 Hi all as we just finished tap dancing again. Today I'd like to welcome Joel Thomas, Mary Mahoney and David Tatum and they're going to give us a session on creating an open digital toolkit for first year learners on domains. Over to you folks. All right hello everyone I'm Joel Thomas the user engagement library and at Trinity College. These are my colleagues Mary Mahoney our digital scholarship coordinator and David Tatum our instructional technologist. So we're going to go over briefly what our digital liberal arts framework is that we developed and why we picked domains as the platform to realize the digital tool kits that we wanted to create with it. It'd be great if the slide was advancing I don't know what's wrong with Chrome. I'm very sorry just one moment while I try to figure out why it's not going anywhere. Quick quick. Out of all the things I thought might go wrong I'm going to say this is the one I did not anticipate. I'm going to stop sharing sorry. Dave or Mary if you've got it open if you would like to share because I don't know what's going on. Okay it's now frozen and tap that I'm using. Okay let's let's see if I can get this going here. So I'm going to go ahead and start since I have the next slide anyway. So I want to talk about sort of where we started. Let's go back to the beginning here. So a few years ago Trinity College revisited their strategic plan right a lot of colleges every few years do their strategic plan of course and so in 2017 we adopted a new plan to support our mission which is to prepare students to be bold independent thinkers lead transformative lives right great grand talk we want to create bold learners created inclusive community and engaged citizens so as we do a lot of our bigger projects we like to at least refer back to the strategic plan you'll see here the three pillars of the plan be a first choice college for students faculty and staff connect with Hartford in the world and create a sustainable future so when we started developing what we started calling a digital competencies plan we ended up coming up with our different name or digital liberal arts framework we realized very quickly that a lot of the things we're talking about had real obvious direct connections back to a lot of these pillars so it's always a good idea when you can connect things back to your colleges strategic plan as you're talking to the administration other offices for support so I just kind of wanted to ground this in our strategic plan which is sort of where it started thanks Dave and in 2019 just to add to that Trinity College adopted a digital liberal arts framework and this framework offers students opportunities to reflect on and develop digital skills which if you think about liberal arts colleges as teaching students how to think that this liberal arts framework digital liberal arts framework is something that invites students or provides students with competencies to think with digital competencies in particular including information in data literacy communication and collaboration digital content creation and making safety and problem solving and our framework draws on a model proposed by the european union a link to which we can share and builds on earlier adaptations proposed by other liberal arts colleges including Bryn Mars digital competencies program our digital liberal arts framework deliberately defines the safety area broadly to include intersections of technology with physical and mental health covering topics from ergonomic device use to developing healthy emotional boundaries with social media and this focus on safety would become the basis for some of our first programming efforts to share the framework with students and so as we've kind of been emphasizing what's really important for us with this framework is to not just provide opportunities for students to become proficient in different technologies and techniques but to create an environment in which they're exposed to digital scholarship training and tools that provide them with perspectives to enhance their overall liberal arts education we're really trying to empower them and give them the building blocks they need to create things on their own really emphasizing empowerment here so as things progressed our college our faculty came up with what we're calling a new curriculum it's not entirely new and radical compared to what we had but they created a new curriculum which we call the 32 plus four so it's 32 credits plus four extra or co-curricular credits but one of the things they included in that was what is called the wellness initiative and so we had already been working on the digital liberal arts framework and we had started the toolkits and then the wellness curriculum the wellness initiative came along and obviously in wellness they are certainly focusing on physical health and well-being you know things like sports and activities certainly count for that but they expanded it partly with consultation with us to include topics such as community health and responsibility mind body spirit and civic and environmental engagement so it was it was a great opportunity for us to start thinking this these wellness initiative requirements don't start until the incoming class coming in the fall so we're just starting to gear up and starting to think about these these topics so in um 2019 when we first really started doing some programming on our digital liberal arts framework some of the first projects we decided to try were based on things like privacy and security digital health safety wellness productivity so you can see some examples of the the guides here so this is a scrolling capture of what students would see as an example of the productivity guide and the digital health and wellness guide that we had put together so we had already done this this was already something that we we had decided we want to make this part of our our digital liberal arts framework and so it was a great opportunity for us to continue so the success of these guides that we had already started inspired us to create a more sustained digital toolkit covering a range of topics helpful to students thanks Dave yeah and I've shared the links to those initial guides into the chat which hopefully should be reaching you now and something that really influenced our thinking to turn to domains and WordPress as Dave will continue sharing in a moment is um people students would come to our initial live events and they would feel helped by it but in those initial events when we made these digital resource guides to share out they had such a long allowed those events to have such a long life after so in creating our more sustained program which we're calling our digital liberal arts toolkit part of what inspired us was this idea of having guides on a range of topics to help students be successful both inside and outside the classroom that could live in multiple spaces on our website for example and be things that for example faculty could choose from in an a la carte way to include in their own course websites and we imagine this being an iterative process that we can refine every year so as Mary was saying when we started talking about the toolkits there's so much of what we talk about with our digital liberal arts framework is about the broader topics of critical thinking of uh creating knowledge and creating content and it's it's not tool specific it's not platform specific and that's kind of the it's the whole point um so we figured domains was the the obvious platform to model that kind of approach so we love the fact that it's not specific to any tech or apps we love the flexibility and we really want to encourage students to take ownership of the digital presence we talk a lot about we talk about privacy and security that's a big part of it and one of the best ways to learn more about that is to create a presence and and build your own presence so um we're constantly encouraging that we're actually constantly encourage students to um for experiment and explore and domains is is the the perfect match for that so that they can do things that they want to do and experiment and and grow so we want to share with you some of this work in progress that we're engaged in right now and what we started with is a series of surveys that we asked both our first year instructors and first year mentors or the equivalent of ta's um to fill out so we asked them a series of questions mainly drawing on a sense of what are skills or resources you wish you'd known or had when you yourself were first year student in the case of the mentors or for faculty you know what are you seeing in your classroom what kind of skills can be help provide students with to support them both inside and outside the classroom as they acclimate to being in college and the responses to that survey have been super helpful to us as we set up our pilot program so what you see on the slide in front of you are the topics that we'll be covering and our first pilot guides as part of the toolkit as I mentioned this is going to be designed in an iterative process it's our hope every year to invite faculty to co-create the new topic guides with us new subjects to refine previous guides and to work with students and faculty in that adaptive process so you can see that some of the topics reflect a desire to help students know how to improve their communication with faculty and folks on campus but also including a range of things including financial literacy as part of a potential ongoing adulting series so as Dave mentioned earlier we had a couple of earlier events about productivity and digital wellness and we created digital guides to accompany those those were made in canva which we had recently bought a subscription to we liked how they looked but when we started to roll this out as a larger concept and we wanted to involve more people and we want to have more people building these and moving things forward and hosting them in different places we had to figure out a different solution for domains instead of paid canva accounts so to begin that we created a couple pilot guides or actually I guess I kind of did so we use we just settled on wordpress because wordpress is something that we all use our college website is hosted on it it's easy to train people in and then we began exploring plugins and in particular one of our other colleagues had used Elementor to create a site around wellness related to library issues so created some templates of Elementor tried those out saw what we like and what we didn't like how easy it is then for other people to reuse the templates to create things and then took a step back and said okay so we have some ideas of how this can work different ways we can build this now let's really talk about storyboarding and kind of what we want to do going forward because we don't want to have to keep recreating these every time you realize something we've left out so we came up with must have components we looked at a lot of different university websites and saw what they were doing with these and we were very excited by the idea of something that included those empowerment sections like what can you do to get started here are some specific things you can go do right now interactive how do I do this how can I apply this in my life and then also have standard FAQ and contact section so that students can get more information about these toolkits so you can see sort of the the mock-up for what we're building right now to move forward with these and those will also be within Elementor and in WordPress is currently the plan okay so as you can see this is this is a work in progress we've been solely working on the our digital competencies and what we're calling our digital liberal arts framework for a while now we're just starting to roll out the toolkit and so we really want to keep thinking about what we're doing and how useful it is and who we're reaching so we really would like to get feedback and open up some questions to anybody here and see what kind of comments that you might have our what other schools are doing similar things you know we found we've been in contact with other places doing digital competencies but other places doing more of the toolkits we've come across a number of more and more schools are focusing on first generation resources and things like that so they're useful so there's any great resources that you all can share with us that would be great any other challenges that we might want to be aware of and and then one of the things that is is really important to us when we started working on this is how to balance creating a resource that center students needs inside and outside the classroom against the broader push towards productivity so for example we like to refer to Anthony Jack's work his book The Privileged Poor is a great read um and talk about the realities that students face and that come from different backgrounds and different circumstances and especially how the pandemic has changed all of that and recognizing where students are coming from and that some students have different needs than others and and we were really trying to focus on first year students because we really want to try to reach students that might not have all the prior knowledge and skills as some other students we have a broad student we're a relatively small school but we have a broad range of student populations um anywhere from first generation college students to um you know students coming from very elite private schools and they obviously come with a lot of different skills and knowledge and so that's really important to us to really try to reach the students where they are to help them be successful both in classroom and out so um we'd really like to open it up and see if there's any comments suggestions questions or direction that you might have for us yes so I see a question in the chat about one of the challenges sort of what I was just talking about the range of student competencies and abilities some are ahead some are in the middle some are way behind does the toolkit accommodate this I want to say that we are trying to be very focused on that and I think the survey Mary was talking about helps us be informed on that Joel or Mary have a follow-up to that yeah that's part of what we wanted to build these things be very modular and so that students can just take what they need or what's interesting and we also want to make sure that we're mindful about how we might think of students being ahead or behind on skills as opposed to just having different skills and different approaches to these things because we think that often that like um what students value what they need to know how to do and how they accomplish something don't really fall on some kind of you know like fluent to non-fluent line there's all kinds of space there I see you nodding Mary what have you got well I was just going to add to that and say I think something that's really important to us and the design process is allowing for many different ways of knowing in different learning styles and that's honestly been a real challenge you know so if and not all of these questions are defined even by questions or privilege something we learned in the survey process is that you know students who even come from an affluent background are facing a lot of the same challenges even as first gen students which was sort of a surprise to me in particular but something that's been a real asset to our project that maybe we didn't mention um strongly enough what we can say now is that we're not just making these kind of on our own we're working and collaborating with offices across our campus including the accessibility office our student success office which offers a range of programs for first gen students in particular and really all students so that's been something that's um hope that's been an asset to us so far in our design process and this is another question about does the toolkit also create a feeling of belonging being part of a community I think this might make the relationship from the student's institution bigger that's definitely what we're hoping for I mean my goal for this is that eventually a lot of people are working on these things because they're hosted on domains we can have tons of people added to these easily to work on them within WordPress I would love to get students involved in building these as well especially from these different departments because we're working very hard to build stronger relationships on campus yeah and we've actually had um another format that we're calling the community library where we create a pop-up virtual library resources catered to a particular clubs event for example that we get invited to and in those community libraries we've actually inserted things like a padlock board so that students can co-create with us and share things that have helped them depending on what the particular theme is so just to Joel's point we're hoping to kind of build co-creation into it yeah a great question how's the shift to online learning impacted your project um yeah um it slowed things down dramatically I would think is probably the best way to put it it's been a lot more difficult to really pull things together we've been working a little bit to be honest I think it's helped us a lot make sure sort of center our thinking it has brought things like the digital divide and inequalities much more to the forefront as an instructional technologist working directly with students and faculty I'm handling that those kinds of questions every single day um whether it's what kind of equipment students have or what kind of internet access they have or just what their text skills are you know faculty members say take a picture of it convert it to a pdf and send it to me and some students just say okay and they're done and others are worried they're going to fail the class now because they don't have those text skills so um it's definitely slowed down the project itself but in a way I think it's going to help us because it has really made us continually think about these issues of equality and really be willing and understanding where the students are coming from and I think it's helped the faculty realize that too which hopefully will make it easier for us to reach out um and have have faculty members be partners in the process and thank you hope for your question about how faculty can interact or promote these resources that's something actually we've thought about from the beginning and actually why we're hoping to collect them all in one place and then to do outreach at we have an event every fall called jumpstart where faculty come and learn about new resources they that can help their support their teaching and we would like them to see this as something from which they can choose and incorporate into their own class sites and link directly there to support students yeah that's why one of our big moves was to do the survey of first-year faculty in particular because we wanted them to tell us what they needed and what they were seeing so we could work very closely with them to create something they also feel ownership of it's a superb resource it's got me all excited it's the kind kind of thing I think lots of colleges and universities are doing wee bits of this but it's great it's really neat to see it all coming together and being being pulled together in terms of co-creation I can see you're you're publishing on to onto a wordpress module does that allow co-creation have you got lots of editors or have you got a different place that you collect the ideas and then you've published a wordpress it's still kind of a work in progress like we're still finishing up our final designs for what the actual templates were looked like but the goal is to have a fairly large number of editors on this we've spun up a little instance of wordpress on a digital project server that we use and then it's fairly easy to add people and train them as they need and lots of interest in all the links I've been posting them up on to youtube but when we're finished we would we will post the links into discord as well so that folks can get them get them there too and because we had the wee hiccup at the start I let us run over a wee bit of time and now I think we've got we've got a wee break before the the next session so thank you so much and a round of applause and I'll see you in the green room well here we are that was great