 Welcome to another community conversation at EDUCAUSE. It's my pleasure today to introduce you to Paula Philpott. She's the head of the Learning Academy at Southeastern Regional College in Northern Ireland. Welcome Paula. Great. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm always really conscious that coming from Ireland, that we talk really quickly. So I'm going to try not to do that in this particular conversation, but do feel free just to bring me back a little. So yes, I work within further education and further education spans that space between secondary, your school education, three into higher education. So we teach everything from level one through to level seven. And so we have that space for technical professional technical education, but a range of profiles within that in terms of age groups, demographics, etc. One of the things we're talking a lot about these days is agility. How have you brought agility to the challenges of COVID and teaching and learning, learning and teaching? We've been really fortunate because our head, our Director of Curriculum is also Director of Information Services, so over the IT. So that's really possibly unusual in that curriculum and IT are married together under the same senior manager. And because of that, the linkages between what's happening in terms of the digital works really effectively. So in the area that I have responsibility for, which is really trying to, you know, bridge the gap between how valuable people see the technology and tutor and students' abilities to be able to use that effectively. I think the linkages are really clear for us there. So I think, yes, I mean, obviously there we've been running weekly webinars. We have done that for the last seven, eight years with our staff. So we have Middle Mondays, which focus on blended learning. We had Webinar Wednesdays, which serve as good practice across the curriculum and share that, that gets shared between curriculum areas in that way. But obviously then we introduced teams on Tuesdays and one minute CPD. So again, just a range of ways in which we try and reach out and connect with staff, but probably the biggest way that we've done that for the last 10 years. And we continue to do that even in this environment online is to, we have peer mentors who go out and teach other people's classes, team teach with them, peer observe them. And these are teachers who teach themselves, but for a proportion of their weak support other teachers. And that piece around against creating that sense of community and connection collegiality has been really important, not just in the lead up to the pandemic, but actually throughout the pandemic as well. So to do something differently and to not have to really rationalise why we're doing it this way, but actually just to kind of explore the opportunities in the space and see what works, what doesn't work. And to note that things will work and some won't. And that's OK. But what we find from our feedback from our students is being that what they've appreciated most is the effort that's gone in to really trying to create that environment for them, where they feel connected, supportive and safe. I have a friend, also Irish, who when he uses a word that I have never heard before or uses described something differently, he always quotes somebody saying that we're separated by a common language. And so I love the differences in how we describe things within our the same language. In particular, I love that you seem to use the word the words digital poverty to describe where we use digital divides. I think that's just so much more brutal and honest. And I love that. I also notice that you also say learning and teaching, whereas for whatever reason, we always say teaching and learning. I think it's actually kind of telling that you you say learning and teaching again. Has it always been that way? Yeah, no, it was a conscious decision to restructure that. So same way with we don't we don't allow any staff to talk about remote learning or it's it's learning online or on campus. It's still learning. It doesn't matter. And, you know, obviously just even in a societal way, there's been a real push to not say stay patients. It's a holiday, you know, stay patients when you stay at home. You don't go anywhere at your house. You know, if you decide to go and visit a local town and have a holiday there, it's still a holiday. It's not a stay patient. So it's trying to, I suppose, just create a different mindset around that. We really get as a college, we get quite, you know, frustrated sometimes when we see remote learning, because all the connotations of disconnectedness of feeling isolated and so on. So again, I think language is really important in this space. Because we want to speak into people's lives in a way that builds them towards the destination that we're going to. So, yeah, so digital poverty for us is that, you know, refers to that idea of not having potentially internet or digital technology or maybe minimal access, because often we forget we would have students to come back and say, well, I do have Wi-Fi that's really prone. It won't let me stream, you know, the live sessions and and also some really rural communities where internet is just it's just difficult to get, you know, adequate internet at that point. So, yeah, definitely the digital divide, sort of embracing that holistic approach, I think, helps guarantee that those who would possibly be disadvantaged in this space have access to both the devices and connection.