 Hello and welcome. So this session is entitled Establishing a Community of Care Lessons Learned from Our Pivot to Digital and your presenters today are Brenna Clark-Gray and Brian Lam. Over to you. Thank you. Brian and I are joining you today from the Kamloops campus of Thompson Rivers University, which is located on the Kamloops Taste Swetmuk territory within the unceded traditional lands of Swetmukulu, where learning has taken place since time immemorial and particularly open learning practices have taken place since time immemorial. So yeah, Brian is going to start by giving you some context for our pandemic experience. So take it away, Brian. So we couldn't help. I mean, this last year, I mean, actually, I remember very well exactly the context that was happening during OER 20, which was pure madness. And actually, I had to pre-record my session with Anne-Marie Scott. And I mean, it was we were just an absolute pure mayhem at that time. So this is very much framed essentially is what our kind of what our practice kind of muddled through in that whole thing. So as we knew that something big was coming to our campus, and it was looking like some sort of face to face shutdown was going to happen, we knew that our university, which although we do have a large open learning division, which is how probably a lot of the OER community knows us, we also have a very significant sized campus operation with about 600 face to face instructors. And to be frank, most of those people had very, very minimal engagement with digital learning and were mostly I would classify as either not involved with it or very, very tangentially involved with it. And I think another thing to just keep in mind, and this is to be honest, I feel like our programming and our kind of discourse within our context at our university, I think it's safe to say when Brenna joined, you know, I think I was pretty frank with her, I said, you know, we really need to start start fresh here. And we actually ended up canceling our entire fall 2019 programming because it just wasn't connecting. We weren't getting turnout, people weren't responding to what we were doing. And so early 2020, we kind of started to build up this two to three year plan where we would slowly start to engage people and get these conversations happening and try to get us to a place where I mean, spoiler alert, where I think where we are now, I mean, I think what's happened over the past years, it's really kind of supercharged what we saw as a two or three year process because we had no choice. We really had to move into it. We knew that if we did not become incredibly responsive, we were going to be completely overwhelmed and overrun. Our campus support side is two or three people at that time. I guess that two or three depends on whether you count me. And we were going to be having five or six hundred instructors who are suddenly going to have to move wholly online in the middle of a semester, most of whom, many of whom, like, do you remember that one workshop we did, Brenna, where people were literally walking with boxed laptops and we were like taking them out of the like setting up their email and stuff. I mean, that's where we are. I don't want to go too much into detail. People who know, I mean, we did have a decent open source toolkit. We do have the pieces in place and we did have to do upgrades and things like that. But we also kind of knew that we had a lot of work to do to be able to extend that. And I think we'll talk a little bit more about this later in the session if I don't talk too much right now. But I think something we were realizing and we were seeing even in the very early times of the pandemic is kind of a touchstone for us with the Naomi Klein book, The Shock Doctrine and that concept of disaster capitalism. And we really could see the vultures were circling, you know, waiting for signs of weakness and ready to come in. And we were really, really concerned that, you know, we were going to get sucked into a paradigm of kind of corporate driven outsourced stuff because there's just no other option. And we were seeing that coming from the kind of requests that were coming to us early on. And as I'm going to do just a quick shout out and we will probably refer to this again later. Brenna has done these wonderful two sets now of these digital detoxes. And I linked to her essay and I'll post this in the discord later. But she did a wonderful essay on kind of the idea of making bad choices. And we were seeing that happen a lot too to the point where even like, yeah, like our privacy law was being, you know, suspended essentially when it came to ed tech. So I don't know, I'll hand over to you Brenna at this point. Yeah, it's so we started off really just with hands on support. As Brian said, we were doing these in person workshops at first or just sort of drop in, we took over a computer lab in one of the buildings and tried to have through the beginning stages these socially distanced help sessions, which were not socially distanced or horribly stressful. And I was so happy when we abandoned them. But they were necessary because yeah, as Brian said, people were coming to us with computers still in boxes. We definitely had faculty who didn't have internet access at home and who were struggling to figure out how they were going to manage that and make that work. So we when we turned to fully online, we started offering four hours a day of daily drop in support. We have continued this process but scaled it back to three days a week. And it was a huge investment of time for the whole team and exhausting. And as someone in my podcast last week, faculty member who was involved in those early stages referred to those sessions as being like therapy sessions. And they often felt like it because we were often the only face of the university that faculty were interacting with in any meaningful way. And so it became a place to really like pour out one's anxieties. So I'm going to talk more about emotional labor in my session tomorrow. But that was definitely a huge component of it. But the sizable investment did give us this opportunity to establish needs and understand just how freaked out everyone was. We were under no illusions when it came to that. So we knew that we needed not just general preparedness and basic digital pedagogy skills, but like really concrete stuff like when do you do synchronous versus asynchronous and which tools in the toolkit are for which task, right? Basic audio and video production skills. And one concern that kept coming up because we do live in this austerity climate for post secondary was faculty, particularly those on contracts were really concerned about how they were going to log and report the work they were doing. And so the task was to kind of imagine a suite of programming over six weeks in May and June to prepare faculty for the September semester that could do all of that, which was terrifying, but also really exciting. And I think for our team, which is we had been so reactive, right, just answering support tickets and helping with immediate on the ground concerns, that transition to actually building a suite of programming was really invigorating. And we tried to underpin everything with an ethic of care thinking. And obviously, this is not new, particularly not to this community. Much of the discourse for teaching and learning professionals, particularly on Twitter was about care, right? How do we manifest care in our classrooms? And so for us, it meant spending a lot of time in sessions prioritizing not faculty wants, but student needs. So we would hear a lot from faculty about, you know, how are we going to stop them from cheating? How are we going to do this? How are we going to do that? And we would try to reframe that conversation to talk about, you know, why students cheat under pressure and what we can do at the assignment design stage to deal with that rather than investing in a tech solution. It was also an important space for actually modeling what online learning and online community in particular could be. And I would say that's the number one piece of feedback we got when we surveyed instructors at the end of the series was that coming to the workshops and joining in the community made them realize that it was possible to feel connected to people in a fully online space. And that was maybe over and above the technical skills, the most valuable thing. There's other issues and we've listed them there, but really, you know, thinking through trauma informed pedagogy, recognizing how just anxious and freaked out faculty were and trying to have a conversation about what that must look like for students at the same time. We spent a lot of time talking about low impact teaching because of our particular demographics. We have lots of students learning in remote communities or on reserves. And so we weren't sure what September would look like for those students and what access they would have to things like, you know, really large video files, for example. And then most importantly, these spaces became really reflective. So we spent a lot of time in each session asking, first of all, checking in with faculty, seeing how they were doing, taking the temperature, just talking about dumb stuff like cats who were always on screen and various things like that. But also inviting reflection and trying to get to the bottom of where that anxiety was coming from alongside the digital pedagogy skills. Um, I love Marshmallow Man so much. So Nicole Singular, who's our graphic designer in open learning, she helped us with the branding and imagery for the events. And summer camp was really a series of workshops. Marshmallow Man really captures the spirit. One of the things we were really careful to attend to, surprisingly, considering how stress we all were worthy aesthetics. So we wanted something fun, welcoming. We used lots of pinks and purples and yellows and blues colors that and pastels colors that really invited a sense of calm, but also fun. So we had 21 one hour workshops. And one of the things was that they were supposed to be light prep for us. They didn't always end up that way they're supposed to be. But they were intentionally zero prep for the instructors. So anybody coming to the session could just drop in. They didn't have to have anything prepared. They didn't have to sort of carve out any more than that one hour from their schedules. We did them during lunch over six weeks. And so basically three a week ish for six weeks. And it really did develop into a very fun community. It was my best hour of the week during probably the most stressful professional time of my life. One of the silly things we did was badging. And we really mean we use badges in very silly way, Brian, if you want to scroll down to show one of our badges. So this idea that faculty were very stressed out about how to log the work they were doing, we resonated with us. And so we developed this little badging system. You got a badge for attending each workshop. And they all had silly names like this. They were all sort of pop culture riffs. So this one's gimme gimme gimme a badge after midnight. I'm going to break into song if you keep this. And this was actually for our badging session. I would say for Brian, the most surprising thing was how much people loved the badges and how motivational the badges were. I'd always been a badge skeptic. And I have to admit the experience of last summer proved me wrong. They can definitely be deployed as a motivational tool, at least for a certain type of person. No question about it. Yeah, one of the people on our team, her dad, was taking the workshops for his teaching. And he was obsessed with getting his badges. And he would be upset if something intervened and he didn't get to the workshop to get his badge. Oh, we'd always get a flurry of questions if there was any delay in getting them posted, or whatever reason, someone didn't get one. That was probably our most common feedback was where's my badge or how do I get my badge. That's true. So as Brian said off the top, we have faculty compliment of about 600. 331 attended at least one workshop, most more than one. We had a certificate of digital competency, about half of those, little less than half of those earned that. And then what I don't think I have here is that Oh, yeah, I do. The video archives have been watched hundreds of times and we are in the process of building an open resource of those workshops. Yeah, and that's at teaching.truebox.ca, by the way. Yeah, yeah, the archives. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to jump ahead to the pandemic impacts because we are running it. Oh, okay. No, and I wanted to make you talk about your podcast, but you got this, Brenna Clark, great. Search it. So we were really concerned, obviously, about the impact of these kinds of surveillance technologies and nobody on this call will be surprised by that. Also, though, we saw a real increase in control and compliance mechanisms, so punitive testing structures, instructors wanting to force cameras on. And so summer camp gave us a place not just to build skills but to talk about care and to really talk about why we were making decisions, like not bringing in an e-proctoring service on a widespread basis on campus, talking about low bandwidth needs of students, talking about Zoom fatigue, talking about equity and accommodations, and making that a thread that ran through every single workshop. So you might be showing up to learn how to edit a video in Kaltura or learn how to use Loom. But once you're there, we're also talking about all of these other equity and care practices as well. And it's hard to assess impact, right? But a couple months ago, we had the experience of a move to bring in a quote-unquote inclusive access textbook service to our campus and faculty mobilized against it in a way that really surprised me. And a lot of the conversation that was happening on campus really did seem to echo some of the discourse of care that was such a central part of the summer camp experience. That's the part that the administrator does not comment on. So just to kind of wrap things up, I mean, I think a lot of this is probably familiar to Learning Text all over this event. I suspect all of us have had a version of this story as well. So I want to thank everyone for letting us share our bit. And maybe I'll try to keep an eye on the comments here because people might want to have their own kind of things. But when I try to look back over the past year, some of the things I've learned since Brenda put me in a musical mood, I think now the Roger Miller song, you can't roller skate in a buffalo herd. And, you know, and there's a line there, you know, the Mike Tyson line, everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth. And I think it's that's idea, like you can plan for stuff. But if anything you've learned from the last year is that plans are a nice thing to have. And yes, it's nice to think things through before you move forward. You always got to be ready to adjust. I think it's safe to say the pandemic lay bare a lot of inequities. I mean, I think the hardest part for me and and and Brian is going to talk more about emotional labor at her session tomorrow. And I've heard her and read her on this and she's amazing on it. But you know, I think that's been the hardest part of the year for all of us were some of the emails we were getting when that when things were breaking down. And I think those things were always there. It's just it became impossible to ignore them because now there was this digital record of it. And frankly, because we were the first line, we were getting that. And some of these emails were really heartbreaking. And then some of the follow up conversations really difficult. I referenced disaster capitalism before, I think we just need to talk a little bit about I mean, at our university, we had significant layoffs. And, you know, for when things like come along that you have problems with. And I think the textbook thing that Brenna referred to a dimension of that, frankly, was, you know, we're not, especially speaking for myself, who basically serves at pleasure at my institution wasn't feeling especially secure in my job. So I have to literally make that calculation. Am I prepared to get fired over this? And I don't I think it's not. I don't think that's over overstated to say that. And I do have a link to the gatesurveillance.net, which was a teaching that Brenna organized with a lot of wonderful people that are actually participating in this conference also in. But, you know, we have a colleague in link letter at UBC who has had to spend $100,000 to defend himself legally because he spoke out against an invasive technology. So this is the backdrop we're working against. So I think it's really great that Brenna made the point, you know, we it's amazing actually, though, when we were building this session or reflecting is like, holy cow, you know what, like, we now have hundreds of instructors, whereas before we had literary people coming with a box, with their laptop in it, we can now say there's hundreds of instructors right now that actually kind of know their way around Moodle and how to convene a big blue button session and are starting to think about using WordPress in interesting ways with their students for portfolios or whatever. But I think more importantly, yeah, I think the discourse really has moved. I think I think the sessions and I got to give Brenna the credit for it. I when she actually proposed the summer camp sessions, we were so busy at that time, I was kind of like, is this wise for your health, much less the rest of the team? I mean, otherwise I always did sessions too, but Brenna really carried the majority of it. And but it really did move the needle and I think it made, actually, I don't know if it made our jobs easier, but it certainly made it less innervating and less frustrating. So yeah, and I guess I'm going to try to take a look at the chat. I mean, or invite Brenna to jump in. I mean, it's, you know, I think people are talking about this return to campus, return to normal, but what do we build? You know, I don't want to flesh this year down the toilet. First of all, those things were laid bare, are still there. And I don't want to just forget what happened. No, Luke's got a great question. It is something that we dealt with a lot, which was how do you deal with the prevailing uncertainty when faculty are looking to reprint structural guidance and information you made out of How are we setting exam policy exactly? Yeah, exactly. That happened all the time, right? Instructors would come to us with a question and I'd be like, I mean, here's what I would do, but this is an institutional policy. And I think it was a situation that was moving so quickly and structures like universities are not built to build policy quickly. And so, you know, one of the things that was really valuable about the summer camp experience was building trust between instructors and our team, so that we could have really frank conversations like actually, we don't have a policy on this right now. And here's who you should follow up with. And in the meantime, this is what I would do. And it felt safe to have those conversations because of the relationships that we had built through that early period. And I have to say, it's good to be part of an institute. I mean, we're housed within the Open Learning Division at TRU. Our team had a certain amount of cohesion in terms of what we kind of believe and where we're at. So, you know, when we were having to improvise, I think I certainly trusted your guidance and I trusted other people on the team, you know, when people came to us and said, you know, why aren't you using this surveillance tack or why don't we just plug the Pearson, you know, course module in here. We were kind of all on the same page about how we tended to respond to those things. That meant everything to me. And of course, we had probably legally actionable back channel discussions constantly, where we were pretty frank and candid with each other. And that meant everything to you because there was an element of badness for most of 2020, honestly. And I'm sure many people, whoever's taking part in this can relate. Great. We don't have an awful lot of time that we're just about a minute. There was a lovely question from Francis there earlier. I don't know if you guys can catch it in the chat, but it was around could faculty relation, relaxation, change their practice to student practices in a pandemic crisis. And then I'm afraid we're going to have to kind of finish just after that. The short answer is a few did. Yeah. And that was great. Yeah, we had this one session called managing your marking load, which was a tricky way to get people in the door to talk about like, how do you manage this giant marking load? And then to say a sign fewer things. So we had a lot of conversations about care that were framed around these larger sort of faculty panic issues. And that really did seem to help people recognize the relationship between the kind of control that some part of them wish to exert in the classroom and the knock on effect for them, particularly in pandemic conditions. Okay. I think this really resonates with an awful lot of people here. The chat is absolutely on fire. So maybe we could just take it over to discord and carry on the conversation there. Awesome. I just want to say thank you so much. Love you all. Love you all. Thank you for helping us. Thank you.