 Hi everybody, my name is Dave Cormier and I'm going to be your moderator today and I have the total privilege of being here with Robin DeRosa and Martha Burdus to talk about the ACE framework. Hi guys. Hey. Hi Dave. Hi. Maybe we can start out by you guys telling us a little bit about who you are and where you come from. Sure. I'm Robin DeRosa and I'm coming to you semi-live from central New Hampshire where I direct the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University which is one of our state colleges one of four here in New Hampshire. And I am Martha Burdus. I also work at Plymouth State University in the Open Collab with Robin and I am also coming to you semi-live but obviously we are not in the same place. And I'm Dave Cormier. I work at the University of Windsor. I'm a digital learning strategist here. So we're here to talk about the ACE framework and I wonder which of you is going to give us that 47.2 second elevator pitch to give us some kind of scene setting for what the ACE framework is and what it's for. I can do that because I enjoy the aerial view and then I like to make Martha do sort of like the actual work of things. But the ACE framework is I really maybe better to tell the story of how it came to be which was when COVID hit and colleges had to quote unquote pivot really quickly to emergency remote instruction. I guess we had some concern in the Colab that there was a little too much focus on the tech tools that were going to drive that period of online learning and less focus on how teachers needed to rethink their interactions with their curriculum and their students during COVID. So we created a framework inside of which sit very particular practices. So it's even though it's a framework and it's conceptual it has a lot of concrete practices to go with it. But the framework is really a guide to say during times of crisis and particularly during the remote teaching of COVID you have to think not just about your tools but about your values, your goals, the challenges that your students face and you have to really center pedagogy more than you center technology. So that's why we developed the ACE framework to help our faculty as they were engaging in that quote unquote pivot. And I say quote unquote pivot because that pivots like a beautiful delicate dance move and I don't think anybody who was actually doing it was feeling very graceful or delicate during it. So Martha really helped sort of flesh out the way the framework works online and how faculty can engage with it. So I think if you want Dave she can kind of take you for a drive through ACE a little bit. That sounds awesome. Take us through a ride. So yeah, just so everybody can understand like when we say framework we literally do mean framework. The ACE framework is divided into these three sort of values, adaptability, connection and equity and then within those those are subdivided at the assignment level, the course level and the institution level. So there's, if I do my math correctly, 18 practices in total. But really for faculty, it's the ones at assignment level and course level that are really going to be the most relevant. The institutional level is more for administrators and policymakers. If you want to just jump into one of those just before we do just before we do, I see the way that this is set up. So there's six across the top. So there's six assignment level one, six course level one, six institution level ones. So adaptability, connection and equity. Just before we jump in, can we get the overall piece? What's the difference between those three things and what does that look like just so we have the context when we get into the pieces? So the top two levels are the assignment level and I think anybody who works with faculty knows that it's great to talk about your vision. But when the rubber hits the road, people have content and activities and course plans, class plans even. So the question is like, what are you actually going to do in your classes? So those assignment levels are really about how to how to rethink the very micro parts of your of your course plans and how you would retool your assignment given the challenges of COVID. The course level are a little bit bigger. Those are about like modalities, for example, how might you deliver your course? They're about how you might set up your syllabus, how you might choose materials for your courses. And then the bottom six are the institution levels and these are really different instead of practices with activities like you'll see when you click into the top ones, Martha will show you what's in there. But the institution levels are really designed more for administrators and committees in particular with guiding questions. So one of the things I was really concerned about with ACE was institutional alignment, because it's all well and good to give faculty like really flexible or innovative or interesting approaches to rethinking their courses. But if the institution isn't aligned and they aren't getting certain kinds of supports, then you can really end up feeling like you're not having a very big impact. An example of that might be, let's say you're designing your courses to work really well in low bandwidth environments, and you're trying to think hard about some of your students who may not have access to the technology that they need during emergency remote learning, but your institution isn't doing anything to consider Wi-Fi hotspots or renting out devices. So we can get a lot more bang for our buck, so to speak, if all of the parts of our, from our inside our courses to our course designs to our programs and our institutions are pulling in the same direction. So that's the institutional levels is set up a little bit differently, but it's aligned to it, but it's designed to encourage that kind of alignment. Very cool. So then if we're going to jump in, then I will select the rethinking fairness one that certainly been one of the things that I've been confronted with during the whole COVID thing is that I thought I was running a fair classroom and doing that kind of stuff beforehand, but I've really been forced to sort of dig deeper and think more about that in my own practice. And it's certainly been a conversation I've had with tons and tons of people in the last 10 months. So maybe we can jump in here and see, see what we got. And you can talk us through what, what this looks like. You picked my personal favorite day. Oh, look at you. It is me. So each of the practices has a short introductory video. Robin, myself or Hannah Hounsel in the Colab talking a little bit about the overall. It's overall idea behind that practice. And then the practices themselves are all structured the same. It starts with the learn section, which are some techniques or activities that we've pulled together to help people explore that idea a little bit more. This one in particular, as you kind of mentioned, I feel like fairness is something that just has come into such stark focus during COVID in ways that it hasn't before. For me, it's actually, it sounds crazy to say this, but it's almost a little exciting because in the, you know, a year and a half ago, if I had talked about fairness with faculty, a lot of them just wouldn't have had the grounding to understand where I was coming from. But I think so many of our faculty have now seen first hand what their students are dealing with across the board. And suddenly it just becomes so clear that every student's experience is different and every student's challenges are different. Those are all the case before it just wasn't exposed. It just wasn't evident. And so in a way, this has been kind of an amazing time to suddenly see faculty say, Oh, I never realized before that I was assuming a level of sub of kind of objectivity to my teaching and to my students experience that has never really existed. So and then if you scroll down a little bit past those, the teach section, we have this Explorer section, this is where we relied so heavily on the amazing community of educators that were a part of through networking online, primarily through, you know, tools like Twitter, we just spent a lot of time mining things that other people were doing. Some of it is older pieces that were written, but I will also say the amount of activity happening in spring and summer in our field was mind blowing. Every day I felt like there was some new, whether it was a new, you know, piece of writing or a new framework or a new set of tools or or techniques that people were exploring. It really was kind of a joy to put together the resources for this because there was no, if anything, it was hard to edit the list. It was hard to come up with, you know, you wanted to add more and more and more. And then I've already been using your framework and your list of resources, because you what you've done here is organize these things into pieces that I can actually get whenever I need them. So if I'm in a conversation with somebody, and I have one of the 10 lists of resources that I collected early on in the pandemic, and then I'm like scrolling through it. Whereas what this does is it not only provides the sort of structure that allows us to sort of learn from it, but also for somebody like me, it organizes all of the pieces so I can go in and find the things quickly and serve effectively. So I really do appreciate this piece. Here has already been something that I've been using. So thank you so much for that. I also want to point out the slipper camp resources. We had kind of a softer version of a boot camp. Just as COVID was was hitting to help our faculty really think about a lot of the things that ultimately became part of the ACE framework. So in the slipper camp resources, there are really some great tidbits like on this page, the cruelty free syllabus that was developed by our colleague Matthew Cheney, which is really about at the syllabus level, you know, how do you how do you think about the messages that you are sending to your students about what the experience will be like in the course. And obviously, he's very influenced there by folks like Jesse Stommel in thinking about cruelty in your syllabus and folks like Sarah Goldrich Rabb thinking about basic needs in the syllabus. So there's a lot of really neat short kind of webinar like things with additional resources there that you can check out when you go into the slipper camp parts. And as a as a greedy presenter, are these resources that I can go in and steal? Yeah, so anything that's in the ACE framework that we created is openly licensed. Other things might just be what we call free stuff on the internet. So like sometimes we might have linked to something that's not actually openly licensed, you can of course use everything. But if it's stuff that's created by the collab, or the framework itself, all of that stuff is CC by. Yep. So for engage, we had a couple of different ways. It probably is worth kind of pointing out at this, you know, at this juncture that like the ACE framework was our professional development work for the summer. So in addition to the building the framework building this resource website, we ran a four week workshop with folks from PSU, walking them through this as a curriculum. And so some of these engagement opportunities have passed like the, the join a meeting, those were some meetings we ran over the summer. But others people can continue to obviously do the discuss on Twitter is just using a hashtag to talk about that practice. One of my personal favorites is the submit something engagement because basically what it allows is any person to to come along and add a an idea or a practice or a technique that is related to this to this particular practice of their own and it immediately gets added to the bottom of this page. So we have a little bit of a library, I don't know whether or not any yet. So we have one that somebody added here. Somebody who was in our workshop last summer had added cool. So it's kind of a neat way to continue to grow the resource as well with with the people who are actually working with it over the summer. We encourage people to use hypothesis to annotate any of this. And then for people at PSU, we also had a Microsoft teams team set up for the ace framework where they could go in and talk among our community about using any of this within their teaching. So that's the basic structure of each practice. They all kind of follow that same structure. And I just want to point out like the the idea here was obviously to support faculty, staff and institutions during COVID. But the ace framework I think was helpful in some other situations. I have talked about it with folks in California, in terms of wildfires. And so I think one of the things about ace and I think in some ways maybe it's time, you know, not the resources, but like the time of ace has passed and we will probably be carrying a lot of this forward into our next project. But the idea behind ace was really not about COVID. It was about the idea that if you're human, which most of our students are, you're likely to be engaged in learning during times of challenge or even trauma. So if you think of K 12, and then you think of college, that's a lot of years to be engaged in learning. And it's very rare that someone's going to go through 1214 plus whatever years of schooling without, for example, having a significant illness or having the death of a family member or having a regional emergency like a flood or a fire. In this case, it was a global pandemic. It hit us, you know, collectively all at once, which really, you know, catalyzed a lot of this development. But you can use these kinds of things when you're just thinking about the fact that most of us are going to be dealing with these kinds of challenges. And if we do build more flexible, connected and equitable architectures for learning, people are not going to have to check their humanity at the door when they engage in something like college. And if you care about things like retention and completion, or even more surprisingly, if you care about people, then these are good ideas, I think, outside of COVID. So that's why Martha and I made a commitment not to put anything into the ACE framework that we didn't think would be a good long term practice after COVID because we feel like these are the kinds of things that can help us adjust our learning environments just for the fact of being human. You bring up the question of retention. It brings me to my favorite current question in the field, which is student engagement. So right now, for the first time in my career, I can imagine talking to a senior administrator about engagement and having them actually care. Because the open that what online learning that the sort of moved online has done is made students realize that they have a choice, particularly regional students, particularly localized students, but students generally have way more choice than they used to have. Well, they may have already had always had that choice, but they didn't realize it was there. And suddenly the experience that a student has as an institution is actually going to become increasingly more important for the hard numbers that keeps the lights on inside the institution. And so if I was and this maybe goes down to some of the institutional pieces, but if I'm going to do you think that this fits in with that engagement conversation? And when I say engagement, I don't mean I don't mean that in a banal sense. I mean, like legitimately students caring about and engaged in their learning. Can you talk about this from that perspective? Like how that really, like you say, addresses the always problems we've had in education? Yeah, I mean, this, you're just putting your finger on so much of my own motivation for for being being focused on ACE, because when emergency remote learning came, my institution and many institutions nationally really transitioned to the most sort of ubiquitous kind of online learning, I think you'll see this in some kind of online learning standards that are very popular nationally in the US. But a lot of those approaches to online learning are a little bit more, they're very flexible, which is great and that's part of ACE, but they tend to be very competency based, very mastery oriented and very focused on content, content delivery. And content delivery isn't important. I mean, you know, I have a PhD. I like content, right? I like stuff, learning, you know, ideas. But I will also say that the engagement piece often falls right out because that's, you know, that's sort of old banking model of making the deposits of the content. And a lot of our online learning architectures are really focused in that way. And when we go to flexible architectures, we default a lot of times to content mastery because students can do it more individually. They can do it on their own time, right? There's lots of benefits. So the challenge for ACE was really to say, particularly like at a school like Plymouth State, where we are a regional institution, we serve a lot of local students, we're very residential based, we're very place based, and we have a big focus on teaching, community and collaboration. So the challenge for us was to say like, when we move online, we don't want all our courses to look the same. We don't want all of our students to be working independently. We don't want content to fully replace collaboration. We still want to be inquiry based. We still want to be project based. And we still want to be experiential, which is very challenging, I think, for some educators, even though connected learning is a thing, lots of faculty are not as familiar with how to use technology to connect people together, right? They use technology to deliver. That's like the mechanism of the learning management system to manage content. So ACE is very much about that connected section of ACE is really very much about thinking about engagement through the process of human connection and collaboration, and that if students become participants who can also bring themselves into the course, we posit that they're therefore going to be more connected. It's one of the pillars sort of of open pedagogy really. So that's a big part of ACE and one of the things Martha really brings to the table is her experience in in connected learning and in online environments that really foster community. And that's where I was going to put the next question, actually. And Martha, feel free to ignore my question and say something smarter. In terms of what when I look at this, the first my first sort of thought is, Oh, it's these are to some degree a response to the affordances of the internet, right? So there are some things that are just different. So if you look at the community, you look at OER, you look at high flex. If you these are all sort of things that have not just started 10 months ago, 12 months ago, there are things that are brand new. There are things we've been forced to deal with. So how much of this do you think is a response to those affordance of the just how the world, how learning has had to change because of the ubiquity of information because of connection because of and in response to some of the amazing capacities we now have to? Yeah, I think it's an interesting needle that we're trying to thread in a way. That's my latest new expression. I always have one because, you know, my background is really in in technology and academic tech. That's where my my graduate degree in is in. That's what I worked in for years and years at Mary Washington. In that work, more and more I was doing faculty development and instructional design. And my focus now at PSU is really on those ladder topics. I don't work in academic tech anymore, but I certainly talk about technology a lot and I talk with faculty about how they use technology a lot. One of my favorite things that I've said in the past is, you know, we always have these weird conversations where people will say, you know, for years and years and years, you'd be in a conversation. People would say it's not about the technology. It's about teaching, which is a really difficult thing to argue against because obviously it's about the teaching like that's the most critical thing is is our teaching because we are teachers. But I also have always pushed back on that because the reality is that we have technologies at our available to us right now that have the potential to show us new ways of thinking about teaching and new ways of thinking about knowledge and new ways of thinking about collaboration and communication and community, what it means to be part of an academic community and an intellectual community. Those new ways of thinking are something we have to become adept at. We can't we can't necessarily ignore those things and say, but it's only about the teaching. The teaching is all that matters. So there's this interesting kind of, like I said, threading the needle or balancing act that we need to do. I think one of the things that was alarming as COVID was breaking was how much of the rhetoric was focusing on technology as a panacea or a solution to this crisis we were facing. And that's super problematic because, yes, the technology shows us new things, but we are the ones who have to make the critical choices about how we're ultimately going to enable those things or enact those things or engage with those things. So I look at like, you'll notice I think that maybe the only technique and ace that's not technology agnostic is the internet is as classroom and community. I don't think there are any others that kind of call out tech in any specific way. And that's really I'm going to say deliberate, even though I just had to question whether or not that was the case, but it really was deliberate because it's not that if you dig into these, there isn't lots of mention of technology, but for fronting our humanity in in make in all of this and our need to be able to make choices, not just choices, but informed choices about how we use technology, I think is the work that we need to be doing a better job at. It would be, you know, you would have to call me a liar if I said I don't think technology is a critical piece of the future of higher education, because obviously I think that thanks, Dave. Obviously, I think that but but I think it's so much more complex and nuanced than than we usually that we usually acknowledge and certainly then at the institutional level, it's usually acknowledged. I don't know if that answered your question, but I like saying it. So it's great. So we have we have a couple minutes left and there are a whole bunch of people who have just watched this video and they're like, I want to use it's framework. So for those people who have made it to the end of this video and are now thinking, I want to use the Ace framework. What's the first step in the process? What should they do right now? Well, on the Ace framework page, there is a link that's called how to use the Ace framework. So that's a good starting place. And there's really two ways that you can engage with Ace. And then I'll say a third quick thing afterwards. So the first is that you can just dip in and out of the practices that are interesting to you. And that's probably what I would suggest. You know, it's it's designed to be learner driven. So you figure out what the parts are that would be helpful to you and you can dip in and out of the practices. And each practice, I think, could be kind of like a three week course on its own or it could be a half hour of learning for you. So you can use that to scale according to what's interesting. Also, if you look at how to use the Ace framework, you will see in there the workshop that Martha mentioned, it's a four week curriculum and you can run that with your faculty. We've had other institutions use the Ace framework with the four week workshop. And Martha and I are super happy to have a quick meeting with you to help you kick off the facilitation of a workshop like that at your own institution. So we won't we we don't facilitate them for other institutions, but we will do a kind of train the trainer thing and help get you ready if if you want to do it. But the last thing I would say is, you know, one of the benefits of having Martha as your collaborator is that the way we think of professional development, I think is that it is a learning community. It's larger than the Colab, larger than Plymouth State. So we're always engaging in that. So Martha is just a wealth of, you know, I may say, oh, I think we really need to tackle such and such. And then the next day, there's a new framework, you know, with clickable things. And because I think, you know, we don't really plan to rest on ACE, we plan to keep putting stuff out, revising, revisioning, rethinking. So one of the best things I'd suggest is join up with a learning community, whether that's following the Colab on social media or like checking our events calendar, if you don't have a learning community of your own around pedagogy or engaging with folks on Twitter or whatever, because ACE gives you a lot, a lot of things to work with. But I think it's less about that content than it is about ongoing conversation. And the Colab is, you know, part of our mission is to provide that beyond Plymouth State as a public service. So engage with us and future conversations, because you'll see probably some things we think now about ACE, you know, Lord knows Martha and I have been doing lots of workshops for lots of institutions about high flex and, you know, month to month, our perceptions of high flex change quite a bit. So we don't expect the content in ACE to stay stable. So join in the conversation is what I would say. Martha, last thoughts. Oh, I would just say this. If you visit the ACE page, one of the things that you will also see is that there's, you know, the ACE framework is at the center, but we also recognize that it doesn't accommodate or address every kind of every kind of situation that you might encounter in your teaching. There's lots of kind of ancillary stuff. We have a student guide for ACE. We have something called complicating the conversation that really drives into some of those situations that maybe those techniques don't feel like they intersect with. So we encourage you to kind of take the time to explore a little and and let us know if you think there's, you know, more that we could be doing on that front. It may not be that we're revising ACE. But as Robin said, we do have plans for the future of what the next step of this looks like. Can you put a logo in now? Like something fancy that's like, stay tuned, you know, some music and icon. Yeah, that's what we want. But the community can help us shape what that next that next thing looks like. So stay stay in touch. That is a perfect final comment. Thanks, guys, for coming in and having this conversation. I know that I enjoyed it, but I always enjoy talking to you guys. So I hope everybody else has a fantastic day. Take care of yourselves. Still wash your hands. Still don't touch your face and we'll see you all again soon. Mm hmm hmm. Om nom nom.