This was an interesting week for the world in general and the microcosms that intersect in mine.
I started on Tuesday helping a frustrated instructor and then updating and prioritizing my goals for the week and then the goalposts moved. Things I prioritized working on were our Open Educational Resources sessions, the Learning Experience Inquiry Group, and more familiarity with WordPress and BlueJeans.
We held our first session on Open Educational Resources with the subject of Open Textbooks. I spent some time planning for my part in that as well as working on the PowerPoint that we used. Liesel, Jason and I hosted the session and had 4 people in the room and one who came in by BlueJeans. It went really well. There was enthusiasm for the topic and one participant is now an Open convert. We shared why and how one would adopt an open text, how it works specifically at NIC if you want to use one and then we hit them with some stats on impact that expensive textbooks have on students. We shared some stories from the #textbookbroke, and #textbookbrokebc hashtags. It was a fun session.
My original plans for the rest of my time this week revolved around preparing for meetings and sessions, and then the cancellations started rolling in. We’ve postponed a lot of things as the college works out plans for dealing with the Corona virus. So far, NIC is staying the course and instructors are working on compressing the semester rather than moving online.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed held an online session on ‘Colleges and Caronavirus’ this morning. I attended for a while thinking there might be some useful content. They had some technical difficulties in getting most of the moderators in. Some of the questions and observations were similar to what I’m hearing in my network – technical solutions that can disadvantage some students, visas and travel issues for International students, the cost of operating an institution that can’t stay open.
The message that is coming through from the people I follow is to not so much try and move everything online but to use the online pieces for checking in, communication, the caring aspects of teaching and learning. Another common theme was that there is a lot that can be done online that doesn’t need to be synchronous, and adding extra levels of tech can add extra barriers for students. This in response to lots of requests for video conferencing software.
My original plans for today were: a session with the Experience Inquiry Group followed by another Open Resources session, followed by an Education Council meeting. I also had some preparation to work on for my session next week on assessing student assignments in BB Learn. Both morning sessions were cancelled/put on hold, but EdCo was a go. There was a lot of reading prep for today. At EdCo we saw a new program in Indigenous languages go through and that was pretty cool. We’ve postponed my session for next Friday but I will still prioritize the prep for it as instructors are asking how to accept student assignments online and I want to have some ready resources for them.
Where my worlds collide, I had plans to attend the Festival of Learning in Vancouver in May, and the week before that I had some personal travel plans. Both of those are off the table now, and that’s fine. Disappointing, for sure but I really feel for the event organizers. There are a lot of moving parts to planning that conference.
So far, my priorities for next week are to continue working on the resources for my assessment session and reading through more of the Experience Inquiry documents. I need to come up with a couple of Digital Pedagogy bullet points for what we want to see in an Educational Developer. Liesel has come up with a nice template set of instructions for using BlueJeans and I imagine there will be more account creation in my future. If there are Continuity of Learning sessions going on next week I will attend when I can. Hopefully I can spend a little time on this site, and, as always, I’ll be responding to instructors who need help or have questions.
A few previous priorities have shifted in these tumultuous days. There are a lot of changes both due to, and completely unrelated to the current pandemic. I expect a fair bit of re-calibration, it’s all adaptable and adjustable. Tonight there is a college event in support of our Tourism students. This could be my last public social event for a while. Who knows what next week will bring?