 Okay, so before I start, I would like to acknowledge that I am currently located in what is now known as New Westminster, BC, and which is on the traditional ancestral territory is shared by ten different nations. And I like to highlight the Kikai Nation, which is the only Canadian nation without a permanent land base. And as we are located in our homes, you might want to take a look at this resource that I quite like, nativeland.ca, to search for your own postal code. And you can find out more about whose lands you are located on and the history of some of those nations. OK, so my name is Jens. I'm an educational consultant at the CTLT, and I will co-moderate the session with Will. And Will, do you want to quickly pipe up and introduce yourself? Sure. Hi, everybody. My name is Will Ingle. I'm a strategist for open education initiatives with the CTLT as well. All right. And we will be in the session with our four panelists, Cole, Georgia, Khalith, and Sylvester. And you can just go ahead and introduce yourselves in that order. Hi, everybody. My name is Cole Evans. I have the fortunate privilege of being president of the AMSEBC Vancouver. It's great to be here today. Hi, baby. And if you... Sorry. Do you want to share your area of study and year as well? Sure. I always forget that I'm a student. I'm a student, too. I work all the time, so I'm like, oh, actually, you also attend this school. But I am a political science student with doing a minor in history as well. And this is my fourth year at UBC. Hi, everybody. My name is Georgia. I'm the AMSE Vice President of Academic and University Affairs. I go by she, her pronouns, and I am a fourth year student studying biology with a minor in health and society. It's nice to see you all here today. Hey, folks, I'm Khaled. I use he and pronouns. I'm a settler scholar calling in from the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. I serve as the AMSE VP of External Affairs, mainly doing a lot of work surrounding government related advocacy. I'm also a fourth year political science student, and I've got one more year left until I hopefully end my degree. Hi, everyone. I'm Sylvester Mensa, the current AMSE Vice President of Administration. I'm in my final year here at UBC, studying international economics and the Bachelor of International Economics program over at the Vancouver School of Economics. It's a pleasure to be here today and definitely looking forward to our discussion. Welcome to our panelists, and we are appreciative of your time. And thank you for agreeing to be here and share your experiences. And I will hand off the mic to Will. Great, I do just want to second that. I really appreciate our panelists being able to take time. Not only is it as always a busy time this semester, AMS elections are currently underway, so there's a lot happening for the AMS. If you're a student who's not currently elected, please go out and vote. Don't don't miss your opportunity to to participate in AMS elections. So it is coming up on March twenty twenty one, and we're about almost a year into the change to remote teaching and remote learning. Can you describe a positive surprise? We've heard a lot of the negatives, I think, or experience a lot of the negatives. But have you just can you describe a positive surprise you've encountered in online learning, I would say, within this term or within the last year? Yeah, I know. Thank you very much for that question. I'd like to kind of share my input on that. So I'll say I've definitely been taking online classes for the past four terms, as everyone else. But for me, I think the big positive for me is the amount of resources being saved and by resources, this goes from time to money to energy. Because now in this online environment, I do find it that I do have a better opportunity where I'm in more control of the pace at which I study. Being able to adjust, I guess, material at a healthy pace that allows me to excel. But also with online school, I do realize that I realized the amount of time that was being wasted just getting to class or just trying to have an education. And now with the comfort of being able to study from literally anywhere, I do believe there is a huge positive when it comes to being able to have a more comfortable learning environment, as well as opening more opportunities for further experiences and engagement to be on just academics and just to speak of my current work commitment. So as a full-time staff in the AMS, I really do not know how I would have been able to balance school and work if I wasn't taking school online. But now I do have the ability to kind of switch in and out of both, allowing me to also do more than just working full time and having a kind of full time course load. So for me, I would say kind of major positive saving resources, which also opens the door for so many more experiences that students often overlook on campus, given the kind of demanding course loads that we have here at UBC. Thanks. Can you give an example of maybe an unexpected specific personal challenge that you feel comfortable sharing related to teaching or sorry, learning online? Yeah, for sure. I can take that on. So throughout the semester, I've been actually recovering from a concussion, which sucks on its own. But when you're staring at a screen for hours and hours on end in this Zoom world, I'm sure that we can all relate to the Zoom fatigue. It's definitely been compounded. So I'm personally registered with the Center for Accessibility. And so one of the best ways of being of having to coordinate with my instructor and reaching out to my instructor has been that additional support. But I think it's also been so incredibly meaningful when instructors and TAs also reach out to students when they notice, hey, something's up, like a student isn't handing in their assignments or isn't showing up to class. So I think that that's been one of the biggest pieces of, you know, when instructors are reaching out and checking in, like, how is it going and being accommodating? And I think that there's also something to note about a lot of these students out there that aren't as familiar as with navigating structures at UBC, like the Center for Accessibility or academic concessions policies, for example. So I think it's really meaningful to be able to reach out to the to these students. But I'm really grateful for the compassion that my instructors have granted me and different assignment deadlines and everything. Georgia, if you don't mind me drilling into that a little bit, can you can you give a sort of example of how you've engaged with like a teaching team and one of your courses around having this accommodation or needing more accommodations? Yeah, I definitely think that it's been a process of being able to reach out to the instructor and kind of like being able to chat more one on one about, hey, this is the nature of what I've been going through and also being able to connect like, oh, these are the realistic deadlines for which I'm able to get things in on. Or these are the different things that we can kind of mark so that we're able to catch back up to speed as well. And kind of what is the nature of the current work that is being being placed in front of a student as well. Okay. Thank you. Jens, I'm going to turn it back over to you for the next question. All right. And thank you, Will, for turning it over. And thank you again, Sebastian and Georgia, for sharing your personal experiences. I'm even more appreciative of your time, Georgia, knowing about your challenges with Zoom above and beyond all of our challenges. So let's spend some time talking a little bit about some specific course design and lesson design aspects of online learning. And we've known even before the whole COVID pivot and online teaching that student engagement in large classes has been challenging. And it's been a challenge for both students and instructors. And maybe now it might even be more so. There's new tools. If you could just on provide us with some examples of something that you think instructors are doing that works well for you to create inclusive interactions and motivate your engagement with your fellow students in this online environment. Yeah, totally. I'd like to take that. I think breakout rooms have become a staple in online learning, at least based on my experience. And we've all been there. The awkward breakout room. You're in a room with four or five other people from your class. Some people have their cameras turned off. Most of them are muted and you're just staring at each other awkwardly, not sure what to say. And, you know, that's something that we I've seen so often in my online learning environment, but something that stood out to me recently in one of my courses was project based learning and incentivizing that through collaboration in the form of breakout rooms. And one of my instructors, it's a very, the course I'm taking is a Poly 308. It's a very course heavy, I guess, structured to the class where we're all divided into small groups and we're all focusing on a project. That's what we're working on for the entire semester. And how we work is the classroom is essentially divided into breakout rooms and we're supposed to work together with that breakout room and work on a project. And I think that's worked really well where we have that incentive to really work together and work beyond just the classroom environment as well and collaborate online. And using other systems to, using other platforms to make this possible is very helpful as well. And Notion, for example, is something that my instructor uses, uses that allows us to collaborate quite a bit online. It's kind of like Google Docs, just a bit more, there's a lot more features on it and helps a lot with collaboration. And I think that's, I think instructors need to use breakout rooms as a tool to encourage collaboration. And I know that's the purpose and that's the purpose it serves and it works most of the time, but in order to avoid those awkward conversations, I think there needs to be a much more clear incentive before being sent into those breakout rooms. And that's definitely something that's worked really well in my experience so far. Thank you, Khaled. And maybe feeding off the idea of that clear incentive. Is there anything your instructor did in that course to sort of set up the environment within your group of students to really become comfortable in working together as a team in those breakout rooms? Maybe something that other instructors could adopt? Yeah, I know for sure. There's a lot of self-direction involved where we essentially had to work with the instructor to choose which area in that course that we'd like to focus on and what exactly our project would look like. And I think this online environment has pushed us to be a lot more innovative and think outside the box. Because for example, if I'm giving a presentation in front of my class, I'm stuck to just sharing my screen and then speaking over it. And giving that freedom, especially during times like this, for us to go above and beyond and really think outside the box on how to make a presentation or project much more collaborative and much easier to present in this environment, I think goes a long way. And I think that starts with the instructors acknowledging that things are not the same and there's a lot of room for improvement and there's a lot of change and really involving students in that conversation and seeing what works best. And that's something I think my instructor did really well is understanding what platforms we'd like to use. For example, we dabbled with Microsoft teams for the first few weeks of the class and students made it very clear that this is not something that works for us. We'd rather stick to breakout rooms and the way we're doing breakout rooms is great and do our actual work on the notion itself. And I think that's why I think the way we're involving students in those conversations has gone a long way. I mean, we're used to the traditional mass lecture hall learning and that's work for us for many, many years and that's a very traditional system that was built off of times that were much more different than we are now. And these days we're seeing students come up with various solutions for some problems that instructors may not have answers to advocate for and push for is is collaboration between instructors and students and shortening that gap. And I must say too the online environment has made it somewhat easier for a lot of students to actually have conversations with their instructors. For example, on Zoom there's a very helpful tool where you can call the instructor to your own breakout room and have those conversations with them. And I think, for example, for students that may be so comfortable speaking to an instructor in person, this is speaking to your instructor through a screen is much less nerve wracking to a lot of people. At least that's the case for me. So I think something I would really emphasize is collaboration between instructors and students to find solutions to problems that have come out of this new environment that we're all in. Thank you, Kenneth. Yeah, I do hear that emphasis on chair decision making and giving up some insight into the students in the classroom. And thank you for sharing your insights on work, work well with breakout rooms and throughout our kind of previous conversations, just before we started, I know Cole was going to talk a little bit about his experience with breakout rooms. So maybe I'll get Cole to share some insights as well. Thanks, Jens. I'm, you know, probably a similar sentiment to Cal as far as breakout rooms go. It's, I was thinking about it and it's it's very let's be real, we're sitting in a lecture hall, whether you have 100, 200, 300 people and we usually see faculty do very frequently is sometimes we'll say, okay, turn to the people beside you or turn to the people around you and discuss this for five minutes and then let's come back and talk about it. Which is definitely effective in person. You know, you're kind of forced a student to do that or else you or else it's pretty clear to the to the faculty member that you're not doing anything because you're just sitting there. But with breakout rooms is a lot different because sort of like Callith said, there's no guidance in breakout rooms. So it's very easy and we see this probably in I don't know, in every single breakout room I've been in I don't know what the actual data is on this but in the many break rooms I've been in, there's always at least one or two people in that group of four or five students that cameras off, mic off, you know, that is not contributing to conversation at all. You know, sometimes people will before their professor goes into the breakout room will leave the zoom call. So they don't have to go into a breakout room and then they will then come back after five minutes down the road once the breakout room has been done. So I think that obviously trying to facilitate student conversation is important and that peer learning that we want to see. But I think that it really depends on what the breakout rooms are being utilized for. I've been in situations where the professor's like going to break a room and like, you know, solve this question. Usually what we I've seen anyway as well with that is you usually have one student that's solving the question and you might have a lot of passengers in that breakout room that are just going to sit there so they can get the answer to the questions and they can then go on to whatever intake you're using whether it's iClicker or Canvas or whatever and then just, you know, type in the answer. So you know those are probably going to be a bit more effective when, you know, you just have a chance to have open discussion. You know, not necessarily that there's like, oh, you go in your breakout room and do this together and work on it together. But like, you know, just have a chat. But I also think that that's something that you can also just bring into your core group as well with your course. Like Callum said, I think a lot more people are sometimes comfortable engaging, you know, through a video camera rather than in a massive lecture hall. So it's a tough question to answer because you know, I think that you encounter a lot of the same issues that you do as trying to encourage students to participate. But of course, without that guidance, you know, it's hard to, you know, keep students accountable to participating if you will. So yeah, I think, you know, similar to what Callum said, I think for me, like, you know, guidance is important, you know, coming with clear, you know, objectives for students that they know what they're talking about. And also, I think maybe not necessarily over utilizing breakout rooms either because I think that we, you know, sometimes see some fatigue with, okay, like, you know, now I'm in the course, I have to go with a random group of students and people who I don't know and talk to them for five minutes and I don't know these people, so why do I want to talk to them? Which is the unfortunate reality of a lot of these situations. So it's definitely a tough task and but I think there's definitely ways that we can, you know, find a good balance. Thank you, Cole. And so I think kind of taking off the idea of balance and guidance. Is there a surface sweet spot in terms of providing structure, kind of the balance between structure and flexibility in the online course design now beyond just breakout rooms, but in terms of the entire course in terms of being flexible with students. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that this year we've seen faculty has been, you know, you know, really quite good at adapting to what has been a crazy year and, you know, quickly modifying their core structures to, you know, accommodate for online learning. But like a big gap that I think a lot of students have noticed and a lot of students have been talking about is professors are really good at doing that for the local environment for their course. But sometimes a lot of these you know, course designs are great for if you're doing one course and they're, you know, they're good for, you know, continuous assessment and they're good for you know, ensuring students stay engaged with material. But it doesn't work as well when a student is doing a full course load and they're doing four other courses on top of it. They also have weekly quizzes and then also have bi-weekly short essay response papers do. It ends up actually creating more workload for students at the end of the day when the intent of the individual faculty member is, you know, to lessen the overall stress in the specific course. So I think that when we're talking about online learning, a way that we can you know, find a good balance is, you know, take what works good about online learning. So, you know, having, you know, educational resources is super accessible for students. You know, the asynchronous, you know, elements as well where lectures are posted and so students can look at them on their own time. They don't necessarily have to attend their live. You know, the ability to do sort of these small check-ins sort of type assessments. But so that's all great and that works, you know, super well for a lot of people, I think. But I think that it's also important for faculty to, you know, be cognizant of, you know, that this exact sort of you know, same sort of structure of being used in probably four other courses. So I think that, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to completely adjust our course structure. But it could mean that maybe we're a bit more flexible things like deadlines. You know, maybe we're, you know, we're being, you know, instead of having a quiz to do a hard deadline, you know, every single, you know, week at a certain time, maybe there's just, you know, more flexibility of when you complete the quiz, if the point of the quiz is really just to learn things. Like, what are these little tweaks that we can make to sort of alleviate that stress on the students that, you know, have all these sort of like micro assignments here and there that they have to manage now rather than, you know, maybe in a normal year where you have a midterm, a final exam, or, you know, you have a one term paper and then maybe a couple of other assignments that you now have three times as many assignments per course. Thank you for sharing that. I'm just looking at the time and I think we have, and I also noticed a few questions from the audience. We'll have some time for questions from the audience at the end. So maybe we'll move forward from online learning to online assessing, if I may. And so online learning has changed the way assessments are conducted and different structures have adopted different strategies to assess student learning. Some provided some flexibility as well. Maybe some non-traditional strategies. So is there anything that stood out to you that worked really well? Yeah, no. I would just like to just kind of piggyback on one of Khaled's points concerning kind of creating assessments that encourage more collaboration within the classroom. I do realize that there is a big shift from kind of secondary education to kind of post-secondary education when it comes to what the main kind of focus of the instructor is. I do realize that, you know, a lot of time in high schools, teachers are making an effort to ensure that the students within the classroom have a relationship amongst themselves. And I do know that, you know, in university with larger classrooms, you know, professors don't necessarily have the ability to do so. But I do think, you know, there could be some sort of happy medium there where professors or educators are, you know, actively seeking ways to create relationships within the student body. Whereas, you know, given students' opportunity to interact with one another, this can definitely happen through kind of project-based work, through kind of peer-reviewed assessments or even kind of continuous learning with discussions of that sort. Because I think, you know, the reason why, you know, you're in a breakout room and people find it awkward are not able to conversate is because they probably don't know each other already. And I think if that's a habit that has been kind of built throughout their academic course load, individuals will no longer feel, you know, hesitant to engage once they're put in an online environment like that. So for me, I think, you know, things that have worked out the best for me have been more so project-based learning that not that also evaluate my understanding of the subject matter, but also rely on my ability to kind of address it to kind of real-life scenarios. And also, I know that there's a huge issue when it comes to, I guess, assessments and ensuring that, you know, students are actually put in their work out there and not necessarily kind of piggybacking up others or like cheating for that matter. And I think that to address that, it may be the question of potentially having more kind of continuous learning assessment. So if it's a case that, you know, you have a class that is really dense content-wise, potentially having kind of weekly quizzes, weekly discussions, something that kind of speaks to the students' ability to kind of continuously engage with the material, I think that way there will be less pressure being placed on kind of end-time assignments, which would probably require some sort of remote proctoring, which hopefully would not be the case. But yeah, I do think kind of project-based learning and also having more kind of continuous learning assessments may be kind of the direction where we hopefully should be switching to with online school and also moving past this time. Thank you for sharing this, Celestrin. It will be interesting to see how those shifts might take hold in the face-to-face classroom once we move on. Maybe building off your brief notions of proctoring and kind of concerns around cheating or piggybacking. Were there some things, what are your experiences with different approaches to proctoring? Is there something that might have worked, something that really didn't work for you? Yeah, there's been a lot of different concerns raised by students around algorithmic proctoring software like Proctorio. I think it's really notable that a lot of these algorithmic remote invigilation software like Proctorio, they don't really reinforce academic integrity. It's often very easy to just put your phone to the side. But I think there's also been a lot of different equity concerns such as it not recognizing darker skin students' faces or incompatibility with disability assistive mechanisms or flagging students with disabilities as well. So I'm really like going to agree with Sylvester here and really commend the different ways that instructors have redesigned assessments to be project-based and really encourage students to reflect on their own learning rather than having to go to websites like Chegg or to share things in a group chat or share answers in a group chat that really encourages them to reflect on their own learning and how they are like also creators and recipients of knowledge as well. So I think it's really important to make sure that the different assessments are balanced and that they're emphasizing students to reflect on learning outcomes of the course as well when it comes to remote proctoring as well. I've also heard students kind of also have a preference when it comes to these two different types of proctoring as well when it comes to proctorio versus zoom. Students much prefer zoom over proctorio and kind of having that similar face-to-face experience where it isn't where students aren't being recorded or that they don't have to go under any algorithmic facial recognition software of any type or where it's logging their key strokes or anything. So it's kind of emulating that same face-to-face experience over zoom as well as well as designing the assessments to reflect their learning outcomes throughout the course. Thank you, Georgia. So really kind of a mixture of co-creations to student-created learning experiences kind of made a cognition reflection as well as some zoom proctoring rather than proctorio. That's what I'm hearing through those conversations. Let me pass the mic over back to Will. Great. Thanks and thanks for all your thoughtful answers. I'm really enjoying hearing your perspectives on these. So with the change to online learning there is also changes around how the university operates. And AMS is the undergraduate student government. How has COVID changed and the shift from teaching change AMS's priorities around things like student well-being, accessibility, inclusive teaching and learning, or other areas that you might be advocating or working towards policy? Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. I think it hasn't necessarily changed the priorities, but it has also changed the landscape under which we're operating because equity, flexibility and compassion in the applications of academic policy, these are all things that we've advocated for before the pandemic and that I think taking advantage of the drastically different situation that I think we can also move forward on. So this includes making sure that the implementation of the academic concessions policies consistent across all faculties as well as being able to ensure that students with disabilities have access to the different resources, especially since online there can be different barriers for various assistive technologies or needing further closed captioning. But I think there has been a lot of opportunity for increasing accessibility during the pandemic. One thing that we've heard resoundingly from students is that they're really enjoying being able to access lecture recordings after the lecture occurs synchronously and that they can go back and review it or even if in a regular classroom or a face-to-face classroom maybe they might have zoned out for a little bit and then they can go back and review this is what the instructor said and this is what is going to be more relevant. So one of the things that we're really interested in is how can we also create that flexibility when we return back to face-to-face or hybrid instruction as well. So it's very much something that we're very excited to leverage the momentum that we've created around accessibility after the pandemic and being able to create those resources for students and faculty as well. I love the focus on equity and accessibility. One of the stats that I use a lot in my own work that always blows my mind comes from the AMS academic experience survey I think year after year it continually finds that over 30% of students who are surveyed report that they frequently or often go without textbooks or other paid course materials due to the cost so not due to the fact that they will find those materials relevant, relevant or that they're able to access them in other ways but solely because of the cost. So how does affordability impact a student's ability for teaching and learning? Yeah, totally. And that is a great statistic that you brought up. We also found that this year the average undergraduate spends $884 annually on course materials which is a little crazy. So for an individual course maybe the textbook might be $75 which might not be too much in the single course but it really does add up that $75 might be their groceries for the week. So instead of focusing on their studies students might then be worrying about how do they pay for their textbooks how do they pay for the costs of tuition, how do they pay for housing. So I think it's really important to be able to look at opportunities to make education more affordable. Students are often going without these textbooks and potentially missing parts of the reading to contribute as part of the discussion or that they might not feel as engaged with a generic textbook. So it's really essential to be able to cut across some of those barriers with the usage of materials such as OER and other ways of assessment that don't require students to purchase online quizzes or purchase online questions up. So if you don't mind I'll just follow up on that so AMS has done some campaigns around identifying the cost of learning materials you've been engaged in, textbook pro campaign where students post the amount of money that they're spending and you've really been leaders on campus in advocating for the use of open educational resources and through AMS leadership you've secured funding through the UBC OER fund to help support instructors who want to use open resources and open resources are generally freely available and without restrictions so students can access them and this was going on way before COVID began. So what role does OER and open resources in online learning? Yeah definitely OER has a huge role in making learning more accessible whether it is online or in person in the midst of a global recession where a lot of students are struggling with cost income or additional costs and students being away from campus the best thing is that OER cuts across these types of barriers that OER can be presented in a digital format that it can be remixed so that parts of the resource can be exclusively extracted so that it is relevant to the course material at hand and that they're super flexible and adaptable so that it can be translated for students or that it can be remixed into a different format so that it's more easily readable or in a different format that is more engaging so I think one of the really key ways is to be able to talk about OER and refer people to the different resources like the OER fund and we also had that awesome event with the CTLT on celebrating leaders in open learning last semester as well so I think celebrating the usage of OER and the people who use them is one of the best ways for being able to promote the usage of open education on UBC campus so I think one going back to my earlier point in acknowledging students as co-creators of knowledge is that it also allows students to engage as part of as part of the course as part of how they create their learning experience as well so I think being able to share and collaborate amongst instructors and amongst students I think it's really awesome I think students talk a lot about oh I love using web work or I love not having to use not having to pay for quizzes for example and going to use like open source materials such as web work or or having materials across like a common first year course for example is really really helpful for cutting across those barriers and also supporting students in some of the financial and now geographic barriers that they're facing absolutely and I'll just note that the open champions thing that you referenced was really neat in that I was students nominating instructors and really seeing the appreciation for not having to purchase materials particularly during this time there was a lot more uptake so before I move on to audience questions I wanted to just follow up and is there anything else that you guys would like to share definitely so on my end I feel like I have definitely been surprised and appreciative of the resilience within our student body the many student organizations ranging from AMS clubs to our undergraduate societies and even the student facing departments within the university student involvement to UBC recreation and UBC orientations to name a few I feel like from an administrative perspective this year has made collaboration the only way to make like our efforts and projects possible which is also really kind of boosted the relationships across campus which I hope would kind of transcend across the years our student organizations have been kind of really creative and innovative and there are ways to elevate the human experience of the various microcosms of the student body and I think there is a lot to learn from our student body when it comes to how these clubs have been able to still retain memberships and still create events that incentivize attendance and still drive the mission and mandate of their respective organizations so I just definitely wanted to shed light on the work that has been done there and just letting people know that there's a lot to learn from especially from our students ourselves. I love that. I love the theme of collaboration. I think that's been sort of inherent in a lot of the answers coming through whether it's collaboration between student to student or student to instructor or instructor to student or amongst as you're saying the different organizations at UBC. Cole, you had jotted down another point that you wanted to talk about. How does this change? How does what happens moving forward? How are things different? Yeah, and that's kind of a really interesting thing that we're starting to exciting that we're talking about it more now because it means that the light is at the end of the tunnel is coming near and near as the months go on but talking about what are the lessons that we've learned from this year of online learning. There are going to be things that I'm sure most of the faculty at this chat know. There's going to be things that are going to stick. It's sort of like figuring out what are those things that we're going to be keeping around for we're going to be the staples of post-secondary education for the next three decades that came out of this pandemic. I have the privilege of sitting as the chair of the academic building needs committee on the Senate. That's something that we're talking about more and more each month we meet is what does hybridized learning look like when we're talking the lecture capture technology in classrooms. How will faculty use that tech to influence how they design their course material? Are we, because I don't think we're going to go back to the same thing, everything's back in person, are we going to have options for people to attend their lectures remotely if they can't make it in person because it's going to be broadcast via Zoom or lecture capture. What does assessment look like moving forward? There's been a lot of debates around invasive invigilation software and how the negative impact it has on students, but are we able to find ethical ways of assessing students remotely moving forward? Does it change how we do that? Does it change how we define how to ensure that content is accessible to students asynchronously and what expectations are for that? I think it's really interesting to start having these conversations because we don't really know what that answer is yet, but I would definitely encourage faculty to make sure they're communicating with their departments and their faculties as well on what's been working and to make sure that you're engaged when those Dean's offices eventually come to their faculty and ask what is the next five years going to look like and what is our post pandemic recovery going to look like? I think that there's a lot of lessons that we can take away from this 18 months of craziness that we've all experienced, but it's definitely an exciting time to be in the post secondary sector and I'm really excited to see how UBC can sort of continue to continue to build great educational programming for students that continues to be world class. I just want to say again we appreciate you guys taking time to discuss these things and helping us I think these conversations about what the future looks like will be ongoing forever and it's great to have your voices here today to talk about that. So now we're going to go ahead and start taking some questions from the audience and I'll just ask the audience to put their hands up and then we'll call on them. There were a couple questions in the chat and I'm going to go ahead and start with the one I have in front of me which comes from Lucy and she asks are there any good ways to emphasize how important peer to peer connections are so that students that disappear from breakout rooms might consider staying and participating and Joanne has a similar follow up to that examples of effectively engaging in peer to peer learning so what advice or what thoughts do you have on how to make peer to peer learning work really well? Caleb do you want to? Something simple I guess that's worked pretty well for me is when we're in a breakout room we're there for a purpose and we have to get something done and the instructor or the TA often notes that they're going to stop by at any moment they stop by so then we're expecting that that's something I experienced in my class yesterday where one of us wanted to leave and then someone in the group reminded the group that the instructor is going to be stopping by in 20 minutes so we should stick around and be ready with something to say so that ended up with us just talking about it and collaborating with their instructor when they stop by and that's something my instructor does every single time when I break out room is everyone knows that either the instructor or the TA will eventually drop by so then you are kind of forced but in a good way to actually stick around and get some work done Yeah just to add I also do believe peer to peer learning is more effective when kind of students are more kind of used to it so I do believe that in the classes where they're only just implementing things like these chances are students may not already be kind of comfortable or used to it and hence would think it's much easier to just remove themselves from it but I do believe that if peer to peer learning is encouraged right from the beginning from their first year university throughout all their courses that would definitely translate into kind of more engagement within the classroom space and I think that would definitely benefit a lot of learning across the board I definitely agree I think one of the other ways that I've seen is really helpful is like creating different pathways I guess or like learning the barriers for students to participate so if we are if students are in a break at room and we're requiring students to have their cameras turned on for example or to speak verbally could we look at other ways of oh you can it's okay if you don't want to turn on your camera or speak verbally you can also speak through text chat or you can speak or you can contribute through like the the whiteboard function on Zoom for example and kind of looking at the different ways that students can also contribute in a way that they feel comfortable with because one of the reasons that a lot of students I've heard might want to leave a breakout room might be because oh it's very panic inducing as well so what are the different mechanisms to kind of lower those barriers to participation as well thank you we have a couple more questions in the chat I'm just going to go ahead and go through this if you put this question in the chat please feel free to turn off your mic and clarify it if I don't have it right but Latisha asks do you think different technology or tools would help resolve some of the issues with online learning or is it more about encouraging implementation of effective course design with the current tools that we have personally I do think it's a kind of where we are technology is really really having a stronger presence in our education so yes I do think that there are evolving technologies that make learning and assessment much easier and equitable which we should be exploring but that also comes with I guess the comfort of the educators themselves being I guess in comparison with these various technologies and being able to utilize the technologies to the best of their abilities because as of now in the learning space obviously it's really no one's fault but chances are the students are probably more equipped at kind of running online lectures than the professors themselves this is probably just because of just how kind of the training and kind of education of just everyone has been thus far so I do think there is a lot of room for more technology adaptation when it comes to our kind of learning environment and this comes with educators being comfortable to take up these additional I guess challenges or milestones when it comes to making sure that their material is still parallel standards but also catered to meet the experiences and the individuals who they are educating I think for me I think that the answer to that question is more of course design because I feel like Sylvester mentioned I feel like the solutions that we're mostly using for lectures and engaging right now with Zoom is it's more than adequate and I agree that you'll see that most students are technologically quite adept so I think that that solution is working well as far as just like with the basis but I think when we're talking about course design and how we can make that better I think that there is also room though to when we're talking about how we're administering assignments to students and how they're engaging with each other when there are innovative technologies that come up how can we integrate those innovative technologies in the course design to further learning so I think that for me I don't think that it's technology that's really the huge thing I think it's more like how does how does the technology impact course design because at the end of the day the course design is what's going to contribute most significantly to the learning of students and I know there's a lot of students that when their professors are introducing a really cool way of engaging or they're using cool software or things like that to do work I know that we've definitely heard positive feedback on that and unfortunately I don't have an example to give you right now but I know that there's a lot of cool things that we've definitely heard from the community that have been done that give students different excuse me, give students different ways on how to engage with course interior so maybe as a follow-up Seth asks in terms of course design do you have perspectives on the preference between synchronous live recorded lectures versus asynchronous lectures he said he was wondering if one of these formats is preferred by students and with heavier asynchronous approach it seems that more of the synchronized time could be spent in direct engagement discussion etc I mean I guess I can share kind of my personal experience with synchronous classes or lectures I think it's very important to ensure the attendance of students in class and something that you often lose with asynchronous lectures at least for myself I find myself less motivated to watch it later than during a scheduled time when the entire class is there obviously time difference and all these things create barriers to that but I think something interesting I've seen is kind of a mix between the two where for the first section of the class you have a synchronous lecture that's also recorded and available for students that aren't able to make it to the lecture that they can watch it later on but the rest of the class or most of the class is focused on actual engagement with the class in peer to peer learning which I think goes a long way so a split between the two have content that they will look at at their own time or watch a lecture and then join the class and then get a little bit more out of that lecture which is a synchronous one and then you spend the rest of the class time either in conversation with your instructor or your peers and I think just finding the balance between the two and ensuring that those barriers education are still addressed it's all about finding a balance to me at least. Yeah I don't think that there's any real preference because it's very much tailored to the individual student just from what we've heard there's definitely the mix I think overwhelmingly students do really enjoy having the option there available I know personally I started out like oh I can I work much better at night for example and I love watching my lectures at night but then I realized oh I should also do some of the participation or use the time that I have within the lecture to be able to ask questions and so I think being able to use that mix of both so that there is the opportunity to have the synchronous part be more heavily focused on engagement and discussion but still having that option open for students is really useful so I think it really depends on the individual students and how they prefer to engage as well. Perfect so I think we have time for one more quick question which is in the chat and it comes from Bruce how would you evaluate the amount of time you're putting into courses now compared to pre-COVID? Yeah I think that's a really tough question because I think it really depends I think everyone would have their own kind of input to this but from my experience I have realized that I am spending kind of less time when it comes to being in the mindset to study or consume whatever materials being presented to me however within that time I do get more quality out of that because gone are the days where I am rushing for my apartment trying to run to class and I get to class all tired, trying to pay attention the teacher is going on and on their people around me distracting me but now I am at home I have asynchronous lectures or synchronous lectures I can wash them over if I have an assignment coming up I know where to get the material so I do believe it's a bit of both but from my experience I am definitely spending less time compared to before and I am getting more value from the last time I am spending but I also do believe that sometimes educators kind of take advantage of the idea that students may have more time on their hands and try to give them more things to do online and that really doesn't work either If I can just quickly jump in here for example, if you take a student that typically was commuted all the way from Surrey to UBC five days of the week, they are spending about two to three hours in total in transit time alone and I think the online learning environment has completely stripped that away from them and given them that extra three to four hours every day to spend on their learning or something else that they can do and that's something that really stood out to me when I speak to my peer I am originally from Surrey and I typically spend hours and hours commuting here back and forth and another thing is students that are working at the same time for me for example, obviously me and my fellow executives, we work full time and a lot of us are taking courses at the same time for example, I have a class at three o'clock so right after this call, I can just stay in my office, prepare for my class and jump straight into that class and I've also engaged with a few students in my classes who are telling me that with this online learning environment, they're able to balance work and school much better than back when they had to transit all the way to school for example so I think that's an interesting perspective to keep in mind as well of students that need to work or travel from a farther distance and the extra time that they have on their hands, whether it's to spend it on school or even to spend it on themselves, at the end of the day if you have three hours to spend time reading and taking better care of yourself, you're probably going to end up learning more in that classroom environment as well so online learning has significant benefits in my opinion that I think we should stick around to stick around with Perfect, and with that note I will just note we are out of time and I do really extremely want to thank Caleb, Georgia, Cole and Sylvester for taking time out of their extremely busy schedule so at least one of these panelists was on another panel today and they all have classes and they all work full time so I really can say on behalf of the Yens and myself that we really do appreciate your time I think these conversations are fascinating, could go on for hours but I really appreciate your work and just want to say thanks again for being part of it.