 Let me welcome everyone to the first community building town hall in this series This is the first of a series of live video events. They're going to be exploring a higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic We have a really interesting variety of folks to talk with but the idea here is for us to have conversations to have Communication to have reflection discussion argument and concord together using this video technology So let me explain a bit about the program and then I'll bring up our first guest We have a professor Tonya means who's an assistant dean as well as a director of the teaching and learning Center at the College of Business of the University of Nebraska And she has been doing some fascinating work with technology and teaching. We also have with us a wonderful professor Andrew Feldstein who was the assistant provost for teaching innovation learning technologies right now And we have both of them as guests in just a minute. Let me explain a bit more about how our whole setup works and what we hope to accomplish today To begin with oh one more person to welcome Ryan Verdeen He's the head of client success at Yellow Dick. He has a good name. He spells it incorrectly But he does make up for it with a fine hat. We're really looking forward to hearing from YouTube, right? so If you haven't been to this technology before let me just explain how it works This is a video conferencing tool called shindig And it's like some other video conferencing platform You may have used and it differs in a few others One way is that we have a dynamic between the stage and the audience where I am right now And where this slide is is called the stage and we call that because everyone involved in this conversation You can see and hear every human goes on the stage Right below me you can see a whole bunch of different icons each of which represent a Different person or several people logging in from somewhere in the world Some of them are represented by silhouettes some of them by video feeds But each of them represents one more participant in our conversation Now if you'd like to talk to one of those people there are a few ways of doing him One is double-click on them And if your camera and mic are working for both of you you can have your own audio visual conversation right there You can also use chat now if you look at the very bottom of the screen You should be able to see a few different buttons and one of them if you click on it We'll let you chat with everybody else in the conversation But there are two more powerful ways of conversing with everybody I want to make sure that you know about them so you can use them during the next hour One of them is video chat and one of them is a question and answer box So first of all if you look in the bottom of the screen You'll see a strip of buttons running across it one of the buttons is a raised hand And one of them is a question mark if you click the raised hand That tells us that you want to join us up here on stage so if you have Your camera working if you have your microphone working and you're in a place where you can speak Then click that button and the time is right. I'll bring you right up on stage easy as can be Now if you'd rather type in a question because perhaps you don't have sufficient bandwidth or perhaps your mic and camera aren't working Click on that question mark button I'll pop a little box into which you can type your question or comment When the time is right, I'll flash it on the screen if for everyone to read and then I'll read it out loud So everyone can hear it. Those are the two major ways that people participate during this conversation We have a few links. I want to share with you before we go further I want to thank our sponsor yellow dig who is sponsoring this series of events You can click there if they're blog a medium or follow their YouTube channel as well as on Thursday at noon You can check out their product webinar Next May 6th at 1 p.m. On a Wednesday, we'll have a follow-up webinar to this I want to thank yellow dig for sponsoring it now that you have a sense of the technology now that you have a sense of Who's behind this what we hope to accomplish? Let me bring up one of our guests on stage This is a fantastic professor who talked to us about his work using multiple technologies in teaching and learning Professor Feldstein greetings. Hi. How are you? Good? How are you doing? Oh doing well? I Have so many questions to ask you, but let me ask the first most basic one. Where are you today? I? Am in Hayes, Kansas. I'm the system provost for teaching innovation and learning technologies here at Fort Hayes State University and I Since it's a fairly small town my normal work commute is about five minutes And so I am Five minutes away from what is normally my office and my new makeshift home Curtis courtesy of Wayfair.com But you really shaved off that extensive commute pretty well Yeah, very extensive. It was close to slightly over a mile. Wow, that's a rough thing. I'm glad for the change rate Let me ask a more serious question. How are you doing? And how is your institution doing during this pandemic? This extraordinary moment? I Think our institution is doing pretty well We have Fortunately, we've been in the online business for for quite a while We currently have more students that are traditionally taking classes online then are taking them face-to-face so When we made this transition most of our students even our face-to-face students had taken some online courses most of our faculty had taught online courses and so despite the fact that What we're doing this semester, which I think is pretty much what most people are doing this semester isn't Going online in a strict sense of the word. We're moving towards the remote teaching model for what we're doing this semester We were pretty prepared for this now, of course It's the it's the other stuff that none of us were prepared for which is the fact that we're all sitting at home and Dealing with things we've never ever thought we might ever have to deal with quite quite I'd like to ask about some of those things in a few minutes But let me ask one other question just to stretch thing just to look ahead a little bit What does the fall semester look like for you right now? Is it still completely up in the air or have you made firm decisions? No firm decisions at this point although I mean, I guess from that perspective up in the air, but that we are certainly planning For any number of potential contingencies based upon What happens and I don't I certainly don't have any better idea What's going to happen than than anybody else? That's a good answer. That's a good answer and many many universities and colleges are Right now on that cusp of decision of wondering, you know We need more data if we're gonna figure out what the fall is going to look like in terms of public health Well, hang on for a second. Let me see if I can bring up our other guests today And see if her just had a technology issue. Let's see if we can solve it Uh professor means Okay, it looks like your camera and your microphone are still off. So you're gonna want to probably just reload the screen Friends everybody before we go further I have a whole stack of questions to ask our guest and I have a bunch of questions That I'm sure you'd like to ask as well But the key thing here is for all of us to have a conversation. That's the idea the town hall metaphor So if you'd like to join us up here on stage Simply click the raise hand button and you can do that or if you'd like to type in a question Just click on the question mark. You can type in your comment or question and we'll bring that up for everybody else as we So and if you have any questions any questions at all about how this works again Just use either the question box or the raised hand button and you can ask Now one thing I'd like to ask you Do you should I call you professor Feldstein provost Feldstein or Andrew Andrew works very good very good One thing I'd like to ask you about this present term Is since you will you're not making a huge leap from nothing online to entirely online What you described is making a kind of shift in emphasis from partially online to hold the online What are some of the practices and habits that? You've established over your years of teaching online that you think are especially useful that other college and universities can learn from Well, I mean, I think that the primary Most important piece is a matter of connection Over the years I think the philosophy of our team and of the university as a whole is that Online learning is not Just delivering content. It's it's more about conversations. It's more about connections. It's more about forming It's discussing things and learning through that process as opposed to just simply Saying here's a here's a textbook. Here's a test have a nice day And I think that's a key element and and I think in this process as we moved To to remote teaching Our goal was how do we translate that how how do we make connections still happen without transitioning these courses to online In the traditional online sense in other words, we weren't about to when we design online courses Those are designed extremely differently than our face-to-face courses. They're designed primarily In an asynchronous mode Most of our online student population are taking online courses because they work and they're busy and they can't fit into a 10 o'clock in the morning class schedule. So it takes, you know months of development for us to build good tight asynchronous courses that match that, you know that have matching specific learning objectives to Specific activities and specific assessments, but also involve having a lot of Interaction involved so that there's there's so that the students are participating in that learning process We as we started thinking about what to do in this Case it was to say, okay, we can't realistically redesign all of our courses by next Tuesday Which was a couple of weeks ago or a couple of months ago or a couple of years ago. I time is sort of Yeah meaning but So it was a matter of what is the best way for us to Mimic the processes that we were doing in face-to-face and We've come to a lie very heavily on on synchronous environments Zoom has done a lot of heavy lifting for us Wow this semester We looked at the numbers recently and as early as January We had and I know January is not not a particularly busy month but Ford Hayes hosted Somewhere south of 400 zoom meetings in January In as in April as of and I haven't looked in the last few days, but as of about the 15th of April We were well north of of hosting 5,000 meetings So we're on the way to hosting close to 10,000 meetings if not more for this month Most of which well Yes, a lot of a lot of them were meetings most of all most all our meetings have gone online But I'm pretty sure that most of that was classroom activity and faculty moved their courses on to zoom and I guess we were fortunate Because when we left campus everybody had a schedule And we basically told everybody stick with your schedule if you had a class at 11 o'clock in the morning Now's not the time to say hey, let's do it at 2 in the afternoon Because some of those students had a course at 2 in the afternoon So a lot of things that we did were Really designed to try to to To keep connection with the students and keep continuity with the courses as they were before we left campus So continually both of schedule and also The Sense of connection with students really really crucial to how you did this Oh, absolutely. I mean and that's one thing That we and we learned that very early on and I don't know if you We started this process earlier than most people And and we started this earlier than most people in late January When we learned that we we have two we we work with two universities in china and We have traditionally for for a number of years. We have faculty that Go to china and teach face-to-face courses to thousands of students And in january we learned that wasn't going to happen right and that because And it seems bizarre now how foreign we thought The situation was I mean imagine if you will An entire country telling their students not to come back to campus and to stay home Matt crazy or what how could that happen? How could that possibly happen? And you know and when we looked at it, I'll have to say that I'll admit to the fact that When you think of this abstractly as something that's happening someplace else It doesn't sound as Stark as it really is once you figure it out So when we started that process My the the main concerns that I had is we were trying to do this as a we have faculty that aren't used to teaching online Unlike our faculty on campus. We have students who aren't used to taking courses online And we had the third factor of the uncertainty of the technology Technology and the infrastructure we were going to be able to use in china We knew that there were certain things that we just weren't going to be able to use at all We knew that anything that had to do with google Including youtube videos wasn't going to work We were concerned about zoom because there were some there had been some issues with zoom going in And so one of the things that we had initially tried to do was To try to make this as bulletproof and as low-tech as possible Trust of course Another piece of information came in at that point, which was we weren't the only ones that were bringing Our chinese partner students online all of their courses were going online and domestically that is china domestically the decision had been made to use a platform Which is ostensibly it was a moot platform and so We discovered as we were in the process of developing and we had three weeks by the way To develop these courses before the beginning of the semester the Total of for the first semester we had 40 plus courses 140 150 sections So putting this together was it was a bit of a race But when we discovered that they were using moot platforms there We had to consider the fact that domestically their experience was going to be Mostly watching streaming video Which is what they were going to be doing with maybe a more generic discussion board component and We weren't we hadn't originally thought about introducing a lot of video because we were Unsure of the inconsistency of delivery We Once we learned what their experience was going to be we knew we needed to make ours a little closer to that So we were able to we used we we were fortunate to have blackboard hosted in china Wow So yeah, that was something we worked on for quite a while, but we we've this was the first year Actually the second full semester We're hosted in china So what we decided to do was to take the videos from our video platform And upload them into blackboard as mp4s so that we could try to avoid some of the issues with the potential streaming issues with vidgrid, which is our video provider And so we put all that in place at the end of the day And I think the most important piece of this is when we finished the the initial part of the process And we had designed the courses and we had everything ready to go and we had designed what we felt were were really good solid courses The first thing we heard from students Is where's my professor? Hmm. I see the video. I want to see my professor. We We're we're there was a cry for normalcy There was a there was a cry for the fact we need to connect with one another at this point and it was something that We began to appreciate once once we started getting this feedback, which quite frankly we should have appreciated Before that if we had or if I had had a sense that What the reality of everybody goes home and everybody sits Wherever they are in their house and is pretending like Everything is normal Because they were doing that in china two months before we were doing it and so Having learned through that process we immediately ramped up the the Pieces of the puzzle that could connect faculty to students and could connect students together to try to We we employed we chat it as part of the process and and diddle and zoom got ramped up pretty well because You know I start I think about you know maslow's hierarchy Yes, you know and unless you've got if you're if you're hungry And you don't have a roof over your head and you don't know Where you're going to be in the next minute in time and you don't know whether you're safe You couldn't possibly be concerned with whatever content it is in the course that you're taking quite Let me let me pause you for one second because this is a fantastic story and I really hope that That you publish this in a in a full account because you you have this extraordinary position of being in the first wave before everybody else Of having to bring your chinese campuses Online with the unusual situation of having a hosted blackboard and so many so many themes have come up I want to bring I want to hit those things but I want to give a few people a chance to Pop in so first of all we have One other person see if we can get our other guest online right now Hello professor means I'm seeing hello. We can see you Your your microphone is muted though So you want to try fixing that in settings to make sure that the mic can work I'll give you a minute to do that We have a whole series of questions have been coming in uh, Andrew. I just want to give people a chance I will give you a chance to uh To uh respond to them. Uh, the first has come in from uh, Jeremiah Perry Hill and we just flashed this on the screen Uh, and he's at uh, rit and he asks Do you have any favorite model for a playbook to get faculty to rapidly develop community Accountability and trust in online class. Let me bring that back up So for community accountability and trust in online class Um, well good question the I mean, I don't know A specific playbook. I mean we work from I mean community of inquiry framework is pretty well central to what we do And if there's a playbook it has to do with the three presences in the community of inquiry framework Can you explain for people who haven't seen that framework yet? Uh community inquiry framework, um, it was developed by garrison and folks actually somewhere around late 90s Um, and it basically talks about When you're when you're in a face-to-face class There are certain things that happen organically and naturally in a face-to-face class um And what they've done in this framework is they've broken it on to three presences and they one is teaching presence One is social presence and the third is cognitive presence and the way I tend to look at it Is sort of as a formula Whereas if you have teaching presence along with social presence that leads to cognitive presence Which is more of the the interactive learning process But teaching presence Is the piece that we consider and think of those are the syllabus. Those are the due dates Those are the processes that you think of as what you as as a as a faculty member will bring to a class We don't normally think about social presence Which in an online? Environment that is somehow The hidden less obvious thing Because social presence is that piece that just happens It's the classroom itself and you walk into a classroom. There are visual cues There are there are cues There are sound cues when you see the professor up in front of the room posture and tone of voice Are all part of what's your your of the connection that's being made as the instructor You get to see what you get you get to see feedback from students You get to see ah that person is just Knotted off on their desk. Maybe I need to pick up the pace a little bit That person is looking like I'm from mars. Maybe I need to explain this a little bit more So all of these social factors Which happen naturally in a face-to-face classroom do not appear at all online There's a vacuum unless you introduce social presence And social presence goes back to where I was just talking a minute ago about china That was the piece that we really needed to bump up As we started getting the students telling us they wanted they wanted more connection When we talk about various That the social presence is the piece that allows us to process The content and the teaching stuff You know, I one of the examples I often use With instructors as we're developing new courses is you know, you need to have opportunities for feedback And you need to not only provide up channels for feedback between Instructors and students you need to provide opportunities for students to feedback with one another In a face-to-face class if you're if you have Given a lecture and the topic is particularly difficult and you ask for questions And you know that everybody should have questions and nobody asks questions What actually happens is When everybody gets up and walks out of the room They start turning to one another and say what in the world just happened What was going on in that class? What do we do now? I'm sinking now In an online class They aren't walking out of the class to have that discussion. So what happens they start to feel like, okay I'm crazy I'm the only one that didn't get this. I don't belong in this class And That things start happening at that point We need to as we develop online classes develop these channels of communication. They need to be, you know We're talking about community building and community building in a class involves Creating a learning community where all of where the students Not only have an opportunity to interact with faculty But they have an opportunity to interact with one another as part of the process their thoughts and once you have this social piece added into the basic Dry syllabus type teaching presence stuff. This is where With this is like where things start to happen where people can actually start to process and think about things That leads to actual learning and that's So as opposed to a playbook is to go back to the I mean The I think all of those things when we talk about creating a community. That's where trust and accountability and connections come in well And uh, thank you We have more questions here piling in and uh friends if you want to join us appear on stage and uh and speak face to face With Andrew and I just click the raise hand button and and you can do that This is from gene mires at also new york university of buffalo And he would like to know i'm curious about the various approaches to handling synchronous versus asynchronous events Some faculty are trying to enforce their formwork face-to-face time frame. That seems to be difficult in this setting And and we're experiencing that we have as I said earlier. We made the decision When everybody left campus to tell faculty to keep with your schedule because this was a middle of semester event They were already I mean habits were formed and people had an expectation of courses. Now that doesn't mean That all of our students Are going to be able to attend those events What most faculty are doing Is they're hitting the record button on their zoom meetings so that students can watch them later now I in full disclosure I will tell you that in normal times that is not something I even think about recommending Because a zoom meeting it has its place and one and and its place is to is Not just to deliver content, but you're creating connections in that environment And because people have a chance to to see one another and they have a chance to see somebody in either head And and facial expressions and all those things if you are watching a zoom meeting after the fact There's this Barrier there. It's not it's it's not there's the less a sense of the immediacy and connections because You're watching a rerun of us. You miss those people that or there's a there's a kind of attention attention That that comes there One of one of the things we've talked to faculty about this semester is Adding asynchronous pieces that they wouldn't necessarily have thought of Working with things like yellow dig boards and and and having discussions So that students have an outlet to communicate with one another in ways that they may not have considered before Or even to leverage to leverage if they've been using a board before you know before Before coronavirus And they're still using a board now Maybe extend what that board is doing. Maybe maybe give the students a channel in that to to sort of Debrief one another and and just to talk to one another about things I want to make sure I only should Asa But we want to question questions before the one is a key jacquard from And this is a sort of positioning question. He asked the question promoting affinity is rising in many campuses How do you differentiate your online offering for other institutions? So you connect with students and learners so they feel connected Now i'll bring that back up again well, I think again we potentially And are And we're more prepared to do this than a good number of institutions Because this is what we do. I mean my my unit which is teaching innovation and learning technologies Works with faculty on a daily basis to build Really tight well connected online courses You know go back to the community of inquiry framework go back to the the idea of Learning communities and creating a collaborative environment for students. That's something that we strive to do All the time and what typically happens and as one of the we're rewarding parts of our job is since we have many of our faculty They're they're designing courses For online at the same time. They're potentially teaching that same course face-to-face And what tends to happen is once they've developed their online course Taught that online course they come back to me and say all right Let's discuss how we're going to take what we've done online and move that into my face-to-face course Because what they're seeing is a lot of the things that that we are building into the online courses Are the collaborative pieces. They're the feedback pieces They're the they're the pieces that that are connecting Not just faculty with students, but students with students in meaningful knowledge building ways That comes back to the idea of learning communities We have a that's a great question And a really solid answer Andrew I love how it's grounded in pedagogy as well as students life We have two Questions that are really close to each other and they refer back to something that you described in in Transitioning campuses in China. So we just quickly bring these up because I They're very close to each other And this is from Kelly Otter Who's another dean and she asks given firewall issues How feasible do you think it would be for other institutions to use in lms to connect with students in china? Who are unable to return to campus in the summer and fall? That is I've been getting that question a lot And I've been getting a lot of calls from various universities that are that are trying to solve that issue I don't believe that We would have been as successful as we are this semester Had we not had blackboard being hosted in china We have traditionally Had issues There was a point prior to that Where we were on a managed hosting blackboard solution in singapore It didn't go well The the lag was there was there was a lot of lag A lot of things wouldn't load You know people are used to The internet working Regardless of whether you're in china or here you're used to a page loading In in a nanosecond I mean could you imagine if a page took three seconds to load now? Imagine then if that same page takes a minute or more to load and the frustration is going to be high um I don't know An easy way to to do that. I mean going low tech sadly is Is is a possible solution? But the problem with that is we found out again early on Was that if you don't have the ability to connect with the students, none of this is going to work very well And so yeah, that is Yeah, a problem that's top of mind. I don't have a solution for yet. Unfortunately We have our Hosting in china and haven't needed to deal with that yet Well, let me hold on to that thought for a second because we have a related question But this comes from the other side of the planet And this is uh from matthew plur He asks In canada, we're trying to get china in the u.s. To have no hand in what we do Anyone else having these concerns about privacy and national boundaries? Who's a university then developed? Well, they're always going to have a hand Because they've just by they've limited your ability to use certain things period Again, no youtube no google no gmail um Anything that has even a web page that you have that might have a google search bar in it isn't going to load So from from that perspective, there's no way to prevent that from happening Oh, that's a good. That's a good question. Um, I can speak back about 18 years ago there were a lot of questions about how the patriot act would apply to other Uh universities other nations because if if they were using say a blackboard hosting service that was hosted in the u.s Would that extraterritorial content then be susceptible to patriot act? oversight because the servers are in the u.s the international complexities of this are are are quite strong and i'm impressed at you using a a Singapore server for a while. That's uh, that's definitely a very 21st century thing to do Uh, we have a couple of people appear on bring it back. I want to try and get tanya back up, uh professor means Hi there. Hello, can you hear working? I can hear you. Can you hear me beautiful? Yes wonderful Thank you for your patience. It's so good to see you. Thank you very much. Thank you If all else fills turn it off and turn it back on that works Well, let me bring you into the conversation First of all, have you been able to hear at least? Good good good good good. Yes, let me ask you a question. Which is where are you today? Well, I'm in Lincoln, Nebraska Oh, great Is it uh, is spring finally there? It is we're finally starting to get spring. Although we we built a snowman a few days ago, so I I think nobody appreciates spring like people in north country. Yes And and let me ask you how is How has your institution been doing with this migration over the past month in this extraordinary time? Well, you know, it's been really fascinating to be a part of the planning committee that has been working on our academic plans and and how we can We moved very quickly to go from thinking about What was coming and how we could help with continuity to now even trying to figure out ways that we can leverage the innovations that people have had through this process to Continue to innovate and to continue to enhance our online and in-person courses So really looking strongly at how can we be blended? How can we? Use this opportunity to pivot towards a more meaningful human centered learner centered Uh environment for our students Human centered, I mean this is such a it's it seems like almost a contradiction for for some to think about using so much technology But at the same time using it for for human purposes I listen there's a nice echo back with our conversation so far, but the importance of of human connection Um, can can I repeat my question that I posed to Andrew before? Absolutely Have you as your institution made decision about fault semester yet? So we haven't made any decisions about fault, but we're definitely in the process of contingency planning And we're trying to look at all the different possible scenarios So we've come up with about nine different scenarios of what could happen everything from fully online to fully remote to some sort of combination of remote and in-person And so we're trying to figure out how can we use those different scenarios to plan ahead and to do some Some contingency planning my biggest thing is just trying to figure out How can we leverage technology to allow us to be agile to be allowed to allow us to Be able to serve the needs of our students regardless of which way we have to offer our courses what the modality is Well agility is really the name of the game right now Well, we've had a whole stack of good questions that have taken us everything from marketing to pedagogy to faculty support to geopolitics A great sign of the participants involved in our conversation But I want to and we've touched a whole series of issues And I want to come back to one in particular Andrew mentioned this and I want to give you both the chance to To address it We talked about synchronous teaching and learning and using video and of course right now We're we're using as an example of that But asynchronous camp in a few ways Won't the idea of providing feedback of of giving peers ability to connect with each other and I'm wondering if if Assistant dean means if you could start us off by describing some of the ways you're using asynchronous technology And then if we could circle back to you to uh to hear more more about that Shut us off Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to do that one of the things that we were able to bring on Fairly. Well, actually, this is quite a bit before we had to to deal with the challenges of a remote instruction was we we brought yellow dig in quite a while ago to start Giving students opportunities to build communities around topics that they were discussing within the content um, we've since Moved into kind of a way of trying to figure out how can we blend the synchronous and asynchronous? And how can we use technology to do that? Andrew mentioned at one point recording a synchronous meeting and then allowing people to watch afterwards One of the ways that we've overcome that barrier or that wall of feeling like you're watching a rerun and you can't really interact Is to within the video itself of the recorded live session Pose the same kinds of questions to students that you posed in that meeting So if I'm doing I can describe what I did Monday night in class We have, you know, 40 some students in the class. We have about 20 who show up for the synchronous session We record the session And during that session we pose students Opposed to the students a set of questions that they then go into breakout rooms and discuss The breakout rooms are not recorded But they come back and report on what their groups discussed or we create an artifact or both So an artifact could be a set of google slides or a google doc or some kind of collaboratively created content Then for the recording We pose those same questions on the video timeline And collect the responses from the students who are watching it after the fact and post those on a page where others can view them So it's a way to still get that interaction and still get that Seeking for your input as a participant without it having to be synchronous or live It's fascinating. How do you how do you technically how do you share all those artifacts? So we use vidgrid just like andrew mentioned we use vidgrid and there's a way to add a question within the timeline That question Then collects the responses. We get the responses and post them on a canvas page So sometimes it'll be a couple of paragraphs Sometimes it'll be a couple of sentences from each person who's watching it But it gives them an opportunity to share their part of what they would have input if they were part of the conversation line Oh, that's fascinating Thank you and I should ask what class was it? Oh the class is a our capstone course for our mba program on strategic management What a great subject to be studying now Absolutely Well, let's let's let's think about this and then andrew Do you do something similar? Do you do something different before that? Are you are you teaching this term? I am not teaching this term. What do you normally teach when they let you in the class? Uh, marketing courses Very good. Very good. So let's let's share your assault your thoughts on the asynchronous technologies and the use of asynchronous pedagogy What do you love to what do you see working? well, I mean for me it Most of this it's it's not specifically about tools and platforms it's about processes and Trying to create We we we try to start this again. This is this is the conversation we have when we're developing any of the courses What do you want to do? Not what is this platform here and how can we? Take this and do something. I mean interestingly if you think about um Synchronous just for a second and you're thinking about We do have blackboard collaborate Which is designed as a classroom based synchronous collaborative tool We also have zoom We have seen far greater usage of zoom than we have blackboard collaborate because It's simpler Yeah and because There's no learning curve and because the immediacy of The situation outweighed anybody's desire to to Go over to learn something new or to or to get something that might be more pedagogically Structure so Simplicity takes a play and then and and pretty much with anything that we look at every to go to to the to the asynchronous piece that it's really a matter of In any case thing about what what are you looking to do? Are you looking are you looking to build? um a group project Are you looking to build to have individuals do Their own projects and yet work together to think about so that everybody can reflect with one another and do that And that depends okay, maybe you know will yellow did work for this particular instance Will I need a blog if we're building if everyone's building out their own stuff? What is what are the processes that we're looking? To have to take places feedback more important than content delivery is collaboration More important than feedback and and then make decisions on those things so A lot of it has to do and I will go back to the learning communities again If we decide to create a learning community and that's and when I teach that's Somewhere around week three or so. I know that I've won When everybody starts referring to the class as a learning community And when everybody starts behaving as if it is a learning community as opposed to a delivery system That's a sharp difference Learning community versus and this this is a fantastic bridge to a topic that I think in many ways we're we're gathered here today to address How do we successfully make that transition from thinking about Distance learning remote instruction alternative modes of delivery as a technology as a platform Then how do we make the transition away from that to actually forming community? I mean andrew you're describing getting people to think about themselves the members of a learning community And I think that's crucial in combining the synchronous and the asynchronous together I wonder if tanya if I may How do you see this work? How do you achieve community? In this extraordinary environment Well, I think it comes back to what I talked about about that human centered environment if the instructor is modeling the behavior of reaching out to the students and Seeking their input and doing more than just trying to deliver a broadcast But doing more of the back and forth and interaction You know we talk about student to student interaction student instructor interaction and student to content interaction We can't have it be just focused on how do I get them the content? It has to be much more around how do I get people to appreciate each other And some of that's going to be that social presence that andrew talked about Some of it's going to be that cognitive presence of recognizing that you need other people In order to learn and some of it's going to be around how you Build that appreciation for you as a human and your experiences and how they relate to what we're learning But also that self reflection capability of looking at what do I need to know? What what's my investment into that community and how can I participate fully? And so if we're constantly trying to connect people to each other Then we start seeing that engagement build because I'm invested in you I care about you and I want to know more about what your experiences are or what you're learning That's a fantastic answer. That's a really really good answer I think between the two of you you've articulated beautifully How we can use not just technologies, but also our practices To establish learning communities and a sense of community and togetherness within classes Now let me ask you to scale that up a bit How do you how do you see your students as well as your faculty and staff? Forming a sense of institutional community You know, they can't physically go to campus. I know andrew they didn't always in your case But but just you think this through I mean they can't always bump into each other in the parking lot or depending on your campus Be in the same dorm or whatever How do you how do you build that larger sense of overall community for your universities? That's a good question. And and it's something that I think people have their attempts are being made People are Having more I know this isn't necessarily a good thing in any world, but people are having more meetings um I have you know We used our staff meetings with my team of of 10 we would meet typically have a meeting once every other week We we started this thing with with three days a week and we've scaled back to two days a week But and much of that It's not because we have business that needs to be conducted that needs to to to take up extra meetings It's say hello You know or you walk down the hall you just the The act of walking past someone's office and and smiling as you look in the office can't happen now How do we how do we do that? You know We have One of the things that we're also doing is we're we're leveraging Microsoft teams at this point It's open on my desktop all the time and somebody has a question they pop in somebody has a comment they pop in we had a it was a very long Wednesday, I think it was and somewhere around four o'clock I popped in with a with a fairly innocuous question into teams And all of a sudden teams blew up and everybody's in there and the conversation went to coffee and not being able to go to starbucks And how are we dealing with the coffee prices? um When we can't go out and get our afternoon coffee and and it was just everybody was in there and zero business was conducted, but It was more important than that and I think that we're starting to see that We're going to need to figure out how to how to create those informal channels in places. We've never done before ad hoc serendipitous And uh tanya, I have to say i'm getting kind of blown away by andrew's sure technological heft Um, so he's mentioned using blackboard collaborator. He's mentioned him. He's using schindig and on the side. He's doing microsoft teams I don't think this is the marketing professor. I think you've seen that the IT master at work Well, I think we've all become better Adept at not only More technologically savvy. Okay, so yeah, some of us are getting that But we've also I think given each other more grace to allow us to recognize that we didn't start out being good at this And we need to help each other and so that you know, you take something that Happened innately in the environment Just being able to see each other and say hi and and that kind of thing and you take it away to such a point where people's now start to recognize I needed that I'm I'm lonely. I miss this, you know casual interaction and we start building that in because we're humans We start building that into other things we do last week my team and I we um, we got into a meeting and teams and we played a crossword puzzle together I mean who would have ever thought that that was part of your work environment? But the thing is is it's necessary. We need that social component. We need that human connection We need opportunities when we turn on our videos and we interact with each other Because we don't have it and we recognize that we don't have it and so I think the more that we're able to You know appreciate what we have and appreciate what we need and then Build that community around the interactions that we have and recognize that it doesn't all have to be business In fact, it's better if it's not all business So it's not just about the task, but it's about the people that you're doing the task with I can definitely see that. Um, I love the idea of doing a crossword puzzle together I never use the word emu quite so often We we have questions that just come in building on this and this is what happens in in this kind of conversation Questions hounds on top of each other and uh, this is from Diana Kichochki from the University of Buffalo And she asks do you have any suggestions for building community in a mass enrolled class? For example a class size of 100 600 plus That's a great question I actually do have a few suggestions one of them is to to recognize that if you were in A real environment where there were 600 plus people in the room you would never Even expect that you would get to know all those 600 people That's not what would happen in reality We don't go to a football game and expect to be friends with everyone around us We do expect that the people right in our circle around us who are cheering for the same team who are interacting with each other Who we expect that to become a little community And so instead of thinking about how do I build community in my 600 person class? Think of it as more. How do I build a connection between one person and another five or another 10? How do I help that one person feel connected and each person feel connected to a few people? And so that's where I think some of these tools like yellow dig if you can break it into groups or like breakout rooms If you're doing a zoom meeting That's where those have great value is because you can say we're going to take our class of 20 people We're going to break it into groups of three You're going to go into those breakout rooms and you're going to have a real conversation Yeah, because it's important for you to feel connected to just a few other people So that you feel like you belong And there were different types of connection as well I mean when you think about That class of 600 I mean one of the scary things I I what when I saw 600 I started thinking about mooks and and I started developing an itch But I mean mooks, I think you know and I by and large Think that they've been less successful than they ought because they don't have any real good Most of them connection mechanisms Where where people can really actually meaningfully communicate with with The people they need to communicate with I think if you've got 600 people One way is to to maybe try to create more connections is to have The instructor or the ta's in the course highlighting certain Students and what they're doing and bringing them to the fore and and highlighting activities that are taking place so others have an opportunity to Again to model what they're doing or to get ideas that they would normally get if it was a smaller class Along with the you know the breaking groups out and trying to create groups of people, but just having general Generally at specific feedback generally at specific contributions that are strategically placed as part of the the classroom process Contributions and feedback This is terrific stuff and our question bubbled up from Eva Steffener and and it kind of anticipates your your answers She had asked do you notice that you're losing students with this online transition? And if so, do you have any strategies for reconnecting to those students? And I think what you've both described for community building at different scales is a way to not lose some students But how how do you go after the ones who've who've dropped off the radar? We want to oh, sorry Andrew I was just going to say one of the fascinating things that we Can do is that once we all are on technology We have so much data that we can mine to figure out who's getting lost and so in the past if we had a classroom full of people and we had one person who was just showing up and kind of On facebook and or netflix on their laptop in the back of the room We didn't have much insight into that But now what we have is we can say well We know that you haven't logged in recently or we know that you're late on this assignment And so we can reach out specifically to those students with some Interventions to be able to say is there anything I can do to help you? And that's been one of the great things that I have found In working with my students is that as I noticed that they are That the analytics are showing that they might be in trouble if I can then reach out to them in a very person centered human centered Way and say look I care about you and I see that you're you're struggling. What can I do to help you? And in that way, I'm able to kind of rescue some of those students that I would never have been able to to recognize before One of the amazing things that that we've done here at Fort Hay State is Developing care teams um, and that's in conjunction with the academic side and advising and and student affairs and these are teams of faculty and staff that are charged with Making sure that the students aren't getting lost and reaching out to the students trying to get a sense on an understanding of what's Happening at home. I mean we know that there are our Students that are have gone back to a house where potentially their parents are now at at home Working they have a younger brother who's in high school And all four of them need to be on the computer and yet maybe they have one computer that they have to work with How do we help those students and and let them know it's okay and give them an idea of processes that they can use Make sure that their their their instructors understand the situation that that they're in And our faculty have mirrored this process and they're they reach out to the care teams Well, they reach out to students. They send emails if they're not getting responses back They reach out to the care teams who then go and then try to reach out. We we're trying to make sure that As much as possible we can try to keep everyone together in this process That's a fantastic thing. That's the first time I've heard of a care team, but but speaking of care We are actually at the end of our hour. We have just raced through conversation and Several people have direct messaged me to say this is a great discussion, but they have a a meeting to go to Let me let me first of all thank you both for your incredible work your insights your Clarity of sharing all of the lessons that you've learned. This is just tremendous and I'm I'm really grateful Let me secondly ask what's the best way for people to keep up with you and your work Do you uh, do you write a newsletter? Are you on twitter? Should we follow your main page? What's what's the best way to keep learning from you both? I have to do more of that I you know, basically I Yeah, I need to start sharing these things out as as you said earlier We need to write up the the china experience and most of what I do is what I do and and yeah I mean, I am out there on linkedin every once in a while and post something but Other than that and I had a blog and I wish I had time to To contribute things regularly, but as it is I'm Doing what I do and trying to make sure that Um, we have successful students well, that sounds like you're definitely doing that and uh I would suggest exploiting some of those students to uh to uh write a write a post And how about you telling you what's the best way to keep up with you and all this flurry of activity? Yeah, definitely. I'm on linkedin. In fact, I I spend more time on there recently just because I'm seeing a lot of Need for people to have some resources and to be able to connect with each other and share ideas and so I've been on linkedin quite a bit and We do have a blog that we run with the college Um, haven't posted there most recently just because there's so many other things going on But when we do post I I definitely share those on linkedin Um, I feel like the the best way is these kinds of organizational Sessions. I'm part of our business accreditation We have a a csb has an online learning affinity group and we regularly run webinars on topics like this and so we every month on the third thursday we have a a webinar that we do and Bring people together and try to get people sharing ideas sharing resources and helping each other Oh, super. Super. Oh, it's good advice and that sounds good. We'll look for a ton you means and linkedin In the meantime, I have to thank some other people. Let me first of all thank all of you participants These are terrific questions. I really really appreciate sharing all your thoughts from your wide range of perspectives including multiple national backgrounds and professional backgrounds and I'd also like to thank yellow dig For hosting and sponsoring this session We're really grateful to you for doing that Speaking of which we have two more sessions in the pipeline We have one coming up On may 6th and we have another one coming up on may 19th Both those are at 1 p.m. Eastern daylight time. So we'd love to have you with us then In the meantime, thanks again to all our participants. Thanks to the youtube splendid guests Thanks to yellow dig and we'll see you next time Take care. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you