 Hi, everyone. Welcome to our presentation, Looking Back, Moving Forward. During Open Ed 2020, Wanda, Jim, and I discussed the challenges and successes with opening education in a remote community college. We're back again to discuss what we've learned over the last two years and to examine some of the changes that we've made. We'll also discuss limitations that we've not yet overcome and new opportunities on the horizon. I'd like to begin by introducing our small group. Wanda Roberts is the program head for health programs here at our college. Jim Stover is the adult learning specialist and our very own ethical ed tech guy in our center for learning and teaching innovation. And I'm Tammy Sones-White, also in the center for learning and teaching innovation as an adult learning specialist in instructional design. And now Jim and Wanda will provide our land acknowledgement. We respectfully acknowledge that Aurora College is situated on the traditional territories and homeland of the Denny, Inuit, and Métis peoples of the Northwest Territories. We are grateful to the many Indigenous peoples of the NWT for allowing us the opportunity to learn, work, and live on their lands. We are also deeply grateful for the generous sharing of traditional knowledge, wisdom, and ways of knowing, being, and doing with our students and employees. I would like to acknowledge that Tammy and I join you from Yellowknife, located on Chief Dry Geese Territory, traditional home of the Yellowknives Denny. These are also the traditional lands of the North Slave Métis. Jim joins us from Wati, a community on the self-governed territory of the Clichot people. We extend our respect and appreciation to the Yellowknives Denny, North Slave Métis, and Clichot people for sharing their land with us. Thanks Jim and Wanda. So Wanda's going to start us off here by looking back and providing us with a recap over the past two years. Thank you, Tammy. In the 2020 Open Ed Conference, I spoke about the personal support worker education in the Northwest Territories. The personal support worker program prepares graduates to work as part of the healthcare team, and unlike many places in Canada, graduates are frequently offered full-time work with this designation or paid a fair wage that includes benefits and pension opportunities. I spoke in 2020 about systemic barriers preventing women from traveling to Yellowknife to attend school. A shortage of student housing units in the city often means that those accepted to the campus-based program cancel their seats at the last minute when they are not able to secure housing. In 2020, the PSW program was initiating a distance learning program in an effort to reach individuals in remote communities and to support them to complete their certificates at home. I was optimistic about the program and the impact we would have for people who otherwise might have limited access to post-secondary education. Another point I made at the last conference was about the measurement of success. If graduation is the only measurement we are using to determine what success looks like, then we are missing the learning and growth that takes place for every person who access education. I've supported many learners in the past who did not complete their designation, but talk about the positive impact their experience at school had. And finally, meeting people where they're at to help them get to where they envision requires relationship building, getting to know students and come to understand their lived experiences, strengths and challenges. When we come to know each student as an individual, we can better support them during their educational journey. Over to you, Jim. At our last conference appearance, I described learners at our satellite learning centers as adults with tremendous courage and hope, people who have overcome their fears far enough to give another try at education in spite of a system that's not only failed them, but has traumatized them in the past. I was looking at imminent co-facilitation of a literacy and essential skills course with a colleague who helped me adapt it for online participation from a really well-designed face-to-face curricular resource. In 2020, I also shared my vision for designing more free online courses with a practical focus that don't depend on extensive synchronous teaching sessions, and that meet requests from employed learners for evening classes. Over to you, Tammy. Thanks, Jim. So in our presentation in November, my concerns were about students' challenges and the barriers they needed to overcome to be successful in their chosen areas of study. I spoke about how upwards of 50% of our students are Indigenous in the School of Business and Leadership, and that approximately 80% of the graduates were women. I also identified two levels of helping students overcome barriers. The systemic barriers are broader issues such as broadband capacity and leadership resistance, and the personal relate more to the personal, pedagogical, and technical needs of the students. I spoke about how all of our students must have access to stable, fast, affordable, and equal internet, and the importance of equitable approaches to create openness and education. Lower costs for internet needs need to be negotiated so that the limits to internet are not cost-prohibitive or inaccessible. I also spoke about how we could use pedagogy to ensure that students progress through our programs. I spoke about the importance of leadership and the need for adaptive practices to be entrenched in policy so that would improve our systemic issues. With regard to the personal, I think we were very underprepared to deal with all of the unresolved and unresponsive needs of our students. Every student and their need took much more effort and time than anyone could have ever imagined, and this also, I think, took a toll on our instructors as well. So now what we'd like to do is continue looking back a little bit of reflection. Wanda, can you tell us your reflections on the past and a little bit about your successes, your challenges, and the lessons you learned over the last two years? Thanks, Tammy. Reflecting on the last two years, it's been quite a ride, filled with successes, challenges, and lessons learned, often the hard way. First, the successes. For the first time ever, we graduated 14 students from the Personal Support Worker Distance Program. These learners were situated in five remote communities across the Northwest Territories. When speaking with students about their experience in the program, every one of them expressed enormous gratitude for being able to complete post-secondary education from home and provide support to elders in their community. In addition to that benefit for learners, optimal healthcare delivery by Northern people for Northern people ensures clients and healthcare workers are connected by culture, language, and common history. The more Northern healthcare workers we can educate, the less we need to rely on local healthcare workers from outside the territory. Like-minded faculty teaching in the distance program was key to supporting students. The individuals teaching in this program valued establishing genuine relationships with students and viewed this as integral to student success. If a student missed a few live classes or the instructor noticed a change in the student's established communication pattern, they picked up the phone to call the student. They checked in to find out how the student was doing, asked if they had any questions, and offered assistance. This mitigated any fear or hesitation students might have had about reaching out and asking for help. They didn't have to. It was offered without having to ask for it. The third success I'm going to speak of today is community adult educators. These folks were key to supporting distance students, calling and checking on students, offering assistance locally. When one student talked about how integral the community adult educator was to her success, the educator was a bit taken aback. He said, Wanda, all I did was print learning materials for her when she asked me to and I left the monitor step on my way home from work each day. This is a great reminder that we may think small acts such as printing material is not that important, but it could mean the world to the student. Despite the successes, we also had some challenges. Once students began their practicum placements in long-term care and home care organizations within their community, it became apparent that existing relationships between them and the organization could be both beneficial and detrimental to student learning. Some students reported feeling bullied by staff within the facility as there was history between them and some of the staff working there. Instructors were challenged with teasing out the details in order to ensure students received fair evaluations. Other students working within the same facility that they were completing practicum hours. This worked well for one student as the employer developed a schedule in collaboration with a care supervisor so he could complete practicum hours while continuing to work and support his family. In addition, there were some systemic challenges. For instance, when a student is accepted into the program, our IT department has to manually create a computer account for each student. So the IT department is chronically under staff and we often face situations where students were accepted into the program. Classes were beginning and students did not have access to their computer accounts. As you may imagine, being able to access Moodle and email are pretty important in distance education. We lost several students each year as they had fallen behind in coursework long before they had access to their college accounts. An additional challenge is that we rely heavily on communicating via email with students. Data, internet and cell phone fees are expensive in the North. If we rely on internet as our sole way of contacting students, we are excluding a significant number of people who live without these class C services. Of the many lessons learned in the past few years, I decided to focus on two. Among them, trust the learner. They often understand their own needs and have goals that they're striving for and we may not be aware of. It's not necessary for us to surveil and control students. Rather, we walk beside them on their learning journey. Trusting learner also means listening when they decide distance learning isn't working for them. Rather than trying to talk them into continuing by distance, help them find the path that fits their learning needs. We cannot have a cookie cutter approach to education. The second one, distance can be done even in the North. I know that Tami spoke to some of the challenges with broadband and internet, but we have succeeded on some levels. We have some graduates, we have some people who have experienced education for the first time. An abundance of patience is required for both students and faculty for it to work. Building and maintaining trust with students is key. Listening to them, ensuring they feel supported and offering flexibility in ways that they can engage with learning activities. Over to you, Jim. Thank you, Wanda. Reflecting back on our past few years, I have to say that while not all of my 2020 vision items are fully realized, we did see more essential skills and adult basic education courses adapted for online delivery in remote communities. I still stick by my description of learners who enrolled in our online courses and who persisted in spite of horrible circumstances. One was supporting her sister through the trauma of a murdered young niece. These learners are the real heroes of our attempts to open education in the North. For me, the biggest success is that our Office Skills course worked. It is possible to design distance courses for adult learners who have not had opportunities to achieve higher levels of education. I remember the excitement and the big smiles as participants in my community met me at their doors when I delivered laptops and course binders. We designed most of the instructional readings and videos as asynchronous activities and we tried to save the valuable live synchronous time for discussing what we'd learned in solving problems. One participant who had almost no previous computer experience taught herself enough PowerPoint skills over the weekend from our course videos to complete the slideshow assignment. I was going to call you, she said, but I decided I could do it on my own. That we had serious challenges is revealed in our retention rates. We had eight completions out of 31 participants initially registered in both iterations of the Office Skills course. Some left for job offers or because they had experience to change life situation, but there were also those who left because of limited infrastructure and other challenges. Bandwidth problems meant our video conferences were often reduced to teleconferences, so learners were unable to share their screens to work through problems as we had planned. Family members of one participant took the college supplied turbo stick and used up the month's data so she could no longer log into course resources or meetings. By the time we figured out a workaround, she was discouraged and no longer responded to our outreach. We learned that distance learning is not only possible but can be designed to work well with adult learners who do not have previous distance learning experience. That said, we learned to be ready to provide massive amounts of our own time to support learners at the point when they need it. Dedicated learners, especially those new to distance learning, also need questions answered late at night when their kids or grandkids are sleeping. That required a more immediate means of connecting than just email. Many of us gave our personal cell numbers to learners and I even enabled notifications for Facebook Messenger, normally a hard no-go for me. I learned to take the time to be interested in sometimes rambling reasons why they needed an extension. Assume those who honor you by sharing their complex life circumstances are not trying to manipulate you. Believing learners is one way of caring and technology will fail. We'll stop. Decide first if that will mean eliminating learners affected by the tech failure or if you will have a plan B, plan C, plan D, and so on to include them by other means. We only had a plan B when we started. We formed some plan C and D on the fly to adjust our ideals to reality but it wasn't enough to retain everybody. And we also learned that distance learning is not for everyone and participants who leave the course are not failures, not theirs nor yours. Learners need the freedom to choose how and when they will engage with the learning. Over to you Tammy. Thanks Jim. I'd like to start with the successes. The successes of the past two years have shown the deep caring and compassionate care of instructors to get their students to the finish line. Many faculty have found new ways of connecting with their students and have grown professionally and many of the students have done the same. Nothing like Jim said is a failure and all of us have learned regardless of if the programs were completed or not and these two past years have forced us all to find these multiple ways to connect and new ways of engaging with our students. Unfortunately, there have been challenges so unfortunately the broadband issues are still unresolved and many of the communities have the same or similar access to broadband capacity as they had before. And personally, I won't be happy until we can actually reach the woman in her slippers at her kitchen table with her five kids in New La Havtec. Since we last spoke in November of 2020, the School of Business and Leadership has discontinued its video conferencing to connect students and has decided to rely strictly on teams video conferencing. The downside is that students don't see the necessity of going to campus to attend classes. More students are becoming self-reliant on internet connections of their own and this of course creates less of a necessity of being present in the physical campus locations. For example, one of our students recently relocated to a campus and during a regular reoccurring power outage she lost her connection to her instructor in another community. The student actually went home and connected through her mobile device to the class and later she called a parent at home and said I don't know why I moved here. I could have stayed at home in my own community and done my work there. Also changes to leadership and leadership responsiveness to open and accessible access have had varied results over the last two years. These responses have been varied because of the return to the way we did business to pre-COVID. Many leaders want to go back to the way things used to be and then others of course are saying that there is no way back to the past. We've learned these things and we can't unlearn them. On a positive note there have been many more people in leadership demanding positive innovative change to improve the learning conditions. What I've learned is that advocacy begins with a classroom of one student. What this means for me is that as I work to create openness I must focus on each student and figure out what's the best way to reach them. That change is incremental and it requires partnerships and collaboration with those who are willing and able to contribute and nothing will ever replace that relational need or in the importance of the connections to our students. Moving forward my role has become one more of advocacy and partnership building. I'm working to create deeper awareness of potential solutions that can be used to leverage and improve systemic issues. My involvement with students is based on a better understanding of what makes students successful and what stands in the way of their success. By moving forward I hope to improve broadband access and create meaningful connections through my current role with the college. So now we're going to go and look at our moving forward. Wanda can you tell us a little bit about how you've moved forward? Thanks Tammy. What's new and exciting with personal support worker education? Well in addition to having campus-based education in a new vacant yellow knife and a distance learning program I have a story for you. This fall we were unable to fill nine seats in the yellow knife in-person program due to a shortage of student housing for the campus. When looking at my admissions statistics there were 10 to 15 people from nearby the nearby community of Bechico who had applied to the program but were waitlisted or did not get housing over the past two years. There were also about a dozen people from the same community who signed up for distance courses but did not complete them for various reasons. So I emailed all 22 people from Bechico who had expressed interest in the program within the last two years. I asked them if they are interested in attending in-person classes on a part-time basis at the community learning center in their community. Guess what 15 people said yes. So now rather than sit and stew about the lack of housing in yellow knife we're taking our show on the road. Bechico is an indigenous community one hour from yellow knife by road. Faculty from the PSW program will drive out to the community and learning center one day per week this year to provide in-person learning to people within the community. Students completing all of the courses that are now planned for the community learning center will complete their certificate in two years. So meeting students where they're at offering varied formats for delivery and receiving education really helps us to to open education in the north. On to you Jim. Thanks Wanda. I am going to be retired by the time you view this but I have the honor and privilege of being asked to take a casual contract to help design an online course for online teachers. With a design specialist as team lead we are taking an organic rather than a linear approach to the material and we're finally getting to implement ungrading or as I prefer to say assessment is a conversation in this course. As we transition from a community college to polytechnic university there is a very real need for consistency across courses and programs for accreditation and articulation agreements but it is so easy for fear of not meeting these targets to stifle innovation and instead keep doing things the tried and true way because that's perceived to be safe. I've been privileged to serve on several policy review working groups as well as an equity diversity and inclusion committee. It's really encouraging to see the values of EDI converging with a willingness to make policies more humane, more learner centered and less controlling. Over to you Tammy. Thanks Jim and Wanda. My role in the college has changed as I said earlier I'm now with the Center for Learning and Teaching Innovation and I'm now working with program heads like Wanda and instructors to improve course design and to look at look critically at pedagogy. I'm now focusing on trying to resolve systemic issues as I've said earlier that are perennial for us here in the north. I've also began raising awareness outside of the college by developing partnerships with industry and by writing and publishing about these problems. I've begun collecting data and I'm creating a GIS mapping database to document these inequities in the hopes of politicizing needs and elevating these needs to the awareness of higher of the higher ups in our organization and outside to those with power and authority to advance these changes. Openness still eludes me. Equity though has taken on a new meaning for me. I now want to know what does equity look like for a community? How is open reflected to learners that don't currently have access? What steps would contribute to advancing community's needs and their desires for education? I've stopped creating standardized approaches and putting the cart before the horse and I asked the questions. What do you need to improve educational options for yourself and your community? Coven opened me up to a deeper understanding that openness looks different for each of us and to really make these connections we need to ask these important connections and deeply contextualized questions and then we need to act. We'd like to thank everyone for joining this presentation looking back and moving forward and we'd like to join you now in the virtual space for a real-time discussion. Thanks for watching.