 So first, before we get into our first presentation, I do just want to thank the National Forum here in Ireland for supporting this seminar today and indeed for supporting many, many projects in the higher education sector in Ireland. And there is a short video from the forum that I would just like to play for you all now. Excellent, so that's a little video from our National Forum. As I said as well, this session is going to be very interactive and one of the tools we're going to use to support interaction is a polling tool called Vvox. So what we might do now is just take a moment for you all to connect to the Vvox session. So I'm going to pop a little link in the chat and all you need to do is just click on the link and it will open up this Vvox interface in your browser on your computer. And at certain points throughout the seminar, the speakers will have some polls for you. So some questions for you to respond to. So those will open and close at certain points and just when that happens, you'll just jump to where you have your Vvox open and respond to the poll. But as well as that, we have this anonymous Q&A board running on Vvox as well throughout the session. So it's a space for you to ask a question with the safety of anonymity and also to upvote other people's questions. So if someone posts a question and you have the same question, you can give it a like and then we'll know that that's a popular question to ask. So to access the Q&A board on your Vvox, you will see the little kind of speech bubble icon. You select that and then you're in the Q&A board and you just simply type in a question. There we go. And then you can come along and like it as well. So throughout the session, please do use that because I know Maha in particular wants to gather some questions and we want to kind of leave some space to answer those. So please use that throughout the session. Lastly, as I said, we do want the session to be reflective. We want you to learn from other speakers, have to say about enhancing wellbeing through teaching, learning and assessment and hopefully to give you some ideas for how you can enhance your own practice. So to support that reflection, we've also put together a very short guided reflection tool built on Rolf's model of reflection. And again, I'll pop that into the chat. So during the session or after the session, you can access this tool and it'll kind of just give you a couple of prompts to help you reflect on what are the things you're learning, what the speakers are saying and how you may or may not be able to put what you learned today into practice. So that's all for me. I'm gonna stop sharing and I'm gonna introduce our first speaker who is Mahabali from the American University in Cairo where she is a associate professor of practice at the Center for Teaching and Learning. Maham, many of you will be familiar with her work. She is an editor or on the editorial board of several journals. She's a co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org and she's a co-facilitator of Equity Unbound. And she's also a former international director of Digital Pedagogy Lab. She's a very passionate, open and connected educator and I'm really looking forward to her presentation which is on building community with care and equity. So Mahab, over to you. Thank you so much, Rob. Selamu alaikum, welcome everybody. I'm very happy to be here with you today and let me just put my slides on and we can start. So before I do anything, first of all, I wanna tell you if you've been having a long day already and you need to stretch, I think that helps a little bit with focus. So I'm doing that if you need to do that and it helps you go ahead and do that. A lot of times we sit in front of the computer in a very rigid way and it just affects our focus I think in a little bit. All right, so my first question to you is how are you feeling today? I'm gonna let Rob collect his, collect your responses on VVox. Just give a word or a phrase to represent how you're feeling. Especially with this pandemic ever since it started, our emotions are all up and down and I think it's important to check in with people before we start. I do it at the beginning of every keynote, every workshop, every class. And somebody looks at giving me an emoji here, either you're sick or you have a headache. These days, every time I get into a workshop, someone, what are two people have COVID or someone at home has COVID or someone's worried about something. Let me know how you feel. Most people have responded there now. I might close this off maybe in three, two, one. I'm okay, so sorry if you didn't get your response in, but here is going to be a lovely word cloud of how we're all feeling. Lots of tired, quite a few good and great, just good, busy. I remember reading a book where someone said, is busy a feeling? It's a state of being I guess, maybe not how we feel. So are eyes, I can relate. Cold with fine, overwhelmed and subtle energized. All right, whatever it is you're feeling, I hope that this session becomes a good break from whatever it is you're feeling. There's someone think overstimulated and sleepy, which may be someone who just woke up. All right, thank you Rob. All right, for the rest of the session, most of the time I'm gonna be inviting you guys to write things for me in the chat. So I hope you'll be willing to do that or the session won't be as interesting if you don't participate with me. I'm gonna share the links to my slides in here. These are open for commenting. So if you prefer to follow there or if you wanna comment later, you still have access to them there on Google Slides and you can put comments for me anytime in your life. And so we've just done the checking in. I'm gonna do a chat or fall thing where I invite you all to participate in the chat. And then I'll talk about pedagogy of care which Rob asked me to focus on, but I don't think it's okay to talk about care without talking about equity as well. So I'll talk about that. And I'm gonna give you some tips for building community online, but these work offline and in hybrid and in all modes really with intentionally equitable hospitality. And then with a debrief on your key takeaways and also give you a chance to vote on particular things if you want me to dig deeper into a couple of things at the end. All right, so I will ask you now to start sort of giving me back on the chat. And the first question for you is what's an important thing you learned that you've achieved in the past year? Patience, perseverance. I hear the patience won a lot and it's really important. And definitely perseverance and resilience. The health needing to be a priority, yes. Which I don't think most of us were doing before. Nothing will be perfect, agree. Compassion, yes. How to call homeschool kids, yeah. We didn't sign up for it, but planning and care to care for others. Perspective, be more agile. Self-care, yes, very important. Some people completing an online course on teaching online, inclusion. Zoom is about both the savior and the enemy and can be both at the same time. Putting kindness first. Building my own cup while being, yes. Flexibility, importance of taking breaks, definitely. Creating new courses. Saying no, so big, Yvonne, yes, definitely. Saying in the present negotiation, only. Only some things matter and they're usually people. I love that, Shenei. We're strong, be able to fight. Yeah, say no to burnout. I was trying to get an image for burnout today, but I couldn't find one that I really, really liked. Importance of movement, yes, letting go. Like, move from the desk when possible, definitely. Accepting help from others, yes, I agree. Do I miss any? What else do we have? Bit of self-love, yes. Little bit of self-love, image burnt to a crisp. Yeah, that would be a good one. Be a bit violent though, Monica, don't you think? Giving in collaboration, yes. We did deeper, yes. Control the controllables. Yeah, find out what it is that you can control in the midst of all this uncertainty that's complete outside of our hands, I agree. And how work doesn't really matter that much at all. Claire, I love that one. Don't tell that to your boss. Yeah, I agree with you. Don't tell it to my boss. Okay, all right. For me, I think what I learned a lot in the past couple of years is how important it is to me to be useful to others and how that affects my well-being to feel like I'm doing something useful in the world even though there's a lot going that isn't very good. And these community-building resources, I don't know if any of you have ever seen them or used them, that I could have helped with a lot of other educators around the world has been one of my contributions that I think is more valuable than any article I've ever written, anything I've ever done because it's benefited so many people at a time when they really needed it, I think, because people didn't know how to build community online. And everybody needed community, you know? All right, what is an unexpected thing that brought you peace or joy recently? Thank you, Jim, I know you use them. Thanks, God, I hope you have a good time using them. All right, so what's been giving you unexpected joy or peace? Quiet time in the morning, Sandra. Haven't had that in a while, I think since I've had a child. Reality TV, I enjoy reality TV too. Finally doing daily meditation, that's great. Eating in a restaurant again, daily yoga, death plants, sunshine, okay, that's good. It was very sunny here yesterday, but very cold and raining. Live theater, reading, okay, sunrides, painting and art, spending time with the dogs, definitely pets do this. Thinking in a group without a mask on again, I guess, seeing a friend again after two years, cycling, running by the sea, plant care, meeting family face to face, definitely, especially after a long time not doing that. Pets again, more me time. Meeting with colleagues face to face for the first time in a while, unexpected visit by friends, making plans now that, yeah, lots of your COVID restrictions are lifted now. Holistic workshops, music in the morning instead of radio news, that's a good idea Suzanne. You should all do that, I think. Cause news doesn't put you in a good mood usually. Usually does the opposite actually. Taking a moment until the bird is, oh, I love that. Watching the bird feeder, evening call with a close friend. Yes, sometimes those unexpected evening calls can do that too. All right, one other, and the thing that brought me unexpected joy recently was the sun, very nice sun in the midst of some very cool days. If you were to create a documentary or a book about your biggest challenges in 2020 and 2021, I should have updated that. What would it be called? Doing it all. I like that, like the periods in the middle, full stops in the middle. Layoffs, oh, and Yvonne's doing it all as well. Tops the bus I wanna get off or maybe stop the nightmare I wanna wake up or something. So Monica, don't do this, I like it. Yvonne, snap, I like that. Staying alive, yes. I did my best. That sounds like a song by Frank Sinatra or something. Crowd control, dropping it all. Resurgence of the offline orthodoxy, I like that. Distractions in alienation. Groundhog day, yeah. I kind of feel like March 2020 sometimes with new things happening these days. Being family and friends, take a hard right turn, finding yourself in a time of COVID, digging deep and then digging deeper. Yes, Rachel, that's like as the pandemic just kept going on and on and on. Managing isolation from humans. Oh, what just happened? We're better than we give ourselves credit for. I wanna break free. Now that is a song by Queen, right? Loving right wing family, oh, that's a hard one. Give me patience. How to get through an EDD during a pandemic. Siobhan, congratulations if you did that. That, you know what you need to do? You need to sort of highlight that on the CV, not just that you got an EDD, but you got it during a pandemic. That's huge. Just breathe, Sandra, I like it. What year is it? Okay, better together. I love that, Sharon. I wonder if those people who are very much against connecting online, but definitely found ways to make it work in the pandemic, how they're calling you things. And I'm still standing, Trish. I'm glad you're still standing. All right, thank you for all of that. So I'm gonna start talking about care. And there's a particular court by now, Nottings who writes a lot about care and pedagogy of care, where she says in the caring approach, we would prefer to advise, do unto others as they would have done unto them. This is the platinum rule. It's not do unto others, it's not the golden rule where you do to them as you would like done to yourself, but to recognize that others may want something different and to try to give them what they want if you care about them. And so for me, I'm an educational developer, Rob and I were talking about these terms, but I'm in job support other teachers to help them teach better. And so I always remind them to do to students what they would have done to them, what the students want done to them. But also it also means that as a faculty developer myself, I have to do to faculty, the teachers, what they want, the way they want me to care for them and support them as well. And that's really difficult to do, but it's really important to know that we don't always know what someone else wants, how they want to be cared for. It's kind of like, you know, if you see someone on crutches and you open the door for them, that might not be what they want you to do for them. They may be comfortable doing things for themselves and feel ashamed or upset if you try to help them. These are things that are important to keep in mind. The other thing I think to keep in mind is what the hooks says here, which is teachers who care, who serve their students, are usually at odds with the environments when we teach. I think throughout my life, I've always been made to feel ashamed for talking about caring for students, to feel like this goes against rigor, that calling for this is not the right thing to do, that I'm trying to ask people to let students succeed even though they don't deserve it and things like that. And it's a lot of work to care and it's very, very rarely rewarded. Except during this pandemic when it started, people started to say, oh, that's stuff you've been saying about care, maybe we need to do that now. And so I'm kind of glad that at least in these very difficult circumstances, people started to feel like care was important. But I think care is not a fad. It's something that we should continue doing all the time. It's just that the pandemic made things like mental health issues really, really prominent and really just everyone was going through something at some point or another or throughout. And this bell hooks and this person whose name I don't know how to pronounce, but who she cites, both passed away in the last couple of months. And he was saying, the practice of healer, therapist, teacher or any help of profession should first be directed toward his or herself because if the helper is unhappy here, she cannot help many people. And a lot of you talked about self-care and filling your own cup first. And that's so important to be able to support others. The other thing I think which is, I don't know if I'm talking about this later, but the importance of a community supporting you because you won't always have within yourself the strength to even support yourself. So it's really important to find ways to fill your cup that don't require self-effort from you, but that call upon resources of others around you. So if we're talking about having care and trying to reinforce intentional equity in our classrooms, I think it happens at a lot of different levels. And it's important to look at our own practice and see where we're doing it and where we might be missing out. So you can show care in your course philosophy, the way you express it to students and the way you design the course on planet to make room for care and room for difference between students. And then there also, other than design, there's the actual facilitation and our habitual practices every day we meet our students. And then there are also situations that come up that we need to respond to. But the more that you do on the design level and the habitual practices level, the less effort you need to make responding to emergency situations because you've sort of already made room for that. Kind of like for me in some courses in certain things like if soft deadline. So it's already a soft deadline to begin with students don't have to come back to me every time they can't meet a deadline, for example. And the last thing is sometimes what we need to do has to happen one-on-one with students in private outside of everything that we've planned for. On a systemic level, can we advocate for caring and equitable policies institutionally? And can we support others and form ally shifts? Can we speak up in situations because sometimes we only can do it in private because it would be threatening to our job security to speak up in a situation. But if you've been building ally shifts, it becomes easier to speak up in situations where others will support you. There are times when I've spoken up at our university Senate against gender inequality, for example. And there will be a group of people who are tenured faculty who are very confident in their jobs who would speak up and support me and others who would send me private messages on WhatsApp afterwards thanking me for speaking up but not feeling comfortable speaking up themselves. And it's still important for us to support other people when they do this to whatever extent is safe for us to do. And then there's this thing, somebody has to care for the teachers. We're doing all this care for ourselves and for our colleagues, but who's caring for us? How can an institution, institutions aren't people. So institutions themselves will not care, but if we help support communities of care and that we reward cares so that work like mentoring and supporting others isn't something that you do unpaid and unrewarded and actually you get punished for it because you're not doing enough research, for example. How can you reward the people who are doing the care better than others? Can universities offer us more reasonable working conditions because I'm not hearing any university doing a good job of that right now? And participatory decision-making, we were just having discussions these days about when universities decide what's happening in the coming term or semester, to what extent our faculty or the teachers and the staff are involved in making those decisions or consulted even to understand what they need to be able to do better. And then just being adaptive and being adaptive in ways that are habitual and not just for emergencies that make things urgent and stressful. So I'm going to do a very quick activity with you guys. TRIS is a liberating structure. You can look those up later. It's just a way of trying to solve a problem by going the opposite way. So instead of trying to say how can institutions support care and wellbeing? I want you to think of it the other way around and imagine that an institution has this anti-goal. If an institution has a goal to promote inequity, anxiety, and burnout among teachers and staff, what would it do? If you were that responsible for promoting inequity, anxiety, and burnout, give me a word in the chat for what you would do. Yes, Monica, he passed 10, 20 seconds. Last minute changes, yes, more work, load, yes, more. Status quo, overload staff, isolate. 24, seven work hours, yes, no direction of support in vague direction, yes. Unrealistic timelines and workload, keep changing paths, ignore staff, more rules on regulation, yes. Only certain people can use the toilet, okay. No autonomy, rules, increased precarious staff. This effort, generalized and television, yes. Widget processes, definitely. If you used to take quality decisions and leave staff to pick up the pieces, yes. Presume everyone knows everything already, definitely. This unspoken stuff is awful. Very tight deadlines, no choice, protect yourself, make everyone produce the same educational offerings, no sharing, top down, yeah. Shoot academic staff workload capacity as magic. I know what institutions do, it's kind of like what academia is all about. Uncertainty, yeah, there is uncertainty, but the institutions can make it worse for sure. Surprise them with urgent tasks, exactly, rigidity and focusing on rigor, no communication, being the best, changing the contract, security. Yes, yes, oh yes, no allowances. Me first, definitely, pandemic lack common sense. Everyone has to reply to emails within an hour, oh my God. No prioritize goals, hierarchy power, blaming victims. Yes, all of these. And I'm just, I'm not gonna stop too long here, but just think about which of the things we listed actually do happen at our institutions. Quite a few of them happen in some institutions. And think about what do you personally have control or influence over? What can you change now? What kind of resources and allyships do you need to develop to create more change and invest time in creating those allyships because they will allow you to make change in the future with people who have similar values to you. And I mean, I agree with this quote obviously from Don Tronto, that humans can organize society so that they're not only an always and constant vicious competition with one another. And I've sort of reworded it, can universities also organize their systems so that faculty and students aren't always in competition with their peers and with one another. And I think that helps promote well-being a lot. And so just thinking about things like promoting equity and care and reducing competition would be, the equal fair treatment of those employed, the promotion criteria, the pay, job security, things you all talked about, making it easier for teachers to care for students by encouraging cooperation between departments, for example, students with disabilities and making it easy for those services with the IT, with the teachers to work together to support students. And things that reduce anxiety during the pandemic, like early on, a lot of American universities in mind allowed pass and no pass policies instead of grades, things like rejecting remote proctoring that promote inequity and anxiety for students. And think about some of the other ways I'm gonna go fast through these ones, sort of grading systems that are arbitrary and competitive don't help, remote procting and normalizes surveillance, things like timed closed book exams in general, especially standardized testing, these things normalize authority and they don't really promote good learning, but they add to students anxiety, especially when they're done online with all these other restrictions. And things like arbitrary and strict deadlines and they promote anxiety as well. And now I wanna share with you this equity care matrix that my colleague, Mia Zamora and I worked on in 2020 and we got work about to be published on it in more detail. What we did is we asked on Twitter, what is equity without care and what is care without equity? And these are some of the responses we received from different people. If you have equity without care, it becomes sort of like a performative thing, lip service, it's diversity theater, it could lead to tokenism. And it just means that you're maybe pretending to do equity but nobody cares to actually make it happen. If you do care, but you don't have equity with it, then it becomes either selective, some people get cared for, some people notice others but they don't notice some others and you get effective labor where people get burnt out because there are few people giving care to a lot of people. And it can be a mirrored but it'll fix a problem but it won't transformatively fix it systemically. And it's like a band-aid, it doesn't continue. But then what do we want? If we want care and equity together, then we want something that closer to social justice where people participate on parity, everybody has power to make their decisions for themselves. And I think intentionally equitable hospitality which is one of the measures I've co-developed with colleagues helps towards that. And so what that is is, as a teacher, you think of yourself as a host building the space where your students are. You're responsible for hosting the space, it's your responsibility. Whom do you involve and listen to? How do you make sure each person feels welcome? How can you design that and facilitate that? So it creates that. And then you need to be very intentional about what you're doing and walking the talk. It's not gonna happen automatically that equity happens just because you wanted it to. So you need to be very intentional and revise what you're doing. And the equity is recognizing that it's not about doing things for all students but making sure that you address inequities faced by each student. And that's really hard. And we learned this by listening to students not by predicting everything in advance. I really like this quote by Desmond Tutu where he says, I'm not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights. But I wanna take it further because I think it's helpful to sort of invite students to create their own menus and choose their own ingredients. Can we do that in our own courses? To what extent do we have freedom as teachers to do that with our students? And I'm gonna go really quickly now because my time is running out. But think about a lot of times we imagine what our students want and we anticipate it and we do things to them or we get some feedback from them and we do things for them but what if we can do things with them? What if we can go farther than doing things with them and actually getting them to lead on what they need to do with each other recognizing that we as teachers we still have to be the hosts of that space because between students, there are power differences. So just by stepping away as the teacher and letting students work things out for themselves doesn't mean there won't be any power there. There's still race and gender and all kinds of inequalities between them. So how do we create those spaces for student self determination to help them have some control? Some of you were talking about not having control over a lot of things and needing to have control but students are also in that same space where there's a lot of uncertainty and they need to feel like they have some amount of control. So how can we empower them to give them the more power to control what happens to them and how they want their education to go? I'm gonna just pause and see what's in the chat. Yeah, aligns with students as partners approach. Definitely, yes. And I don't know of course how it's being done wherever you all are but yeah. And I agree with the terms about equity washing and institutions claiming to do things but not really implementing it. I agree with that kind of thing as well. And the other thing is the thing is you think about fostering agency and it feels like you're gonna have to make a decision one by one but there are ways to plan ahead so that students have a lot of agency to begin with. And I'm gonna give an example from Islam and the way Muslim prayer is, we pray five times a day usually. But there's a time range, there's a soft deadline. You don't have to pray exactly at a certain time. You pray with the same way. And if you're late, you can still make it up if you miss it. And my daughter wouldn't pray regularly until she realized that if she misses it, she can make it up the same day or even another day. There's a certain number of what we call it archives in the prayer, but you can pray wherever you want. You don't have to pray in one particular place like a mosque, you can pray at home. You can pray in bed if you're sick. You can pray alone or with others. You can lead or you can follow. You can choose whichever verses you want. These are choices that you make whenever you don't have to seek permission every time. And you can actually pray less frequently when you're traveling. This is already accounted for. We are supposed to clean up, do ablution, but there's a dry option if there's no water available. If it's too cold or someone's sick, you're supposed to face the qiblah in Kaaba. But actually, if you're on the move, that's not a problem. If you don't know where it is, it's not a problem. If you're in a war and you need to stay safe, then people can face different directions so people can see what's going on around them. Things like that. It's about anticipating things that you know would happen and making room for them and creating as much agency as possible within whatever is reasonable. And I think we can do this in our courses, like just make this analogy and apply it to your own teachings, see what happens. Sorry, it keeps doing that. It's gonna move on soon. All right, so I wanna invite you to just know a little bit about these community building resources that I mentioned earlier. Knowing that there isn't one model of care that will work for everyone, that's absurd. And people varying their ability to give and receive care and online especially, I think the context really mattered. A lot of people didn't know how to do this kind of thing. So we created these resources because a lot of people didn't know how to teach online, building community was important. People didn't necessarily have enough people in their institution to help them learn how to do this. And still, there were still living through the trauma of the pandemic, even when it's over, there'll be a post trauma. And me in my role, I was thinking, care for the teachers so that they can care for their students. And so here are some things that I've been doing in my own classes and you can look these resources up and see what else you find. One of them is annotating the syllabus, just invite students to give you feedback on the syllabus, give them a Google doc or if you're in person, just the paper and ask them to ask questions about it or make comments about it. Students really appreciate that. Surveying them before the semester starts, I was serving them early on, like, do you feel comfortable turning your cameras on? Are you bringing devices to the classroom when we're face to face, things like that? What they're looking forward to, what they're afraid of? And you can survey them in the middle and in the end and whenever you wanna hear from them. Talk to them about trauma-informed pedagogy and if you wanna find out more, you can look at this video by Mesa Ahmed describing what it is and a checklist from Karen Ray Costa. I talk about it and I try to apply it in my classes. But they're just relieved to know that there's such a thing that explains their cognitive load and why they're struggling right now. I try to encourage gratitude journaling for a very small percentage of the grades in my classes because it's helped my daughter a lot. Just try to find, not being toxic positive but recognizing what's good that's going on in our lives right now. Try to support them to support each other with something like Troika Consulting and I can explain this more if someone asks in the Q and A. And then TRIS, which is what I showed you right now is an innovative problem-solving approach. It's actually more complex than what I just did today but you can watch this video of us doing it. So all of these things have demo videos and samples for you to look at. And think about grading and alternative ways that reduce anxiety and focus on learning. And so I'm nearly done right now. And Rob, I think what we're gonna do now, any choice you make next is completely fine. Which of these things would you like me to do? Rob, do you want me to unshare so that you can share? Troika Consulting, Troika just means three in Russian. And the people who invented the liberating structures just like to use Russian terms, I think. But that's what Troika Consulting is. All right, you can choose more than one. Choose as many as you like. And Rob, I've got like two, three minutes, right? Once they've loaded. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we have another few minutes. So if you folks just, if you've disconnected from the VVox, if you just click on the link in the chat again, little open of the VVox and you should see a little poll on screen and you can choose one or more of these things that you want to hear more about and then we'll talk to them. So I'll give you a moment. I can see the counter is rising there. So I'll just give another minute for people to vote. I want to hear about all of them, but I don't think we... They're all in the community building resources. So if I can't answer them all today, you can look. I mean, you won't know which one is my favorite, obviously, but they're all good. So I know it's hard to choose one. Okay, don't worry. There's more of this. There's more of, you know, you just lose yourself in those community building resources, you'll find a lot. You're gonna stop now. Favorite warm up activity helps with reflection and focusing. I am very happy to see that that's the first one and the second one. Oh, there's still, oh, there's more. Okay, you're showing it live, but that one obviously is winning the reflection one. That's great. I'm so happy. And then there's two that are quite, okay. So we'll do the, I think it's time to do those three, right? It's time to do those three, yeah. Okay, so the reflection one takes a bit of time and I'll do it first. So first of all, if you've got a piece of paper with you, we can actually do it really quickly. Usually it's a bit slower than that. So could you unshare, Rob? If you've got a piece of paper and you can take it out, that's fine. If you can't, I mean, if you can, just fold it in two and another two. If you can't do that, you can just, you know, just draw two axes like that. All right? It's called spiral journal. And it's influenced by Linda Berry, who is an art educator. And if you have a minute, just do this with me right now. So if you've got this piece of paper and you start from the middle point over here and you start doing a very tight spiral, I'll just do one very quickly to show you what I mean. Let me see it. Yeah, just keep doing that. Put your eyes away from the screen. Someone was saying they have sore eyes. Take your eyes away from the screen for a minute and just very quiet and just focus on doing that for a few minutes. I'll just do it for a few seconds for time, but usually I do it for two minutes and maybe put on some calm music or something. I'll just count to 15 or something. Okay, so normally I'd give you more time, but for now we can stop here, all right? And then what I would do is I would invite people to fill in the quadrants, the four quadrants with the answers to four different questions. And so imagine if this was a class and you'd just talked about something or you've just finished a module or even just like a day to day, we've just had a 30 minute keynote and I want you to reflect on it. So I'm gonna ask you in the chat and you can write it on your journal. You don't have to share it just yet. So one thing is, you could say, one thing I'm going to take away from today is, I'll give you a minute to fill that out. One challenge that is still on my mind is, you can fill that out. And next year I am hopeful about and the last one I need to build ally shifts around. Okay, and normally I would put these up on the screen and people would see the four questions, you answer it on your own, it's just for you. I don't know Catherine actually. I've never read about ally shifts, just a concept that I see around. Sorry about that. But after that, usually I tell them, look back at what you've written in underline or circle, one thing that stands out for you and then I tell them to pair up with someone and just discuss one thing that they're willing to share. And then we share out. I don't know how you guys felt doing this activity. I'm a very, very hyperactive type of, not hyperactive person, but just very extroverted and I like to talk a lot. And this one I think meets the needs of people who need to slow down a little bit and reflect and just look away from the screen and it works for students who are not like me. You know, how did that one feel? If anyone wants to put a comment in the chat, we can look at that. And then I'll talk about the other two things that were top of the list and Rob, talk to me whenever you want to. I think we still have time, right? Five minutes? Yeah, we still have another five minutes or so, yeah. Great, perfect. I think my timer was off by five minutes or something. All right, so there's drawing the spiral slow people down. I think it helps you focus and different people say that in indigenous culture spirals have different purposes. People ask, I have no idea what the purpose of the spiral is, but people always ask, what do you think the purpose? Like, what did it do for you? You love drawing it, Rachel? You could unmute and say, you know, what was it that you loved about it if you want? It's slowing me down. I'm busying today, absolutely fizzing. And so this is really good. I might fill the whole page. I had someone do that today in an earlier workshop. They filled the whole page with it. Yeah, and slowing, someone else saying slowing and take a breath. Yeah, strangely satisfying. I agree. It is. I do it with my daughter too. Oh, and Celtic artwork, Celtic or Celtic. Does it have a particular meaning, Rob, or is it just a thing that's... I'm trying to recall my primary school education when we learned all about the ancient Irish Celts. I think it signifies life in someone else who maybe has a history of it and correct me, but I think it signifies life. Okay, and Janine said it did help your sore eyes. Was it you who talked to us for eyes earlier? I'm glad to hear that. It's we forget that when we're online together that we could actually look away from the screen sometimes. Like, why do we have to stare at the screen the whole time? We could be doing other stuff. We could move around and walk and, you know. So yeah, spring to decompress. All right, good. And I think it also helps people if they're gonna have a discussion, just talk and think about four things before we get into the discussion because a lot of people can't think like this. The other activity, my other favorite icebreaker, I call them warmups because I like that term more than breaking ice. It's more constructive. It's called wild tea. It's originally called mad tea, but then people said, you know, that could offend people with mental health issues. So we're calling it wild tea and there are two ways of doing it online. Face to face, it's like speed networking and you stand in two concentric circles and you give people a prompt, something like my superpower is, and you give them two minutes, prepare to talk about it, so one minute each, and then after two minutes, you ring an alarm and then you move and they move to talk to another person, right? But you have prompts that are related to what you're gonna be talking about that day or helping them get to know each other. And that one, you can do it that way in person. Online, you just put people in random breakout rooms on Zoom and then you switch them. It's very easy to switch the recreate random breakout rooms, but I do it usually in threes just in case someone drops out so no one ends up alone. And again, you just put prompts similar to the prompts I was giving you in the chat or fall. And chat or fall is the other way of doing it, which is asking a question, just asking people to respond in the chat. To me, when you're doing it in the room, it's really, really energizing. You feel the buzz of the room, you can see, especially young people after coming back from being online, just being happy to be together and getting to know so many of their colleagues. You can do like five rounds in 10 minutes. They've met five people and had a conversation within a very short time. So it's kind of cool. And online, they like it online too, but you as a teacher don't see what's happening in the room. So you're not really sure that they liked it because you haven't seen the buzz and the laughter. And so we've got, there's videos of the spiral journal and the wild tea on the community building resources. So you can see me demonstrating them with someone who's never done them before and the reactions and sort of adaptations for how people might do them in class. So then the third one was an activity to help students get to know each other well. So this one I really, really like, it's called Thick Greetings. It's in the community building resources again. This is something I wouldn't do at the beginning of a semester. I'd do it towards the second half if they're younger students. If they're more mature students, they may be able to do it a little bit earlier, but it's giving students a list of like six or seven questions and the particular questions are in the template that you can get from the website. Asking them to think really deeply about things like, what does community mean to you? What do you like when you break down? And there's some that would encourage you to go really deep and personal and others that you can choose to answer in less personal ways. So that students have a choice of how much of themselves to share, but you're encouraging them to be more vulnerable and open. But if they don't want to, there are other options and they get to choose whichever they wanna answer in their pair. And in the pair, whichever one of them, as it says, whatever they want, they don't have to both answer the same question. But one of the things about it is you give each one four minutes and they take up the entire four minutes and the other one doesn't interrupt them. So it also encourages listening. It's actually usually the case when you're saying something or the other person wants to jump in and say, oh, me too, or oh, that happened to me too, or what do you mean by that? But if you give someone the whole four minutes, they may say much more than they normally would. And as a listener, you end up listening a lot more deeply than you would if it was just a normal conversation. So those were the three, the top three that you guys chose. I think we're exactly on time. Yeah, thanks so much, Maha. That was really excellent. Those are food for thought. They look like great practical strategies, I suppose, for bringing in an element of empathy and care into our classrooms, be they online or in person. And Monica made a comment in the chat that this really resembles a students as partners approach, working with students and caring for students and involving students in their education, which is always wonderful to see. Our next speaker, Dean, we'll get to him in a moment, but I'm just wondering, Maha, there's two questions on the VVocs, I wonder, can I put to you quickly before we move on? Just share my screen again for a moment. So the first question, which was upvoted, is how can we show flexibility with student assignment deadlines when all academic staff ourselves have marking and grade inputting deadlines we need to make sure? Yeah, so definitely there's, in my case, there's just one deadline that I have to meet, which is at the very end of the semester, but there's things they do throughout the semester that I can be a little bit flexible with. And I also teach students, there's several things. There's one thing where I say, some things have a hard deadline because we need to do this on this time to be able to do that. And there are other things that can be flexible. And there's also an element of agreeing with students on what is due when, because sometimes they all have a big deadline happening at some other time for another course. So we can agree early on that, oh, okay, that day if you wanna stay away from that date. Or sometimes my students say just, can the assignments be due on Sunday rather than Monday? And things like that that make a little bit of a difference to them that wouldn't make a huge difference to me. So they're discussed those things with them. But also, I think also learning that the value of meeting deadlines but also recognize that not every deadline is as important as every other deadline. And then choose the ones that are strict and let them know they're strict. Maybe give them what I do. I think when something is a really important deadline is to split it up into several smaller things. And that way by the time the last thing they've already done three quarters of it. And so if they're late with that last thing where they can't finish it, they've got 75% of what they need to have done. Does that help? Yeah, excellent. Thank you some very, very practical suggestions there. And remind them that you're human. Like you can't be grading every day for the rest of your life. So if you've given them a lot of chances and they still don't, I think it's okay sometimes to yell at them or tell them like, really, like what, tell me what I could, like I really said this, I'm like, I've given you three chances. What else can I do? All right, the next one is worried about senior management. I'm worried that senior management will be introduction to remote proctoring because it's a blunt tool to protect academic integrity and finding it really difficult to change their perspectives and educate them on the dangers of remote proctoring. All right. I had the same situation locally and there are two things that I did. And I don't know if they're forcing you to use remote proctoring or it's making it available to whoever wants to use it. First of all, I convinced the administration to tell people to use it only when they can't find any other way of doing it. Because honestly, it is a lot of work to do an exam online that isn't cheatable. It is hard for some people like in early mathematics courses. I understand that. The other thing is I've talked to students and made them advocates and some students in some departments were able to convince their department chair to ban it in their department. So I've sort of started a revolution for students. I gave them the article by Shea Slaugher. It's called Algorithms of... No, not Algorithm, that's not being able. But anyway, there's an article by Shea Slaugher. I'm gonna put his name because I don't remember the name of the article but it's about remote proctoring. And it was actually written before the pandemic was published during. And Shea Slaugher, he has a good argument. So the students use that to convince their university not to do it. And then the other element because I'm a faculty developer, I helped faculty with consultations and workshops on how to create assignments that promote academic integrity that don't require proctoring. And the thing about protecting academic integrity with proctoring is that proctoring is surveillance. It's just letting people know, be honest because I can see you, not be honest because honesty is important. So it doesn't promote academic integrity at all. It just promotes a culture of don't make a mistake when someone sees you but then do whatever you want when nobody's looking, which is, yeah. Thank you so much, Maha. I know you're going to stay on the seminar and there'll be opportunities at the end again for open Q&A discussion. And people, please do continue adding questions to the V-Vox. I'm going to have time at the end of the seminar to address them again. But can I invite everyone please to go down to the reactions button on the bottom of the Zoom toolbar and give Maha a great big clapping emoji to thank her for her wonderful presentation there and her fantastic engagement. So thank you so much, Maha. I'm delighted you're able to stay on for a little while as well. What I'd like to do now is introduce our second speaker for today's seminar who is Dean O'Reilly. Dean is the Vice President for Well-Being at DC Students Union and he's going to give us a very important student perspective on well-being issues. So Dean, I'll hand over to you. You should be able to share your screen I think and take it away. So let me just, there we go. That'll go to everyone. Yeah, all good. Perfect. So hello everyone. As Rob very graciously introduced me, my name is Dean. I am the Vice President for Well-Being at DC Students Union. So today what I want to do is talk a little bit about what is well-being for students, what different aspects go into that and what different challenges and concerns students may be dealing with outside of the classroom and how we can be cognizant of that in our practices, both as sports staff, academic staff and so on. So as I mentioned, so I know everyone here may not be really too familiar with what the Students Union is. So at the very top of this, I'm going to cover what is DC Students Union then look at a little bit how the Union conceptualizes student well-being. Take a look at some results from a feedback form that we did back in January of 2021 and look at more contemporary concerns and from casework that I would have had one-to-one feedback with looking at some more national surveys and then some recommendations I'd have based off of all of that. And so DC Students Union is the Democratic representative body for students in Dublin City University. We are funded by students, run by students, for students. We are completely autonomous and independent from the University and every student within the University is a member of the Union and basically we function as sort of a electorate local government kind of for students. And so there are 11 paratime officers and then five full-time officers of which I am one. So in terms of how we conceptualize well-being, what we look at in my remit, I focus on student mental, fiscal, sexual health and finance. So some of the things that I would be involved in would be the work around the National Consent Framework. So training into my first year students in consent, looking at campaigns and protocols and procedures to end sexual violence in third-level and higher education. I also was involved in the establishment of our period products distribution service in DCUs to ensure that every student who needs period products has access to those for free. I'd also work on drug harm reduction among students. So providing students with drug testing kits and providing them information on how they can reduce the harms associated with drug use including ceasing drug use. I'd also work very closely with DCU Healthy on health promotion practices in the University and as well with the counseling and student support and development service in DCU. And then one of the other things that I would do would be finance casework. And so that would be if a student comes to me and let's say they're looking for information on how they can qualify for certain grants and like the SUSE system here or maybe they're short and rent that month or maybe they just need bus fare for that day. All those different sorts of financial support then a student may come to me with that. And then I also would organize campaign weeks focusing on different well-being centric issues. So for example, this week is the Union's annual consent week. So within that there are different events like consent classes, workshops on gender-based violence and other like social media content focusing on conversations on consent, et cetera. So with all of that in mind looking at kind of what the job description of my role is well-being for the union here is basically mental, physical, sexual health and finance and providing the optimal context and environment for students under those four main categories. And so as I mentioned last year in January 2021 the union we conducted a feedback forum. So what we wanted to do was to hear directly from students in a systematic way and how they experienced the first semester last year. Of course, important context that would have been it would have been completely online at that stage and with COVID everything was virtual. There was no real anything open here. And so of course that's the context in which this took place and what it is filled out by 1,847 students represented around 11% of DC's student population. It's a little bit less than that now. And there was even spread across your groups and faculties in terms of participation. And the three main themes that came out of that piece of research that we did is isolation was a massive issue for students under well-being which we would in many ways expect given the context in which the students participated. So 81% of participants felt alone more often than not in the semester of 2021. And I will say while we expected isolation and lack of socialization to be an issue for students we really didn't expect it to be as high as 81% at that point. So that was quite a shocking thing to have seen. And interestingly enough, while we're still seeing at that time 81% of students feeling alone more often than not that even persisted with students reporting that they had a friend to turn to that they had someone to speak to. And so clearly that experience of isolation was quite a significant challenge for students during semester one of last year and which we've all spoken about and in many different contexts quite a bit. Another important result that we saw in that feedback form was around 59% of students and knew who to turn to if their mental health was affecting the academic performance. I think this is a really important note to touch on in that we would hope that that percentage will be higher. And so around, I think it was around 70 or 80% of students reported that they knew of the mental health supports in the university. But then of course we're seeing a 20, 30% reduction and how many of them knew who to turn to if these mental health difficulties were affecting the academic performance. And I think that's a really important thing for educators and lecturers to understand in that while the general awareness may be high on the student population when it comes down to the specifics of I'm certain with my depression and I can't meet my deadline not as many people really understand who they go to speak to about that. I think that can have quite a significant impact then on the students while being experienced. And then lastly, one of the main things that came out during that feedback form that we conducted was that students found the workload to be unmanageable. So 52% of students found the workload was unmanageable and a similar percentage reported that they felt that the spread of assessment and the spread of assessment due dates was unmanageable. And that similar percentage found that the proportionality of the work that they had to do in terms of how it contributed to their precision grade and was unbalanced. So that is not to say that lecturers or those who set those assignment deadlines were academic staff in the university were doing a bad job but this is what the experience of students were and during this time last year. So now I want to take that discussion and broaden it out a bit more to look at those different aspects of wellbeing that I touched on at the beginning of my presentation and what students may be dealing with that we're not necessarily thinking of in the classroom. So if we're talking about mental health from the Union Students Ireland Mental Health Report in 2019 we know that between 60 and 70% of students experience clinically relevant levels of anxiety, depression and stress and around just under a third of students report those mental health difficulties affecting their studies. Similarly on physical health from the Drug Use and Higher Education Survey that was published I think last week we know that just under 25% of third-year students and final year students, fourth-year students are current drug users and around 52% of those current drug users are in the moderate to severe risk category. So that would mean that their drug use is affecting their day-to-day life. Then when we're talking about sexual health and consent we know from the sexual experiences survey in 2020 that just around 40% of students have experienced some unwanted sexual touching or attempted penetration just under 20% having experienced force or threat of force in some sort of sexual relationship or scenario. And then when it comes to finance around 41% of students are reliant on social welfare for funding and 79% of students work per time and just under 10% of students work full-time. And so the reason why I bring up these pieces of the student experiences is just to remind ourselves that what maybe a student is underperforming in the classroom and it seems like maybe they're dejected or it's apathy or it's laziness and but even on just the surface level when we talk about mental health, physical health, sexual health and finance and there's so many different aspects and struggles that the students may be experiencing that we might be thinking about immediately. So moving on from then I want to touch a little bit on insights that I would have from my own casework. And so this would be students coming to me with some sort of query or question themselves and that they want to touch on or they want to get some insight on from myself and that perhaps I could help them with. So on mental health, the largest volume of queries that I've had this year have focused on the impact of students' better health on their studies. And so just over this Christmas period, so we're looking at the last week of semester one and the first week of semester two and I directly spoke to over 300 students who were experiencing some sort of mental health distress or some sort of extenuating circumstance and that was affecting their studies and they needed guidance on what options were available for them and in the university could they get assignments extended could they get deferrals of their assignments to another time of the year and that sort of thing. And then another big one this year has been students coming to me looking for how can they access counselling in the university and I believe the queries on counselling access in DCU have increased by 50% and this year compared to last year. And so that's to give you an idea of how strained students may be this year even with and that issue of isolation being gone that's kind of where we're at. Physical health so I'd have over 200 degrees of students in the last 14 weeks looking for a free pregnancy tests distributed over 4,000 period products to students and since September including 40 people who are on our recurrent delivery service so that would be students who would deliver period products to each month around I think it's around 100 products or something for students and so that's given insight into students who may be struggling financially who can't afford some of these basic necessities. Sexual health so I've had around 10 or more so disclosure of sexual violence or harassment students coming to me directly which I would have experienced as being an increase versus my time last year and then finance a lot of the case work is focused on students losing their grants due to the pandemic unemployment payment that students will have been put on last year which for many students I've put them just over the threshold to qualify for the grants and which has then led to them incurring thousands of fees to pay and then students looking for students assistance funds so maybe they're short on rent and so on that I would have covered around 1800 students who have applied for that scheme this year. So just taking into consideration all the different points that I brought up there in terms of the different difficulties that I've experienced firsthand that students have come to me with and then what we know from the national service students really face an array of concerns that affect their well-being that has an impact on their studies and no less than any other person and really the main recommendation that I provide and from that is being aware of the sports systems that are available in DCU and respective colleges if anyone is joining from another institution makes the biggest difference so students being able to access the information and to find the sports services for themselves and their educators being aware of those and really ensures that students get the help that they need and where possible I'd recommend that if you can build in the information on those sports systems into your introductory lectures and it really makes a difference students look to academic staff and as their authority in the university and having it built into their academic life and I found as we made a massive difference and students not feeling that they have no option and that sort of thing. So that's my whole presentation and I wasn't keeping in line the chat as I was going along so I'm not sure how many things came in but yeah if there are any questions or any further things that people would like me to touch on I'm happy to do so. Dean thank you so much that was a fantastic presentation as someone said in the chat it was sobering and it is sobering to understand some of the difficulties that students are facing in this day and age both COVID related and non-COVID related and I think and I know certainly I can be guilty of times of just seeing a student as just a student when in actual fact they are people they are persons with all sorts of things going on in their lives and they don't leave those things at the doorstep when they get on the bus to come to college they bring that stuff with them into the classroom but what I like is that perhaps some of the the simple techniques that MAHA introduced us to can really help to maybe make students feel a bit more welcome make them feel a little less isolated make that workload a bit more manageable obviously there's certain issues that they will always need some professional support with that that we as educators can't provide but simple caring things I think can can really go a long way to helping students well-being and it's important to keep that perspective in mind so thank you so much Dean for sharing that important perspective there is a I did see a question from Kiran Dum in the chat if I can scroll up where did Kiran post that yeah Kiran was asking about a campaign around reducing mobile phone social media there's data around how that always on culture is having a negative impact on student well-being I suppose this is the whole digital well-being space you know so just wondering Dean if you have any kind of thoughts on that or indeed does anyone else have any thoughts please share them in the chat yeah absolutely I think what we need from the student union perspective is it's finding the middle ground between how do we acknowledge the realities of the student experience in that most students lives are whether it's work or extracurricular activities that center around social media right and advising them how to use social media in a healthy and sustainable way so I think that's definitely something that the union should look to over the next few weeks and next few years and that how we can instill sustainable practices around social media and how can you take time away when you notice that it's doing harm to your life rather than the simple get-off-your-phone sort of mantra you know yeah absolutely I mean it is much more nuanced than than that you know so I think it probably does need a considered approach Monica has a question as well this would be very useful for staff to hear about is there any plan to share this information more widely yeah I mean I'm more than happy to make the slides available to anyone who's interested and I have no problem doing that yeah excellent excellent and I think Monica you know and something for us all to consider maybe is you know we will have this recording available we'll hopefully are reflecting on what we're learning here at the moment I do think it's important to have these conversations with our colleagues and to to raise it at departmental meetings and and and planning sessions with our colleagues as well to make sure that that kind of perspective is always there but to jump in there Monica yeah so Jean thanks I think this so Matt's talk was really a format and energized and I'm kind of assuming people are in the room because they're kind of already at the table and whatever but I think your thing would you know help convince some people maybe they shouldn't need convincing but you know that there's hard cold figures there that they're we're not just talking about one student who might have something whatever that it is there is a cohort of students I'm just kind of when you see the cold hard facts it's kind of unsettling a little bit you know and so I think that would be helpful so thanks Dean thanks very much thanks Monica thanks Dean can I invite everyone please to go down to the reactions button on the bottom of the zoom toolbar and give Dean a great big clapping emoji or if you have your cameras on you can you can you can clap physically if you if you so choose like like Monica is doing feverishly right now so thank you all very much for that thank you so much Dean we're we're motoring along now and I see our our next speaker has joined us in the room Alan Smeaton who is a professor of in the School of Computing in DCU and Alan is going to talk to us a little bit about using students own data to support their wellness and well-being so over to you Alan thank you very much thanks Rob good afternoon everybody just doing a sound check Rob can you give me a thumbs up you can hear me okay yes he can okay great so I'm going to the ordering of these presentations is really well chosen Rob because what I'm going to do is is use the situation and the numbers as presented earlier by Dean as a as a motivation for what we've been doing in particular in using students data footprints which the university has every university has about all their students and using that for their own wellness and for their well-being so a little bit of history about me is that one of the things I've done in the past is that I've used student data access logs from Moodle or loop I've used that in the past in the middle of the previous decade to help with completion rates working with a small team we targeted year one modules those modules would have had big registration numbers and high failure rates like 60 or 70 percent of students taking some business course or some mathematics course in first year and failing it and as a result not being able to go on J1 visas to the United States because they had to hang around to repeat the exams in the summertime so what we did was we worked with ISS and we got the archive of previous years of log access to those modules and we built some clever artificial intelligence and machine learning stuff to predict student behaviour for the current semester so by the time we reached week four or week five for many modules we were able to predict the outcome of for a student for these high failure modules in first year and we would alert those students saying hey you're doing really well in this module keep going you should be fine or hey you're not doing so good in this module you really need to pull up your socks and get stuck into it or else it's not going to work out well for you and this resulted in an overall improvement in the pass rates for the modules and then the average mark and it won some awards for some got some attention in particular got attention from senior management so we ran this for two years it impacted about two and a half thousand of our first year students helped some of them get J1 visas to go to the United States or whatever they do then they're similar but after two years it's not really my role on my expertise to institutionalize this and offer this as a regular service we're happy to do it within the insight centre as a once off or even because it was so good so successful first time to do it a second time but third time and fourth time that's not my role but in order to institutionalize that it required some great data upheavals and I was told to wait until the emergence of the new student information systems which is going to be the all singing, all dancing solution to all of our problems and then we'll be able to institutionalize it so I went into a corner and started to wait and then I got fed up waiting and in the meantime I developed the flourish module which is running at both DCU and at UCD I think Dean certainly drew my attention to the USI mental health survey of 2019 three and a half thousand people nearly a third of them with severe levels of anxiety and a formal diagnosis of mental health issues and then in the UCD they carried out a survey subsequent to that in 2020 and that survey was of 19,000 young adults showing that only 42% are in the normal range for depression and anxiety that means that nearly 60% of them aren't and UCD survey also said that during COVID times the university support services including ours and the other universities received more than 11,000 requests from our students for counseling and other forms of help and the main stressors for our students from this 19,000 survey was the university life which is deadlines and assignments and the usual stuff managing their finances and worrying about their future so there are many wellness courses at places like Yale and Berkeley and they look at science of happiness or the wellness or the well-being the science the theory behind it and the practice and so on and the poster child for this is Larry Santos pictured here and her course at Yale which became the most popular course module ever given at Yale and when it was put on course area it has nearly three million people who have taken it in online form but this course you Larry's course and others miss a trick in that what happens is she stands in front of a crowd of people and she gives them a PowerPoint lecture on the things they should do and then she gives them workshops and so on but none of these other courses use students own personal data in any way but in the flourish module we do so we carried out more than two years of background work from within the insight center at both UCD and DCU and this background work included interviews and group meetings with students with student leaders with health experts with student services and supports and with pilot runs on small cohorts of students and the flourish module in belfield is an optional module it's available across all undergraduate and postgraduate years it earns those students five credits and it forms part of their core degree program here in DCU flourish is reserved exclusively for second year undergraduates and it's an extracurricular which means it doesn't form part of their 60 credits for their degree it's something they would do as an addition it's been available in full format since the beginning of the current academic year prior to that it was run as a pilot for a small group and for our DCU students it earns them five credits it's available across all our campuses and all of our degree programs so all second years and as I said students will take the flourish module because they want to and as a reward if they complete it and they don't have to complete it and then they will get the credits that are assigned with that as an additional top up as a micro credential as of now we have more than 170 students who are registered for the module so what goes on in the module well the content is online resources it's given entirely online over loop and for each of the 10 topics we have a series of interview style videos between myself who's the recurrent for each of the topics the anchor if you like and any number of experts from throughout our campuses so the top video is it's recorded using Zoom it's recorded using exactly this technology Kahal is in his office and I'm in my office so there's no lights or makeup or hair or anything done it's just recorded like that and what our colleagues in in DCU and the teaching enhancement unit do is that they enhance that video by basically swapping in one shot or another shot and if I can jump around in that video what they'll do is is that they will overlay graphics and they will overlay things on top of that so as we are talking about for example DigiMe in that interview we then go and jump onto that website here's another example of me carrying out an interview with with somebody else Ashley Burke from the Institute of Education same office right and we're talking now she's talking about the three the five forms of engagement so what that means is is that this isn't your usual recorded Zoom lecture of an hour with a PowerPoint and a lecture as a kind of tiny postage stamp in the corner this is professionally produced and therefore engaging and all of the videos are 10 minutes right because that's the digestible unit for video right we don't like sitting through one hour recorded lectures and what we do what our students do is is that when they look at a one hour recorded lecture they listen to the lecture and if the lecturer is somebody who speaks naturally very quick then they can't fast forward that lecture and make it go up any faster like this but if the lecturer is one of these really slow speaking and they're playing it at 2x nobody plays these videos at 2x because it's engaging content and the 10 topics in Flourish include a topic on sleep there's a topic on nutrition there's a topic on work habits there's a topic on procrastination there's a topic on relationships with others not just loved ones and family but other students and other people top of strangers there's a topic on physical activity and movement there's a topic on positive psychology there's a topic on life quality which covers alcohol and drugs and safe sex there's a topic on digital footprints and digital literacy and behaviour change and more and who gives these topics these people give these topics some of you are on the call you recognise yourself right so these are all scattered across all our campuses and all our faculties in DCU the two exceptions are Eileen Gibney who's an expert in nutrition and has a system for data gathering so we use that and we also got some support from Fitbit for this program we didn't need it but as part of that I was able to engage with Conor who's a... I've known Conor for decades and he's an expert in sleep so I was happy to do the interviews so all of these people have contributed of their time by preparing their content in other words preparing for an interview with me over a Zoom call and those calls have lasted probably about an hour an hour and a quarter and that's been their input and what's happened after that is that has then been taken and polished up and made available as topics within the module within DCU now that's great so we have all this fancy content and attractive looking content and professionalised content but for each of the topics there's an assignment and for those assignments students will gather their own data on their sleep or on their nutrition or on their exercise or on their physical activity levels or their work habits and more so the assignment for each topic involves looking at the content playing those videos following some of the other links and then taking out their phones and measuring their own sleep or measuring their exercise or measuring whatever it means what it means is that they don't just get the content presented to them in a sort of a leisure layback way they then have to actively engage in it by using their own data gathered mostly from their devices their phones they use this to learn about themselves and how changes that they can introduce into their sleep, nutrition, exercise levels, relationships whatever whichever topic can be used and is reflected in their own personal data there's strong support for this from across the university all of the faculties of students union dean and the colleagues and student support services have been involved in this right from the get go the senior management and right up to the DCU president who's a strong supporter of this but flourish isn't just about student health and student wellness it is about student health and student wellness but what we do with this is that we use digital literacy so instead of switching off their phones we get them to use their phones to gather their personal data because that's what they would do in their normal day-to-day activities so it blends wellness and digital literacy specifically the aspect of digital literacy which is to erase the awareness of their personal data and to show that personal data the data they gather on themselves has potential for good it's not all bad so wellness and digital literacy are two examples of 21st century skills which you're here to for not formally taught to our students nobody teaches our students how to sleep or what to eat right or how to build relationships with others or how to make decisions or how to take exercise so this is not formally taught to them anywhere we teach these aspects to the two students or we present the information to them and let them learn themselves but as an alternative our delivery of this information is so that they will learn it from us as opposed to learning it from their peers or worse learning it from social media so there's a version of flourishing ongoing at UCD it's smaller in that it's capped at 50 because there's involvement in workshops in hand-to-hand whereas ours is entirely online and therefore can expand to whatever number and like UCD Dave as we both UCD and ourselves have run pilot versions and we're now in full sort of full rollout or full production for example and this morning I had a call with the student welfare people from Ulster University and at the end of the call they said well how can we get a copy of yours can we copy it can you give it to us can we replicate it I've also had meetings with colleagues in NUI Galway who want to do the same and in UCC who want to do the same and again it's not just the attraction of addressing wellness and well-being but combining that in some way with digital literacy last slide Rob so student wellness student well-being is hugely important that's why we're all gathered on this call right and many other places as well but we need to teach aspects of it or we need to inform students about it because if they don't they're going to pick it up from Facebook and that's the worst place to pick it up second point is that personal data it's a bad reputation mostly because of abuses of personal data but personal data can be a force for good if it's used properly and if it is not misused and abused and that's what we're thinking and that's what we're teaching them as well through their first-hand experience and final point is that flourish is about student wellness but it brings the bonus of digital literacy and I'll stop there Alan thank you so much that was a wonderfully comprehensive overview of your module and as you say yourself there at the end what I really like about this is the fact that you're addressing the topics of wellness and well-being head on you're bringing it straight into the curriculum you're having students study it and then tracking their data to actually see is what they're learning having the impact on their on their day-to-day behavior and I mean isn't that a great indication of whether they've learned or not you know seeing as their behavior changed and one subtle thing Rob is is that they are gathering their data on themselves they never share their data with us so somebody will pick up on sleep they'll track their sleep for a week they'll do some intervention track it for another week they'll figure out the differences and their assignment will be to submit a blog post on what they learned from that so they never have to share their data with us yeah it sounds very empowering very empowering for them all together and you mentioned being in talks with Ulster and NYG about you know about them copying it or whatever are there any grand plans maybe to make it an open course maybe rival the three million learners on Coursera compete with Laurie Santos no I don't think so no I think this has grown from the ground up and I think what happens is is is that the tom-tom runs in the networks of learning from each other so so also this morning where I'd already spoken I previously spoken to to our colleagues in UCD who've done this because they've done they've done it slightly different by making it a core module or part of the 60 credit squares ours is extra curricular so it's been it's been not by design but it's been great that UCD and ourselves have done almost every aspect of it differently because then other places like Cork and Galway and Ulster can come in and say oh well I like the way they did that and I like the way they did that and they can come up with their own version of what they think would work for them exactly exactly very good and there's a question from Kieran done in the chat Kieran is asking how do students register for flourish so they don't register to the ITS system and there's a web because it would have been oh we're in the middle of building the new student information system ITS can't cope how many times have we heard that in our lives ITS can't hope but so what we did was we hosted a web page ourselves and I will post that on the chat as he stalls to try and find some time to go and get the link while also hoping that the dog outside doesn't go completely mad delivery at the door I don't know and if I just post this so yeah so this link will get any student can go along and there's a bit of background information on it and pointers to it but basically the register here goes to a google form where we capture the students name course and student number and then we then register them on the loop page and it's made available to them that way William Allen I think it'll be wonderful to see some version of this or some version of addressing and learning about wellness and well-being incorporated into student orientation or semester one of first year or something like that and really start to bring those conversations directly into the classroom with students so that we're helping them build the skills they need to be resilient both in their studies and university and beyond university as well yeah I see a question from James can DCU staff get to have a look yeah drop me an email and you battery as well drop me an email and I'll add you on the loop page and you will then see it that way that would work okay so just popped your email there in the chat as well Alan so yeah people can email Alan directly well listen thank you so much Alan what we might do again is if everyone goes down to the bottom zoom toolbar and chooses the reactions button we will give Alan a great big digital round of applause with the clapping emoji although some others Monica's there going again mad clapping her yeah so thank you so much Alan that's wonderful so what I'd like to do now is to invite our our our final our last but certainly by no means least our final speaker Caroline Mahan from DCU Healthy Caroline's going to talk to us now for a little bit around kind of the wider issues of well-being and connecting well-being to the wider environment so over to you Caroline thanks Rob I got the graveyard shift as they say but hopefully you can stay with me just sharing my slides okay so my title isn't so inspiring other well-being considerations but I'm trying to cover a few I guess what my my ethos is to try and bring you outside the classroom a little bit into maybe the broader university and and and see how it all kind of can integrate I guess I know you've had a break but if you feel free to turn off or turn on your camera and stand for this session being practical about well-being is so important as well it's it's through our lived experience so it is the little things and it is the big systemic things coming together so as Rob introduced me as part of DCU Healthy so DCU Healthy is DCU's whole campus approach to student staff well-being so we try and take a multi-pronged approach and bringing everything that we're doing around health and well-being what you'll often notice is there's never a lack of energy or enthusiasm to work on student staff well-being but often it's about trying to come out of our silos which Alan has talked through by showing the list of people he's collaborated with and we do that every day we do really well it's just to make sure we keep doing that I'm showing you a very eventsy like classic health promotion type slide but I do think it's quite feel good here are some of the kind of events that we've done in DCU so we launched a framework and we had the head of Healthy Ireland come we did a little staff challenge we did a healthy eating course we ran some we've run some quit smoking so it is about that stuff and personal and professional development but actually it's a bit deeper than that and I hope to touch on that I presume you've touched on that already I just wanted to pull down an image around being fluid and I guess in Ireland our restrictions have lifted on Friday so our world is kind of changing again and I think COVID has reminded us that we have control over some things we don't have control over a lot of things and things are always moving and adapting and I think that's a nice analogy for our well-being so at a personal level someone's well-being is always changing so when a student enters university versus when they exit and I think we have an opportunity to support and enable that so I'm going to do a little zoom because I'm taking you a little bit more out of the classroom I don't want to proclaim that I'm an expert in student well-being I think you guys know students really well you might be you know an academic in this area work in this area but what I'm trying to do is zoom out and give some context to our well-being and talk about a bit of health promotion as well so my first VVox is what does well-being mean to you? Rob, do I need to stop sharing my screen? Yeah if you want to stop sharing for one second Caroline I'll just share the VVox again quickly so for those of you who are still connected to the VVox you should see another prompt there for you another poll to respond to which is what does well-being mean to you and I'm just going to grab the link and pop the link in the chat for anyone who has disconnected from VVox Thanks Rob I kind of fell into that bit quickly didn't I? I'm asking such a broad question but I just want to see you know well-being is something very personal we all have well-being and a sense of our own well-being and I think we can't escape that when it comes to maybe what our interests are how we approach our classroom so it'll be interesting to see what Yeah I think it's really important to try and interrogate the term as well you know because you know it could be one of these suitcase terms that you know has a lot built into it and we all interpret it in different ways so I do think it is important to probably get an understanding of what it means to all of us so I can see some people have responded there on the VVox we might give it another few seconds Caroline will we? Yeah perfect I do know just even from like the education part of education and into the primary and post-primary they've defined what well-being is for them and I think that was really important for I guess the department have taken on well-being is a core objective now so schools will be inspected on it and for them to do that they had to take the department of health definitions and combine it with philosophies because it wouldn't make sense you know Well I let's see what people have responded to so we'll close off this poll so there's some of the responses Okay great I see no bird out came out first and that's really interesting and also actually the WHO talk about it being not just a neutral state it should be a flourishing but that might be a sense of where people are at and people might be feeling burnt out happy and not overwhelmed self-care a sense of belonging absence of stress centred and grounded feeling balanced having energy to do the things I want to do and not be stressed balanced balance balance is a huge word and I think that's absolutely at the core in terms of balancing your work balancing expectations your feelings all of that great okay oh we've well actually the next one is also V-box Rob so if you want to stay on the next one yeah okay yeah move on to the next one thanks everyone so I'm just putting it out again what does student well-being mean to you so is it the same is it different things while putting the student before it makes you kind of think about the person behind well-being or as we can talk about you know well-being definition we can use words to describe what we're now being asked to think about a student well-being I mean we certainly have to think of you know a person behind us and does that change our definitions or our beliefs we'll soon find out I guess and do we have different ideologies around what it is to be a well-being student or and our culture like I'll just know anecdotally from meetings you know people will say things like well they should be going out getting paced because that's part of the experience you know and actually that can be quite damaging if that's someone who's influential to our alcohol committee or enabling that at a top level and I do want to speak to that a little bit as well I'll look at some of the results coming in great pastoral care not being overwhelmed students who can manage well most of the time so there's possible chance to reach their full potential whatever that looks like great saying students can manage well most of the time and who have the best chance oh I wish I had that one putting the student first remembering that everyone has different circumstances for study contentment that's a really nice and confidence great same as for staff balanced in their approach just studying other demands feeling their body heart and soul and their peace and that their support is a whole person that's that's a gorgeous deep rooted look at earth thought around well-being great okay so we're not saying you know slapstick things we're not you know it's quite deep and it's very connected to who we are so I'm gonna continue Rob how do I move my slides oh god I'm really showing my that's a lot so you should just be able to click on use my mic yeah oh there we go sorry okay so again I guess I should provide some definition for well-being and I just wanted to pull from the Department of Education here into 2019 they took responsibility for well-being so they took it from our HS these are a national health service and they define well-being as student well-being is present when students realize their abilities take care of their physical well-being can cope with the normal stresses of life and have a sense of purpose and belonging to a wider community so it's about bringing well you know educating them in the classroom but also providing an environment that supports that messaging I'm going to just touch on health promotion just to give some theory and ideology there and I think that might be supportive that this isn't all on you like someone's well-being or student well-being can't be pinned on individuals so there is a wider determinant at play and just to be conscious of that so we work off this thing called the social determinants of health so we know their health is influenced by multiple factors and I think COVID has really highlighted that so education is on one of those outer layers we know that by going to third level students and staff have you know staff are obviously employed so we might be more likely to have better well-being outcomes but not for everybody that might actually I mean all of these have a negative and positive influence so we work off the Ottawa Charity for Health Promotion so it starts with developing personal skills so that's really looking at the individual which is what we might be doing when we're providing like well-being in the curriculum but we want to move that out because we know from health promotion or supporting behaviour change or supporting well-being it needs to be environmental it needs to be a lived experience so the environment and the culture cannot or shouldn't contradict what we're teaching so you know sometimes it can feel like a big ask but I think it's doable and having that buy-in is really important so if you move out to the next layer it's about creating support creating support environments strengthening community action and reorientating the health services and that might be maybe our systems in DCU so if we're looking at if you take healthy eating we can't talk about healthy eating on the curriculum and then have a canteen or a policy in DCU that's about making money more or you know selling only chips and fried fruit we also talk about the pyramid this is just taken from an Australian mental health secondary school framework so we talk about primary prevention early identification intervention and then complex intervention and restoring well-being so at any point on the scale your students are going to be fitting into this so if a student it might be more likely that a student in the amber of the red might come to you and so at that point it might be a complex intervention that they need but what we really want to do is try and reckon the primary prevention and stop students moving in to the amber and red so if we know that timetabling or the way we're rolling out our assessments or just something is adding stress to students let's remove that and support them to be relative to the system and we talk about upstream versus downstream so if we know that we've got cogs in the system that are causing excess stress why don't we change that and stop them falling in the river and then having all these extra supports and resources and money needed to support students I guess just to call out again this idea of systems and complexity this is an obesity systems map and I know like the terminology and the conversation around weight is quite topical in Ireland at the moment but I guess just to show you that obesity isn't at an individual level this is complex and there's multiple factors that play including our environment, media all of that so then I just pulled out this image for an example to show you I guess a student and their experience so they're coming to us if I take the typical undergraduate who is 18 to 25 they are coming to us at a pinnacle point in their life so it's a major transition that can have some shifts in their well-being but we know something like their first thousand days 80% of your emotional brain is developed so we've got all these determinants kind of hanging around and impacting their well-being so just to be conscious of that and then just to bring out that social determinants of health again if we take something like a time as a barrier to physical activity so how it can be perceived is saying well they've poor time management so let's do a course on how to manage their time better a lack of discipline or real power a lack of prioritizing low motivation little responsibility for one's actions does not view health as important so there's some assumptions that we can all make but the factors that are likely to influence time available to be physically active are commuting transport links parental or care responsibilities availability of local sports and leisure services cost household tasks different values disability care our types of employment if students are working part-time and studying you know how have they time to build that in and then I just wanted to bring back I guess that things are complex but it's also simple and if you go for a 20 minute walk this is a brain scan to show after 20 minutes of walking that the warm colors are made to high brain activity so again getting out and going for those walks are really important so I just wanted to pull that out I guess Alan and Dean have pulled on these statistics really really well and I obviously didn't want to keep it so ire focused but we have national data that we can pull on and I think that's important to just understand or realize in that drugs use in higher education in Ireland education was perceived as being the least effective intervention to reduce her and that's an interesting statistic and I think we need to remember that and we do need to educate but I think it's it's more than that and it's about the multi-pronged approach which I know not we don't all have influence over it but I think Alan spoke to the 58 percent who are classified as outside of the normal range for depression and anxiety females reported higher level anxiety the male the males but but on a positive note 74 percent of young people use their friends for support so we know that 74 percent have a good network and feel like they can confide in their friends the sexual experience survey again like we roll out things like consent workshops so 29 percent of females 10 percent of males and 28 percent of non-binary students reported non-consensual penetration by incapacitation force or threat of force so it's really important that we're touching on all these subjects and that we're supporting students in and outside the classroom there is an opportunity for change so when students come to third level they are laying the foundations for lifelong behaviours suggesting that behavioural choices maintained during university may track into adulthood and influence long-term health outcomes so I think we have an illness and responsibility to carry that on for students and to to to reflect the work that's been done at primary and post primary we don't want to uproot all of that especially when they're at a you know a really pinnacle point in their life so I'm just going to talk about health promoting universities some of you may have seen these definitions or you may be involved in committees in your in your own universities but health promoting universities and college transform the health and sustainability of our current and future societies strengthen communities and contribute to the well-being of people, places and the planet so we're bringing in sustainability we know that these are intrinsically linked so we can separate or work against each other they're also talking about future societies so actually student well-being is really important now today for students but also future societies so if we're thinking about future nurses, doctors, engineers whatever our discipline we actually should be supporting well-being through that so that they when they go back out to the community and the world they are bringing that with them I think that's really powerful so we nationally or locally we work under the Healthy Ireland, Healthy Campus framework so Healthy Ireland is our national health and well-being framework and it talks about you know health and well-being is everybody's responsibility we can't stick with it's in the HSE or it's in the hospitals to look after everybody it's not, it's lived in there every day and I think universities are really starting to step up to that internationally there's the Okanagan Charter so that's something that people here could pull on as well and in the UK there's a Healthy University's network which we're also part of so what is the evidence around supporting why should we be looking at health and well-being and I just quite like this one so enhancers of health and well-being for staff and students in the university setting have been documented as feeling valued being listened to having skilled and supportive line managers and having a positive physical environment and I think for me that pulls on the department of it if we looked at that original definition and I know they talk about their noddings a lot and you know connectedness and Mahav would have touched on that so feeling valued so connecting first and making me feel valued and making me feel seen all that other stuff will come the healthy eating the consent if we can first make them feel valued and connected then we can layer it out in terms of the healthy campus framework it is that whole campus approach to health and well-being so we can't just look at well-being in the curriculum and we should and it needs to be there but it also needs to be across our structures so leadership strategy and governance so our top level management need to care about this in a proactive way and be not afraid to step into that space of making some changes or having awkward conversations or or driving it our campus environments and facilities and services we can't contradict ourselves when it comes to maybe having some vending machines or do we have accessible places for students to maybe store their bags or physically exercise campus culture and communication so what's the culture like are we communicating healthy messages and more than that and then personal professional development so supporting people in that I guess I use this as a mixing bowl analogy just that there's so many things happening and a healthy campus framework is about bringing it all together here in Ireland we have a lot of frameworks that you know universities are answerable to and I think we can run the danger of rolling these out in silos and you might as academic teaching staff have felt the pressure of being pulled this way and pulled that way but we are working to try and bring that together so something like the national health strategy we actually have thanks to the HSE been able to provide you know 20 plus condom machines free of charge that are stored in bathrooms that are accessible for students to all students and we restock them so we met a partnership with the cleaning company so they restocked them first that was a fantastic initiative that just is one part of maybe looking at sexual wellbeing then our safe, respective and supportive positive environments we were talking about consent and healthy relationships we're doing a lot of work particularly driven by SS&D and ourselves on consent workshops today we're rolling out a consent workshop for the GA so we're kind of scaling down and we're actually targeting specific groups then there's the national suicide mental health and suicide prevention framework so again like we're rolling out a student survey on student mental health and well-being and that's called the JED survey there's a you know there's a framework around a list of substances within higher education there's tobacco free Ireland there's a list I could keep going and you'll probably be familiar in your own wherever you are of your own framework so it can be complex and heavy to navigate but I guess one thing to talk about is that it can't be bolted on it needs to be baked in and the more we're just trying to stick it on is the more it's going to seem really heavy and inauthentic and I think if you were to tell someone at an individual level you know how I want to do something around my wellbeing it's about stepping back and what's a priority for you so what's a priority for DCU students versus Trinity students so we know just on a light level Trinity students are more likely to be active commuters because it's in the city so maybe some of their priorities are shaped around that but it really needs to come into our everyday just a survey by Student Minds group in the UK they just have some data like there was strong correlation between how well staff and students feel the university supervisors and management have supported them and their wellbeing and mental health oh am I okay so I guess I guess yeah we're showing how that supports people's wellbeing and good clear communication from university staff also appears to have a positive impact on students' sense of social connectedness and loneliness and I think that's something I know from just working in DCU that there is such a strong sense of community and there is fantastic people and I can only imagine that everybody who's on the call today you know really does care and cares about students I did just want to flag that given that people who've signed up for today are likely to be caring and engaged in the topic and so I wanted to bring back just flagging looking after yourself and putting in boundaries because I think we can all be guilty of the wellbeing space and I know myself it's like we want to give and we want to help and we want to change and we want to shape it but we really need to look after our own wellbeing respecting ourselves respecting our energy and role modelling I think actually that's one of the healthiest things we could do so taking your breaks I know that sounds silly but try and really put some boundaries in if that's not happening for you if some of these don't resonate with you and you're like oh she's just talking about the same thing then please leave them but walks in nature we know how powerful that is amazing brain break that is connections and support now that we're returning who are your support networks who do you go for coffee with keep that up boundary setting and do you communicate these at students so maybe at the beginning of the year it's like well I actually don't like this type of communication or maybe not like but this is how I like to be communicated with and you can put that on your emails contact so including things like your contacts or your item errors and I forgot my T there but for me turning off my news notifications has been a really powerful support in my own wellbeing so if you want to pop in the chat box around what keeps you well particularly in your academic life then please do and I might just give you a minute to do that that might be helpful maybe to see other people's suggestions and I'll keep going just so we can kind of finish I guess but my computer does this little thing restores great it's back then I wanted to flag this again you might think this is like very self-helpy but it is about controlling the controllable so you know we can control a lot of things but what can we and I guess reflecting on that within your space and within your faculty I know sometimes there can be a lot of frustrations and demands so bringing it back is always important things like healthy lectures again I'm kind of lightning it again but if we are running a two-hour lecture we need to make sure we're giving them the break in between like if you're into meditation or exploring mindfulness you might want to do meditation with them or invite students to take over that break in a healthy way standing breaks maybe do a standing lecture they do that in the RSI they do some public lectures with standing icebreakers and fun and interaction I know that might be something you're comfortable with but I think there's no harm communication so email signatures messaging so again around maybe some of your boundaries I really like when someone calls that out I'm staying connected so as Dean I think did touch on you know finding out what is the student support at your university and as I think Dean mentioned putting it on a slide at the beginning of your you know your orientation just to be aware and maybe touch base follow them on Instagram if you're on that do you have a healthy campus initiative and are you wanting to get involved with that and maybe follow some more local organizations spawn out in our fantastic resource for young people and they will they will do more and support you more than you know a mammoth task you know researching things or trying to look up things yourself I think there's there's merit in that and then using your power in your voice so like if you're really passionate about well-being you feel like something isn't happening at the university I really would encourage you to use your voice and your power within that to advocate to speak to that to be that role model so if you think that we're you know you're not taking off breaks try and put your boundary in there and see if you can shift the culture a little bit because sometimes it is that I guess people coming into your to your space so yeah that's me Thank you so much Caroline that was a absolute tour de force giving us lots of things to think about I suppose there are very often national or institutional strategic projects that are underway to help us support well-being and whilst those are great I think you know what you're saying is you know they could and also should be met with our own personal practical activities for ourselves and for our students and I think what really stuck with me in your presentation was the idea that you know by supporting students to have good well-being at university and get into these good behaviors around their well-being we're setting them up with a lifelong a lifelong skill that they will need for whatever career they go into or whatever complex difficult world they are going to live in the world is already complex and difficult and only going to get more so so I think it's it's really important to be cognizant of of that fact so thank you so much there's some things in the chat but I see also Monica has for a handle do you want to jump in there Monica? Yeah I agree thanks very much my poor head is buzzing after all of this I like the person who said fizzing earlier on there's just one slide I wanted you could explain it again so if you sit at your desk for 20 minutes you had the brain scan and the brain was kind of nice and calm if you go for a walk in the park there's a red bit stuff going on what is that showing like why is that good? Well it's your brain activity so it's actually are you asking me in a clinical way? Well no I was just thinking like so like my problem is my brain is always buzzing and I want to get it to kind of so the calm thing so and I was just wondering so the idea of going for a walk in the park it kind of energizes your brain? Yeah includes your mind but I guess I mean mindfulness is a fabulous trying to get away from thinking because we do thinking very well I think in universities I think but actually you know well being is a practice of connecting with our bodies and connecting with emotions and feelings and regulating ourselves so I would suggest mindfulness I'm not a clinician around thing but I know personally myself if we can be heavy cognitive you know trying to step away from thought it can be really helpful so Helene actually in counseling and personal development does run a four-week mindfulness course and part of things like we're trying to do is opening that out to students and staff so and there are those who say that the time slot might coincide with caring responsibilities which is unfortunate but anyway yeah yeah yeah yeah I know no time seats anybody so everybody yeah yeah thank you I know I know yeah that's really good like loads of great practical tips there so thanks okay thanks Annika thanks very much so could I ask everyone please to scroll down to their reactions button on the bottom of the zoom toolbar and give Caroline a wonderful clapping emoji or physical clap Fiona's off there now clapping away like mad thank you very much to you Caroline in fact thank you to all of our wonderful speakers Maha, Dean, Alan and Caroline I think Fiona mentioned it in the chat I think they all really brought something different to the seminar but all along the same theme and as I said we hope that this has been reflective and we hope you know you can go away from today with a few ideas for things you can do for yourself and for your students as well so one last thing that I might ask you to do please is I've popped a link in the chat to an evaluation for the National Forum who supported this seminar so if you take a moment just to complete an evaluation that'll be wonderful you'll need to select our seminar from the list and we are seminar number two so you'll see it's second in the list this session has been recorded obviously I'll post that recording hopefully within the next few days and I'll circulate the link to you all as well as sharing supporting resources I know Maha in particular shared a lot of links and so on in her slides in the chat so I'll make sure to collate those and send them all on to you as well so thank you so much wherever you are in the world I've seen there's people here from New York there's people here from Malaysia there's people here from Dublin from Britain from all sorts of places so thank you so much for joining wherever in the world you are I hope you've learned something and I hope you're able to implement some of this in your practice so thank you all very much and have a wonderful day or night or morning or whatever time it is for you so take care