 Hi, good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our webinar for the afternoon. How and why to use USIP's free online micro courses with high school students. We're thrilled you're with us today. I'm Megan Chabalowski and I'm a program officer with the Public Education Program at the US Institute of Peace, where I lead our work with American K-12 schools. I'm very pleased to be joined by my colleague Elizabeth Rosenbaum and by current USIP Peace teacher and high school teacher Emily Pilpat, both of whom I'll introduce shortly. This webinar is the second in a series of webinars for US-based K-12 educators. This monthly series offers teachers opportunities to learn about critical issues in international conflict management and peace building and how you can integrate this ready-made USIP resources into your classrooms. So new webinars are announced each month, so please stay tuned for future updates. Thank you for joining us today and to those who are watching the recording afterwards. We all at USIP appreciate your work deeply as educators. So before we get started, I wanted to share a few logistics. You are all in listening mode, but we would still like to hear from you. So you are probably very familiar with Zoom by now, but if you run your mouse over the bottom of the Zoom call screen, you'll see some ways to communicate. So will you please use the chat box throughout to ask questions or make comments? We'll be keeping our eyes on the chat box and we'll try to answer questions as they come in. If you have a tech issue, please also let us know in the chat box and we'll try to help fix it for you. And finally, we'll be recording today's webinar and we will make the recording available on our website afterwards. So I think I'm going to take a minute to introduce my two co-presenters today. Elizabeth Rosenbaum has been on the global campus team at the US Institute of Peace for four years working on the online and hybrid learning portfolio. Prior to joining USIP, Elizabeth taught English and worked in community development for a non-profit in Nicaragua. She holds an MA in international affairs focused on global gender policy from George Washington University's Elliott School here in Washington, D.C. and a bachelor's in international studies from Virginia Tech. She lives in Arlington, Virginia. So thank you for joining me, Elizabeth. Thanks, Megan, and hi, everyone. It's great to be here. Emily Philpott teaches AP World History, AP Psychology, and Global Studies along with serving as Associate Director of Global Studies at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Jackson, Mississippi. Since graduating from the University of Virginia with a master's in teaching, Ms. Philpott has spent the past 18 years in the classroom. In addition to teaching history and science courses, she has advised the Model United Nations and Youth and Government Clubs, served as history department chair, and coached tennis. Recently, she has been a teacher for Global Classrooms Fellow in Senegal, a trans-Atlantic Outreach Program Fellow in Germany, and a member of the AP World History Standard Setting Panel. Ms. Philpott lives in Richland, Mississippi with her husband and two children. So welcome, Emily. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, Megan. Glad to be here. Great. So before we move into the content of our program, which is about our microcourses, I wanted to just say a few words about the U.S. Institute of Peace for those of you who are new to us. The U.S. Institute of Peace is a national, nonpartisan, independent institute founded by Congress in 1984 and dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical, and essential for U.S. and global security. We are headquartered in Washington, D.C., just off the National Mall. In fact, you can see our building in the lower left-hand corner across from the Lincoln Memorial, which is out of sight in this photo. But our work mainly takes place internationally, which is the focus of our mandate. We work with governments and citizens in conflict zones abroad to prevent, manage, and resolve violent conflict, from training women leaders in Columbia in mediation skills, to supporting reconciliation efforts in Iraq, the peace process in Afghanistan, and young peace builders from Nigeria, Syria, Pakistan, and other countries affected by violent extremism. We support those who are working to build a more peaceful, inclusive world. You can learn more about our work and find stories of people building peace in some of the most difficult places on our website, www.usip.org. Complimenting our work to build peace internationally, the U.S. Institute of Peace also serves the American people directly through public education. This, too, is part of our mandate from Congress. We work with schools, universities, communities, and organizations across the U.S. to engage everyday Americans in learning about and working for peace. So we are here today to introduce you to an important peacebuilding tool that USIP offers as part of our education mandate, which is our free online microcourses. So in today's webinar, we intend that participants will get acquainted with USIP's catalogue of online microcourses and what each course covers, that you will understand how to access and use these courses with high school students, and that you will make connections to your own content. So with that, I'd like to turn the floor over to my colleague, Elizabeth, who will introduce our opening poll and lead us in an introduction to USIP's microcourses. So I will stop screen sharing, Elizabeth, and I will turn it over to you. Thank you, Megan. I'm going to take over the screen now and share mine. And to get us started, we thought it would be interesting to... Let me know if you can't see my screen. We thought it would be interesting to start with an activity similar to one of the ones we'll actually directly pulled from our introduction to peacebuilding microcourse. That's one of our 12 microcourses that we'll be talking about today, but before I get into that, just to give you a taste of what we do and how we do it, this is an infographic that lists six strategies for peace. And what we're going to ask you to do is look through this. Sorry, I realize that it's cut off the bottom one. So I'll scroll through it. But there are six strategies for peace here. They're pulled from Peace Education, which is by Ian Harris and Mary Lee Morrison. And they are six different world views for how you think peace either is achieved or is the best method of achieving peace for those that are working in that. So take a moment to read through here. The six topics or options are peace through strength, peace through justice, peace through transformation, peace through politics, peace through sustainability and peace through education. Now, while I might have a guess what this group would lean towards, I'd like to encourage you to look through these. You can see sort of what we call the assumptions about human nature that are inherent in each of these strategies, the tactics, and then also the problems with this strategy, why some people might not think that it's a good strategy. So take a glance through this and we're going to pop a poll onto the screen and you can just give us your answer if you are comfortable. It's an anonymous poll. And the way that we use this in a course for some background is this is an infographic we've created. And then there's a similar poll in the course itself. And then after that, there's a discussion forum, which I'll show you how those work as well. And the discussion invites you to talk about why did you choose the strategy that you chose and why do you think others might have chosen a different one? So it's a good way to sort of get your feet wet with some of the ways people think about peace and peace building. Let me know. Do I need to stop sharing my screen for the poll to work? Oh, no. My colleague, Yusuf, is on it. So go ahead and take a vote when you have a moment. Not everyone chose the peace education, which I think is great because it really shows that there's so many ways to think about peace and not only there isn't just one way. These are all related and you can have thought, maybe I would choose more than one, but it's interesting to think about what's my worldview and what are other people's worldviews. And so that's just an example of how we like to introduce these topics to our learners in our microcourses. So thank you for participating. And with that, I'm just going to launch into what the microcourses are and why they were created. But Megan or Emily, is there anything you wanted to say about the poll results before I get started? OK, great. So like Megan said, I've been working with the global campus for about four years. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about global campus and general on why these microcourses were created and how to register for them, what they look like, how they're structured and how you can use them or how we encourage you to use them. And then Emily will give you much more detailed and expert advice on how she has done this already in her classroom with the microcourses. So we'll either share or maybe we can put in the chat some of the links to these pages. But this is the USIP Academy online course self-paced microcourse catalog. So the global campus is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of online peacebuilding courses. These courses exponentially increase the reach, inclusion and accessibility of education and training programs developed at USIP. Our online courses cover a range of core peacebuilding tools like conflict analysis, mediation, negotiation and dialogue, as well as prevalent topics such as gender inclusivity, religion and peacebuilding and nonviolent action. All of our courses are rooted in theory and practice and the supplement video instruction, which is the main basis of the course with case studies, infographics, publications, resources and tools, discussion forums, dynamic scenarios and quizzes and exams. So that's a lot, but we'll get through how those are all set up in the microcourses. A bit of context. So these are our 12 microcourses. We offer two types of courses that are microcourses and advanced. So the global campus actually started with only advanced courses, which are tuition based most of the time and are academic in nature. They're long. They take about 20, 10 to 20 hours to complete. And in the spirit of accessibility and inclusion, like I mentioned, we wanted to make available free and easily digestible content that anyone, even a busy professional like a teacher, could take to learn core piece building skills. So microcourses introduce foundational topics in conflict management and provide the convenience and accessibility for learners at all levels to begin improving their knowledge and skill sets. These introductory courses cover a wide range of foundational topics. Sorry, stop scrolling. There's still more. All the courses are self-paced and again, are video based with all those tools as options for how to supplement learning within the courses. So these are the 12 that we have at this time. And I want to just say one quick caveat before I get further is these last two, religion and piece building and gender and piece building, actually were the first two micros we created and we didn't have micros yet. We realized they were shorter and more introductory and they were the ones that inspired us to make microcourses because of that. They're actually laid out a little bit differently, but they are still the same sort of timeframe and content that you can expect from the rest of the microcourses. So if you sign up for these later and go through, you'll notice they are formatted a bit differently, but everything else about them is the same. And yeah, so like I said, we talk about sort of the core piece building tools that USIP focuses on, which are this negotiation, mediation and dialogue. And then a lot of these have come from programs at USIP that came to us, such as our governance program that had an in person training that wanted to put their content online to make it accessible for more audiences. Our media and arts for peace and design, monitoring and evaluation program, excuse me, courses were designed with the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Geneva, Switzerland. And so we also do partner with other organizations to create courses as well. So all of that to say, demand is constant. There's always more to learn. And so we may be adding to these microcourses in the future. We actually have one coming out very shortly called preventing election violence. So keep an eye out. The courses are the course catalog is always growing. I'm going to take you through the steps to log in just to make it easier. But before I do that, I just want to show you each of these hyperlinks will take you to a promotional page for that course itself, where you can learn about the course objectives, learning objectives, an overview video, the agenda and who your instructors are. Also, each of these pages is on our public website. So there are related publications and anything that is tagged to the issue areas that this course covers, for example, for example, conflict analysis and many others as it's our most broad course. When you do that, you can go to the register now button and this will take you to, you'll see it's a new URL. This is the Global Campus's Learning Management System dedicated solely to our online courses. Now, I'm going to sign in as Megan. I'm going to make a fake account so bear with me here, but I just want to show you how, you know, it's the easy, it's an easy way to sign up, but I want to go through it all in case anyone has any questions or wants to come back and reference this later. So we just asked for a username and a password. And while I'm doing this, I do want to make a note about privacy. We are compliant with all privacy restrictions and settings. We can talk about that. Or if you have any questions about that, you can definitely reach out to me personally. We just require, sorry, Megan, we just require this. All of this for our purpose is to understand who's taking our courses and why and how we can maybe make them better. You know, I'll just sign up with me, but I'll use your email. So like I said, there's just a few demographic questions to be answered here. I'm just going to do the ones that are required. We asked for a birth date and when I'll get down to, let's see, where I go, postal code, alzine, gender, country. So lots of nationality. Or we do have another form that sometimes it will say country. This is because we have people coming from all over the world. And again, your default language for the same reason, we do have options in Arabic, Dari, French, Spanish and Pashto as well. So if any of your students speak any of those languages, they can sign up for an experience that is in that language. I would recommend anyone put you can recommend your students to sign up as students and their sector is educational institution and their organization or company. You can just put student. We that's more for maybe a professional, but it's not obviously required to be anything specific. So at the end, you put submit and confirm this order. And once you are signed up for an account, you automatically have access to all the microcourses. So you don't have to just sign up for one. When you go to the promotional page and you click on one and you register, you aren't just signed up for that one. You'll then have access to all of them. So that's just a way to find out more about the courses themselves. So we are processing here. There we go. And now you're in. So now you are on the training catalogue, which is very similar to what you'll find on usip.org. But this is just all hyperlinked to the course materials themselves. And you'll see here, we start with our 12 microcourses. One quick note, we do have of those advanced courses I was talking about. Those are free through the end of 2020. That's an initiative that USIP took on. But starting in January, they will go back to being tuition based. So in order to access those, you would just see them over here under the available courses tab. If you have an interest in any of our full length advanced courses, they do all come with a certificate of completion. I think Megan or Emily may talk about a bit about how that might be valuable to teachers. But we understand that students in high school right now might not be taking full lengths, 20 hour advanced courses. So we're going to focus on the microbes. I'm going to take a deep dive into one of these and then stop for questions, unless there are any that have come in so far. Like I said, these are the the topics that we've chosen based on what either our full length courses were or are or what other programs at USIP have come to us and asked to help us build a course for. One of those is our nonviolent action program. And so I'm going to do a deep dive into this micro course. And this one came from our one of our oldest courses, if not our oldest, actually, which is called civil resistance, and that is still one of our full length courses that's available. And we wanted to, again, make it a shorter and more digestible. You know, what is nonviolent action? What does the term even mean? How is it related to peacebuilding? What does that look like the world over? So this is a great introduction to this, which, you know, may be relevant to what's going on in the world here and abroad. You know, at any given time. So when you log into any of the courses, you just click on that hyperlink and there's an orientation video that you can watch and you can introduce yourself to the group. This will take you to a discussion forum, which these are how all of them are laid out. There is something called a discus plugin, which is down here and here's your prompt. What is your name? Where do you live and work? Why do you want to build your skills as a peacebuilder and increase your understanding of the field? All that kind of stuff. So any discussion forum is optional, but we hope that, you know, users will take it and experience it to get to know more of who is taking the course with them all across the globe. This is the course overview page, which is just like the promotional page that I showed you on the other website. So some of the content is duplicated, but it's just so that there's easy access for it. You get your learning objectives and your overview. And then you just scroll down and jump right in. All of the courses are laid out the same way except for those two that I mentioned. So there's introduction, definitions and historical context, stories from the field, theory and practice. And then there's a quiz, a scenario and reflections. I'm going to briefly just click through these pages to show you some of the highlights and then we'll get into really how you can use these. But before I do that, I just want to say one thing. Please keep in mind that you don't have to use this course in its entirety. If something looks like it might be useful, even just one video or one discussion forum, you can actually go to this link right here. And if you press click here, you can download the video itself. And of course, giving credit to USIP please for any content of ours that you use. We'd love for you to take this and use it in your courses or in your classes, even if you don't necessarily want to use the full course itself. So just keep that in mind. These are resources to be used any way that can be beneficial to you. So we start with definitions and historical context and you'll see how we have quotes and photos to make it engaging in between the videos. These are brief videos, generally not more than five or six minutes. So they're easy to watch and then step away from. There's additional podcasts and then again, getting to the sort of the activity and the discussions that I mentioned like the one we did in the beginning. Featured resources can be videos, they can be internal to you or USIP focused or they can be external. There's usually a very good mix of both to bring in not only what our experts are teaching and working on, but also what others in the field are as well. Then we get into stories from the field. This can be either a USIP team members experience in the field or history, whatever seems more appropriate for the content of the course. So for this one, it's history and theory of nonviolent action and what that really has looked like in any of the countries that we are exploring what those movements look like, the power of participation and then asking, have you ever participated in a movement or a campaign and share your experience? So trying to tie in that story from the field with what the learner may have experienced in their own lives. And so each of the courses will have that sort of practical application or that's what we're hoping people take away from it. And then a theory and practice section, okay, what is the theory in this field right now? What does it really look like happening in the world? You know, we've talked about it historically, but what's happening today? And so we have a section dedicated to understanding really what this looks like in the days and the lives of everyday peace builders. And then after this, we get into the sort of reflect and share and assess section. So there is a quiz based on just the content that was outlined in the course. I will say that if you pass the quiz or exam with a grade of 70% or higher, you do get a certificate of completion. So that is something to put on your resume or to show or to share or a way to assess whether or not your student actually did the course. They'll get a certificate if they do complete that quiz. Now we move to a scenario, which is fictional scenarios made by the course designers about what this could be anything depending on the course topic. This is a protest in a fictional city called Pisada. And then there is a question. So once you read the content of what their scenario, what might happen in a situation like this, how would you approach it or what non-violent action approach do you think is most appropriate? So really trying to take what you learned and not just quiz them on it, but, you know, ask them a little bit deeper questions about what it would be like to maybe experience this in real life. And then at the end of that, there's a bit of a discussion. Again, if you wanna engage with any of the people that have taken this course over the years, see what other people have thought and shared, that's all that all lives here in this discussion. And then finally, there is a reflection, which is another chance to share, what have you learned? What do you think? Not just necessarily what terms did you learn, but how might this apply in your own life? And so these are the reflections or the questions that I think or hope could be beneficial to you all as educators, you know, taking even these if you don't use the whole course, but if you wanna talk a little bit about non-violent action in another course or something like that, please feel free to take any sort of parts of these discussions as inspiration. And then the last page is just the post course survey, which I won't, you know, we like it if you take it, but that's not necessarily part of the course content. So that is our deep dive. I am going to turn it over to Emily, but please let me know if there are any questions and I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and hand it over. Great, thank you, Elizabeth. I'm so glad that everyone got to see what the courses actually look like. And from that, I hope you can tell that they are so well put together and really engaging. And that is why I have found that they are just a tremendous resource for myself, but also for my students and they have really enjoyed accessing the courses and the content in there. So thanks, Megan, for sharing your screen and let's jump right in. My task today is to show you some examples of how these can be used in classrooms, but hopefully it will also just get you thinking about the possibilities. They are kind of endless. There's so many different ways these could be utilized by students or clubs or even faculty at your school. So I'm just gonna give you a snapshot of a few ways that I have used them. As Megan mentioned, I have a few different roles at my school, but I wanna say that I have actually used these in all the capacities of my job at school. And so it's not just for history teachers, even though I am one of those, but I also teach science and do global studies work. So let's take a look at three different ways that I have used them in the classroom. So the first was with a global studies class that it was an elective course, it was a semester and this tied in nicely to a unit on war and peace. And in this case, I allowed students to choose four of the courses and then they had several assignments related to that. One of which was to actually take some sketch notes while they were in the course and then to journal throughout the process. And you can see a couple of pictures from students work. I had a really artistic group and so they enjoyed that task and it was a way to be hands-on at the same time they were in a virtual course. So it kind of mixed pen and paper with digital. But of course, you could make it completely virtual if you wanted to. So you could do a digital journal, you could have them create an infographic and I've listed a few that are free and that students can gain access to. You could have them share their experiences and thoughts on something like Jamboard. So this is really easy to translate into a fully online or even hybrid situation if that's what you find yourself in at the moment. And a few things that to note about this, mass students really enjoyed the choice. These were seniors and they liked that they were able to look through, preview the courses and to choose topics that were of interest to them. And I think it really opened their eyes to a whole new world. And they just did not have any understanding of what peace meant or peace building meant and most of their exposure to conflict had just been the violent piece of that and not looking at how much work goes into this area of peace building and conflict. So they really enjoyed it. Okay, Megan, you can go on to the next slide. Great. So I also have used this in a world history course and for this I had them all take the introduction to peace building course and they were able to respond using some thinking routines like reflecting on what they used to think. Now I know one that I've used is, what is powerful? What do you find that's problematic? And they share it with each other in a variety of different ways. And again, this can be in-person or it could be virtual. This was really valuable to my world history course in terms of current events. So I try to weave that throughout the course and this was a great entrance into how they might look at current events and how it's applicable. And I find, especially for my 10th graders in AP World History, that they have a difficult time at the beginning of the year finding current events to share or discuss. And one of the things that's great about these micro courses is that Elizabeth kind of mentioned it but it also curates relevant kind of additional extra resources from USIP that relate to that topic. So it might be podcasts or articles. So once they take a course, when they click on that page at the bottom, they then can get linked to a whole other set of resources that relate to that topic. And again, there are ways to adapt this to virtual instruction. I use Flipgrid a lot for students to create video reflections and they can respond to one another. You could have them post their work to something like Padlet where they can share their work even if they did it by hand, like you see a picture of, they could take pictures and then share it on something like Padlet. So there are a lot of ways that you can use this in a history course and it can just be the beginning of even greater discussions about peace building. Then the third application is actually going on right now in my psychology class. So they are doing this this week as we wrap up the semester. And it's a great way to have my students apply what they've learned to a real world scenario. So we are wrapping up a social psychology unit. And so students get a choice of some of the micro courses they are picking one. They're going to watch it. And then along with a reflection, they are also going to figure out how psychology concepts that they have studied apply in this case. And I've been able to model it after an AP style free response question. So in the task, students are actually going to pick eight concepts from first semester that they feel like apply in some way to the micro course that they took. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what they come up with. And this has been great, especially because our semester exams were canceled. And so I had a little bit of leeway to build a project, but not anything that was overwhelming. This is something they can do just this week. And then they've seen an example of what they're learning being applied in some real situation. There are many other ideas as I mentioned that they're kind of endless. But a few I wanted to point out, you could easily have students complete individual ones and then present to each other or assign a group to do one of them and then share if you don't want students to do multiple of the courses, but to maybe do one as a group and then present it out. If you ever do hardness discussions, this would be a great resource for that. Instead of giving students a packet of readings or let's say a novel, you could have them all complete a micro course, create discussion questions and then come together and have a hardness discussions. I mentioned that there are resources for other subjects. Art teachers might be interested in using media and the arts for peace and assigning a project based on that. English teachers, if you were studying literature that has a theme of conflict, these could be really great resources for your classes. Religion teachers, there is a course on religion and peace building. Additionally, if your school has something like a global studies diploma or a global studies certificate, if you need activities for students to do, this could be a great resource for that. If they have to have a certain amount of activities that relate to global studies in some way, and especially where we are right now with COVID, this is something that students can do on their own and virtually, I know our students are missing some of that global programming that typically happens during the school year, speakers, events, and this could be a substitute for that. And I think they've hit on a lot of this. Elizabeth did a great job of showing the wonderful courses, but I just wanna point out a few things. These are ready to go. Everything's been done for you and they are made by experts in the field. Elizabeth showed you that you as a teacher can preview the modules without having to do all of them yourself. So there's an introductory video, their course objectives, you have access to an outline. And again, it links to additional resources. And I think the most powerful thing is that it takes this abstract concept of peace and really gives students examples. And my students consistently comment on the fact that the case studies are their favorite aspect of the course. And of course, it's always good to think about the standards that might connect to this. And I've given a few examples, but it connects to NCSS themes, many of the 10 themes, specific content standards. There were way too many for social studies to actually list them out. Standard number eight for the National Council of Teachers of English is really applicable in terms of synthesizing information and communicating knowledge. The Asia Society global competencies of investigating the world, recognizing perspectives, communicating ideas and taking action are woven throughout all of these courses. And it's a great way to teach skills and content. And finally, I think students say it best. These are some of the words from some of my students. And you can see that they've had some great experiences. I wanna highlight just a couple of these and then you can read the others. But the third one down, this course was my favorite because I felt the most personally connected to the topics and methods addressed. I like how this course emphasized that nonviolence is not a weaker alternative, but the stronger and more effective option as compared to war. And then the final one, I feel as though this course provides students with the skills to mediate religious conflict, not only on a large scale, but also in my own community. And I just wanna close by saying, I think what is so valuable today is that I feel like as educators, we are constantly telling our students to value other perspectives and to work and get along with people who have different opinions and values than you do. And sometimes that seems really abstract and this shows students how it's done in the real world and the value of it and the skills to do it successfully. And that's it for my presentation. Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Elizabeth. That was excellent. I might leave the slide up for another minute and Kate Spokes wanna read the other two quotes while we're talking. But I wanna pause and give anybody watching a chance to ask questions, either of Elizabeth or Emily or me, but anything that might have come up either about the logistics or about how to use these courses, please feel free to drop any questions in the chat box. While we're waiting for questions to come in, I just wanted to ask Emily a quick question. I'm wondering how you might scaffold some of the learning in here. So if a course might seem a little too advanced for some students, I know that there are lots of different ways to access the resources. You can watch the video. There's a video transcript, for example. So what are some ways you've navigated that to maybe make it accessible to every student? That's a great question because altogether they do take around three hours to complete and so for some, and it's a very independent exercise. If you just say, I'm assigning you this, go do this. But there's several ways that you could break that down and make it more accessible. I would say you could do it together as a class. So you could take each part, have students watch the video, come back together, discuss it. You could read it aloud, the readings you could read aloud together. You could pull out certain parts. You could even have students work together and pair students up to complete this together. And of course the videos have captioning and things like that. So I don't want teachers to think that, oh, my students couldn't handle the independence of doing this on their own and think it's not for them because it could be really accessible in many ways by breaking it down and using pieces of it in that way. Thanks, that's really helpful. Great. And Elizabeth, okay, actually I'm gonna take this question that just came in Elizabeth might come back to you but this is a question perhaps for both of you. Other than the certificate of completion that is generated when someone passes the quiz, is there a way for a teacher to monitor student's progress through the course? And this is from Jessie. Thank you, Jessie. There is, yes and no. So there isn't a way for you to see what percentage say of the course they've done. So you don't have access to be able to see the progress that a student has made throughout the course. If you are in the course, you can see the comments that students or people in the course have made to the discussion post. So you as a teacher could monitor it that way. You could always ask them to take screenshots of things they've done but the best way I have found to monitor it is to have assignments for students to complete that relate to the work that they're doing in the course. And Elizabeth might have other ideas as well. That's great, Emily. Thank you so much because we actually, we don't have a formal mechanism the way Emily was saying. It's really, that's one of the, maybe the flip sides of doing self-paced and really focusing on this independent aspect is that we don't have a way to really track, did someone watch this full video. So I think that she had great suggestions about that. I would say that another thing is you could potentially take a discussion question out and have it only open to your class. You could host that on your own platform. And people wouldn't be able to contribute to the discussion if they hadn't gotten that far in the course. So maybe making it in a way that you can track who's responding in that discussion, how you can see how the group's interacting and you can probably gauge from there whether or not they were able to get through the chapter three or chapter four. So maybe that could be another way as well. Great, thanks. And Elizabeth, that's a nice segue into a question I had for you and you spoke a little bit about it but maybe you could elaborate. There's like the discussion forums. When I've taken these courses, I've really enjoyed the discussion forums and reading the various people's answers in there. I wonder if even if teachers might want to ask their students to respond separately in maybe something, a forum that you have set up. I wonder if there is value still in having students go through and read the other responses in the discussion forums anyway. And maybe you could elaborate on some of the things they might find in there or why you think there's value to still looking in those forums. Thanks, Megan. That's a great question. And one that actually didn't occur to my team to do until like a couple months or years after the courses had launched, we were like, why aren't we gleaning from the comment section? What people really think about this course because we had that post-course survey but there's forums all over the place to really see what people are learning and maybe what they're not learning or what they might have more questions on. And so I would say it's two parts. One, you can really get an understanding of what people's learning on this topic has been, again, speaking sort of what Emily was saying about what is it really to have people different from you or what it's a little abstract to think of like that, what is something that you might believe that someone else doesn't, that kind of thing. You'll find that in the comment section. I mean, people are really a lot of times to share where they're from. They're really coming from all over the globe and really explaining, well, in my community or in my home or in my tribe, this is how we dealt with a similar situation. And so I think that's incredibly valuable if even just anecdotal because it is each person's story but there's such intrinsic value in that. And also, I think you can really, it makes the course content even more understandable, I think, by seeing how other people are reacting to it. So understanding if you took that poll, for example, that we did in the beginning and those six strategies for peace, what do other people feel strongly about those strategies and why might they totally disagree with yours? We're not gonna really put that in the course but maybe someone's gonna put that in the comment section and that's a great way to really take it another level deeper and digest and understand what those strategies mean and why they could be viewed so differently but there's still ways to approach peace. So those are just some off the top of my head examples but I think that there is a lot of value in just seeing who in the world is taking the courses and how that applies in their daily lives. Thank you, that's great. I think that that's all we have for questions. So I'm going to move us along but if somebody still has a question that comes up, please ask it and we will take a moment to answer it. So I wanted to share with you all, everyone watching ways to stay engaged with us. This is one resource that USIP offers teachers and schools are micro courses but there are lots of resources that we make available to teachers. And so I wanted just to highlight a few of them. Some of you, if you're watching this and you know us well, you may know these. Others, if you're new to us, I hope this perhaps will direct give you some direction. We have an email list that you can sign up for and I believe we're gonna put that link in our chat box that where you can receive periodic announcements about new opportunities and resources for teachers and students. In fact, we send out a bi-monthly newsletter and then periodic updates on things like these webinars so that you can stay on top of what's coming when. So please, we encourage you to sign up for that. We have lots of virtual resources for teachers and schools and we're gonna include I think a link in the chat box as well to a list of those resources so that you can see what you might access. I wanted to just share a few of them right now so you can get a sense of the world of resources that we offer at schools. First up, we have access to our experts. So experts like Elizabeth, people who work on these issues in countries around the world, we wanna make sure that we're connecting them to you and your students. So if you're interested in virtual guest speakers, and that's something I can help arrange for you and your class. We also offer content on current events. So our website is a wealth of resources for you. In particular, we have a great blog that tells peace-building stories. We have podcasts, we have events that are all currently webcast because they're all virtual at the moment, but when they're back in person, they're webcast as well so you can tune in from anywhere and watch recordings afterwards. And a lot of other videos and multimedia that you can access with your students. We have additional free educator resources, including lesson plans, simulations, other study guides, other activities that you can do. Some per virtual and then some for when you're back in the classroom or if you're there right now. We offer online learning opportunities like the one we've discussed today or the longer full-length courses. We do additional professional development for teachers for the webinars like you're experiencing today. I often also will host workshops for teachers. So if this is something that's of interest to you or anybody in your school community, if you would like to do a workshop on our resources, I'd be happy to help organize that. And we offer virtual visits to our headquarters. So when we are able to welcome people back to our headquarters, we offer on-site educational programs. But in the meantime, we would love to bring our headquarters to you. And my colleague, Ellie, runs really great virtual educational programs and I could help arrange that for you. So please stay in touch with us. There's lots of resources you can use. And I will just put one plug, because I always plug it, for the Peace Day Challenge in honor of the International Day of Peace on September 21st. We have a lot of time to plan for this. We encourage everybody to take an action or a piece on that day or around that day. And it could be something very simple to something very elaborate and to share it on social media so that you can see everything that everybody's doing for the International Day of Peace all around the world. So please stay tuned for more information on that. And last but not least, connect with us. I am here as a resource to you. My role is to connect with teachers and the schools. So if you have any questions or want to explore any of the resources further that we've discussed today, please send me an email and I'll be happy to connect with you. We are gonna be posting, I think in the chat box, a link to a short survey to help us know how we did today on this webinar. So I request that when the webinar ends, if you could please go take this short, very, very short survey, that would be great. And I think, let's see, I'm going to see it. Make sure I haven't missed any questions. Thank you, Tim, for that comment. That's wonderful. And I'm going to go ahead and close us out then. So I'd like to thank my co-presenters, Emily and Elizabeth, for joining me today and for introducing our participants to this useful tool that they can use immediately with their students. So thank you so much. Thank you, Megan. And I just want to say thank you all to any teacher that's watching this or any teacher that's participating, especially Emily, as if you didn't already do enough. I can't imagine the hurdles that this year has thrown at you. I hope this can be a resource for you, but thank you for what you do. And again, stay engaged if we can be more of a resource. I'm also happy to connect with any of you. So thank you so much. Go ahead, sorry, Emily. Thank you, everyone, for being here. And thanks, Elizabeth, for making such wonderful courses that students can access. Agreed. And if I could ask you to drop one more link in the chat box before I close this out. We had mentioned that we would drop a link to the Global Campus Microcourses just to make it easy to get to. You can find them really easily on the website. They're in on the Education tab. You can, it'll walk you through pretty quickly, but we'll include a link to make it extra easy for you. Thank you, Yusuf, great. And I want to thank you all for joining us today. And we hope to see you again at future webinars. Please take care. Happy holidays, since it's that season. And don't forget to take our evaluation. Thank you so much. And bye-bye. All right, thank you.