 if you can see. And welcome. Welcome to everybody that's just joining us. We're just going into our second part of this session and we're moving straight across to Leo and Verena in a second and I'm just thanking Pebblepad for being our sponsors for this session. So thank you very much Pebblepad. I know there will be people very interested in that who are in the chat already. Okay. I'm going to pass you over now. I'm just going to stop these slides. Are you okay to get yours once up Leo? If not, give me a shout out. Great. Okay. Pass you over then. Lovely. Thanks Leo. Okay. Hi everyone. It's Leo Havman here and I'm joined by one of my partners in Crime Verena Roberts. And we have this idea that we should have a discussion or we should offer a discussion at this conference about pandemic pedagogy. And as we developed our ideas, we discovered that there was even more to it than we at first thought. So our sub theme here is social presence in the viral learning environment. Just to quickly introduce ourselves. So I'm based in London, in the UK. I work at University College London as a digital education advisor. Also a PhD student at the Open University. My research is around open and digital practices and policies in higher education. I'm a member of the GOGN network and also one of the coordinators of the M25 learning technology group, which is a sig of old. And it's through Twitter in general, knowing the same people, but ultimately also through GOGN that Verena and I have got to know each other. And maybe Verena, would you like to introduce yourself a bit too? Thank you Leo. Yes, Leo and I are partners in Crime and I come to you as a penguin from Canada. I'm Dr. Verena Roberts and the irony is that literally downstairs in a room, a very closed room with 50 people, I'm expected downstairs after we finish this and meet with my high school group, which is quite exciting and scary at the same time. I'm a learning designer with the ETS group at the University of British Columbia. I'm a session instructor with Victoria and Hugh Calgary and I have been literally teaching online courses non-stop since January. I've been given lots of opportunities again and again to teach in different ways, which is really exciting and we'll come into play in our chat today. I'm also an educational specialist with a nonprofit called Cibera here in Canada with which focuses on open data science and coding. And most importantly, I would say as well, I'm a mom to three kids and I survived so far the K-12 remote access learning, although two of my kids are going back online next week. So let's get going. So what is this about? Sorry, I think we advanced a little bit too. I think we're both moving this slide. So sorry, the text wasn't meant to be this faint, but anyway. This is a slightly shortened version of the abstract. The long one is, of course, on the site. But essentially, that this was prompted by the fact that at the beginning of the pandemic, there was such a huge demand in terms of just moving, just getting online, getting everything online in any kind of possible way as rapidly as we could. And certainly some questioning going on around are we doing things in the way that we would like to do them and hoping that we were going to be able to refine our approach and really help our colleagues to get more confident and more sort of adept in online teaching, heading towards the autumn as it became clearer that the autumn was also going to be very much an online focused kind of experience as well. And so really, one of the things I think that led us to want to talk about this was our sense of frustration that a lot of the discussion around all of this was happening kind of in a strange kind of parallel universe where people seem to have the capacity to discuss and engage with the ideas where for like certainly in my world, I was just completely focused on just attending all the meetings that I had every day, sometimes like five to six hours of meetings a day and then trying to sort of do the things that were emerging from what we decided to do during the meetings or what was being asked of us. And so there was a time that we didn't have a lot of time to be putting our ideas out into the world and we were interested in the volume of the ideas as well as what they were that were coming from other people. And so we wanted to kind of reflect on like basically where have we been and where are we going at this stage with COVID and education? Over to you, Vrina. Yeah, sorry about that. So I was going through my phone. Oh, can you hear me? Yeah, I was going through my phone and I started to look at some of the different slides that I've taken off and no they're not all CC license. They're literally things I took off the screen or just from Twitter or from Instagram. That literally I was taking pictures of the newspaper every day because at my university there were all sorts of things going on like all of a sudden the students could opt out of letter grades and they didn't even understand what was going on. There were incredible things happening where students were coming together and defeating apps and figuring out how to use technology in ways that teachers couldn't even believe or even political systems couldn't understand as we've seen. And finally as a teacher it's all often been criticized. YouTube has been criticized or digital learning has been criticized and now all of a sudden we all looked like the YouTubers that we see in this picture right here. I looked at my horoscope daily. It's a lot of time spent at home and as a mom working from home that is not me but that was a picture taken from Instagram and that's definitely how I felt. And then there's also the picture in the middle and that is me and that's when I was in two different web conferences at the same time. On the left I was presenting and on the right I was actually in a meeting. So I think we can all relate to these slides in different ways in the chat. Did anyone relate to any of these experiences in any way? You're welcome. I don't know if you can actually put in an image as well. So I'm seeing some people can relate to this but in the middle of all this chaos we wanted to think about what are we actually learning in terms of learning designers because Leo and I can't help it. All we do is reflect and think and so even though all this chaos was going on and we couldn't live breathe and we were struggling with what was going on and the expectations we really wanted to look at the positives and see how we were all responding to this crisis. So pandemic pedagogy what do we even mean by it? At first I just thought I like the alliteration but then I thought well the obvious question here is how do we teach and learn in the context of the pandemic? But I feel that there's a second question here which has been more emergent which is what is the pandemic teaching us? At the beginning of this we didn't realize we would have so much to learn as time went on we would see how the pandemic exposed and magnified inequalities and we've heard quite a bit about that throughout this conference and I think that many of us who were fortunate enough not to realize it have realized how fragile our normal is and so as a way of thinking about this in maybe a more playful way and I'm glad that we ended up doing it in a playful way for one of the last sessions of the conference. We started thinking about identities and narratives in the early pandemic and how perhaps these were evolving as it's continued. So we came up with these ideas about ostriches, owls and vultures as being some of the pandemic identities. Should we have the pictures? We've got nice pictures of them for you to look at while we ask you who might be our ostriches our owls and our vultures in the pandemic educational landscape. So thinking back to those first that first month did anyone come across as a vulture an owl or an ostrich in your opinion and not names generalizations? Thank you Dom. Exactly. So we have ed tacks as owls, interesting, yeah. Anyone else have some ideas? Panguins, we forgot the penguins Leo, how could we forget the penguins? We also were trying to figure out how it related to Audrey Waters' pigeons but in the end we couldn't. So there's no pigeons either. That's thanks Martin, vulture ed tech. Oh vultures, there we go. Martin got it. We're thinking more vultures are ed tech. Ada and an owl, yeah. Yeah, we've got some ostriches as some of our colleagues who remain nameless. Exactly. So I think you see where we're going with this and we thought in terms of the narratives that these identities related to the ostrich narrative is yeah, good point from Sharon as well. I think we think that as well. One of the narratives was maybe this will all just go away and this obviously relates to the ostrich identity. Sorry Verena, you were going to explain this slide. No, no, no, that's exactly what I was going to say. So specifically, also we wanted, no, the next slide. Sorry, I'm getting myself with my slides. There we go. The other really important element was the free for five minutes phase. I didn't take enough shots of all the different opportunities that I was given as a K-12 educator for free products, free digital access, free, free opportunities to be in a learning platform. But my favorite was free open access until June, specifically June 30th, 2020. That was really the date for everyone. And I did find this shot that said free resources, but this slide will be updated as resources become available. And that's kind of the feeling of what happened a lot of time. The free came with an ending or at a cost. And we're going to talk a little bit about where was OER in all of this? Was it an opportunity for OER or did it get missed or did the vultures kind of overshadow or did other people kind of step in and offer free products that have now, in many cases, disappeared? So go ahead, Leo. So another, I think, really key narrative of this period was one that in the end I've summarized is this is our moment. And I think that this actually was prominent across various different variations of identity, but which we're kind of relating to the owls. And I'll explain the owls from our perspective a bit more. So the wise owls, whether they were long standing or brand new experts and thought leaders, sometimes we're presenting a, and of course also some of us felt ourselves to be wise owls, but we're not necessarily very visible in the more public sphere of this. This is maybe the educational variant on the live your best life narrative that was circulating more broadly in the kind of early pandemic. This is the one that says now you're going to go on a diet, get fit, learn a musical instrument. This time at home is a gift horse you'd better not look in the mouth. It was exhausting us to be good neoliberal subjects and use the time productively. And of course some of us though were already using all of our time and more quite productively, leaving no time for self-improvement and not much for self-care. And it was tempting nonetheless to be caught up in the idea that this is our moment. It wasn't only for those who had wanted to sell e-books, ed tech solutions or leading thoughts. It was also perhaps tempting for staff within organizations supporting online learning to hope that despite feeling some discomfort with the idea of pandemic as opportunity that this was our moment to recruit academic staff to this cause that we've put so much work, so much of our careers into, to be recognized for our expertise in it, to stave off disaster in the short term, but also to make lasting improvements to teaching and learning through increased engagement and baseline knowledge. I don't blame you for banning the word opportunity. I remember my moment and actually this was from a principal who sent me a tweet saying Rita, this is your moment. I didn't have a job in that moment other than being a session instructor. And all you can see me doing is tweeting about open educational resources. So that shows you the moment and what the reality was for me. I went from no job to like looking for a job in that moment and then I was completely inundated and had no time. The idea of the opportunity for me to share ideas or to to lead, I still have it, but it definitely hasn't happened. Catherine, the musical burden is coming. Catherine says there should be a musical slide. No, no, no. I agree. There should be music slide and Catherine pointed that out to you. And then there was the reality of trauma and really accepting the fact that we were in this too. It was almost like we forgot just because we were part of online learning before that we wouldn't be as traumatized. And even though I put those pictures out there and I was looking at it and thinking about it, it was, it came to a point that I had to accept that I was in this traumatic experience like everyone else. Leo. Leo is having too much fun. I'm just figuring out where I am. Oh, no, you just have to speak on trauma. Trauma is everyone. I think that we, I mean, we all know. And so coming back to our, I guess, to our theme here, one of the interesting features of the response and the wider society to COVID has been the phrasing of social distancing, the idea that we all need to be distant from each other. But of course, this is really about physical distancing. And, you know, it's quite strange when we were thinking in an online learning context, we're actually, we're often much more concerned about social presence and kind of how to develop and sustain that and foster that and encourage that. And so one of the great challenges we think has been for the staff that have been moving from the kind of classroom-based face-to-face teaching mode into this new modality and tempted to just try and sort of replicate that with Zoom has been trying to think more about prioritising presence and care. I do think, though, that one of the reasons that it's been quite tempting from any staff to want to do these kind of synchronous live streamed lecture sessions has been, has actually been because they've sensed the desire on the part of students to kind of have their presence. And they find the idea of developing presence in a different way is quite, they don't necessarily know how to go around doing that. So we're going to talk a bit here about some of the things from our own experiences of our work in this context. But do you want to start? So in my experiences, as I said, consistently teaching online, I think one of the biggest humbling experiences was realising that I didn't actually know as much as I thought I might have done about online learning. Specifically the trauma, the need to be flexible, the fact that students now had no access. It wasn't like it wasn't there before, but it was amplified and equity was amplified in ways that were previously inconceivable. As a result, I definitely started to shift my practice even more to what's called human-centred learning. Specifically what I did as an actual practitioner during the session courses was that I would create what's called social pods. And social pods are either informal or formal learning groups, where the students are put together in groups, either by the instructor or they choose their own groups. And they do activities and work together online in their own way in their own time throughout the week. But the activities are designed by the instructor and encouraged by the instructor. The reason this evolved in particular was because some students really wanted synchronous sessions every week and I literally couldn't maintain that as an instructor. So I had to come up with some kind of asynchronous support network for the students. And in some cases they would do group work together and they would have some kind of assessment, but in many cases it was working on blogs together or working on questions together with their discussion threads and not making everything online in terms of online in my course or online wherever our digital space was. So the social pod idea has really expanded. It also expanded into my work as a learning designer with UBC. And I was working with kinesiology professors and they loved the idea of supporting their students in some kind of way, especially with courses where you had 300, 400 students. And so they've started to design ways to encourage these social pods. And the only other thing I would add is another way to learn is I've been lucky enough to work with instructors who realized that it's not about the online, it's not about the medium, and that online learning is about learning. And so they're really excited about the positive and the potential and they just said they'd never think about it before if they hadn't been given this opportunity. Leo, you want to say something quick about connected learning? I do want to say something quick, but aware of our five-minute warning. So I'll be quick. But because Farina, I've worked kind of in a sense on the same problem, but in kind of, I guess, different scales in this situation. In my role, a lot of what I've been doing has been trying to come up with ways that we can kind of push out messages to kind of the wider swathes of the UCL community. And one of the things that we were asked to do was to develop a kind of a standard or an approach or a kind of a good practice checklist for teaching online. And we said, well, okay, that's okay because actually we have that. We had the UCLE learning baseline and traditionally, and it's evolved over the years and I've kind of become one of the people that generally does revisions to it and kind of looks after it in a way. But traditionally, it's always been divided into the kind of the baseline and then baseline plus for the courses which are taught completely online, which are quite a kind of a distinct and minority kind of group and where we were asking people to do a lot more. So what we did was we merged the baseline plus into the regular baseline. And we also kind of rewrote in ways where we tried to emphasize tutor presence, communication, support, very much in line with as Aras was saying during the Gojian Gaste yesterday about with the idea that she will probably remember how they felt at this time and really how we supported them and how we guided them and the sense in which we said, don't worry, we're all going to get through this together rather than what specifically they were learning and so prioritizing that sense of that we are a community and that there is care, making that a bit more front and center rather than content. And so we also rebranded the baseline as the connected learning baseline rather than just the e-learning baseline and because we wanted to rather than call it distance learning, we wanted to emphasize the idea that we are still connected even though we might not be meeting up in the same in the same space. And various other aspects of our work have kind of built off of this. This is a kind of an underlying approach including a staff development course called connected learning essentials, which I'm thrilled to say actually 900 of our staff did in the first run and it's been smaller groups as it's subsequently been rerun but we've really seen a lot of engagement from our staff with it. So we're hoping that all of this kind of stuff is making a big difference and we're hoping that our next AVN identity that we're all transforming into is a phoenix and at the end of this you know we'll be phoenix is rising from the flames of this rather than that there will just be scorched earth. So that is pretty much where we wanted to wrap up I think but we did if there is any time we thought we'd be delighted to know what what people think might emerge from this period after the kind of initial initial crisis what kind of online learning are we looking at in our institutions. Oh thanks thanks so much Leo I was going to say if people if anybody would like the mic just let me know in the chat or put your hands up and I can just quickly give you the mic. That was really good wow I was I've been so lucky in the sessions that I've been given mind you all of them have been so good. Really really really interesting stuff you've raised and online kind of social presence is stuff I'm really interested in. There's Matai Miller to tell me to stop talking. I know that the Mariners started to say that people are starting to move into the into the final plenary so but if anybody would like to either comment or to ask a question please do pop it in the chat quickly or if it's quicker you'd like the mic you can have a very quick opportunity to thank everyone to let us know if you have a quick question but thanks very much to all of our speakers really really appreciate your effort really appreciate everybody coming along as well and showing your support and enjoying these excellent sessions that we've had. I'm just quickly scrolling through the chat if you have any questions for you Leo, Verena but I'm sure if anybody wants to get in touch that they can find you very easily all over Twitter. Lovely lots of love in the room for you lots of penguins excellent thank you ever so much I don't think there's any more questions thanks folks I'm going to stop the recording now thank you