Week Ending March 27, 2020

How now?

We hit the ground running Monday morning sitting in on LIesel’s daily faculty get together in BlueJeans. I think these are important. There are a lot of repeat attendees and we learn something new each day. I sat in on another session with people from Student Services who are going to need to change the way they do things.

After those, I had a few faculty support phone calls and the rest of the day was spent trying to finish up the BlueJeans handouts and spending a few minutes catching up with Margaret and helping with some edits to her hand out.

Tuesday started much the same – same things, different people, different sort of trouble shooting.. The morning felt a little stressful – just wondering  how there would be enough time to respond to everyone and get actual work done.  I had back to back conversations with faculty – first was in Skype for Business, then one by phone, another with email exchanges and then one more in BlueJeans. Awesome that we have so many ways to communicate. This came following the 9 am BlueJeans session for faculty and there went the morning.

I managed a draft of the participant user handout for BlueJeans  and I have an outline and screenshots for the moderator one. That one has a lot of moving parts but will hopefully come together without too much trouble (it didn’t).

I Had a nice chat with LIesel from my home office window and got outside to walk some documents over to the college. It was very, very quiet over there. Signs on all the doors ’employees only’.  Finished the afternoon on that draft I mentioned and was able to jump into a faculty support call with Margaret and an instructor before stopping for the day.

I am going to start building in breaks. It’s something I used to be good at. These days, not so much.

Wednesday was a lot more of the same. The  9 am session followed by faculty support, followed by working on a moderator hand out for BlueJeans – just the basics – but still a lot of ground to cover and in and out of my meeting room for screen shots.  Had a brief meeting with the SCETUG leadership team and it was nice to see everyone and touch base. We’re going to arrange for an after work happy hour with the whole committee to check in and there’s been some activity on the slack site. We’re all feeling the effects.

There has been a little humour – for example: This acting teacher working out how to teach online

and a great McSweeney article “welcome to your hastily prepared online college course”

I took some time off creating hand outs Thursday morning to source some things for future handouts.  Open University has a nice post for students. Advice from Open University Students

I spent time, again, with faculty in the morning and I learned more things about BlueJeans and how people access it. Things are different on  computer, tablet and phone. The options change. On an ipad or Android tablet there is no browser option, for example. I managed a draft of a handout for recording essentials in BlueJeans.

Friday… after our 9 am session I attended a BCcampus supported session and it was great to hear what’s going on with educators in general. Lots of faculty, including a couple from NIC, and lots of people working at institutions in the same boat as we are. Later, I  was able to clean up the document on Recording Essentials.

The SCETUG  happy hour was a rousing success for those of us who could attend. What a supportive group and so nice to see everyone and share our stories of this past couple of weeks. I needed that.