 I think it's time to get started. So let me welcome you all to the session. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI, and you've reached one of the project briefing sessions in the Coalition's Spring 2020 member meeting, which is running virtually through the end of May. This session, just by way of introduction, is one of a number of late breaking sessions that we added after we made the decision to go virtual that focus on various aspects of the current emergency and our members' response to it. Today we're going to hear a presentation from Scott Walter, which describes how a smallish liberal arts institution with very little experience in the online instructional delivery world did a very, very rapid pivot to online instructional delivery. And as I think you'll see, this is quite different than a number of institutions who already had extensive experience and were delivering at least some courses through the online environment. And I believe Scott's going to share quite a fascinating story. At the end of his presentation, Diane Goldenberg Hart of CNI will materialize and moderate questions. There's a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen, and please feel free to use that to enter questions at any time during the presentation as they occur to you. We'll take all the questions at the end, but certainly as you think of things, feel free to put them in. And with that, I just thank you all for joining us. I thank Scott for sharing his experiences and insights with us. And over to you, Scott. Thank you, Cliff. I'm going to go ahead and share the screen. And then after I put the presentation up, I'm going to close out my video so that we can keep attention on the presentation. And I'm also going to switch it to the presentation mode. There we are. So first off, I'd like to begin with my hope that you and your colleagues are all well. And my thanks to CNI for this opportunity to present at its virtual conference. My talk today, as Cliff noted, is about the coronavirus-driven pivot to online. But it's a topic especially appropriate at a conference that has made that same sharp turn. Let me continue with a quick caveat. When I proposed this talk a month ago, I had no idea what I would be talking about. And now I realize how little time 30 minutes is to talk about it. More than any presentation I have ever given, this talk is happening in the middle of events, situations, and plans that change every day. Yesterday on Twitter, CNI promised that I would provide, quote, a strategy to support continued innovation post-crisis. I wish that I had that crystal ball, but I don't. I hope you'll forgive me for what is inevitably a brief talk about a work in progress and that we may share strategies for innovation during our Q&A. For many of us, I expect the metaphor that has come to mind most often over the past two months has less to do with strategy and more to do with building the plane while in midair. Today, I'll talk about most of the frame, some of the essential systems, but there are definitely some parts of the cabin that are still open to the elements. And as a final part of this introduction, let me note that my campus is still in the scenario planning phase for fall. We aren't looking at 15, but we are looking at several, running the gamut from fully on campus to fully online to different variations of somewhere in the middle. Given this, our planning for library services, IT services, and more must be flexible and prepared to shift as fall plans firm up. Our response to the virus has been shaped, as one reporter said, by the fact that it attacks our campuses at one of the places where they have been strongest. That is, in the establishment and strengthening of community. And while this has been felt in colleges and universities of all types, I'll share some thoughts today on why this impact may be felt most keenly on the campuses of small liberal arts colleges, where, as Botstein reminds us, we have shaped the academic experience around the virtue of real contact with people. And I'm not the only one to suggest that the universal impact the virus has had on the traditional academic experience may be felt most keenly on small residential campuses, or that even in recovery, these campuses already strained by changing demographics and budgetary pressures may soon face an existential challenge to their continued existence. For context, let's begin with a brief definition of liberal education, which is closely associated with, though not synonymous with, small liberal arts colleges like mine. This definition from the AACNU is closest to the one that I grew up with, liberal education as an approach to learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to think critically and to learn throughout their lives. The AACNU continues by describing liberal education as that best suited to a democracy in which empowered citizens are disposed not only to critical thinking, but to civic engagement in support of a more just and inclusive society. Finally, on a more practical note, an education distinguished by certain high-impact educational practices conducive to providing the knowledge and shaping the habits of mind that help to ensure those learning outcomes. I've highlighted some of the ways that those educational practices aligned with the conduct of a liberal education depend on community, engagement with peers, and opportunities for mentoring or, as Botstein put it, real contact with people. Many of these building blocks of a liberal education are the ones most difficult to keep in place in our current environment. Each of these features of the distinctive mission, character, and pedagogical approaches associated with liberal education is clearly seen at Illinois Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college in central Illinois. I've provided the fast facts here, but you can see that we are small, highly residential normally, and very successful when it comes to measures of student success, such as first year retention, student participation in high-impact educational practices, and graduation rate. You can also see that we feature personal attention and access to mentoring opportunities in our description of our educational offer. So much so, in fact, that the creation of an even more enriched campus environment was a goal of our last president's strategic plan, looking to capitalize not only on the in-class experience our students have, but on a similar approach to learning in the co-curriculum in non-classroom spaces, including the library, and through the synergy provided by connections between campus and community-centered programs. The pivot to online challenged each of these aspects of what we've promoted for years as some of the most important reasons to choose IWU, whether as a student or as a faculty member. And as Gannon reminds us, we had to make this change without a blueprint, without a roadmap, choose your metaphor. For me, I'm thinking without a net. Hicks provides a good description of why this pivot may have been especially challenging in liberal arts colleges, as it may require faculty and students to embrace with little preparation or discussion modes of teaching and learning that they may have made a conscious choice to avoid. Moreover, they may be doing this work in an organization in which broad adoption of or even broad discussion of best practices in online learning may not have been a part of the faculty culture. Thus, any efforts to pivot to online may have found a relatively small number of faculty already engaged in this work or even familiar with some of the tools available to them to teach remotely. This was the case at Illinois Wesleyan. For the remainder of our time today, I'll be discussing how we made the pivot in our planning for the future across three areas, the library, information technology services, and faculty development. You can see links here to a number of the sites I'll draw from today, and I'll add others. Please let me know if you'd like any of them dropped into the chat. I also want to note that while we talk about the pivot, as if it was a one-time thing, I've experienced this more as a tide or more accurately a series of tides, each representing points in a crowded academic calendar. And while the tide may evoke a serene vision of waves breaking on the beach, my experience has felt a little more like this. And as my title suggests, my experience has also felt like one of starting almost from scratch, as we were required to address the full range of pivot issues within the context of a traditional residential liberal arts environment. But even almost isn't really fair, because we had a strong foundation in place on which we could build while supporting the pivot to online learning. Of these, I'd like to note the history of faculty engagement with and instructional collaboration with the library, as well as changes in the use of library space that ensured that key partner programs were already here when the virus came. Also, the library and campus IT had a long history of working together successfully, and this had resulted in the establishment of a number of new media spaces in the library over the past year, including a one button studio, podcast studio, and film production studio. These are the more typical focus for a CNI talk, and they were critical resources for campus as the crisis evolved. Finally, while online teaching and learning had not been a recent focus, we had a strong model of instructional mentoring and collegial approaches to faculty development essential to our ability to meet the surge in demand for help with a very small IT staff. And for me, it may be helpful to note that circumstances had placed me in the middle of all of this as university librarian, co-interim CTO with responsibility for online learning and technology training, and point person for our Center for Engaged Learning Initiative, which includes a faculty development component. Given the audience today, I won't go into great detail about the challenges we faced in making the pivot to online in the library. These have been well documented in emerging work, such as the COVID-19 survey that Hinchliffe and Wolf Eisenberg put in the field in March, and on which they have already presented for this conference. I will say that this survey was incredibly valuable in terms of benchmarking our swiftly changing response to the virus at the Ames Library and to my ability to advocate with campus leadership for a speedy progression through plans that resulted in our moving to an online only model of library service ahead of other campuses. To get a sense of how volatile the planning environment was in March, I am reminded of the fact that I had to update my responses to this survey at least three times in one week. Key factors influencing our plan included the rapid evolution of the statewide plan advanced by our Governor, especially his early closure of the schools, the tradition of face-to-face services in the library and IT, and the opportunities that we had for campus engagement. Some of the major areas of focus for our work over the past two months have been on the access, acquisition, or creation of digital content that faculty needed for courses, as well as a renewal of earlier discussions about open access content. While drop-in research consultations dropped off almost completely, we continued to see requests for scheduled consultations with specific courses that mirrored the way our librarians had worked with those classes in the past. We also found ourselves consulting on a wider range of copyright fair use and digital inclusion issues as edge cases became mainstream. And like many libraries, we began to document our experience with the virus as part of university archives. In IT, our focus was on ensuring access to necessary technology for teaching and learning, media content creation, and help desk services, which expanded into heavy use of drop-in opportunities using Google Meet and Zoom, as well as scheduled assistance with issues from course setup to assignment construction to creation of grade books. The pivot meant a stress test for our LMS and video conferencing solutions, and exposed significant gaps in areas such as availability of home technology for faculty, remote access to licensed software and software needed to support certain types of courses, including lab courses and performance-based courses. Finally, it exposed the need for a much more coordinated and sustainable approach in the future to IT training, both for students and faculty. This provides an overview of the support we put in place for training during the pivot, and on which we must build over the summer. This picture suggests something about the planning environment at the start of this. This was the Monday of the extended spring break we had been given to provide workshops to faculty to help get their courses online. And we had more than 20 faculty waiting at the door for the first workshop. Ten minutes before that workshop was to begin, there was a campus-wide blackout. Our staff pulled power from an uninterruptible source and projected from a laptop in the middle of a reading area. We continued this guerrilla technology training until the power came back and had faculty in the building until we closed. Sadly, rather than a week of workshops, we had only this one day as the university closed the library to the public the following morning. One of the distinctive areas of our academic program greatly affected by the pivot to online was experiential education, including study abroad, internships, undergraduate research, and community engagement. The impact on study abroad was obvious and total. Let's set that discussion aside. While some undergraduate research projects were able to continue, others were left incomplete or greatly modified, especially if completion required access to a lab or performance venue. Our annual undergraduate research conference was cancelled, but the abstracts for the projects accepted to the conference are available in our institutional repository. Finally, while many community engagement projects were completed before we suspended on-campus programs, others were not, including those being pursued for credit as part of the Action Research Seminar. One student had been scheduled to complete an internship with a firm providing legal services to individuals with low incomes. Instead, she completed an interview with an attorney via Zoom and shared the responses through one of our community partners. Another student was preparing a workshop on seed starters in community gardens as part of a community-based food access initiative. Instead, she created a how-to video on seed starting and connected it to the victory garden movement that has grown up as part of local responses to food access issues during the lockdown. We have also worked with our Student Affairs colleagues as they have addressed numerous issues on access to technology, services for students continuing to reside on campus, and opportunities for student employment, including in the library and IT. One area where Student Affairs has had to pivot is in student engagement and involvement, an issue of particular concern on our campus because of that core commitment to campus community. Here you see the Campus Activities Board running a virtual trivia game, and there have been other campus traditions that have migrated to the online environment, including late-night breakfast with the president for spring reading day. We have conducted two surveys to date of student satisfaction with remote instruction as well as remote access to core student services, including academic advising. Here you can see the results of student satisfaction with the advising process for fall. Student satisfaction with remote instruction was more mixed, but it was generally positive and helped us to identify key topics for faculty engagement and development in advance of the fall. One of those areas for further work is to direct faculty to digital resources available to them through the library. Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt, but we seem to have lost your slides. Oh, could you try sharing them again? I will. Hold on. Thanks for your patience, everyone. How's that? Yes, perfect. Thank you. Let me go back to presentation. Presentation mode, yes. There we go. Okay, great. Thanks. So this brings us to the least-defined, but most important priority for the summer, faculty development. As noted earlier, we have a collegial culture for faculty development at IWU. As our faculty are recruited not only for their skill as teachers, but for their commitment to focus on continuing improvement of their teaching in support of student learning. We are fundamentally a student and teaching-centered university and one that has supported substantial collaborative approaches to faculty development in the past, including grant-funded initiatives around information literacy instruction in the disciplines and interdisciplinary team teaching. This aspect of our culture was critical to our surviving the pivot to online because we were able to count on faculty colleagues who have been teaching online to join librarians and IT staff in consulting with faculty new to online teaching as they made the pivot. Among these were faculty mentors in English, music, biology, and other departments. For us, with a small library staff, a small IT staff, and no dedicated staff in a teaching center or instructional design office, the expertise of our most innovative faculty colleagues and their willingness to share that expertise widely, even while having to make rapid adjustments to their own courses, reflected the culture of the liberal arts college at its best. Having spent some time describing where we are, I'd like to close by bringing out that crystal ball and sharing some of our thoughts about where we're going. In full knowledge of the fact that our students and families will expect a more robust, better coordinated approach to delivery of these services during the fall, if we are going to successfully retain them at our university. On the library side, we're working aggressively to review our collection plans and align what we expect to be a smaller budget with the need to enhance and expand access to digital content. We're looking at how we will support some of the common intellectual experiences on campus, including the first year experience. Finally, we're reviewing both our plans for library assessment and the library's contribution to campus assessment of the remote academic experience, and we're doing it within the broader context of similar discussions going on among members of our state consortium. On the IT side, we're focused on strengthening the infrastructure for online learning, including a census of current teaching spaces, surveying faculty about the spring experience and the specific needs for planned fall courses, and realigning our routine approaches to IT planning and budgeting to focus on the online learning environment in the coming year. This is an enormous endeavor and one complicated by the fact that the supply chain for hardware, software, and expertise is currently stretched to its limits. Finally, on the faculty development side, we're working with governance and other existing structures to determine how we can align existing opportunities to focus on these issues. These are some of the issues we're building into our contingency planning for a phased reopening of the library, both as a workplace and as a facility open or partially open to the public. Much of what we do will depend on the campus contingencies plan and our governor's phased approach to reopening Illinois over the next several months. We're looking at workshop programs combining synchronous and asynchronous components that can serve as a foundation in preparation for online teaching and learning. We are drawing these from existing examples, many developed over the past few weeks, as well as specific areas of concern raised by our faculty or by students responding to our surveys of their satisfaction with the remote instruction experience. One area that we recognize as especially important given our strong culture of face-to-face teaching and personal interaction is support for hybrid approaches, approaches that recognize the necessary blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning, especially in an environment where all of our students' courses may be delivered through online learning platforms. This is a short list of some of the issues where we are currently engaging with colleagues in academic affairs, student affairs, admissions and elsewhere to see where we will go now that we have made the pivot. And I should note that we hope that at least some of this work will be an opportunity for external funding, for example through the NEH CARES program. Here are some of the major resources I have consulted in each of the areas I've discussed today as these plans have evolved. This is me if you would like to talk further or ask a question that we don't cover today during Q&A. And with that I will thank you for your time. I open the floor and the chat box for questions and stop my screen share. Thank you Scott for that very rich presentation. Thank you. And also for the very well documented resources that you provided in your slide deck. There's a lot in there and I just want to let everyone know we will be making that slide deck available after the webinar on the project briefing page. So stay tuned for that as well as a video of this presentation. As Scott mentioned we have now opened the floor for questions so please go ahead and type your questions into the Q&A box. And Scott will answer them live. And we have our first question from Roger Schoenfeld who comments, very impressive pivot. Thanks so much for the real-time update. I'm almost afraid to ask a question about the future but is it too soon to wonder how if at all the residential liberal arts college might change longer term in the sense of mission, identity, and pedagogy as a result of what has happened during this experience. A big question. Yeah and we certainly don't have time to go through it. I think that where we're really focusing right now is on thinking about those core aspects of our identity both in terms of the focus on personal attention and mentoring and collegiality but also on that real connection between the campus and the community because so much of our work is really rooted not just in bringing people to a campus but to a community that they're able to contribute to. And I know that we're going to be looking at a number of ways to virtualize some of our academic programs, our co-curricular programs, these experiential education programs. And we've seen some examples of how we can do that but that notion of the close community and the interaction between faculty and students but also that opportunity to really grow and contribute to the local community in which the campus is currently situated, that I think is something that is a longer term discussion. What I can say is that the faculty that I know both at my college and at other liberal arts colleges are fundamentally dedicated to finding a way to bringing these experiences and these approaches that they've taken for years and making them work whether it be in a hybrid environment, a modular environment, a de-densified campus, pick your model. And I think that we will see all of those become components of that liberal arts offer in the future. Indeed. Yeah that's a big question. Thanks Roger for bringing that up and thank you Scott for addressing some of those issues and we will all be curious to see how this evolves for sure. As I said please go ahead and type your questions into the Q&A box there or into the chat. If you would like to make a comment or ask a question live you can raise your hand and that will allow me to unmute you and you can ask your question live. And while we're waiting for folks to type in their questions I just want to remind everyone that this webinar is part of CNI's spring 2020 virtual meeting which continues through the end of May and I'm sharing in the chat box there a link to the full schedule for the rest of the conference and also just wanted to bring everyone's attention that we announced yesterday a final plenary by Clifford Lynch which will be given on May 29th so if you haven't registered for that please join us then. Final thanks to Scott for coming and sharing these experiences with us at CNI and thanks to our attendees for being with us. Thank you so much again Scott, thanks everyone. Thank you. You're welcome.