 So, I am going to be taking over the moderation. My name is Lisa Marie Blaschke and I am from the University of Oldenburg and also a member of Eden, a senior fellow and part of the board of the Fellows Council. So, I'll be moderating today. We've got a wonderful panel of experts from around the world today to talk about the topic of care and self-care. I mean, all of us are dealing with this pandemic, most of us in work mode as we transition into an online working environment. And while we're doing that, there's a lot of issues that come up in terms of, you know, how do we care for our students, how do we care for our colleagues, and most important, and our families, and most importantly, how do we care for ourselves? And those are the kinds of issues that we'll be addressing today at today's webinar. But first, what I'd like is for Antonelle Approaches here from the NAP Steering Committee to talk a little bit about the Network of Academic and Professionals here at Eden. Go ahead, Antonelle. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, everyone, for being with us. I will still just a couple of minutes just to introduce the NAP because this event is offered within a series of events, of webinars, that NAP, the Network of Academic and Professionals, which is a committee for professional development within the Eden family, has been offering for, since, you know, the beginning of this last mandate of the steering of this steering committee with which I chair. What should, what do we do? We try to support the members providing information, opportunities for professional actions. We support members with the building up of portfolio, documents, resources, blogs, whatever we can do to create the community and to develop professionally our community. We promote communication and what we really would like to be is a place where people can find partners in developing ideas and research, and shared research. If we go on with the following slides, but maybe I can do it myself, I think, yeah. I want to underline being NAPMAP members include. Of course, belonging to a large community. That's what we have been doing and we try to support also participating and giving our effort in this particular moment of emergency. As an institutional member, you can delegate up to 30 individuals in the NAPM. Of course, when it would be possible again, you can participate at conferences. We've reduced fees. I take the chance to remember that this year, our annual conference will be online. We support the establishment of partnership. As we said, there's the possibility to access electronic versions of Eden conference proceedings, which is an important source for deepening and research. Use of the logos, use of all the electronic information that will be sent through our criteria to each member. Those were the only things that I wanted to tell you, introducing this event that was offered within the NAPM, Network of Academic and Professionals. Thank you to everyone. Enjoy the session. Thank you, Antonella. To get us started today, first I'd like to introduce our panel. Our panelists today are Deborah Arnold from the National and International Projects Coordinator at the Digital University for Economics and Management in France. Deborah has over 20 years experience in the field of transnational collaboration to support the transformation of learning and teaching through the use of digital technology and media. From 2010 to 2016, she served on the Executive Committee of Eden and held the position of Vice President of Communications. She's a senior fellow of Eden and currently serves on the board of the Eden Fellows Council. She has a master's degree in media production, journalism and communication from the University of Burgundy and is currently completing a PhD on the topic of digital education, leadership and higher education at Universitate Oberta de Catalunya. Our next speaker is Esther Salomon, who is Director of Parents International. She's based in the Netherlands, although she is from Hungary. Parents International supports parenting on a global scale. Esther was originally trained and practiced as a teacher and later became an... Oh gosh, why can't I pronounce this word? Because I'm thinking of the word in German. Economist. Economist. There we go. She soon completes her PhD in Educational Leadership. She will complete it soon. She started dealing with rights of children's issues in 1989 and has specialized in student rights and parents' rights with a focus on education in the past 22 years. She's been involved in international education and social topics and projects primarily focused on parents, their role, engagement competencies for over a decade. Our next speaker is from South Africa, Open and Distance Learning Research Professor from the University of South Africa. He works in the Department of Business Management in the College of Economic and Management Sciences. In 2019, the National Research Foundation in South Africa awarded Paul with a B3 rating confirming his considerable international reputation for the high quality impact of his research outputs. Some of those awards have actually been through Eden where he's also won the research paper a couple of times. He's a fellow of Eden and serves on several editorial boards. His academic background includes fields of diversity, theology, art history, business management, online learning, and religious studies. He's an internationally recognized speaker, scholar, and researcher and has published numerous articles in the fields of teaching and learning, student success in DE context, learning analytics, and curriculum environment. Right now, his current research focuses on the collection analysis and use of student data and learning analytics, graduate supervision, and digital identity. Our final panelist today is Dr. Jane Brinley from the University of British Columbia Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology in Canada in Vancouver. Thank you, Jane, for getting up early today to be part of today's webinar. Jane is a clinical psychologist who has practiced in a variety of settings taught and supervised graduate students in clinical and counseling psychology most recently at UBC in Vancouver. She also has over 30 years experience as a practitioner, research, and administrator in online learning where she specialized in development and evaluation of learner support services. Her focus is on student resilience, mentorship, and social justice. She's written and taught master's level courses for UBC and University of Oldenburg and has worked as a researcher, consultant, and trainer and distance and online education in Canada and internationally. So we've got a fabulous panelist here today to answer your questions about care and self-care and to start things off, we have a couple of questions that I'd like the panelists to ask right off the bat, and there's just going to be two questions and then we'll lead into some more questions from those in the audience. One of the things I mentioned when we first started out with the webinar today is that all of us are dealing with new circumstances. As I was speaking with my daughter the other day who said, you know, Mom, it's really not all that different. It is very different. We're working under conditions that none of us had ever really worked under before or perhaps not to this extreme. We're working from home. We're at home with our families. We often have to share our computers with other members of the family. So there's a lot of challenges that are facing us as we try to care for our families, to our students and for our colleagues, and for ourselves. So to start off, I'd like to ask Deborah this first question. What do you think we can learn and transfer from our existing experiences in remote working to the online environment, and what else is needed to ensure self-care and care for others? So maybe you could start by tackling that question. Okay. Thank you very much, Lisa, and thank you very much to Eden as well for organizing this webinar on such a vital topic. I think it's becoming one of our primary concerns at the moment. It's very interesting what you said about remote working being a new way of functioning for many people because in fact remote working is my universe. It's my default mode. And so I've been thinking a lot about what works and why it works within the different teams that I'm involved in. And I'd be very, very interested to hear from the other presenters and from participants as well as to what is transferable from this experience, whether it's to working in remote teams or whether it's to online teaching and the whole caring for students aspect. So I'm going to be looking at this from two perspectives. One as a team member who work remotely, and then the other perspective as actually being a manager of European project teams who work remotely themselves. So just a little bit about the team at Onege. So we're a small association which supports universities in digital transformation for teaching and learning. We're a small team of four staff members and we have three or four very, very active board members. So in fact when we consider the Onege team, it's all of those. And one of the interesting things here is that there is no explicit hierarchy. We don't have a manager. We report obviously to the president of our association but who is considered one of the team members himself. So that might be a recipe for disaster and chaos, but in fact it works. And so I've been thinking long and hard about why it works and trying to get some, a few themes out of that. I think the main one is trust. And through that trust comes flexibility in the way we use our time. There's lots of guides going around at the moment being shared about how, when we're in these circumstances, especially in the current crisis, that there needs to be flexibility, flexibility for students in how they use their time in meeting deadlines, but also for remote workers. Another aspect I think is that we all share the objectives. We have ownership of the institutional mission. The fact that we're helping teachers make this emergency shift to remote teaching makes us feel useful. And I think that's a very, very important aspect of how we're actually coping. And the fact that, linked to this absence of hierarchy, we feel we have a voice. We're all part of the team. We can express things, whatever is happening, if things aren't going well, that there's that trust and there's a sympathetic ear on the other end of the computer or the telephone. And so that's what I watched that says, well, how are we actually communicating with each other to make sure that everybody is fine, that nobody is having too important difficulties to be dealing with. So we have regular check-ins, which are more operational. We do those in a webinar context, like here today. We've got an informal WhatsApp group. And we really set the boundaries there of what we would use that for. We wouldn't use that for chasing people up for a late deadline or something. It's just really to relax and to try and get that social cohesion more. And we didn't have that before confinement. We didn't feel the need for that. That's something that we brought in when we went into lockdown. One-to-one phone calls as well, very, very important just for checking up on each other or getting something off our chests if we need to. And I think one of the things that we really need to pay attention to, especially now, is the tolerance of mistakes and the tolerance of moments of what you could call weakness, but just a day when you're not feeling right, when you're not feeling up to it. And reaching out, offering support amongst ourselves. So I think the point that I really want to make there is that it was our normal way of working. We needed to take a step back to think about what was working, what wasn't working. And my own feeling is that all of these should already be in place in normal office-based working circumstances anyway. I think that they're amplified when we move into remote working. And I think they're amplified even further by the current situation related to the pandemic and confinement. So that's just my contribution from my own experience of working. Obviously with EU project coordination as well, and I was doing this from an office before where my team members were distributed all around Europe. So the same practices there. And I'd just like to give a special mention on our European project teams especially our Italian colleagues in Milan who as everybody knows were the first hit by the crisis in Europe. And really they were such an inspiration to the rest of us because they were there, they were leading the work. And I think perhaps it was important for us to have that common goal to think beyond the daily challenges that we were meeting. But of course, we also do need to recognize that many of us are in very good shape. Paul, would you like to share some of your thoughts on this question? Great, thank you Lisa and greetings from South Africa. I'm also privileged to greet you from what we consider to be the oldest distance education institution in the world. We were founded in 1873 and currently we have 380,000 students. So if there is one institution that should have solved the issue of remote by now, it is UNICEF. And when the pandemic arose and it's still unfolding in the African and South African context, we just realized how unprepared we actually were. Suddenly the pandemic has highlighted and continue to highlight the inequalities in our society. While distance education has been from its very start, a humanitarian outreach to those that don't have access, that were excluded. Suddenly this pandemic in South Africa has just made it very, very visible how deep the inequalities still lie and what the role of distance education is in a society that is not yet fully online. So just two aspects with regard to staff and students and what we can possibly learn from this is our lectures were mostly campus based up to now and suddenly they have to work from home. And as reports start to come in, we realize how few or what amount of our lectures don't have the hardware or the software or the Wi-Fi or the Internet connectivity affordable and sustainable from their homes that we never realized. We don't never realize what remote access to our institutional portal looks like and the frustrations therein. We're not geared for telephonic inquiries. We have about 4,000 staff and you cannot phone anyone. You cannot phone ICT. You can send an email if you have email. So suddenly all these, we thought we had it all. We thought we were leading open business learning and suddenly we realized there are some issues we haven't solved. One of the issues that keep coming up from our lectures and our staff is that many of our staff share living spaces with family, with extended family, with friends. So there's no private spaces to log on to Zoom or to a Microsoft Teams meeting. Microsoft Teams has been a huge surprise in this pandemic. While it had been part of our institutional tool kit since I think from last year, not many academics were using Microsoft tools and suddenly we have to and now we're finding our way. So that's on the student, on the staff side. We really get a sense that the inequalities don't only refer to our students but also to our teaching and our support staff. On our students side, this has just amplified more. They live in most of them don't have affordable and sustainable Wi-Fi access. And while UNICEF always then relied on postal systems with the pandemic, the postal systems came to a standstill and suddenly you left with contact numbers. Many of our students have more than one mobile telephone number depending on where they get the cheapest rates. So when you start phoning students, you suddenly discover that the number we have of them on the system is not available anymore or it's not your student anymore. So what we can learn from this and what I think what I hope UNICEF learns from this is that we're not really cared for remote teaching and learning. We were assuming too much from our lecturers, from our systems, from our students. And yet in the midst of all, we see a lot of resilience, how people reach out to their students and to one another with email, with telephone, with SMS, with basic low bandwidth solutions to say, have you seen the email? Are you okay? Just regard for myself, okay. I'm a full-time researcher and though I can work from home, I always worked. I love my office and I miss my office on the campus very much. And now suddenly for the last six weeks, I'm housebound and I found it overwhelming suddenly with all the research opportunities. A colleague of mine said, it seems if there's no shortage of publication spaces, everyone is looking for a special issue. And that is, I'm overwhelmed. There's just too much research to be done. So in this feeling of being overwhelmed and too many opportunities to do research and to collaborate and to document this time, I find my networks on Facebook and Twitter extremely comforting. For me, while I miss my colleagues on campus and my networks on campus, Facebook and my network on Facebook and my networks on Twitter has become my daily bread. Somehow they sustain my scholarly enthusiasm, my scholarly need for support and for a sounding board. So that's a whole range from what we got wrong, but we're trying to get right and how I personally cope with this. Thanks, Lisa. Thank you, Paul. I appreciate your insights. Esther, perhaps you could tell us a little bit more what your experiences have been. Probably more from the parenting perspective. Hello from the Netherlands. Well, the question is about what can we learn from our existing experiences? And along the one hand, I can report very much the same as Deborah has reported because basically we are working remotely. What we see is that the changing circumstances do have an impact on how our colleagues work. And well, I can very much say the same that we really have to be very tolerant because people are influenced by the current circumstances. But of course, I can also talk about the huge amount of parents feedback and what we can learn from that. And I can also speak from my own experience. My son is a university student and I will start with that because what I see is that their university is very proud of taking care of their teachers. But why there is no issue about internet access? What we see is that they really are letting the children down. Well, the young adults down. So they are focusing too much on the faculty and it also results in let's focus on the students. Which, well, of course, this is something that we can learn from because we have to have an equal focus on ourselves. And also on the others. And why, of course, it's always the most important thing that those who are responsible are better taken care of first. I always quote what you when you will be able to travel again here in the security announcement that in the airplane about the oxygen mask. So take your mask first and then take care of those in need. So if you are not okay, and this is, I think, a very important learning point, then you cannot help others to be okay. What probably is the biggest learning from the current situation that must be also considered in online remote work and also regular day-to-day face-to-face work is how to find work-life balance. And what families are experiencing now is a kind of an extrapolated problem of what they already have because you are 24-7 reachable through your phone. But a lot of people feel that they really have to be 24-7 available. And we are trying to help families to establish a schedule, which is very important for self-care and also care for others to make a difference between free time and work time to include enough physical activities in their day so that they don't only focus on work and school. And also to use the same means, the same online means, but also face-to-face meeting possibilities, social distancing in parks, going out together with children for keeping up non-work personal relationships, because all of these have a big impact on how well you can deliver also in your work. And I find it very important what Deborah said about trust because one of the things I listed for the learning points is that we have to find a fine balance between control, trust, and guidance when it comes to working remotely. Because what we see is that some people who are very much used to face-to-face working are trying to do everything to prove that they are controlling the situation while remote working is very different from that. So you really have to give the appropriate guidance, but at the same time you have to learn to trust the people you work with. But my last point here is that we also have to learn that this is not for everybody. So once things go back to normal, even if there will be more people working from home, we do have to consider that this is not for everybody. And also, in my circumstances, this is my own decision that I'm basically working from home. For many other people, it's also their own decision, but the circumstances have changed and because the children are at home, the spouses work from home, the university students were sent home. In the UK, I know that these wagons are popping up on driveways because they don't have an extra room for the kid who was coming back from university where they were kicked out of dorms. And so when the circumstances change to even without psychological pressure, and I think it's a very important learning point. And what we also see, and I think it's a very positive thing, that there are all these ludic who would do anything to keep people away from digital. And now they're learning the difference between active and passive digital use, and they are using it. So I think we have to take leverage of people enjoying digital, even those people who were very much against using digital devices and connected things. Thank you, Esther. I really appreciate your insights. I especially like your example of the mask in the airplane and how you need to put your own mask on first and care for yourself first before you can care for others. Jane, can you provide some of your thoughts on this? Jane, I think your microphone is on mute. There, can you hear me now? Okay. Go ahead, Jane. That's great. Thank you, even for organizing this session and for inviting me. I also really appreciated what you said, Esther, about putting your own oxygen mask on first. I think that's one of the most important concepts that we can think about because online teaching, you can drown a bit. You could work 24-7 running as fast as you can and still not feel like you're being adequate for your students. So self-care is such an important concept to take care of yourself so that we can take care of our students better. My first experience with remote working situations was when I was with Athabasca University, and so this was not to date myself too much, but it was actually pre-internet. And I was in charge of managing regional offices, but I was also in a regional office myself, and we had a central office that was at a distance from us. And I really learned that although management is complex, managing at a distance is a lot more complex, just like teaching is complex, but teaching at a distance is much more complex. And if I could sort of boil it and distill it down, I would say that the most important factor in demonstrating care is engaging in frequent two-way communication. So you need to develop common goals and clear expectations both ways, and that can only be achieved through ongoing communication and a negotiated process. And it has to be empathetic communication that contributes to relationship and trust building, and you talked about this quite a bit, Deborah. Applying this to online teaching, what I found is it means trying to create an environment that I would describe as generous so that the care is actually felt and experienced, so that you take time to do things like acknowledge individuals, negotiate expectations, and build trust, and you have to have some shared experiences as well. One of the things that we started to do in early days at Athabasca University, as part of our staff meeting, we would always have office space for a regional office to give a case study, and this was done by teleconferencing. And then we would all discuss that case study, whether it was an issue with a student or an issue within the office, so that we really developed a shared understanding of one another and got to know each other on a personal level. I think early demonstration of care of students just like that kind of management at a distance, you can set a certain tone. And then lastly, what I would say is the importance of communication of expectations for one another, because it's so easy to have misunderstandings at a distance. But a big part of self-care is having clear expectations, what people can expect of me, and what I can expect of them. Sometimes we allow students to have too high expectations from us. We answer emails at all times of the day and night. I'll just check my computer, for example. We have to set boundaries, and we have to set just as if we were on campus, we would have office hours. So we have to take care of ourselves that way, and we also have expectations of our students. But in this particular context, I'd like to go back to something Deborah said, and that's tolerance of mistakes, having a forgiveness. So we have expectations of one another, but these are unusual circumstances. So we also have to have a tolerance and a sense of forgiveness for ourselves and for mistakes that other people will make. Thank you. Thank you, Jane. The panelists, you've come up with a lot of, or you've mentioned, some very important aspects, characteristics of this environment in order to care for others and to care for ourselves, elements such as trust and flexibility. Deborah mentioned empathy and tolerance is so very important. Paul mentioned the challenges that we have with infrastructure, whether it's a technological infrastructure or a physical one. Esther also mentioned the importance of tolerance and finding that work-life balance. And, Jane, with your statements about having those common goals, common expectations, setting a tone, setting boundaries, and really having an empathetic communication with students and with those around us. These are all really excellent points that I think will be very helpful for us. I'd like to move on now to the next question that we have for our panelists. And that's really, you know, what insights can we draw from the research and the different disciplines that can help and inform us in our practice? You all come from very different backgrounds, all working within education. Where do you see us being able to draw from this research in these other fields and which fields are they? And how can we use this knowledge, these insights to help us? And we're going to start with Jane. I know you just finished up talking, but if you could just take two minutes. Well, my background is in clinical and counseling psychology. And so I look to what I teach my graduate students who are just starting out learning how to do therapy. And I think those are highly applicable to the online teaching environment, but also particularly the situation we currently find ourselves in. And that's looking to the importance of relationship building and use of emotional intelligence in creating an environment where change, which is what learning is, can take place. So taking an empathetic stance, understanding the context and unique perspectives of an individual and conveying that understanding. We just talked about this a little bit, having a generous and forgiving attitude of others and self, the tone of the messages that you give. Having that empathetic and generous tone, communicating respect. And you can do this online using names, using the names of individuals, acknowledging their experience, calling on learners skills, showing belief and confidence in others and their capabilities. Building trust through demonstration of authenticity and honesty and communications and use of feedback, use of active listening to demonstrate empathy and understanding, acknowledging people's feelings. And responding to their feedback, referring to something that was said earlier to show that you can hear them. Communicating expectations for self and learners clearly again, but we do this in therapy all the time so there are no surprises and you build trust. Setting boundaries through that setting of mutual expectation, but again, showing willingness to make exceptions with exceptional circumstances and demonstrating self care. So our students practice self care as well through things like Esther mentioned, like work balance. Those are certainly some of the basics from teaching therapy and I think they have great transferability to teaching online. Thank you. Thank you. Well, yes. Well, first of all, I would like to follow up on the importance of feeling and focusing on this psyche of the person. But I was thinking about the question and I have some ideas about how we can continue after the current situation is getting better or the restrictions are being lifted. So the first thing that I thought about is that we really have to consider other disciplines and experiences and we will have to tackle on the long run. The effect, the long term effect of the current situation, which will quite likely be very similar to some kind of a PTSD for many students, teachers, people who were forced out of their jobs were forced to work remotely. And well, I know about Bruce Perry, who is already focusing on this long term trauma tackling necessity, but I haven't heard too much about that. So I haven't really heard others focusing on the current situation as being a trauma for many parents, many children and many adults were not parents. And also, it's very closely linked to the fact that what we consume via mass media and social media is very much infiltrated with fake news or over exaggerating certain elements. For example, it's a very interesting kind of self assurance and also stress management thing that every time we have an online meeting, we ask our colleagues from Italy, from Spain, from areas that are supposed to be very much impacted, how much their lives are affected, whether anybody from their family or group of friends have been infected or died. And it's also very important to understand that what you leave is very often just something that is there to support what the governments are doing, to give you a kind of emphasis that they are doing the right thing. And this leads me to a third thing that we can draw from the current situation and that needs other disciplines to come in, is the necessity for active and responsible digital citizenship to be able to differentiate between fake news and real news to demand that your government trusts you. That's, for example, the basic difference between how Sweden and Netherlands is tackling the situation. They say that, well, you are the citizens, you are grown-ups. We can tell you what is best for you, most probably, and then you can make a decision. So I think we have to think about how we can properly resuscitate active citizenship because in a lot of countries, people happily gave up their citizenship rights. And well, I think it will, again, be as big a task for everybody as tackling the trauma thing. And you were also asking about what other fields can help. We were talking a lot about people being in the same room. I think we will have to talk much more to architects because even when we go back to normal, one learning will be that we have to create personal spaces as much as possible for every member of a family or a small community. Because anything can happen anytime. Somebody can have measles or severe flu and people will be confined in a small place. So it would be a very big task for architects to design personal or family spaces that are for being together but also for being separated when people really need it personally. Thank you, Esther. Thanks, Lisanne. Thank you, Esther and Jane. I find it very useful what you've already indicated. I think from my specific context and what I see in the South African context is as institutions and as faculty members try to reach out and make plans without having necessarily all the facts to their disposal, not knowing whether something will work. You're often damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. So institutions have really, really tried to move online very fast and students have pushed back and say, but we don't have access. So I think in this context where there's really chaos and there's no recipe, we cannot really learn from anyone except ourselves. The leadership framework that was crafted by David Snowden and Mary Boone a number of years ago. They called it the Cunefin framework and I will post the reference in the chat box. For me, that is a very, very helpful framework just to make sense of where we are. And they basically distinguish between simple context, simple problem spaces, complicated spaces, complex and then chaotic spaces. And without using a lot of time, simple problem spaces, there is a solution and we all know the solution and you just must just do it. Complicated is yes, it's a bit more difficult, but we have experts in the room. Someone knows the answer. Complex spaces is like a butterfly flapping his or her wings in the Amazon Fair Forest. We're not sure where this is going. You do something and it may have unintended consequences. And then the chaotic spaces, there's no recipe, there's no guidance. And David Snowden and Mary Boone guides us there and says, you must act. You should do something and just know that you will be held account, but you don't have any choice but to act. But then you must be sensitive to what are the responses and then you must adapt. And I think just lastly from my side, as I respond to my students, as I respond to my colleagues and where I don't have the wisdom to know whether this is the right thing to do, I think we must all consider the potential of harm. What can go wrong? We should never forget the ethics. We should never forget that we need to be very, very careful. And then lastly, there's a danger that as we respond in emergency situations, that this can become a new normal, that we can disregard privacy, that we can collect as much data after the pandemic as the data we need now to understand the pandemic. So with these few pointers, I really think we in a chaotic state, we must make choices without having the necessary wisdom or precedent to go to and then to take responsibility and to act ethically. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was very moving, particularly the ethical aspects that we really need to be considering right now and the way that mixes with just the power. Okay. Yeah, thank you. Yes. I mean, everything resonates for so many different levels. I think we need to be multidisciplinary. And I would definitely agree with what Paul's just said about ethics being at the forefront in the face of any decision that we make. My current research, as you said in the introduction, I'm looking at digital education leadership and I'm looking at it from the point of view of leadership literacies. So it's really at the intersection of communication studies, management and pedagogy because of the theme of digital education leadership. And so I'll be very interested in the framework that Paul mentioned. So I'm working around this, this framework of leadership literacies which was developed by an Australian academic, Heather Davis, and she divides them up into five dimensions. You have the world leadership literacy and it's all about attitudes and behaviors with respect to teaching and learning with respect to technology and the place of digital society, which Esther also touched on earlier. So there's this one, there's the whole sustaining leadership literacy, which is all about issues of access and equity and the ethics is in that as well as the wider environmental concerns of a greater recourse to technology to solve our problems. Then there's the leading full dimension, which is all about the actual leadership behaviors and actions, which I touched on earlier when I was talking about the way that we work with this distributed leadership approach. And then supporting those, you've got the relational leadership literacy, which is really what we've been stressing, many of us, this trust building, sense making together, sharing responsibility from a leadership perspective, investing that time and energy in managing relationships, the climate of trust and empathy. And something that comes as well from e-leadership, which is really the remote leadership mediated by technology, is creating this sense of remote presence. Now, it's actually very difficult to define and do, but I think the best online teachers and online tutors do that very, very well, so that's something that we could look at from the pedagogical side. And then the final dimension in this framework is called the learning full literacy, and that's all about unlearning, relearning, learning to learn. Thank you, Deborah, and thank you for sharing the framework as well. There are a number of questions that are coming in from the audience, and so I'd like to move now to some of those questions. One of them is from Anna Cristina, who commented on something that Paul said, and she writes, the challenge is really making the shift to another space. In other words, finding that sense of place and purpose in a digital environment, it's not always that simple. What do the panelists think about how can we create, nurture and support and sustain that space? Who would like to perhaps address that question? Lisa, can you just repeat the question somehow we lost? Sure. The question is the challenge is making the shift to a new space, finding a place, a sense of place and purpose in the digital environment. And it's not always a simple thing to do to create that space where students feel safe or secure. What kinds of things can we do to create a space where they feel nurtured and supported, and what can we do to sustain that space? I think it's very important that we reach out to our students to not determine spaces beforehand, but to ask them what space will work for you. If they are comfortable with what's up, or if they're comfortable with sending me a piece, call me or whatever, we need to find which spaces they will allow us into. I think that's very important. They may not be comfortable in the spaces that we create. We cannot build a campus and they will come, especially in this time. We cannot assume that the spaces we create will be safe, will be caring and will be accessible. So that's just very shortly from my side. I would add one sentence. I do agree with co-creating the space. And I also think it's very important to co-create the rules of the space. And in the case of adult students, the student and the institution, in the case of a minor student or under 16, 18, it has to be a co-creation of the institution, the teachers, the students, regardless of their low age and the parents. It would be my contribution in terms of what the... Jane and Deborah, do you have anything you'd like to add? I can bring to it. I would just like to say that I totally agree on this, co-creating the rules of the space. And that resonates with what we did on our own age team in the WhatsApp group, where one or two people were not comfortable there in the first place. And so we're missing out on conversations. So we had to constantly come back and review what was going on in there, come to an agreement. But if anybody didn't do something because it had been said in the WhatsApp group, then there was no problem there, that more official exchanges of working tasks and so on were to take place by email. And that the WhatsApp group was really there as this way to let off steam and to just create this sense of team. Thanks, Lisa. Jane, I think I would just emphasize the same point, the importance of negotiating mutual expectations. And as much as you can, living up to those, I think we do sometimes have very high expectations for ourselves that are unrealistic. And it's much better to negotiate expectations on both sides. And that's not a point in time. It's really a negotiated process during the length of whatever that relationship is. So during the process of one course, for example, you constantly have to check in, as Deborah said, and Paul and Esther as well have said is that we need to be clear with each other when we're working remotely, what our mutual expectations are, and be prepared also to check in and maybe move those goalposts a bit depending on what the circumstances are, but share the expectations I think are key to trust in relationship building. Those are all very excellent points, Jane. Thank you. We have another question from Dr. Rukmidi Jamdar, who asked what changes are needed for students post COVID-19 in terms of emotional development. In other words, what are we going to need to do? I mean, what is your advice on how? And I try to go first, Lisa. I think we underestimate, especially on the African continent and in the context of poor communities and communities that are already disenfranchised or genders that are disenfranchised currently. I think it's more than emotional development. I think communities will need food security, there's employment, there's a number of very, very basic needs that I don't think we have an idea of what is coming. So yes, emotional development, of course, but then I would almost say it starts with the institution. How do our institutions care for our staff so that our staff can care for our students? There's a lot that institutions can do for students, but I do think staff at this moment in time, students have realized that the institution is not the boarding. The institution is a lecturer on the other side of the phone or the other side of the LMS. And institutions must really find a way to support lecturers and support staff and administrative staff to get through this time so that we can support our students. But not to become our working environment. Thank you, Paul. I would totally endorse that. Deborah, a question I'd like to ask you, which has also come up in the questions that we've been receiving from the attendees. It might be a good drift. It might actually come to develop into something that becomes a new way of working, but until that's made explicit. Well, this just comes back to what I was saying earlier about unlearning and relearning. At this point in time, I don't know if other people are feeling this, but I feel this enormous tension and this relates to the self-care and caring for others theme today of just getting on with things on a day-to-day basis. You know, I've got my job, I've got my PhD, which I need to get finished. And that PhD in fact has actually been very, very useful because it's given me a project that I need to focus on. It's given me that structure. And also it's quite a big topic as well because I'm trying to imagine define what good leadership of digital education, higher education institutions should be. So it's this tension back and forth between just day-to-day data analysis, making baby steps on the PhD and then looking at the wider world and looking at everything that's wrong with the world, which is just highlighted and emphasised so much by the current crisis. And sometimes that can get on top of you. And then I have this feeling that I really ought to be doing something to start to help to create the world that I dream of, which is a fairer, more equal, more ecologically sound world. And I think there are lots of opportunities here to build on. And I know that we should be doing that. I know that there are lots of people, scholars and activists and people out there already doing things. And so this brings me back to the tension of the time, how I use my time now. And I don't have the answer, so I have decided that for me in terms of self-care, the most important thing is not to... Thank you, Deborah. You mentioned the enormous tension that we're all experiencing and how structure has been very helpful for you. Jane, I'd like to come to you and ask, how do you see us that are balancing the care that we give to our students with our own self-care? What kinds of approaches can we use in order to... Thanks, Lisa. I think the number one thing is you can kind of get a bit lost, and that's normal because we've never experienced anything like this before. So just remembering and recognizing that you are, in fact, a competent professional. But it's normal to feel overwhelmed, that you're not able to accomplish as much as you would like, maybe sometimes, or be as proficient as you would like. And also at the same time, recognizing that your students are experiencing exactly the same thing. That they may be dealing with unfamiliar learning circumstances, probably are, and very challenging ones. And so what I would say there is that it's really helpful, and I think Deborah's just demonstrated that for us, to really reflect and think deeply about what's most important. And in terms of your teaching, thinking about what's most important that you would like your students to learn and how you can best support them. And what that may mean is just lightening up on course content, not concerning yourself with the lecture, so to speak, but doubling down on what's most critical. So maybe thinking about processes, skills that will help your students at this particular time, and that are transferable skills. You know, we could talk about what kinds of things help in course design, but I think most people, if they're starting, they are competent professionals and teachers and there's lots of good resources out there that are free on, that are quick reads and that will help you with that. So I'd say not to start with that, but to start with basic self-care. As I said, in terms of the courses, I would just say think about what's most important and it probably isn't content, it's probably mostly about things you can help your students with with skills. And in terms of your own self-care, try to think of it rather than a sprint. Our own public health officer here in British Columbia, of whom we're very proud, has actually become famous. But she has said think of this as a marathon, but really a very slow marathon, and that there's different activities along the way. And most importantly, there are choices. We still have a lot of choices about how we can do this. So things that Esther talked about earlier are really important, making choices every day to have a daily routine, get exercise, get some fresh air, all of those things. And avoiding, we have been forced into isolation somewhat, but collaboration with others is so essential to the kind of work we do. So if you don't have one already, setting up your own informal support network, comparing notes with a couple of trusted colleagues, maybe forming a small working group, it can save you hours of time as well. You can have complimentary skills. If you engage in self-care, I think you can show much more care and patience with yourself and with students. And so for me, that's how I would balance care for my students with self-care is think about what's most important to start there. Thank you. Thank you, Jane, some very good points, particularly the point about creating an informal network of support to help you through these times. I know I have that as well, and it's very, very helpful. Esther, this is a question I have for you. Given the multiple roles of parents as working adults, as educators, and with their careers, what have been or are the impacts of the pandemic on their well-being? What's your perspective on that? And what do you think? Which of these will be kept and which will be discarded once the restrictive measures to lockdowns have been lifted? We see a number of elements that need to be considered when it comes to well-being and also when it comes to what we would like to carry forward and what we would like to change in the general way of living and working. I mentioned the trauma and the stress issue. It is actually a big challenge because what we see is that there is a need to tackle the fears that the parents themselves have. And on the long run, it will have an impact on how they behave when it comes to institutions. So for example, there will be a necessity to do some thinking about compulsory attendance of schools and the well-being element, because some parents will not feel comfortable sending their children to the school and some children will really be fearful going into the school. Well, actually this brings me to the other element that we see all around the world. There were basically two different parental strategies, especially when it came to smaller children. One was telling people to attend their children that, you know, there are these crazy people called government. They are imposing rules on us. They would find us if we go out, so we have to stay in. These children in countries where they are lifting the restrictions are happy to running around and going out. The families who were trying to be very carefully telling the children that there is this invisible danger outside and we shouldn't go out because it can attack you at any time, you know, this kind of approach. And we receive reports of many, many children who are terrified to go out now that they can. They are actually in a PD as the kind of situation and it will need to be tackled on the long ground. And of course, it raises the question of how much we should accept regulations that are imposed on us and how much we should demand governments, as I also mentioned before, to treat us as responsible adults and to make decisions together with the people. And of course, how to empower people to make informed choices and informed decisions. So this is a very big package and this also shows us that what we have been demanding for many, many years now that schools, institutions that have a regular contact with families, have a regular contact with families who are from disadvantaged backgrounds should have a role, a recognized and remunerated role in empowering the parents and not just working with the kids. Because this is the only link that most of the parents have to any kind of learning opportunity and this is very clearly until now a missed opportunity. So we really hope that the systems will understand how important it is to empower parents for many reasons. We have started a new initiative because we have been collecting parental feedback and also feedback from teachers and school leaders and social workers. So we actually just started a campaign yesterday trying to aim for a new deal on education and we listed the number of topics that seem to be universal. We have to reconsider and rethink how we are providing education for our children and what is the role of the school in it, what is the role of the parents in it. I'm not going to list the topics that we are tackling in that document and we are going to have a lot of expert friends reacting on it with small videos and visuals and some blog entries. But we do see that we need to learn from the current situation and we also see that what is happening now is a unique opportunity and we can use this as a leverage to rethink what we have in place as education provisions. I'm talking about formal education, not university because we all know that what we have in schools all over the world is just not right. We know it from the World Bank research that children go to school, children even leave school with a school leaving certificate and still they don't have basic skills. And we also know that there are offers, there are solutions. The UNESCO was trying to pursue the idea of defining education as a common good which means that education is something that is equitable and inclusive for everybody. It's available for everybody but at the same time it is a common responsibility and the current school closure situation very clearly shows that parents are really willing to make this deal to decide on who should do what. Teachers can also see that the parents are actually champions of distance schooling because it's not education, it's actually just the schooling that is more or less on the table. So I think we have a very, very good starting point. The ultimate goal would be the well-being of all children but it can only be made possible if it is at the same time the well-being of all the professional educators and the well-being of all parents. It's idealistic but at least the overwhelming majority of children, parents and professional educators. Thank you, Esther. We have a question from the YouTube channel that I would like to address from Gabrielle Cornayuma. Would it not be a challenge for an educator who did not practice much care for others or self-care when teaching in a classroom to transfer that into a remote teaching and learning environment? Kind of a rhetorical question. Perhaps you could take it from the perspective of what can we do if we haven't practiced care and self-care within the classroom? Thanks, Lisa. Thanks Gabrielle for watching on YouTube. How can we do that in a remote teaching environment? I think it's more than the fact that I may not have experienced a caring teacher in a face-to-face classroom. I think it's much more wider than that. I think we can all attest to having had horrible teachers and horrible experiences in face-to-face settings but we've also had wonderful experience where a teacher did reach out and did comfort and did care. But even if we didn't, I think the basic human principle is we've all experienced care and had been subjects of care as well as objects where someone reached out and if we can transfer that feeling and that empathy and that act of taking responsibility for someone else into our online classrooms, that will be a good starting point. To be overwhelmed, as Paul said earlier, and to concentrate on these small things while not losing the big picture and making sure they're both strong and healthy. Well, we're coming close to the end of the webinar and I'd just like our panelists to take a moment to think about and respond to their thoughts about how they might, what would be your final words to the participants on how to manage care and self-care within their environments. Now, Esther has brought up some really important points I think about empowering parents, empowering teachers and really looking at this as being a unique opportunity for us where we have a common responsibility where we become champions within this new environment rather than victims, so to speak. So what kind of thoughts do each of you have and I'm going to give you both, in terms of self-care and care for others, what kind of advice would you give to our attendees today? Who would like to start? Paul just ended. Hi, Lisa. Thank you. I think one of the themes from today and Paul really emphasized that when he kicked off the discussion is we do have an opportunity to learn right now. Right now I would say we're in a period of just sorting out our new world and how to work, how to be with our families, new ways of being in the world, but at the same time we are noticing. We're noticing where there are gaps and where there are weaknesses and we may not be able to immediately address those, but we are taking note of them and we shouldn't forget about them. Here in Canada, I read a statistic this morning and this has been turning up more and more that 79% of our deaths from COVID have been in long-term care facilities. Over the years we've turned over long-term care to private entities. They're understaffed and the staff they're underpaid and what's the connection to online learning? The connection is that COVID has turned up a terrible gap in our social support system, our social safety net that we're so proud of in Canada has some terrible gaps and Esther has talked about this with regard to children and we're seeing the schools where there is the most fear of them not opening again our schools with food programs because those children now have food insecurity. So I think one way we can practice self-care is to take notice of these things and think about what Deborah said, what would we like our post-pandemic world to look like and how can we contribute to that as educators, as leaders, as community members, as family members? What are the gaps at a micro level in our own life that we discovered? That maybe we can be doing some better self-care and that at a macro level or in our work environment? What are the gaps and how can we contribute to filling some of those gaps? Maybe not tomorrow but over time. So I think there's some really important learnings here for us and also what isolation took away from us and how we can collaborate better, how we can reach out to each other, how we can work together to fill some of those gaps. Yeah, those are some of the things that I was helped to think about today and reflect on by listening to colleagues. So I thank you for that. And I think as a last thing I would say it'll probably be very healing for us to work together and to be working on those. Okay, well, thank you very much, Jane, because what you've just said leads me into the message that I was wanting to formulate for the takeaway from this. I think the message is you're not alone. This is a message particularly to teachers and it relates to the question about that we had earlier from Gabriella on YouTube. I think it's really important to take this team perspective and also to surface all the support from the workers within higher education institutions. I've just been back on Twitter to find very, very important blog posts that were shared about care and educational technologists and I'll reshare it with the Eden account and the hashtag. Just very shortly, Lisa, I think one of the issues we face in massive open online courses or courses with large enrollments is how to scale care. I think Deborah mentioned something. I would have loved my institution to send an email or a message to our students to say if you have financial concerns at this stage, this is a number you can call or send the message to. If you need to talk to someone on a psychological level, this is a number. Send us a message and we will call you. If you have academic, if you need academic support. I think we must provide this range of support with a human on the other side if possible, but now we know humans cost and care will cost. So I think we in larger distance education institutions have to think about how to make use of algorithms to send out a first caring email to all students. Personalize to say if you have any of these needs, these are the people you can contact. But to follow up, if you have 14,000 students in economics 101, you cannot take care of all of them as a person, as one, tutors won't be able to do that. But we can use algorithms with all the constraints and the biases and the dangers in them. I think we have to explore how we can use these automated systems to make that first move and then to follow up with even a second move that we see you haven't logged on for a week now despite our previous email, can we call you? So I think we need to think through this together. How can we not care better, but how can we scale care? Well, I have two and a half points. The first thing I want to mention that has not been mentioned yet. Do you have any final comments? Care and self care is that a lot of people are taking up learning something in the current situation and we want to keep from that is that these people are experiencing the joy of learning again. So I think we have to keep that again as a leverage and to make people realize that life-long learning is actually joyful and it's a good thing for them. I was watching an episode of Suits the other day where there was a guy who was imprisoned unlawfully and he had to make a decision whether he will go to court risking a life sentence or he will be free in four years and he actually went for being free in four years because another care issue is that we really need to demand information and we need to demand decisions because not knowing what's going to happen, to say that it's going to last for two weeks and in two weeks time we will tell you whether it will last longer or not. It's really, really damaging for the overwhelming majority of people and we also have to see although the majority of countries don't publish numbers, here in the Netherlands they did publish numbers of deaths since the middle of February when the panic started in the media and actually the death toll of the panic is at least three, four times as many as the death toll of the virus. So this is a very, very important care and self-care issue. People are panicking, they're getting heart attacks, they're getting strokes. It's not yet even those who are not getting their chemotherapy or something like that. So my final message will be the same as my first message was take care of yourself because otherwise you cannot take care of others, you will be burnt out and then you will have to stop taking care of those who are your responsibility. Thank you Esther. Thank you to all of our panelists today. You've really been bringing some really incredible insights personally from my own perspective that will be very helpful as we address this issue in the classroom and in our private and personal lives. So thank you very much to our panelists for being here today. Thank you for the participants for being here today and for all of the questions and the comments, the feedback that you gave within the chat, giving guidance to other people who had questions within the chat areas. Thank you to all the participants. Thank you to Antonella for being here to talk about the NAP. Thank you to the Eden Secretariat for all of your support for this webinar. I'd like to bring your attention to the Eden 2020 Annual Conference which will be a virtual conference. The call for contributions remains open so please take an opportunity to submit a paper or a poster workshop, what have you, to the annual conference with the topic of Human and Artificial Intelligence for the Society of the Future. And also I'd like to remind you that next week as part of our Eden Education and Time of a Pandemic webinar series, Steve Wheeler will be with us and he'll be talking about face-to-face at a distance building a learning community online. And so with that, I'd like to bring this to an end. I'd also like to thank Tim in the background who's been channeling me questions from the YouTube channel and from the chat. So thank you to everybody. This is really a team effort and thanks to all of you for your hard work and for your support. Thank you. Online learning does tutoring very, very well.