 and welcome to the session at the Alp Annual Conference. I am really delighted to see many of you joining us online as our in-person program has turned fully online for the rest of today. Here with me is our next speaker, Dr. Sally Vinden and I'm very delighted to have Sally here with us talking this afternoon about the digital toolshed is open and Sally, if you're ready, I'll hand over to you. Lovely. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be joining you today. I had hoped to be there in person, but this is just almost as good. So good day everyone. My name is Dr. Sally Vinden and I'm an associate dean with the faculty of applied trades and technology at Vancouver Island University. So I'd like to welcome you today from sunny Vancouver Island. Although it's not that sunny yet because it's only 5.30 in the morning, I'd also like in doing so, I'd like to acknowledge that Vancouver Island University community thanks the Sonimuk, the Quinsam and the Clallung on whose traditional lands we teach, learn, research, live and share knowledge. So my presentation today, the digital toolshed is open, focuses on the approach I took to building a community of practice in the faculty of trades and applied technology during COVID. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about where I come my background, what drives me and then talk about what led me to develop a community of practice in our faculty. Why I think you need one, what outcomes you can expect from building such a community and how to launch this COP at your institution. So here we go. So just first of all, a little bit about me. I started my career as a hairdresser in the UK many moons ago and I moved to Canada in 1992 with my husband and two very small children. And soon after moving here, I sort of began to change my career and move into a role as a hairdressing instructor at a post-secondary institution. And at the same time, this really triggered me to want to learn more about teaching and learning. So I started out with a diploma in adult education which soon led me into a masters of education in curriculum and instruction. And that was followed by a PhD which I completed early in 2020. So it gives you an idea about my background and my passion for teaching and learning. So prior to COVID, I was aware of the benefits of collaboration as a learner. And I was also aware that this was a gap within my own faculty, it was a gap within my institution. So when COVID hit, I saw this opportunity to build a community of practitioners at the IU throughout this crisis. So what you're seeing here is the original even bite that was sent out to all trades, faculty and staff during September, 2020. And it quite simply said, please join me at the digital tool shed this Friday. At that point in time, nobody knew what the digital tool shed was. But on the invite, as you can see, it told folks a few key messages. It told them that it was gonna be instructor driven, instructor led. It was collaborative in nature. It would be informal and that it was for anyone that had questions, answers or stories to share from the frontline of their digital classroom. And really the message was everyone was welcome. But before I get into what happens inside the digital tool shed, let me take you through the journey of how the digital tool shed evolved and what really drove me to actually implement it. So during COVID 2020, as I'm sure you all remember so well, by the time we reached September, 2020, faculty were beginning to show signs of exhaustion. They'd been teaching in this emergency remote delivery modalities since March, 2020. And what we were seeing was that isolation was a big issue for faculty members. They were working from home and they were working for long hours on Zoom and finding very little time to connect with others outside of their departments. So we knew that faculty needed more support. In 2020, I was in the role of teaching and learning specialists with their faculty. And so from where I stood, it was easy for me to see those that were thriving in this new environment and those that felt they were drowning. But most of all folks were hovering between the two. So it seemed to me that the answers to many of the current struggles could be found within our own faculty. From what I had seen our instructors during those first few months of COVID, the March to July time had rapidly become some of the most experienced online TV educators really in the world. Now, not everyone was at the same place at the same time. It's fair to say that there was a continuum. We had folks that were treading water, barely staying afloat. And they were the ones that were just counting days until they could return to their traditional well-rehearsed teaching practices. Yet there were others whose teaching philosophy and pedagogies had been permanently changed during the short period of the pandemic. And they were the ones that were reporting success stories to me. And these were stories that I felt that others needed to hear. So these folks, they were here and they were in their faculty. So what I needed to do was to bring them together. And I believed that there was enough momentum in the faculty and it was just time to take that leap. So this is when I conceptualized and launched this very own community of practice, the digital tool shed. So here again, you're seeing this invite that went out. It goes out via email, but I set the email up in a way so that when it's opened, the faculty member or staff member gets to see this visual. So what is the digital tool shed? Well, the platform we use is Zoom. The sessions run every Friday from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. And each session begins with a short presentation from a faculty member and then we just open the floor up the dialogue. So I have a few examples here of the topics that were covered during the first few weeks of the digital tool shed. So this is our blog site called Life is an Apprenticeship, Teaching and Learning in a Digital World. And so here we actually capture the essence of what those sessions have been in the digital tool shed. So the first one here that you're seeing is how to set up an asynchronous module design in VIU Learn. So one of our baking instructors prior to COVID had designed a fully online baking program using D2L. And so her design was very intentional. It was designed in a way that was very self directed, very engaging and also very experiential. So this instructor Rita Gower, what she did was invited others to join her inside her D2L shell which we call VIU Learn. So that's one example. Another session was an instructor that was using Padlet to work with her students and she'd taken this idea from a conference she'd been to and then she'd adapted it for her horticulture program. There were other instructors that were finding resources online and sort of saying, hey, you know what? I watched this Ted presentation, this Ted talk. It's really influenced the way I'm teaching approaching things right now. And so this was one session that was shared with us our Ted talk on problems in education and we don't know what the future looks like and we certainly didn't know there in 2020. So the Ted link was shared out ahead of time and then faculty came together on that Friday morning to discuss it. Now, I have a question for you and I was hoping to be able to see your responses in the chat but I don't think I'm gonna be able to do that but I'm still gonna pose this question to you. The reason why I'm posing this is when you think about developing a community of practice in your faculty or in your institution what are those just in time topics needed by your people at that time? So what are the topics that you think your faculty needs to learn more about? What skills, pedagogy or technology? What is it your colleagues are asking for? So where are those gaps? And like I say, I hoped that we'd be able to share those but I don't think we will be able to. So I'm going to move on. But I'm sorry Shelley, just to interrupt you I was gonna keep an eye on the chat both on the platform and here in the chat and I'll let you know if comments come in. Okay, so we do have that. Thank you so much. So right now if you can think of some topics that would be really helpful in your faculty if you could pop those into the chat that would be great and then we can have those shared out. So I'm gonna move on just while you're putting your thoughts in there and tell you a little bit more about some of our other sessions. So this was a session that was brought to us by Jessica Gamela. She's the chair and instructor of the Horticulture Department at VIU. And she brought to us the Super Mario Effect tricking your brain into learning more. So this session was all about how we could support students to better understand their learning. So Mark Rober's theory on the Super Mario Effect is really about understanding how we can help her students prepare for the bumps that lie ahead as they enter the world of adult learning. So Jessica had recently welcomed a new cohort of students during the pandemic and she had used this program, the Super Mario Effect during her online orientation and she'd had great success with it. So this is when she came forward, she shared it out, she supported others to implement this idea. So just so you know, this would be the graphic that went out to the faculty and then it would be followed by a lot more information. So although there's a sense of the informal about the sessions of the digital toolshed there is a structure. The sessions are grounded in the culture of appreciative inquiry. So we're focusing on individual and collaborative strengths. And my role as the facilitator was to keep the basic principles of pedagogy before technology in mind and also the fundamentals of outcome-based curriculum design. So frequently talking about alignment between outcomes, assessment and learning activities. So this informal nature of the digital toolshed allows for these just in time approach. So this was, I think, really accelerated during COVID. Faculty members were realizing what they needed to know and they needed to know it now. So there wasn't time for the typical teaching and learning center approach to planning of teaching and learning workshops. Although we had those going on at our institution this was in addition to that. So another example of what was a very hot topic back in September, 2020 was instructors were struggling with multiple choice questions. I think we'll all remember the discussions about online proctoring. And so what we found was that we had instructors putting into practice oral examinations. So David Drury, a welding instructor here at VIU, presented on this session. And during the session we created a how to implement oral examination and assessment best practice handouts. So during the session, not only did we learn about it we created this resource that could be shared so that others ahead could go ahead and implement this approach very quickly. Sally, we've had a few comments in the chat. So let me know if you want me to bring those up. Yeah, I'd love to hear them now. That would be wonderful. Excellent. So we had a question from Yvonne Cotum who's joining us from Teeside University. So her topic was video creation and editing. Wonderful. And then we've also had another comment here from Patrick saying just in time assessment design in various tools. Great. And you know what, it's really interesting because that whole video creation and editing we had several sessions with faculty their very early days, elementary days of using Camtasia and it was so valuable because faculty didn't have time to really dedicate to that steep learning curve. And yet having another faculty member share out was wonderful. So thank you both for sharing those ideas. And there's something that I can take away for sure and I hope that you can too. So I'm just gonna move us on here. So one of the things that I'd also like to say the benefits, the outcomes of having a community of practice similar to this model is that prior to the pandemic the culture of working in silos that was historical at my institution. And I hear it is from many others. So the big shift to collaboration during COVID what we saw was the digital toolshed also shifted this mindset around working in silos. So this addition of technology as a teaching tool crumbled those silos in a way that we've never been able to accomplish in the past. We had these cross disciplinary connections. We had electrical instructors working with culinary instructors sharing their D2L shells, looking at their designs looking at some of their case studies and their interactive learning modules. We're baking, working with welding. And we didn't design this, this evolved out of these sessions. Heavy equipment operators can you believe we're working with the hairdressing team. So it was quite remarkable what we saw. So again, I have another question for you is thinking about who are your people? Who are your stakeholders that are gonna support this and invest? Who are the people that actually need a community of practice at your own institution? And sometimes it's important to think about who you need to get on board in order for you to do this. Is it the deans in your faculty, your colleagues, your teaching and learning centers? So again, I'm gonna pause for a second here and ask you to just drop a few thoughts into the chat room. And I'm being mindful of time. So I'm gonna move on and then we can jump back to those thoughts in a minute. So another session that was presented was around digital pedagogies which we know provides opportunities to enhance access and enhance the student experience in multiple ways. But one aspect that I'll focus on today is the inclusion of open educational resources. So as we know, OER reduces the overall cost for education for students. And here in British Columbia in 2019 it was reported that the inclusion of OER to that day had saved students a total of $9 million in textbook costs alone. So pretty amazing. But OER not only reduces costs for students it provides those opportunities for multiple forms of representation, increasing indigeneity of curriculum and accessibility for all learners by broadening that body of literature available. In addition, OER provides those opportunities for the inclusion of universal design in learning principles by allowing students to engage in course materials in multiple ways. We had up until this time during COVID we had found that it was very challenging to bring faculty on board with the idea of OER and yet this was their moment. There was huge interest and we found that instructors were looking for different resources and suddenly there was this opportunity. And so just through this community we brought faculty on board with this idea and then provided them with the opportunities to either access OER resources or to start developing their own. This is a great example of how OER and Open Educational Pedagogy really overlap. This is Christine Quist who is a horticulture instructor here at VIU and she presented on the non-disposable assignment. And what Christine was doing was growing crops of poinsettias during COVID. She was at the main campus in the greenhouses but the students actually had their own grow tents at home and they were growing their own crops but because they could not meet they needed to do this. They needed to share their growing climates, their pH of their soils. They needed to do testing on heat. And this, so the students were creating their own blogs and there was this collaboration online. So Christine was providing these learners with this non-disposable assignment which they could then share, you reference in the future, share with future employers as well. So that's something that you may want to explore later. When we talk about non-disposable one of the things that I wanted to mention was all of these sessions in the digital toolshed were captured on the blog site, on the faculty blog, which is the Life is an Apprenticeship blog site. And so we found that it was really valuable to record these sessions so that others could actually return, watch them at different times or reference them later on. So each one of these posts is about a faculty member that had taken that leap into the unknown world of digital pedagogy. And these were the people that had come up grinning with success and wanting to share their story. So some of these stories represent small steps, very small steps and some of them represent huge shift in pedagogical understanding. So I really wanted to share these stories, hold up each one of my colleagues and give them the pads on the back and we found this blog really did allow us to do that. But when we think about this, this is longer term. It really, these collaborative practices have shifted how we share knowledge within our faculty. So I do have one more question for you. And it really is, which platforms are you going to use? Which platforms are most accessible to all communities of practice, members within your institution? So just something else to think about if you're going to go ahead, move ahead and implement a similar model, which platforms are gonna work best for you? And I mean, excuse me, we've really expanded from, oh dear, do excuse me, we've really expanded from just Zoom and have a much broader platforms to range of platforms to choose from. So my voice is fading, that probably means I'm almost out of time. I just want to take a few moments to reflect on these three key principles that I believe have led to the success of the digital toolshed. So number one is collaboration. Faculty have this feeling of connection to their peers across departments. They also recognize that they've got these shared interests that bring people together. It's not mandatory. It's just one of those welcoming environments. Any individual or faculty member can attend and can find inspiration and glean inspiration from these sessions. I think on the second note of inspiration to create new exciting ideas can energize faculty and spark them to design their own approach, their new contents or new strategies. And we know that it's easy to find yourself into a creative rut. It also provides a voice for faculty member. That's a bit ironic, isn't it? As I'm losing my voice, all faculty members willing to share experiences have this weekly venue to do so. So why should you go ahead and create a community of practice? Well, for me, I believe the biggest change is yet to come post COVID. I think the future of trades, vocational education is a blended revolution. Students of any disciplines are gonna have choice, choice of when and where they take the courses and what modalities they take them in. So while we've been living and teaching in this COVID chaos, we've also been shaping a whole new generation of learners, digital learners. And this is not as Prensky predicted. It's not dependent on age. So another factor that exists within the 21st century is the reality that we're now preparing those students for jobs that don't yet exist. And this rapid pace changes in the industry disrupts traditional approaches to teaching and learning. So I think the time is right. And one of the things I'm going to say is that I hope you leave this session today with a few ideas on how you can build a community of practice from the ground up. I'd also love to hear from you if you're interested in talking about it a little more. One of the great things is you already belong to this amazing community of practice at the macro level by attending such conferences. And I'm going to leave you here with one slide and one thought. So thank you so much, everybody. Thank you for listening today. And I'm just going to end the show there. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Sally. A really inspiring talk and a beautiful note to finish on as well. We had a lovely reflection that we just have enough time to pick up on. Here one from Laura Abram to say, really thought-provoking. And then we had a lovely comment from Patrick here who says, academic instructional staff want their own communities, trying to break that for team design opportunities to include local and central learning designers and learning technologists as well as discipline librarians. So there's other applause in the chat as well. But Sally, do you want to share any final reflections on these comments? Yeah, I think it's wonderful to see these, you know, everybody thinking around this collaborative approach and just go Patrick's comment there. Just I focus today on just the faculty of trades, but I have to say that much of what was brought to those sessions in the digital toolshed were shaped by our librarians, shaped by our teaching and learning centers and for the other faculty from other disciplines. And I think the way forward is collaboration and the digital platforms we have now to collaborate like today just make it so much more valuable and easier to do. Well, Sally, thank you so much for a really thought-provoking presentation. Please do continue the conversation on the Social Discord channel as well as a dedicated thread for this presentation. And Sally, if you'd like us to share your slides and put it on there, please let us know. We'd be very happy so people can get those resources. For everyone who's joined us, have a really good rest of your afternoon.