from an assessment standpoint certainly things like multiple choice are nightmare online but even other kinds of assessment and thinking of how students get towards success I know some people have passed fail there have been a number of other things that have happened with storytelling yeah storytelling can be a really powerful tool there to student-led approaches a lot of student-led stuff which is great I'm going to go back up I think I missed one section up here I saw the Maslow first blooms second and for those of us in education we often talk a lot about blooms taxonomy and getting to higher order thinking but well Maslow's can be critiqued as a as a hierarchy nonetheless the idea that people need the basics care first is important I put that into the chat for sure we got UDL in here so for those of you are not familiar I'm sure most of you are universal design for learning in terms of our our work go right to the bottom and then we'll move to the next lot wow there's so much great content here I will make these slides available so people can see them after the fact that this is a much great wisdom in here human face to your course you know what that introductory video has been such a powerful tool just a three minute video at the start to introduce people it's been so so much a that falls into the next section of habits student guide to a virgin's class so much good stuff okay I don't want to disrespect the work you've been given you've given here we'll post this up so people can explore them later we're going to have to move on to the next section here given the fact that we're doing Q&A if one of the moderators would just pop the finishing time that we're looking to hit into the chat room so I can make sure we keep us on time that'd be fantastic okay so I'm going to switch this back over and we're going to move to the next section which is show care and your habits so the first piece is about the way you design the course and the sort of planning you do ahead of time for what you're trying to get done the next piece is the actual habits that you build in oh perfect that you build in in your day to day practice the things you make sure that you do all the time so part of that's just about how you plan your presence those of you who are familiar with this this is from Athabosca from 1999 I believe but that way that you actually build your presence in your course so one of the things that that I like to try to tell faculty is think of everything you do is just an element of presence whether it's your teaching whatever that happens to be the synchronous the things you choose the content you choose that fact that you set up third space or shared space for people with social presence the ways in which you bring in other people's material think about it as one giant sort of miasma of presence they give you all of your actions as being present to that student and making yourself in there did Dave steal the present stuff as well that's amazing build regular experiences to make people feel like there's a regularity right so this is from Sarah Rose Kavanaugh I do a combo of music and question of the day to set the soothing movie set in front of a soothing movie animation that's sort of regular I'm going to help calm things down I'm going to build in a piece that makes everybody feel comfortable I think that those kinds of approaches can be really helpful to to build that regularity to build that comfort to in some way I won't say replace but do that first five minutes of class the smile the wave the hey Jimmy the how are you doing Jane that that sort of feeling at the start of class you can build that kind of habit in that gives people a sense of safety gives them that sense that you care about what they're doing and building in the culture of appreciation into what you're doing right so every appreciating people's good work I've seen people say well I read all the stuff you got to give people a sense that their works valuable and that smile in the wave you might give in the classroom you have to have a process by which you're telling students giving them that sense that their work is important that they are important and that's something you have to consciously build as a habit right you would have those sort of habits online a pertinent face to face you'd have them built in but to do them online you got to work your way through them so I'm going to skip this one guys because I want to make sure we hit the 1045 1050 mark and we're going to go into the connections one and we'll do a reflection after the next one okay so the next piece is showing care in your connections with your students so you know this signals back to the earlier comments about not making students declare what their challenges before you should care for them and when that those instances do happen it's not about asking what happened to a person it's about asking what happened to a person what's wrong with that person and I think that there are a lot of tools out there that will help you process those situations certainly what we've seen in these online scenarios is I've had more people reach out to me with their problems in this environment than I've had in the face-to-face one right in some cases you become that person of trust in that person of care that people look to and sort of finding those tools like this one that can help you know what to do becoming aware of what processes there are on your campus to help people it's something that allows you to connect and work with each individual those students because and this again is maha's distinction it's not all students and it's tempting and sometimes it happens where you get into that oh I can communicate with all my students at the same time it's awesome sending group responses to discussion posts I'm sending out emails at the start of every week because the habit's really important but what you can fall into is not dealing with every student right and there's a real distinction between constantly connecting to all students which again is easy to do online but not missing that fact that there's every student out there and there's a real distinction between what happens when somebody gets a group email and what happens when you connect with them individually and so one of those pieces for me that that's really important in my own work and something that I've always been super passionate about is that early intervention which is an individual process right where you see that student who is at the simplest level not logged in not known that the class started not know how to get there and it's pretty easy to find those people and intervene but also you don't see that shocked puzzled look on people's spaces that makes you realize that you've got four or five students who are not understanding but paying close attention to each of those individual students in their work and having those points where you can get a sense of how they're doing early on gives you a chance to do that individual intervention and again it's something that needs to get built in to the process that into your regular processes so you have those sense of connection so this time we will go back to Menti we're going to talk about connecting with care so you guys know the drill right now I'm going to move this forward assuming I remember how we're how would you connect with care so this is about thank you Bonnie or Martin sorry Menti.com 497 0043 so in terms of reaching out and paying attention to that individual student that individual faculty member who is who needs that care that person you're connecting with how do we keep how do we find approaches that allow us to connect with care to each of those individual people how do we make that happen what are your thoughts first names asking how they are doing those for that first five minute thing right where you're sort of still doing the introduction oh the class starts at nine we need to start the lecture at nine take some time have that conversation with people do the time to do the relationship building uncertainty into the curriculum love that be open listen don't judge that's good advice for life right there drop in chats yeah again that shared space if you can drop into those chats and be present in those spaces that can be really a really powerful way that students make that individual connection with you don't get assumptions about knowledges or skills so true taking that time like I'm I'm talking when I'm talking to faculty I'm saying like take even a half an hour your first day just do that sometimes painful but absolutely necessary process of making sure people are comfortable in the online environment you find out really quickly who's going to struggle take some time to make sure that they can come up they can catch up modifications for individual Bonnie is that you that just tried to jump in there I just have my mic on that I just wanted to share is when folks are designing things that encourage students to share with each other particularly in online spaces where they may not have built a whole lot of knowledge of each other also keep in mind not forcing too much disclosure keep things low stakes don't never I was in a session recently that asked people to share a story about their name and that can be both deeply intimate and also light and so we give people a safe place to go take the light path you don't have to build all the trust in day one with people that you don't know yeah the icebreaker thing like tell us about the best thing that ever happened to you you get into some pretty deep conversations right like you want to make those early conversations as low stakes as you can that's a great point on me I'm feeling that I don't belong at the moment oh see that's sad an empathic approach listen understand develop empathy I'd love to hear more about that person who doesn't feel like they belong be vulnerable show your mistakes you know just being kind to yourself and that's really where we're going after this but just being kind to yourself accepting that these mistakes are going to happen understanding that these challenges are everybody's challenges there's nobody who does this stuff as there's nobody who does this smoothly there's nobody who doesn't make mistakes and sort of in terms of their ability to do stuff encourage empathize ask about bright spots rather than problems open and approachable this is such great advice okay all right again we'll post these so people can get a chance to have a chance to go through them on their own but I'm cognizant of the time so I want to sort of finish this up here with last note we won't do the last breakout but I do want to say at some point showing care to yourself is maybe the most important first step of this process you can't pour from an empty cup folks if you don't take care of yourself and take care of each other it's really hard to take care of anybody else you know take that time find space for yourself somewhere and if you have to to pull back at something so that you can be healthy it's absolutely necessary or you need to have that space you need to be able to be you need to be good at some level to be able to be good to someone else right so to take care of yourselves I hope you guys have a fantastic fall I hope things you find new pieces inside of this and I hope that that you're all healthy and happy okay thanks everybody thank you so much Dave and Bonnie what a wonderful overview of how to think about care and how to strategize for it as we move forward with another academic season it's so critical and you gave us so many great tips and like a deeper dive into thinking about what care actually means I particularly like the self-reflective aspect of the work of care it's so important and so much at the core of what we have to do together I hope that we can take some questions from people we have a bit of time which is perfect so I guess some folks can use that mechanism in Blackboard collaborate here where you're you're putting up your hand or just throw in a question in the chat I'm happy to read it or I'm happy to pass the mic so to speak and you can ask a question verbally hi Mia it's Marin just to say if anybody wants to use the mic to ask a question I'm happy to give the mic to anyone who needs it and I know she will go ahead hi Bonnie hi Dave thanks for that that was really interesting one thing that I just wanted to I don't expect you to answer this but I think this is one thing that always comes up as the issue of time and you know with everyone just now is really time pressed just now and I think you know it's great that we're having this emphasis on care and I really hope that we can keep that but I am worried that when we get back to well not normal but when teaching begins again the time pressures are going to be even more time pressure so how do we ensure that we are making time to focus on design and and still do that and kind of counter some of some things I see kind of slipping back through in terms of oh yeah we've all done that we've all done things we've got everything online we don't need to worry about that anymore and kind of falling back into the old ways I have to say I was really struck by how optimistic everyone was and then one of your questions about what's coming you know what's going to happen I I sway from like just being kind of under the bed to be like kind of under the ceiling you know with really really scared about what's happening next but that's kind of a bigger thing but just the whole issue of time how do we make sure we have enough time and continue to have time to do these things are really really necessary for us and our students and everybody. Sheila I'm under the bed with you just to be totally clear and and I found that I teach five courses starting in two weeks and I'm currently teaching one and it's always a reminder once you're two feet into it how much extra time it does actually take to teach online partly because you never have that sort of everyone in the same room with you oh I've answered one question and everyone heard the answer element there is that you will get five emails that ask you the same thing and they all take an individual response so there there is an extent to which we can exert some control over time but I want to be again back to that idea of nested crises some of us simply have different types of time capacity in our lives depending on what else is in our lives and what kind of crises we're in this is where for me the biggest thing is keeping things as simple as possible I have paired out not the core ideas of any of my courses but things that I thought I had to have in them that I'm just finding at some point when it's up to here I've got to go okay we're not doing that and instead I'm going to make a super quick two-minute video and send this out to everyone saying hey I need you to hear this so that I'm not sending those five extra emails and maybe that I'm dropping an assignment because literally if I can't manage it my students can't manage it and it may be you know very important to think about the rigor of what people are learning but if people are totally overloaded they're not learning anything so ultimately you've really got to hold a line and that is to an extent a power that sits with many of us who teach not as much as we would like but nonetheless the block has to stop somewhere and I think there are I will also add to that because that is you know do less is is there the answer to this and you know sometimes it involves changing the way that you create assignments sometimes involves giving assignments and not grading them we're doing a pass fail on an assignment in I mean you've got to find a way to do that formative feedback but you don't have to give formative feedback on anything at the end of the day you need to care for yourself and if it's too much work it's too much work in addition to that though I do think that there are different people listening right now than there were before one of the things that's happened here is we've opened higher ed and taken a look at the whole box and people are looking inside and going well what are we doing anyway and I think there's a chance now with a concerted voice to actually have different conversations about how valuable it is to put people through the kind of hazing rituals that we do in so many sort of departments and talk about learning as something that is a human experience that is transformative and not about content coming into things because future of higher ed is not going to be content let me let's face it I think that there are actually people listening to that conversation right now who weren't listening even you know six months ago great and just to bring in Katherine Cronin's point that we also need to advocate for this at a structural level right that now obviously I'm not sure that anyone's standing there ready to give out more money but at some point we have an enterprise that we are that we need to fund in order to keep going right people can take on everything I know there are other folks with one who took on there's some folks who do have the mic now I just want to invite them to use it to ask the question I'll jump in then because that's an opportunity thanks I posted earlier in the chat some of the struggles that I've been through with my colleagues discussing how they're going to approach the coming year I've been advocating for increased flexibility I've kind of been made to feel that that's too soft that's not doing my job tips for surviving those sort of conversations Dave you've actually sat to some extent on some of the admin side of these conversations how would you suggest people respond wow thanks Bonnie um that was clever she did there she did there that was good um I think I've been in so many of these conversations I don't even know where to start um I always think of it as misplaced rigor somehow if I am tracking down the exact content of what somebody has done um and the fact that I've done a real multiple choice that's been validated through some process that I'm really actually doing my job to me it's misplaced rigor now telling that to people doesn't make them happy but what I have done is walk people through the process of what's actually what they're actually doing in that story earlier about the faculty member who said that they have been just covering the content um that's where that conversation started but they're listening to me talk about I think I may have even talked about rhizomes I think I was talking about community being the curriculum or some nonsense and they said well I mean you don't know what the students are really learning and then we sat down and had a conversation about whether or not the third year engineering students knew everything that happened in the second year and they went well no actually they start the year they're never prepared right so and so much of that was about opening up the things that we already understand about higher ed we know that somebody getting a 95 doesn't mean that they remembered everything that happened in the course we know that um when we give people all the things it doesn't mean they have them because we have that evidence the next time they start a course and yet we overlook all of those things because they're a part of what we've just accepted is wrong with face-to-face teaching because there are a ton of things that are wrong with face-to-face teaching right but we just accepted them because we've been doing it since Mesopotamian times right and I think walking people through that whole process is the only way I've achieved the 47.2 percent success rate I've had in this argument and it's certainly not one I went all the time but it is a question of just going through and deconstructing what that face-to-face place is and some people are willing to have that conversation and some aren't I mean I think in one guy who was like well I need to have 55 students on video while they're doing their exam so I can see what they're doing and we spent a half an hour in that conversation and by the end of it he goes wait I don't even know those students what am I even checking how am I even going to know what they're doing right and wait I actually want them to learn something anyway why would I do it that way it just took a lot of patience to get us there right a smart dude just had never thought about all the implicit things that he had taken on from his own education and how they were really um cloudy his own judge notice they said he in all those cases I think there might be a couple more questions and people lined up yeah we've given the mic to Pete and to Catherine so we've got two more minutes folks make the most if you want to ask a question can you hear me yes okay um this is Catherine and go away um I already asked my question but I was thinking about a second question and that is that um both of you have shared this work so generously since you started doing it in March and I really appreciate that you know just while you were building the boat you were sharing all the work with us all so I'm just wondering what what you're still struggling with the most I mean you have one another for support and you know you have your communities and so on but you know what's still a struggle for you and you know any any words of advice there I think for me the struggle is the one we just talked about is putting all the work in and then hitting the wall of I won't right and that is for the work I'm doing now so I'm responsible for digital learning strategy at the university and you get to that point where uh you know it's funny because I've been talking to my students about this I have 36 co-op students this summer and I say you know being right or being getting this done is not the same thing or not the same thing right so it's that accepting that you're only going to win part of this at any given time is the part that I struggle with the most um I've had people agree with me and say they won't do it yeah and for me I mean I'm teaching um and the struggle is not my students it's perhaps the systemic situation that they're being asked to navigate um and so really like everything with this crisis that is the pandemic the particular structures that were involved in affect you know our embodied identities our experiences and there is a real um it's really hard to move structures it takes as we are seeing with some of the the conversations for race and equity um all across the world now it takes a huge push to make a tiny move and a tiny change and even you know the this conversation Black Lives Matter conversation is six years old but suddenly Dave's mom is talking about it right it's it's finally hit a place I don't think that the online learning conversation well very different is um has quite hit that critical awareness and mass yet I'm very interested in what happens at the end of the fall because the spring was emergency remote and I think that the fall now for a lot of schools particularly in the states where there was a plan to go back face to face and now they're all going online it will still be emergency remote but some of us like where we are we've had more of a chance to plan and perhaps at the end of this particular window there may be a chance for that structural conversation um but it is really really difficult to have and all of this conversation is really about the structures that are oppressive to people in a whole variety of different ways in my humble opinion um that humble opinion is a wise one um I'm looking at the time and I think that we have made it to the to the completion point so once again I want to thank both of you for your wisdom and insights here I think you've given us so much to think about and also um stuff to sort of take to heart as we start a new academic season the self-reflection is so critical to moving forward with care and you've made that so evident today um thank you both so much once again I'm sorry we don't have time for more questions but I know that both Bonnie and Dave are very responsive in the Twitter environment um and they're super communicative people so um I I bet you if there's something you really want to connect with them about they'll be receptive um take care everyone