 Welcome to yet another session of Domain's 21, and I'm your host today, Jim Groom, and I have the absolute pleasure of introducing three folks who have been working with WordPress Multisite for a while now, and I was interested in putting together a panel to talk a little bit about not only how they're using WordPress Multisite on campus, but what that usage has looked like during the pandemic. So I'm going to hand this over first to Laurie Miles to talk a little bit about her work and then folks will chime in and hopefully we'll have a great discussion. So thanks for coming to this session. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. Hello, everybody. I'm Laurie Miles. I'm an instructional technology specialist with the Center for Teaching and Learning at UNC Asheville. I am not a web designer. I'm not a web developer. I am an instructional technologist and designer. So I definitely cannot talk the web design, web development talk, but I want to tell you our experience with WordPress and how successful it has been. UNC Asheville is a small liberal arts college in the UNC system. The UNC system has about 17 universities that are connected. We're small liberal arts. We have about 3700 students and about 250 full-time faculty. We first got a WordPress Multisite back in 2016 when we ran a digital humanities pilot study mostly to introduce faculty and their students to digital humanities tools such as interactive timelines, interactive mapping, digital storytelling, data visualization tools, infographics gave students a different way to basically show their learning other than just writing a term paper. Because of the pilot study, we found that the WordPress gave the students a place to actually a platform to show their work, to show their digital projects. The pilot study was really well received and everybody really liked WordPress. So we ended up keeping WordPress for these digital projects to continue to use in classes. But it also gave students a place to record and reflect on what they were learning and share that information with a larger Internet audience. So they learned how to not just develop, but also how to write for an Internet audience. Since then, we still use our WordPress Multisite as a venue for these digital projects, student digital projects. But it's also evolved into this great platform for applied learning situations for the students like internships and study abroad experiences and service learning projects, undergraduate research, as well as portfolios. Our English department has adopted WordPress as their writing portfolio platform for their students, as well as blogging, and then some students request our sites for their organizations. Our sites are available to our faculty, staff, and students. So we also have faculty who have been requesting sites, mostly for personal websites to display their research, or talk about their courses that they teach and that sort of thing. Some have been using it for posting and showcasing student work or for their department, or some have used our WordPress sites for a campus event or a conference, and then some have used our WordPress sites for maybe a grant that they've been awarded. So explain that grant. It's grown quite a bit from that small pilot study back in 2016, which involved about seven or eight faculty, approximately 35 of their students, and I think we set up 10 original sites that pilot study. We now have over 1,400 sites in our WordPress multi-site, and that includes about over 1,300 students, our users actually, and that includes in those users about 70 to 75 faculty and staff who've used our WordPress site. So it's grown quite a bit. That's excellent. I mean, wow, let's just even the playing field here, Lori. There we go. Yeah, that's fascinating that you grew from just a pilot to 1,400. I'd be interested, Colin, what's your experience been like? I know you introduced WordPress multi-site at Trinity Western University. I'd love to hear more about that. A lot of parallels to UNC Asheville as well. We're a small, private liberal arts university in Lower Mainland, BC, just outside of Vancouver. I started there as manager of instructional technology and online learning in 2016, and installing WordPress was one of the first things I did. It was a WordPress multi-site shared hosting with Reclaim, and when we started, the first big project was getting our education students building their portfolios, their professional year portfolios in WordPress rather than the current heavily templated site that they were using prior to that. Since then, we've grown to we're just a little under 3,000 sites and users. We've got a few more users than sites, so a few people have signed up, but haven't created a site. Mostly what we're using it for is portfolios at this point. We started a foundations project, which foundations is a course that all first-year students take in their first semester. It's kind of an introduction to liberal arts learning. So every incoming first-year student gets a site. So we're adding about five or 600 sites each year. So that's caused us to grow. We stretched beyond the shared hosting and went to a dedicated server, and now we're on Reclaim Cloud. One of the questions is you have a kind of custom template, almost like a cloner situation where you've created a custom portfolio possibility for your users. Like, how is that working? I'm interested in that and what work you did. Yeah, we worked with Alan Levine 2017 or 18, and he created some custom themes for us that he created four themes and he built in kind of the structure of the foundation's course. So students can come in, they choose one of those four themes and we've actually added a bunch more for different uses now. And when they choose one of those themes, they get a clone of that site. So it comes built in with menus and some custom post types. And categories, everything is ready to go along with some instructions on how to get going. So instead of getting a blank WordPress site with Hello World, they get a site that's built out with some templates already and some instructions. Like, hey, if you wanna change the content on this page, click here, click the edit button. And really like training wheels to kind of get them up and running with, hey, this is it, this is how you use WordPress. Here's one really well put together portfolio site, but feel free to explore beyond that. Yeah, I really like that, this is just a split idea in some ways or smallest possible learning online tool that Brian Lam and Alan Levine created as a kind of structure within which to make using WordPress even that much easier. Yeah, yeah, it's worked really well. Great, well, thank you. Shannon, how are you? How's it going? Good, welcome to Domains 21. Can you talk a little bit about WordPress at University of Mary Washington? I can, you know, how much time do you have? So I'm the Associate Director of the Digital Knowledge Center at Mary Washington, which is not a title that discusses at all any of the work I do. And I've been in that position since November, no, October of 2019. And, but I've been at Mary Washington working since 2013 and I was also a student from 2006 to 2010. And so I feel like I've seen a lot of the evolution. I'm gonna be talking about UMW blogs because that is our WordPress multi-site. And that started in 2007. And, you know, I feel like Jim, at any point, you wanna just pop in. It feels weird to talk about some of these projects as I'm gonna touch on domains a little bit. And Jim, along with other members of DTLT were people who started UMW blogs at Mary Washington as well as Domain of One Zone. So it started just, you know, it's weird to hear these experiments still happening because to me multi-site is this thing, this archaic piece of software that people were doing way back when. In fact, in some ways, we'll probably talk about this when we talk about the pandemic. Mary Washington made the move to really strongly push Domain of One Zone. And because of that, the consequences that our WordPress multi-site kind of started to languish and not really get the attention and love that's needed. And over the past year or so, working with Reclaim Posting and the people within my unit, we're trying to think about how we could revitalize that space in contrast to Domain of One Zone because, you know, as I've been hearing other people talk about, it provides that really easy way to get into WordPress, get to publishing right away where Domain of One Zone has a little more of a learning curve as well. So that's the bit of history. So since 2007, UMW blogs has existed and it comes with all the legacy crufts. You imagine a system that is that old and tale, so dismantling that and getting people excited about that space again, just added some new themes and plugins in the hopes that people will be like, oh, this is not a dated website anymore to get people thinking about that space and what it could afford over, say, a Domain of One Zone or how one might use one over the other at Mary Washington. So, you know, long legacy of being in those spaces and thinking about how to use that kind of technology. That's a great overview, Shannon, thank you. And it actually really transitions beautifully into a discussion we can all have now about what has the usage of WordPress and WordPress multi-site in this situation looked like over the last year? I mean, there's been a lot of discussions about shifts to the year of Zoom, the LMS, and I would be interested just each of you working as you do with WordPress multi-site on your campus. What does that situation look like with supporting that kind of work? In particular, Shannon, you talked about like this moving to a simpler self-service up and running. You don't have to deal with C-Panel and Domain of One Zone and some of that overhead. You can put people in really seamlessly and then when you have tools like you talked about column with the cloner, you really open up possibilities for a quick portfolio website that you can explore beyond but you could really solve a lot without the same overhead as something like Domain of One Zone. So I'd love to hear you all talk a little bit about your experience. Maybe Lori, you can start us off and then folks jump in. I'll be glad to. We've definitely seen an uptick since the pandemic and particularly with the faculty requesting our sites because I think the faculty are just, now they've had to jump to online. They're looking for all sorts of different tools to make that happen for them and to make sure they get the information and their resources and materials, content to the students. So we have definitely seen an uptick in faculty requests. For example, this spring, I was counting up, we have 17 new faculty have requested sites and that's up from, I think there was six last spring in 2020 and like seven in fall 2020. So it's definitely more and what we're seeing is that there is, what they're using them for is mostly to make online resources for their course like say a syllabus or course materials that can be seen easily like responsive in like a tablet or a cell phone. And so the student wouldn't have to go to a PDF which is a little bit more difficult to read on say a cell phone. Another way we've seen an increase is that faculty want a site that they can put their course materials out there and share that information or those resources with their colleagues either in their department or at another school. So those are the two big areas I've seen a change over and particularly this semester. Like the old school idea that a WordPress site is an open educational resource where you could put links, videos, create a whole, I mean, I've seen some amazing examples of WordPress sites that really are elaborate teaching resources that are open and accessible beyond that. But yeah, Colin, Shannon. Okay, yeah. I wish that I could say that we had like an upswing and people excited about getting into UMW blogs or even to made one's own. But what we experienced was kind of the opposite in many ways. And I'm gonna chalk that up to the fact that we are a really small unit on campus and we did not lead in that conversation. And so, so many people were desperate to think about online. And there were some, not a lot of pressure from the top but there was an expectation that you would use Canvas which is our LMS in some baseline way. So, the provost says it should be a landing page and faculty here, you must use Canvas or else, right? So there's this disconnect. And then if you were gonna add something like UMW blogs up top of that, it becomes yet another technology thing that they would have to worry about. So one of the big things I've been thinking about since we've kind of seen our numbers drop in some ways. People not utilizing it in the same way is that I wanna help faculty think about what are the connections they can make between the LMS and UMW blogs or to main one's own. Like how can you use these, it's not either or. Like it's not like you're either in Canvas or you're in UMW blogs. How can you utilize what one does well, what the other? I would not recreate a grade book in UMW blogs. That seems like crazy to me, Canvas does that. Like let's let that live there. But like what could you do in a WordPress multi-site that you just Canvas locks you down, doesn't let you do. That's awesome. What I noticed coming into this last year is, there's not a long history of online learning at Trinity Western. We're very much a residential face-to-face environment. And so there's just not a long culture of thinking about teaching online. But I had a couple of faculty in the fine arts department who wanted something a little bit beyond Moodle. And so they started playing around with WordPress. And this was just before everything shut down. And one of those guys, Josh Hale, teaches a class of fine arts class and he has some experience in WordPress. And so he put together a really nice site, built it from the ground up and had everything ready to go. And then he shared it in his department. And so we've got three, four, five other faculty who are brand new to WordPress who have this awesome template that they're starting with. And what I noticed is the faculty that put together those sites last summer really had great courses this fall. Still a lot of work and it was still exhausting but because they had put so much thought into building that site and building the structure of their course, they had a much easier time this last fall when a lot of other people who hadn't had that opportunity maybe had a bit more work to do. One of the things I agree, I mean, that's interesting, the idea of putting the time into building the infrastructure and the course and then watching it. And one of the things I know we played a lot with with UMW blogs and Laura Gibbs has talked about recently when talking about beyond the LMS is the idea of students having their own space to do that work, to do that reflection, to do that writing and blogging, can we say that word? Do that blogging and then have it kind of stream in or syndicate into a more centralized space, right? What has been termed the mother blob? And like it's almost seems, as Shannon you were joking about earlier, it almost seems archaic to be talking about like RSS, syndication, people having their own site, my website and then that streaming into a course site. But I still think like it was one of the real kind of asynchronous decentralized methods of using some of these technology tools that was a lost opportunity over the last year. And I don't think it was for lack, I mean, for complexity. I don't necessarily think, I think there was this sense where presence is all, right? Like being there, if you can't be there is everything. And there was no other way to be there than for us like this to be split into the Hollywood squares of another presentation. And I just wonder why that was and why the actual tools that made the web so amazing were so quickly, you know, disregarded. I mean, I know this is an open-ended question, so jump in. But I was just wondering in your experience, like what's your take on that? I think there's a lot of kind of reversion to what's comfortable. That, you know, happened in the last year. You know, the initial transition, the pivot as we've come to say, you know, to this emergency remote teaching was really traumatic for a lot of faculty. And so they went to what they know. And, you know, I wasn't gonna fault anybody for trying to just trying to survive that last three weeks of spring, what was 2020. So I think that played a lot into it. And since then, I think we've been able to build capacity and I think there's more pliability and kind of willingness to look at some new ways of thinking about online learning. I'm gonna play the devil's advocate here for just one second with something you said, Colin, is, but did they know Zoom or did they have to learn Zoom in the pivot? Like, so that to me is like, they could have learned several things, but the thing we all decided for them to learn seemingly was Zoom or some Zoom-like product. Yeah, they certainly had to learn Zoom, but learning Zoom wasn't, behind Zoom was still the lecture, which is still a comfortable place. I think that, you know, I had multiple conversations about, hey, you don't have to lecture. You can take your lecture notes and type those out. And then students who don't have significant bandwidth, those students can still participate. And there was a, I got a hard no on that one. Well, no, I couldn't possibly do that. And, you know, it's that reversion to what's comfortable. I think that played a lot. Well, one thing I've noticed is that there are, I agree with Colin, and we're a small university too that did not adopt online at all. We had Moodle as our LMS, and that was usually used as a supplement to the face-to-face classroom. So when the big COVID transition happened, we were still getting questions, faculty did, but we were still getting questions about how can I deliver my content? That was their main focus. It wasn't necessarily, what are the students learning? So I think something like WordPress where the students actually demonstrating what they're learning, or, you know, you have a record of it, you can see, particularly when they're reflecting on what they're learning, you know, how that's changing the way they're thinking, I really think that's a slow shift to turn. It's just the way faculty were taught themselves and that's what they're comfortable with, like you said. But I think it's happening. There are definitely proponents on our campus that are all about students doing more work and seeing what they're producing instead of throwing the content at them. And so it's just a slow transition, I think. Yeah, I would echo everything you all said here. I'm also at a small institution, really residential face-to-face is emphasized and making that transition. Yeah, it makes sense to, I'm going to lecture going forth. And so I don't think it's so much a face-to-face to online so much as a synchronous versus asynchronous idea. Like most people were not familiar with the idea of what it would mean to work with students asynchronously because traditionally if you're face-to-face, like that is just not something you do because you benefit from that face-to-face time as well. So, you know, I think this revealed for a lot of faculty. I'm hoping that they recognize the ways in which they've been teaching, like coming into that conflict, realizing like, oh, if I try to do what I do and push it into this online, you know, mode, thinking it'll be the same. Like it reveals the ways I teach and maybe I need to rethink that, like maybe give students more time to reflect. Can asynchronous be just as good as a synchronous? I mean, I would say yes, you know. Laura Gibbs would definitely say yes, right? But I think people are just not, especially in the residential mode, not in that like, no, what I do is I'm, you know, I talk to students and like they can only imagine that happens in this kind of, you know, conversation. Not that it can't happen like that in an asynchronous world, but it's all of this or not. But it's interesting. And I want to thank you all for engaging this because I am talking now as like, you know, I used to play a professor on TV as an adjunct. I used to play an instructional technologist at UMW on TV. But one of the things that struck me is as folks started to go on to a Zoom and I saw this with Antonella, who is my special lady friend who was doing adjunct teaching for Italian, is there was this sense of talking into this strange void of black boxes and that idea of presence and bandwidth and people not being there or being there. And like, so the idea of presence that Zoom tried to approximate was kind of like laden with its own deep issues about is that presence or like Lori said, is there a presence around having people record and share what they're thinking in a space that maybe isn't one to one dependent on bandwidth, immediate access at the moment, simultaneously and synchronously. I mean, I'm obviously a little bit biased, but I thought the push to synchronous video virtual learning at all times seemed anathema to what instructional technology was trying to help folks imagine for decades now. Yeah, and one last thing I'd like to turn here is like, I think a lot of places students were demanding that because that's what they imagined that they also needed, right? It wasn't just faculty pushing for this. Lots of students are like, I want this thing and like not really, you know, they wanted what was easy for them too. Like students working in a synchronous world, most of the students that come into Mary Washington are not used to setting themselves up to work in that mode. Like just the, I rely on the structure of coming to a class and meeting synchronously to understand what I'm supposed to do and that through people for students, I think wanted the same thing that faculty wanted in many ways. And so we're fine with that. We're not gonna push back. Well, look, I wish we had more time to keep going with this conversation because now I'm fascinated and I speak really as a bit of an outsider, which I'm not used to. So I wanna thank you all, Shannon, Lori and Colin for spending some time with us and sharing your experience over the last year. Appreciate it. You're welcome. Yeah, thanks for the invitation. Absolutely. All right. Well, I'm gonna play the famous, now famous outro. Ready? Get ready. Nom, nom, nom.