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Teaching and Learning Online - Innovation Under Pressure
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Teaching and Learning Online - Innovation Under Pressure
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TODD: Today's topic is teaching and learning online, innovation under pressure. This is a special program that we've put together for you all. We are all getting very accustomed to using Zoom so I won't go through how to use Zoom. I presume you all do. If you need technical assistance at any time, you can get that by contacting a live chat. That is https://support.zoom.us. You will need today's webinar ID which is 619884181.
TODD: We'll post that into the chat box so that you have it. We will be making these slides-- the questions and these slides available. We are also recording today's program so that we can share this publicly. We will post the recording onto the NISO website. And we will email all of you with links for how to get access to that recording.
TODD: This will be under the NISO website. We'll embed the MP4 file when we get it. Probably take us a day or so to get this posted up. NISO has a very robust program of educational events. We have a monthly webinar program for NISO members. The next NISO monthly program will be on Wednesday, April 8 on artificial intelligence and planning for implementation.
TODD: NISO also hosts a virtual conference series. The next one is how to make content accessible. What can publishers do to satisfy the obligation to serve those with print disabilities? That'll be on April 15 from noon to 4:00 Also, we'll be launching in May an eight part series on agile project and project management for information projects that will run every Friday from I think it's noon until 1:00 May 14 through July 2.
TODD: And then we'll continue our monthly webinar program on May 20 with a session on artificial intelligence and media analysis. More information about all of NISO's programs is available under the Events tab on the NISO website. I'd also like to draw people's attention to NISO's online publication, "Information Organized." This is where NISO posts information on the standards world, information distribution, content creation worlds.
TODD: We post a variety of stories throughout the month and then we send an email summary. This is under the I/O tab or the publications tab on the NISO website. Want to focus now on the past month and the tremendous changes that we've been facing. Organizations have had to close their physical facilities, had to move on to virtual operations practically overnight.
TODD: And we are fortunate to have the technology in place to do this, something that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. And yet with all those tools, we're still scrambling. Normally, designing an online delivery of a class, content, or service could take months or even years. But now teachers, professors, and librarians are all having to switch to deliver those resources through new modes of delivery, often having to change that in the course of days.
TODD: This is creating significant challenges related to approach, to infrastructure and tools, to policy. It's also generating concerns around access and equity. We're kind of building an airplane as we're learning how to fly. And since we're already two weeks into this, this could be a certainly long flight. We wanted to share with the community some learnings from leaders in the community.
TODD: Collectively, we're an innovative group. We do have lots of resources at our disposal. And we certainly can do this. But our thinking here at NISO was that-- and the rationale behind this program is that we can learn from each other, learn about who's doing what, and share our knowledge, which is why we quickly put this program together.
TODD: We have a limited amount of time today and I want to get started. But before we begin, I'd like to thank all of our speakers and panelists for joining us today and taking the time to participate in this program. Each of the participants is busy scrambling to support their own institution, their needs, and we really appreciate them taking the time to join us with very short notice to share their experiences.
TODD: We encourage you all to participate in this conversation, although we have limited time. You can use the Q&A functionality to participate in this program. If you're in full screen mode, you mouse over the little green control bar at the top, or, if you're in a window environment, you mouse over the bottom and click on Q&A. You can type in any questions that you have.
TODD: To the extent that we'll have time, we'll get these questions answered to you. We will also try to create a Google doc with any unanswered questions and have the panelists answer those questions in written form to the extent that they can. And then we'll also share that link out with you all. So joining us today-- and if you would each please say hello when I introduce you so that people can recognize your names and associate a name with a speaker.
TODD: Our first speaker is Heather Reid who is dean of the library at the Berklee College of Music. Say hello, Heather.
HEATHER REID: Hi everyone. I'm really thrilled to be participating in this today. I'm very much looking forward to the discussion.
TODD: Derek Bruff, who is director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University.
DEREK BRUFF: Hi, folks. This is Derek Bruff from Vanderbilt. I'm happy to be here this morning.
TODD: Thank you. Michael Reese, who is associate dean and director of the Center of Educational Resources at the Johns Hopkins University here in Baltimore.
MICHAEL REESE: Hi, everybody. And thank you Jill and Todd for inviting me to participate.
TODD: Thanks. Jon Shaw, Associate Vise Provost and deputy university librarian at the University of Pennsylvania.
JON SHAW: Good day, everyone. I'm glad talk to everyone about this.
TODD: Great Brian Alexander, who is an independent analyst and Brian, you're on mute.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Good morning, everyone. Very excited about the conversation.
TODD: Great. And Polly Thistlethwaite, who is interim university dean for library services at the City University of New York, CUNY.
POLLY THISTLEWAITE: Now this is Polly Thistlethwaite. Hello from the epicenter in Brooklyn.
TODD: Thanks for joining us. All right. So to kick things off, what was the triggering event at your institution? There were a variety. Obviously, we're all dealing with the same situation. But was it an internal administration decision? Was it a state closure mandate? Was it something else that moved you in this direction?
TODD: And had you previously had emergency planning ideas in place at your institution before you had to jump quickly into this current state? Why don't we start with Jon.
JON SHAW: Great. Thanks, Todd. So I think the triggering event for us was we started restricting travel in February. And as we were approaching our spring break in March, on that Friday before that spring break was a real moment where we were like, wait a second, I am not sure if we're going to be able to come back from spring break. And from the library's perspective, this was what in the world do we need to do to prepare for a potential-- the worst case scenario planning.
JON SHAW: So we do emergency response planning at the University. And in our last two tabletop settings, what happens if the library lost power for a month and essentially you didn't have access to the physical facility. So we kind of had a month planning from this year's emergency response. And the one the year prior was what if there was a vinylchloride outbreak in the city and you couldn't get access to campus.
JON SHAW: And so we had two plans actually in place in subsequent years where we were like, what if we didn't have access to the building? What would remote work look like without having access to the facility? And in this case, we actually had access to the facility for about two weeks more than both scenarios that we planned for. So in each one of those plans, it was how do we set up our remote work and how do we start making our virtual support network robust quickly?
JON SHAW: And so we got that all in place. But the triggering event for us was when things started happening in Washington, and California, and travel was really the knife's edge that made us concerned about this. I mean we did worry in December and January. I would say that the predominant time when it became a trigger event for us was when travel started going and what could we do.
JON SHAW:
TODD: And Derek, from the Vanderbilt perspective?
DEREK BRUFF: Sure. This is Derek. At Vanderbilt, it was an internal decision to move online. Earlier in the year, we had had a committee of various administrators and faculty who had been monitoring the situation, learning what they could, bringing to bear all the expertise that we had on campus in terms of emergency planning, and infectious disease, and other things.
DEREK BRUFF: They had set, as I understand, a whole number of kind of-- a set of triggering events and responses that the university would take. And so when one of those triggering events happened in March, we moved to cancel classes for the rest of the week and moved classes online for, I think initially it was going to be a two week period. We had some other triggering event that was on the list that happened a couple of days later.
DEREK BRUFF: And so we moved to online for the rest of the semester. So that was kind of how we handled it. I'm not intimately familiar with the emergency planning groups at Vanderbilt, but I do know we had a couple of weeks where our focus at the teaching center was on the potential of some of our study abroad students not being able to continue their studies overseas. And we were working on ways that we might be able to integrate those students abroad in some of our on campus classes.
DEREK BRUFF: And so we started reaching out to-- the administrators reached out to us. And we connected with IT and other units and started to figure out what would the tools be that we would use and how could we provide that support, were there any gaps, who were the people that need to be at the table. We didn't have to do any of that actually, because things move faster than that was necessary.
DEREK BRUFF: But I think that groundwork was really helpful in helping us figure out what we'd need to do a couple of weeks later. I'll also say at Vanderbilt we had a mumps outbreak a couple of years ago. We've had H1N1 and other reasons where campus access might potentially be limited. And so my teaching center had already developed a whole lot of robust resources around tools to use online for teaching continuity.
DEREK BRUFF: And so it was pretty easy to kind of dust those off and make sure they were up to date. And so we were able to get moving pretty quickly on the teaching continuity work.
SPEAKER 1: Todd, I think you might be on mute.
TODD: I'm the one on mute. I had turned to Polly and said, Polly, I'm not hearing you. So yes, I should learn how to use Zoom. Polly, from your perspective in New York.
POLLY THISTLEWAITE: Well, you know, we're kind of having this run up to online and zero cost teaching with an $8 million New York state governor's grants to SUNY and CUNY to push instruction costs down. And then it just goes hand in hand with online pedagogy. So we've been making a serious effort to move courses online and to reduce the cost for textbooks and that since really 2017.
POLLY THISTLEWAITE: That is some of the run up. But the big challenge that we faced at CUNY is about 50% of our students do not have-- or we estimated about 50% of our students didn't have access to a computer off campus. I mean, students have smartphones in great proportion but it's hard to do all kinds of assignments on a smartphone, although it's amazing what can be done on a smartphone.
POLLY THISTLEWAITE: So that was the big challenge. And then that impacted the conversations about what facilities to keep open and what facilities to close, and all that. And we can talk about it a little bit more later. But that's sort of the outline at CUNY.
TODD: Yeah. And Heather?
HEATHER REID: Yes. So for us, it was definitely an internally triggered decision. So it was not something directly in response to, for example, a state [INAUDIBLE] mandate. It was virtually announced that we would be moving online. The announcement was made March 11th, effective as of March 23. And that intervening week was our spring break week, so there were basically just a couple of days after the announcements before the students departed for spring break.
HEATHER REID: I think, though, it was becoming increasingly clear over the course of, certainly, that week-- it would've been the week of March 9th and even the tail end of the previous week-- that the city of Boston was moving in the direction of starting to put in place [INAUDIBLE] and restrictions. And, of course, our campus is right in the center of downtown Boston.
HEATHER REID: And we work very, very closely with the city on many things. While I, myself, was not involved in any of the conversations, I think that we and other universities and colleges directly in the city of Boston were in very active conversations with the city [INAUDIBLE] time frame. And I would imagine we were getting encouragement from Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston, to consider moving online.
HEATHER REID: But the actual impetus here was, in the end of it, actually, the decision was internal. To the best of my knowledge, there wasn't a formal emergency or disaster recovery initiative at Berkeley. However, Berkeley did close around the time of the Boston Marathon bombing. Our campus is very close to the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and so when the bombing happened, the entire campus was closed.
HEATHER REID: I was not at Berkeley at the time, but I think it ended up being I think a couple of weeks. And, of course, in that particular case, with absolutely no advance notice. So there was some previous experience with triggering events that caused the closure of the physical campus.
TODD CARPENTER: And Michael?
MICHAEL REESE: Sure, I'll try to put a different perspective on this. Like most universities, we're almost like a federation of independent colleges. And so we were seeing this trickling through our institution based on what the campuses were. So first error, J2 Nanjing campus closed. And I should mention that all of these decisions were internal. So Nanjing closed, went to remote before there was any lockdown and before the University of Nanjing, the local university, did.
MICHAEL REESE: And it was based on student concerns. They were responding to student concerns. About a week and a half later, our J2 Bologna campus did. And then it wasn't until later February that what was happening at the Baltimore campuses was the initial conversation was around concerns about international students not being able to come back in the summer or fall. So we were planning for a hybrid remote in person, but I will say my staff were, you know, more prescient than I was in saying, we're all going to be shutting down.
MICHAEL REESE: And so we started developing resources to plan for going completely for teaching remote. And I'll give a shout out to Derek Bruff. Our office is well aware of his center of work, and borrowed some ideas and resources from his center. So it wasn't until the beginning of March before the Baltimore campuses decided to shut down. But we were able to learn from our remote campuses in Nanjing and Bologna about how they navigated the process, even if we use different technologies, because there are different programs offered there.
MICHAEL REESE: We do have, every semester, business continuity exercises where chief risk officer John Links runs through a different scenario like a fire in a building or a lab blows up or something significant. So when they stood up the business continuity teams and the incident command teams, it actually felt, while we were dealing with a lot of information, the way those groups work was very seamless in terms of how we were going to run those meetings and who was in charge, which I think really helped us out through this process.
MICHAEL REESE:
TODD CARPENTER: And Bryan, you talk to a variety of institutions or engage with a variety of institutions across this space. Is this pretty consistent from your perspective?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: It is. A few weeks ago, I started up a Google spreadsheet to track campuses that were ceasing or pausing face-to-face instruction, moving online. And initially, there were some pretty clear patterns, and my colleagues on this panel here articulated them very nicely. Sometimes it has to do with international students, sometimes from following CDC guidance, sometimes state guidance, and occasionally, exchange programs.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Then our spreadsheet just grew, expanded as more and more people started checking in, more information as the number of campuses expanded rapidly to dozens and then hundreds and then more than 1,000. I would just say that one of the interesting things about this is the timing that we moved online in a hurry. And so each campus really sought to give people an intermediary stage for preparation.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: And that stage could be as short as one day and as long as a couple of weeks, depending on all kinds of local factors, such as the timing of spring break. So that made an interesting difference. I had to just send a shout out here, please, to all the instructional designers and academic computing folks who have been just working unbelievable hours, just doing heroic work to get all these campuses fully migrated online.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: That's an incredible story.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, in terms of some of the logistics, and Polly, you started to step into this, what are the kind of issues that faculty are interested in seeing in terms of support? And have you seen some best practices develop both at your institutions or at others?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Go ahead. Go ahead.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: You were talking to me? I was just going to-- I wanted to back up a little bit and say, you know, almost any emergency planning I've ever seen, any plans that I've seen in an office when I start to occupy it is kind of like they're always like hopefully obsolete, hopelessly obsolete. They're really, like, just leaping through them, might suggest some abstract ideas, but they have to be sufficiently abstract ideas about coping in an emergency, because every emergency is so different.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: I learned from the-- I was at Fort Collins, Colorado University-- Colorado State in Fort Collins in '96, I think it was, when there was this huge flood that wiped out the periodicals collection from the library. And from that experience, it became clear that libraries and network are very powerful and that the collaborations that we build are the most useful in emergencies.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: And I think we're finding that here, too. Out of that flood effort, rapid ILL was developed. It still is with us today, and that was just a formative emergency event in my professional career that led-- I think just led to this, like, notion that collaborations are the best device-- the best organizational configuration to bring to any emergency.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE:
TODD CARPENTER: Derek, Michael referenced you and your organization's work in this area. Could you tell us a little bit more about the issues that you've faced and the kind of resources that you-- the thinking that you've put into situations like this?
DEREK BRUFF: Sure, I'm happy to do that. So we kind of tried to take a couple of different directions at once. We knew that a lot of our faculty who had very little teaching experience online, to make the transition would want things to kind of feel as much as possible as what they had been doing in person. And so for those faculty, we looked at tools like Zoom and virtual classroom and screencasting tools that would allow them to continue doing virtually what they had been doing in person, mainly because, I think for those faculty, the idea of kind of totally redesigning their course to teach online was not something that they were ready to do, nor did they have time to do.
DEREK BRUFF: But we also had another thread, where we're trying to help faculty who maybe aren't as worried about that kind of teaching continuity piece and maybe have more experience working with some technology tools. Really quality online course design doesn't center itself on Zoom, right? There's lots of tools in the toolbox, and a lot of asynchronous and low bandwidth tools are really effective for quality course design.
DEREK BRUFF: As others have noted, we didn't have time for quality course design. We were just trying to kind of do some just in time online teaching. But some of our faculty, either immediately or in the last couple of weeks, as they've gotten their feet under them, have kind of shifted to thinking about other options, other tools, more creative, intentional ways to do online teaching other than just synchronous video sessions.
DEREK BRUFF: And so we've tried to create a lot of resources for both. We initially did some workshops on campus. We had about a three-day window-- excuse me, four days where classes were canceled, but we hadn't started the online classes yet. And so we loaded up as many workshops in person and via Zoom as we could. We ended up with, I think, 450 faculty or so through those workshops.
DEREK BRUFF: A lot of the faculty who were most nervous and needed the most help really wanted the in-person workshops, so I'm glad we had a small window where we could meet those faculty in person, even while we made them sit 10 feet apart from each other in the lecture hall. We also ramped up a whole lot of online resources on our website. And I think that's what Mike was referring to. So we had some existing resources, because we do course management system support through my center.
DEREK BRUFF: But we beefed those up rather quickly. Again, a lot of them around tools for synchronous video work or screencasting, but also asynchronous and low bandwidth tools. One of the things that I think is interesting that Stacey Johnson-- she's our assistant director for educational technology-- said yesterday, a lot of our faculty, they'll come to our support team with a specific question, and we've already written a guide to walk them through that very thing.
DEREK BRUFF: But they didn't know where it was. They didn't know it existed. I think our faculty are seeing a lot of resources coming at them, and it's hard for them sometimes to find the answer to their question in that sea of resources. And so I think there's still a role for just kind of directing folks to things that are already there.
DEREK BRUFF: The other thing that we did-- I'll mention briefly-- is we appointed some what we call Brightspace deputies. Brightspace is our course management system, and so these are faculty and some grad students that we knew were fairly tech savvy and would be willing to help their colleagues learn these tools as they moved online. And so we deputized them and gave them some additional resources, training courses they could use with their peers, an email listserv where they can ask each other questions.
DEREK BRUFF: You know, we have a fairly robust teaching center. There's 12 of us working full time, but we've got over 1,000 faculty. And so it was great to have some colleagues among the faculty do a lot of peer-to-peer work to extend our reach.
TODD CARPENTER: Does anyone else have any other thoughts about best practices at this time, and what your institution's doing.
JON SHAW: This is just Jon from Penn again. Just to add one thing-- and Derek's program is fantastic-- one of the things that we did was faculty and focus groups early on, so that first week. And that helped us anticipate a lot of the questions so that our guide was more proactively made through the focus group sessions rather than what questions were coming in. And then we used the questions that came in once people were preparing our online classes to refine our guides.
JON SHAW: Another way of how we were able to get this out to faculty, so our learning management system is Canvas. We would embed those announcements within the guide, and so at the top page, so that they could go back to the resources and build the classes as they were within the tool to work on their classes. So those were two things that we found to get them as they're in this very fast moving upstream as possible.
JON SHAW: So-- but thanks, Derek. That was great.
MICHAEL REESE: This is Mike. I'll jump in just with some other ideas. We also reached out to a cadre of faculty that we knew that had expertise in particular tools like Respond is the lockdown browser, because while the initial questions were coming in about content delivery and engaging students for the typical type of courses, we were looking ahead to how were labs going to be handled, eventually, assessments as well.
MICHAEL REESE: And so we were partnering with faculty to develop help guides. And while we didn't officially deputize them like they did at Vanderbilt, we asked them to specifically start working with people in their department that we identified would likely need additional help, because they were offering unique courses like a design course or a lab course and would need unique perspective-- unique ideas for continuing to offer their course remotely.
MICHAEL REESE:
TODD CARPENTER: And as we've moved forward here, I mean, I know there's been a lot of talk of Zoom and privacy, but have you noticed any other issues about privacy and security that you've encountered along the way or things that we should be aware of? Anybody want to jump in?
MICHAEL REESE: I'll jump in again. This is Mike, again, from Johns Hopkins. What was interesting is the provost's office, last week, based on concerns that were coming in from the schools, quickly developed some guidelines for recording class sessions based on FERPA concerns. So this is not something that we had been talking about on our campuses, but quickly came to the forefront with faculty recording lectures, sharing them, or even conversations with students.
MICHAEL REESE: And so last week, very quickly, the provost's office led this initiative with general counsel and representatives from each dean to develop guidelines for recording any course interactions with students where they would be identifiable.
TODD CARPENTER: That's interesting. Bryan, have you been hearing anything?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Yeah, this is Bryan Alexander. The biggest concern is around Zoom bombing right now, But I do want to [INAUDIBLE] my colleague and raise the question of technology and student privacy. I'm seeing two very, very conflicting narratives or arguments in play. One is arguing that what we're seeing is this enormous experiment or an enormous project with vast amounts of data, both quantitative and qualitative.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: We've never had so many people all teaching and learning online at once. That's a fantastic treasure trove of content to explore, mine, and learn from. And opposed to that is the narrative or argument which holds that this is actually not a good experiment, that this is a kind of humanitarian disaster, and that it is the wrong time to analyze or study or treat this as a pilot project or as an experiment.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: I think these two are pretty completely opposed, and both of them turn on part to the questions of privacy. You know, the former, who want to analyze this, have to go through FERPA as well as other regulations and policies. And then the other side thinks, no, this is something that can't be done very well. In the chat, Carmen asked, what is Zoom bombing? Zoom bombing is when somebody in the Zoom video conferencing tool either floods the chat box with repellent content, or they turn on their video, and in their background they display something equally repellent.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: The content I've heard and experienced has either been racist and abusive or pornographic. And you can easily disable this from happening with a few different settings in Zoom, but they're not default settings. People have to do it. Good question, Carmen. But it got to a point, I think we have to think really hard about this question of data and privacy, and to what extent can we learn from the experience, and to what extent is this an experience that we really shouldn't be focusing our attention on in terms of research, but instead more support for faculty, staff, and especially students.
HEATHER REID: This is Heather from Berkeley. We have had some instances also of Zoom bombing in classes and some subsequent advice from our technology resources team on how to set up and configure our Zoom session to at least minimize [INAUDIBLE] not completely avoid it. Another issue that has come up, which isn't exactly privacy and security, but I think is somewhat related is questions around IP, intellectual property.
HEATHER REID: So we have had some faculty express concerns about the intellectual property issues around recording their classes. And this is [INAUDIBLE] particular [INAUDIBLE] an institution like Berkeley, where the faculty are often using, incorporating, in some ways, their own artistic works into their teaching. So we do have a very newly released IP policy at Berkeley that, luckily for us, foreshadowed some of these issues and we're able to point to.
HEATHER REID: But that has been a concern on the part of some of our faculty.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, intellectual property rights are an interesting problem at the moment. You know, for example, my wife is a professor of theater, and they have the rights to put a show on a stage, but they don't have the rights to show a performance via video. And what are the rights with regard to performance for the students in terms of a virtual, say, class presentation or via Zoom? It's kind of some interesting intellectual property rights challenges at the moment.
TODD CARPENTER: Anyone else have any thoughts on that?
DEREK BRUFF: Yeah, this is Derek from Vanderbilt. On the question of privacy and security, I might add that a number of vendors of various educational technology tools have made their tools available for free for a limited time. And so it's been a lot easier for faculty to start using new tools that they think might be helpful. On the other hand, we do have FERPA concerns and student privacy concerns, in the United States at least. So we've tried to have our team from the registrar vet the privacy documents and statements from these tools as much as possible so that at least we feel more comfortable recommending faculty use some of them.
DEREK BRUFF: The other issue I'd point out is that as lots of activities in higher education move online, we're becoming a bigger target for hackers and vandals and such. It's not just Zoom, but I think all of our systems are under more kind of cybersecurity pressure right now. And I know our IT team is kind of doubling up everywhere they can in terms of cybersecurity.
TODD CARPENTER: And there is a question that came in about Zoom bombing. And I-- and what sort of tools and resources exist that people can help avoid that situation. Mike posted a link to some US fee resources. We can share that in the Q&A response.
TODD CARPENTER: But there are a couple tools or a couple of explainers on how to get access to that technology, those settings and how to control some of them.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: This is Bryan. To go back to your question, Todd, I'd say one of the things that we should point out is that-- and to build on what Derek was saying-- many vendors of all kinds have been opening up more and more content. I mean, we've seen this from newspapers. We've seen this with scholarly publication. We've seen this with a wide range of educational publishers.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: And part of that's under pressure. There are a lot of activists who've been calling out for help. And as a result, you've seen companies like Elsevier and Wiley, who've been putting forth a lot of content in the open that has to do with COVID-19. And you know, there's some pushback about this saying that these are either too little too late, or that they will be-- they're basically a kind of marketing ploy to induce people to consume their products.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: And then when the paywall comes back up, they'll be forced to pay out. On the other hand, it's pretty useful. My new book came out in January, Academia Next, for Johns Hopkins. And Johns Hopkins, with Project MUSE, very kindly put the whole book available on the project news site for people to read in their web browser. And as a writer, I'm always happiest when I'm being read.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: So that's a very good thing. So I just wanted to acknowledge that boom or boomlet in open content.
TODD CARPENTER: Do others have any experience in changes in licensing technology or problems that they've had in terms of licensing technology or content to support remote instruction?
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: Yeah, hi. This is Polly Thistlethwaite from the CUNY, City University of New York, Libraries. And following what Bryan said, I just want to say that this little boomlet of open content might appear to be, like, you know, beneficial in some ways, but what I'm seeing vendors doing is, like, taking an end run around the institutions, the libraries that are generally providing the licensing, making the content tracks to provide this content to our readers, and doing an end run to the end user.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: And as Bryan said, the paywalls go back up in June, and we'll be left-- faculty will have to rework courses if they've provided links to that temporarily open content. But I think, you know, we're in this time of crisis right now, and we have this opportunity to sort of like rework our relations with content providers and institutions.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: Instead of sort of like having this end run to the end user by content providers who don't seem to appear to be moving in the end user provision direction, what's really going on? I think it's an opportunity for us to shore up the kinds of collaborative arrangements we have to provide access to the content, rather than to sort of divide and compete.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE:
TODD CARPENTER: Jon, do you have some other thoughts on that?
JON SHAW: You know, I think I could echo a lot of what Polly has said. And I think it goes back to something what Bryan was saying earlier. I mean with all this free technology and content coming out, it's not an adequate pilot phase. I mean it's mostly a reactive phase to it, and this is not how we would run pilots on any of these technologies. Yes, many of them are useful, but I think the thing to do right now with a lot of the technologies that we may be adopting or students maybe adopting is how can we track that in a fashion that respects privacy and security.
JON SHAW: And so I mean this is not the standard times for initiating new technology licenses or exploring new content. But it actually is the time that we're doing this, and how do we balance that going forward? And so I think I think we are at a critical pivot point, where we rushed to move a lot of things virtual, and now is the time for us to start being strategic about what is a short, medium, and long term future with the coronavirus out there?
JON SHAW: And how do we start thinking that way as opposed to the reactive way that we've been thinking towards a lot of this?
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, there's an interesting comment here from one of the participants saying that it's interesting about all of the free content that's available now. But are students going to be lulled into thinking that everything is free online, and the battle [INAUDIBLE] remains so, are we creating unrealistic expectations around students' satisfaction?
HEATHER REID: And this is Heather from Berkeley. We've had ongoing, pretty persistent challenges, particularly around video content, where very often, there's some of that content that is available from licensable training platforms. But there is really a lot that is not, and there aren't really easy solutions for folding those materials into online teaching.
HEATHER REID: That's probably been one of the most persistent questions that we're getting from faculty. And we oftentimes, unfortunately, don't really have great legal solutions for them.
TODD CARPENTER: And there's a specific question for you, Heather, in terms of your role at Berkeley. This is a question from a music librarian. Are there ways in which the library is working to support performance-based pedagogy, or has it changed in any way?
HEATHER REID: That's a really great question. I think, writ large, Berkeley is an institution that is really-- I think it's the biggest challenge in front of us as an institution at this moment is we do, indeed, have a very much performance and practice-based pedagogy, and how does that translate to the online world? It's really-- it's a very specific-- I know there are lots of challenges across the board here, but it's really a very specific and, I think, steep hill to climb for the institution.
HEATHER REID: So I would say we are still figuring out how the library fits in in the new world, where that pedagogy is shifting online. Honestly, I think it's going to be a different challenge as we face the increasingly likely, indeed, certain situation that this is not a short term situation that we're in. So I think, initially, there was a feeling that we could kind of, you know, duct tape and glue some things together and that the faculty could work aligned with a lack of access to library materials, particularly course [INAUDIBLE] books [INAUDIBLE] sheets.
HEATHER REID: But that's going to be a different matter entirely if this is our situation, as it looks almost really certain it will be, through the summer, and who knows, perhaps, into fall. So I think this is something that we're just at the very beginning of, and I don't have a kind of wrapped up with a bow answer to that great question.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: Yes, this is Polly from City University of New York again. Just to echo Heather, I mean I think we've got every reason to believe that our economic landscape is going to be irrevocably shifted here. And this is not only an opportunity to rethink how we support and fund access to archival and scholarly content, but really, if we want to continue in recognizable form, we need to get-- we need to shift our models here.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: It's almost like we have to be reactive about thinking about the long term, so to echo what I think it was Jon who said this morning that it really is a time that we need to think about how to stay afloat, how to keep providing content, and to shift-- necessarily shift the way that we license and support access to it.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE:
TODD CARPENTER: Polly, Polly, I think that's fantastic. And, you know, that's a nice segue to the next question. And a lot of people have been talking about, what does the future of this look like? Does everyone go back to campus in the fall? Is this something that-- is online instruction all of next year, or is this something where we come back for a little bit, and then we social distance? And some people have been calling that the pumping the brakes on ice method.
TODD CARPENTER: And I think one of the things that as we've started getting a little bit of headspace in the last week or two, how do we start doing scenario planning around this? And this is where I'm really curious of seeing what some of Bryan's foresight approaches to this would really help institutions. And how can you start scenario planning around this so that you can be prepared for the long term?
TODD CARPENTER: And you have to prepare for the worst case scenario always, and then all the alternatives to that.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Well, just-- again, this is Bryan. Just to be clear, people speak of this event as a black swan or as something that we were completely unprepared for. And that's not quite true. The futures community has been simulating gaming, building scenarios, analyzing pandemics back to the 1960s. It's a pretty thoroughly understood possibility that we've worked out. And so we're still busy on this panel.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: I and others have been publishing scenarios, so for example, one of the questions is, how long does the pandemic less? Do we have a relatively short term experience, such as what China and Singapore seem to have done, where the virus rages and then gets burned out or controlled within a few months? Well, that's possible, so we could imagine, say, in May, in the United States, that we have it under control.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Another possibility, the flip side of this, is that it lasts for a long time. We're talking about a vaccine, and the timelines are variable, but people are talking about some time in 2021. And it may be that the virus continues to mutate into more virulent forms. And it may be that we experience a great deal of secondary infections. So we may have the next year of continuous lockdown due to the coronavirus.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: The third possibility is that it comes and goes in waves-- for example, a similar, but not that similar disease, 1918, the Spanish flu did that. It came and went in huge and terrible waves, and it may be that we then, in higher education, have to model our responses based on these three options. Either we prepare for summer, which is going to be online, but then in fall, we'll come back, in which case, we have to figure out how to tempt all the students as well as staff and faculty back on campus.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: They may be used to being online. They may be more comfortable, and they also fear infection, either from the facilities or from each other. If, on the other hand, it's going to be a long plague, a long, long pandemic, then we have to make preparations for what does it mean to teach multiple semesters in a row. And then that ricochets up and down the academic chain. What does it mean for people with their PhDs, undergraduates and graduation, people starting new programs, and so on?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Or if we go with the wave pattern, then it may be that we basically can toggle a switch back and forth-- on campus for a month, and then off campus for two months, and that kind of thing. All of these have ramifications for, perhaps, one of most important things, which is economics. If the US economy is clobbered into a recession for multiple quarters, that's going to just gut campus budgets for the next two years for a start, everything from what happens to endowments to what happens to state budgets to family willingness to pay.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: And that we have to figure out. And I'm already tracking this in campuses that are either shutting down completely or are talking about mergers or ending programs that are just not enrolling enough. So I think that's a good starting point for scenario planning is where we think the plague itself will go.
MICHAEL REESE: If I can jump in, this is Mike, I actually just left a conversation that was dealing with those ideas but in a very specific way. Our public health experts were on our academic continuity call talking about Washington state seems to be beginning to come out of the first phase, but only 3% of the population was infected. So there's still a lot of vulnerabilities, so we're assuming this is going to come in waves.
MICHAEL REESE: We're also seeing that we enacted-- I should also add that there was a report we were trying to verify that for international students, Beijing, the next available visa appointment is late November. So we're beginning to think about our international students might not be able to get here even in the spring semester of next year. And that's still-- this was a report that came up, and it was in some international journal that the group was trying to verify.
MICHAEL REESE: But the issue that-- the way we were transitioning in the conversation was we just enacted a pass/fail grading policy for the undergraduate programs, and students, some of them, are very upset, especially our premed students. And they're not going to stand for that in the fall semester. So we're already talking about how the way we're teaching now is not going to be able to stand in the fall.
MICHAEL REESE: We're going to have to do not teaching remotely, but truly teaching well-designed online courses, if that's the way we go, so that we can pull away from our pass/fail grading policy that we're using for this semester, because students aren't going to be interested in coming back if they can't be-- if they can't receive a true letter grade.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: I think that's very true. Again, this is Bryan. I think this is a very, very important thing to keep in mind. One of the most decisive factors is going to be the kind of aggregate response of students to this experience. Will they find it to be inferior? And if so, how will they react? Will they, for example, demand refunds?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: We've already seen that, people asking for refunds for room and board as well as for certain fees. But we've also seen this with an analysis from last week looking at MBA students, who are asking for a discount to their tuition, if their tuition is going to be for wholly online programs. On the other hand, will students find this to be adequate, if not better, in certain ways? I think a lot-- we don't really have a good way for all this to be carefully thought out.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: I mean we can do some polling, but higher education in the US, as we all know, is so disaggregated and disintegrated that it's hard to track all those opinions. One thing we should watch for are stories that circulate widely from, say, Chronicle of Higher [INAUDIBLE] Higher Ed, as well as NPR and the New York Times. I mean I'm waiting for video clips to go wild on TikTok or on YouTube showing faculty members fumbling Zoom or students having a good experience.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: But I think you're absolutely right to draw attention to the student experience. That's going to be critical.
TODD CARPENTER: Derek, have you-- what has been your experience in this regard with regard to planning ahead? I mean, I know you've done a lot of-- you have already done planning. I'm thinking about where you're headed with your planning for the fall, multiple rounds.
DEREK BRUFF: Yeah, and I'll just concur with Bryan's assessment of these kind of three possible futures. There are others, but those seem to be the big categories. And you know, I'm glad that for the summer, when we move fully online, we'll have more than four days to get ready for it. So we're planning on doing a lot of faculty development with our summer instructors in May to try to help them move closer to robust course-- online course design to avoid some of these issues that Mike mentioned.
DEREK BRUFF: I'm also imagining a kind of a-- something like a pivotable, if that's a word, course design, where we're hoping to work with faculty this summer. As I think about fall classes, if we are in that kind of middle ground where we need to be ready to move online in a hurry, we can plan ahead to be ready. And so I'm imagining helping faculty use more online tools in their teaching.
DEREK BRUFF: A lot of our faculty were maybe-- you know, 5% to 10% of their course had some online component to the course management system. You know, if we can get that up to 25%, then it's going to be a lot easier for them to go to 100%, if they're already using a course blog or they're using Zoom occasionally or they know how to do a screen cast. And so thinking about kind of increasing the amount of online activities in a course so that if it needed to go higher, we could.
DEREK BRUFF: Or planning our course to say, if I'm-- you know, for this aspect of the course, for this learning objective for these activities, if we're in-person, we'll do it this way. If we're online, we'll do it this way. That's a lot more work, certainly. But I think that may be what we need to do in order to get ready for an uncertain fall and spring.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, it's definitely a time of significant changes. I'm noticing the time. We had-- in the preparation for this session, we had more than two dozen questions and about six pages worth of notes, and it didn't surprise me that we only got through maybe a third of it. Does any-- I want to go around our virtual table and ask if people have any final thoughts before we wrap up.
TODD CARPENTER:
JON SHAW: I just have one, Todd, is, you know, as information continues to come out and the situation changes almost by the week in terms of our knowledge of it and where we see it going, I think forums like this in an ongoing fashion, rather than one-offs, would be useful to people. And then hearing how a variety of vignettes are informing or how people are doing things. I also think that resources like the stuff that Bryan put together for instructional continuity plans for institutions, those are good to share with a large audience of people just so that we're not all inventing wheels, that we are all relying on each other.
JON SHAW: And I guess the great hope for all this is greater collaboration. I mean a lot of people are asking questions about, the vendors are not changing. How does improvement [INAUDIBLE] access change? And I think it's going to have to be through greater collaboration going forward at the university, national and international, level.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: This is Polly from City University of New York. I totally agree that collaboration is the key, and we need to continue to provide access to content, course content, scholarly and archival content, based on our values and our principles, not widening the gap between the access that people who are privileged and have access to high subscription libraries versus the people who rely on the public spaces for access to physical books and Wi-Fi or computers.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: We need to think about how to keep our access aligned with the principles that we embrace and think about what the cutting off of physical spaces means for that access and speaking to that gap.
MICHAEL REESE: This is Mike from Johns Hopkins. I think the challenge that we're seeing with our students are twofold. It's technical, and then, of course, the socio-emotional. And it's actually been the latter that has been the most challenging. Students have their parents are losing jobs. I have a grad student who's now a faculty member who just-- former grad student, who reported a student-- the first student whose parents passed away from COVID-19 complications.
MICHAEL REESE: And those aren't going to change over time as the economy continues to suffer. And so a unique solution that I saw is that we moved our support of students to advising, so they can triage the issue as either a financial issue, a mental health issue, or technical. Normally, my staff would be on the front line, but it was decided to pull it into advising so that they could work with the students directly and figure out, is this something where maybe financial support can help if the university is in a place to give that, or we need to provide mental health services, or it's a technical solution that can be solved by one of the edtech groups on campus?
MICHAEL REESE:
HEATHER REID: This is Heather from Berkeley. I would say the thing that I'm thinking quite a lot these days is the broader question of the long term impact here for higher education as a sector and the economic implications of what we're seeing here. And I know at Berkeley, a lot of thinking and planning around that is happening right now with regard to the fall semester. And some of the issues that have already been mentioned here are parents' ability to pay, students' ability-- international students' ability to actually get to the United States, whether we'll be in a position to actually run a sort of, quote unquote, normal fall semester.
HEATHER REID: I think for all institutions, the economic consequences are going to be significant.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, this is a pretty significant and challenging period. I'm noticing the time, and we promised to keep this to an hour. One thing-- and I think it was Jon who mentioned it and seconded by Polly-- this is an era where collaboration, communication, best practice sharing is really important.
TODD CARPENTER: I hadn't thought of this until just recently in the last couple of 15 minutes or so. We might consider this as an ongoing-- this particular program, we might consider reprising it in a week or two, maybe not next week, but kind of explore some of these issues in more depth.
TODD CARPENTER: It's something that the community, I think, needs. And I'm grateful for the comments and the chats. It seems like there's been a lot of engagement in this session. We have been recording this session. We will post the recording. I'm hearing that it's taking Zoom a little bit longer to process the files and post them back to us, so hopefully, by Monday, we'll have the video of this posted.
TODD CARPENTER: But we will send information to all of the people who registered for how to get access to the recording early next week. We'll also post it freely on the NISO website for this event, and the URL is there on the screen. So with that, I want to thank everyone for joining us today. I hope you are all well. I hope you remain safe and healthy. And want to especially thank our speakers, Bryan Alexander, Derek Bruff, Michael Reese, Heather Reed, Jon Shaw, and Polly Thistlethwaite for joining us.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you so much for your leadership and your ideas, and it is much appreciated. So with that, we'll draw today's session to a close, and wish you all a very pleasant afternoon. Thank you. Bye bye.
SPEAKER: Thank you all to our attendees as well as to our speakers. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TODD: Today's topic is teaching and learning online, innovation under pressure. This is a special program that we've put together for you all. We are all getting very accustomed to using Zoom so I won't go through how to use Zoom. I presume you all do. If you need technical assistance at any time, you can get that by contacting a live chat. That is https://support.zoom.us. You will need today's webinar ID which is 619884181.
TODD: We'll post that into the chat box so that you have it. We will be making these slides-- the questions and these slides available. We are also recording today's program so that we can share this publicly. We will post the recording onto the NISO website. And we will email all of you with links for how to get access to that recording.
TODD: This will be under the NISO website. We'll embed the MP4 file when we get it. Probably take us a day or so to get this posted up. NISO has a very robust program of educational events. We have a monthly webinar program for NISO members. The next NISO monthly program will be on Wednesday, April 8 on artificial intelligence and planning for implementation.
TODD: NISO also hosts a virtual conference series. The next one is how to make content accessible. What can publishers do to satisfy the obligation to serve those with print disabilities? That'll be on April 15 from noon to 4:00 Also, we'll be launching in May an eight part series on agile project and project management for information projects that will run every Friday from I think it's noon until 1:00 May 14 through July 2.
TODD: And then we'll continue our monthly webinar program on May 20 with a session on artificial intelligence and media analysis. More information about all of NISO's programs is available under the Events tab on the NISO website. I'd also like to draw people's attention to NISO's online publication, "Information Organized." This is where NISO posts information on the standards world, information distribution, content creation worlds.
TODD: We post a variety of stories throughout the month and then we send an email summary. This is under the I/O tab or the publications tab on the NISO website. Want to focus now on the past month and the tremendous changes that we've been facing. Organizations have had to close their physical facilities, had to move on to virtual operations practically overnight.
TODD: And we are fortunate to have the technology in place to do this, something that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. And yet with all those tools, we're still scrambling. Normally, designing an online delivery of a class, content, or service could take months or even years. But now teachers, professors, and librarians are all having to switch to deliver those resources through new modes of delivery, often having to change that in the course of days.
TODD: This is creating significant challenges related to approach, to infrastructure and tools, to policy. It's also generating concerns around access and equity. We're kind of building an airplane as we're learning how to fly. And since we're already two weeks into this, this could be a certainly long flight. We wanted to share with the community some learnings from leaders in the community.
TODD: Collectively, we're an innovative group. We do have lots of resources at our disposal. And we certainly can do this. But our thinking here at NISO was that-- and the rationale behind this program is that we can learn from each other, learn about who's doing what, and share our knowledge, which is why we quickly put this program together.
TODD: We have a limited amount of time today and I want to get started. But before we begin, I'd like to thank all of our speakers and panelists for joining us today and taking the time to participate in this program. Each of the participants is busy scrambling to support their own institution, their needs, and we really appreciate them taking the time to join us with very short notice to share their experiences.
TODD: We encourage you all to participate in this conversation, although we have limited time. You can use the Q&A functionality to participate in this program. If you're in full screen mode, you mouse over the little green control bar at the top, or, if you're in a window environment, you mouse over the bottom and click on Q&A. You can type in any questions that you have.
TODD: To the extent that we'll have time, we'll get these questions answered to you. We will also try to create a Google doc with any unanswered questions and have the panelists answer those questions in written form to the extent that they can. And then we'll also share that link out with you all. So joining us today-- and if you would each please say hello when I introduce you so that people can recognize your names and associate a name with a speaker.
TODD: Our first speaker is Heather Reid who is dean of the library at the Berklee College of Music. Say hello, Heather.
HEATHER REID: Hi everyone. I'm really thrilled to be participating in this today. I'm very much looking forward to the discussion.
TODD: Derek Bruff, who is director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University.
DEREK BRUFF: Hi, folks. This is Derek Bruff from Vanderbilt. I'm happy to be here this morning.
TODD: Thank you. Michael Reese, who is associate dean and director of the Center of Educational Resources at the Johns Hopkins University here in Baltimore.
MICHAEL REESE: Hi, everybody. And thank you Jill and Todd for inviting me to participate.
TODD: Thanks. Jon Shaw, Associate Vise Provost and deputy university librarian at the University of Pennsylvania.
JON SHAW: Good day, everyone. I'm glad talk to everyone about this.
TODD: Great Brian Alexander, who is an independent analyst and Brian, you're on mute.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Good morning, everyone. Very excited about the conversation.
TODD: Great. And Polly Thistlethwaite, who is interim university dean for library services at the City University of New York, CUNY.
POLLY THISTLEWAITE: Now this is Polly Thistlethwaite. Hello from the epicenter in Brooklyn.
TODD: Thanks for joining us. All right. So to kick things off, what was the triggering event at your institution? There were a variety. Obviously, we're all dealing with the same situation. But was it an internal administration decision? Was it a state closure mandate? Was it something else that moved you in this direction?
TODD: And had you previously had emergency planning ideas in place at your institution before you had to jump quickly into this current state? Why don't we start with Jon.
JON SHAW: Great. Thanks, Todd. So I think the triggering event for us was we started restricting travel in February. And as we were approaching our spring break in March, on that Friday before that spring break was a real moment where we were like, wait a second, I am not sure if we're going to be able to come back from spring break. And from the library's perspective, this was what in the world do we need to do to prepare for a potential-- the worst case scenario planning.
JON SHAW: So we do emergency response planning at the University. And in our last two tabletop settings, what happens if the library lost power for a month and essentially you didn't have access to the physical facility. So we kind of had a month planning from this year's emergency response. And the one the year prior was what if there was a vinylchloride outbreak in the city and you couldn't get access to campus.
JON SHAW: And so we had two plans actually in place in subsequent years where we were like, what if we didn't have access to the building? What would remote work look like without having access to the facility? And in this case, we actually had access to the facility for about two weeks more than both scenarios that we planned for. So in each one of those plans, it was how do we set up our remote work and how do we start making our virtual support network robust quickly?
JON SHAW: And so we got that all in place. But the triggering event for us was when things started happening in Washington, and California, and travel was really the knife's edge that made us concerned about this. I mean we did worry in December and January. I would say that the predominant time when it became a trigger event for us was when travel started going and what could we do.
JON SHAW:
TODD: And Derek, from the Vanderbilt perspective?
DEREK BRUFF: Sure. This is Derek. At Vanderbilt, it was an internal decision to move online. Earlier in the year, we had had a committee of various administrators and faculty who had been monitoring the situation, learning what they could, bringing to bear all the expertise that we had on campus in terms of emergency planning, and infectious disease, and other things.
DEREK BRUFF: They had set, as I understand, a whole number of kind of-- a set of triggering events and responses that the university would take. And so when one of those triggering events happened in March, we moved to cancel classes for the rest of the week and moved classes online for, I think initially it was going to be a two week period. We had some other triggering event that was on the list that happened a couple of days later.
DEREK BRUFF: And so we moved to online for the rest of the semester. So that was kind of how we handled it. I'm not intimately familiar with the emergency planning groups at Vanderbilt, but I do know we had a couple of weeks where our focus at the teaching center was on the potential of some of our study abroad students not being able to continue their studies overseas. And we were working on ways that we might be able to integrate those students abroad in some of our on campus classes.
DEREK BRUFF: And so we started reaching out to-- the administrators reached out to us. And we connected with IT and other units and started to figure out what would the tools be that we would use and how could we provide that support, were there any gaps, who were the people that need to be at the table. We didn't have to do any of that actually, because things move faster than that was necessary.
DEREK BRUFF: But I think that groundwork was really helpful in helping us figure out what we'd need to do a couple of weeks later. I'll also say at Vanderbilt we had a mumps outbreak a couple of years ago. We've had H1N1 and other reasons where campus access might potentially be limited. And so my teaching center had already developed a whole lot of robust resources around tools to use online for teaching continuity.
DEREK BRUFF: And so it was pretty easy to kind of dust those off and make sure they were up to date. And so we were able to get moving pretty quickly on the teaching continuity work.
SPEAKER 1: Todd, I think you might be on mute.
TODD: I'm the one on mute. I had turned to Polly and said, Polly, I'm not hearing you. So yes, I should learn how to use Zoom. Polly, from your perspective in New York.
POLLY THISTLEWAITE: Well, you know, we're kind of having this run up to online and zero cost teaching with an $8 million New York state governor's grants to SUNY and CUNY to push instruction costs down. And then it just goes hand in hand with online pedagogy. So we've been making a serious effort to move courses online and to reduce the cost for textbooks and that since really 2017.
POLLY THISTLEWAITE: That is some of the run up. But the big challenge that we faced at CUNY is about 50% of our students do not have-- or we estimated about 50% of our students didn't have access to a computer off campus. I mean, students have smartphones in great proportion but it's hard to do all kinds of assignments on a smartphone, although it's amazing what can be done on a smartphone.
POLLY THISTLEWAITE: So that was the big challenge. And then that impacted the conversations about what facilities to keep open and what facilities to close, and all that. And we can talk about it a little bit more later. But that's sort of the outline at CUNY.
TODD: Yeah. And Heather?
HEATHER REID: Yes. So for us, it was definitely an internally triggered decision. So it was not something directly in response to, for example, a state [INAUDIBLE] mandate. It was virtually announced that we would be moving online. The announcement was made March 11th, effective as of March 23. And that intervening week was our spring break week, so there were basically just a couple of days after the announcements before the students departed for spring break.
HEATHER REID: I think, though, it was becoming increasingly clear over the course of, certainly, that week-- it would've been the week of March 9th and even the tail end of the previous week-- that the city of Boston was moving in the direction of starting to put in place [INAUDIBLE] and restrictions. And, of course, our campus is right in the center of downtown Boston.
HEATHER REID: And we work very, very closely with the city on many things. While I, myself, was not involved in any of the conversations, I think that we and other universities and colleges directly in the city of Boston were in very active conversations with the city [INAUDIBLE] time frame. And I would imagine we were getting encouragement from Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston, to consider moving online.
HEATHER REID: But the actual impetus here was, in the end of it, actually, the decision was internal. To the best of my knowledge, there wasn't a formal emergency or disaster recovery initiative at Berkeley. However, Berkeley did close around the time of the Boston Marathon bombing. Our campus is very close to the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and so when the bombing happened, the entire campus was closed.
HEATHER REID: I was not at Berkeley at the time, but I think it ended up being I think a couple of weeks. And, of course, in that particular case, with absolutely no advance notice. So there was some previous experience with triggering events that caused the closure of the physical campus.
TODD CARPENTER: And Michael?
MICHAEL REESE: Sure, I'll try to put a different perspective on this. Like most universities, we're almost like a federation of independent colleges. And so we were seeing this trickling through our institution based on what the campuses were. So first error, J2 Nanjing campus closed. And I should mention that all of these decisions were internal. So Nanjing closed, went to remote before there was any lockdown and before the University of Nanjing, the local university, did.
MICHAEL REESE: And it was based on student concerns. They were responding to student concerns. About a week and a half later, our J2 Bologna campus did. And then it wasn't until later February that what was happening at the Baltimore campuses was the initial conversation was around concerns about international students not being able to come back in the summer or fall. So we were planning for a hybrid remote in person, but I will say my staff were, you know, more prescient than I was in saying, we're all going to be shutting down.
MICHAEL REESE: And so we started developing resources to plan for going completely for teaching remote. And I'll give a shout out to Derek Bruff. Our office is well aware of his center of work, and borrowed some ideas and resources from his center. So it wasn't until the beginning of March before the Baltimore campuses decided to shut down. But we were able to learn from our remote campuses in Nanjing and Bologna about how they navigated the process, even if we use different technologies, because there are different programs offered there.
MICHAEL REESE: We do have, every semester, business continuity exercises where chief risk officer John Links runs through a different scenario like a fire in a building or a lab blows up or something significant. So when they stood up the business continuity teams and the incident command teams, it actually felt, while we were dealing with a lot of information, the way those groups work was very seamless in terms of how we were going to run those meetings and who was in charge, which I think really helped us out through this process.
MICHAEL REESE:
TODD CARPENTER: And Bryan, you talk to a variety of institutions or engage with a variety of institutions across this space. Is this pretty consistent from your perspective?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: It is. A few weeks ago, I started up a Google spreadsheet to track campuses that were ceasing or pausing face-to-face instruction, moving online. And initially, there were some pretty clear patterns, and my colleagues on this panel here articulated them very nicely. Sometimes it has to do with international students, sometimes from following CDC guidance, sometimes state guidance, and occasionally, exchange programs.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Then our spreadsheet just grew, expanded as more and more people started checking in, more information as the number of campuses expanded rapidly to dozens and then hundreds and then more than 1,000. I would just say that one of the interesting things about this is the timing that we moved online in a hurry. And so each campus really sought to give people an intermediary stage for preparation.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: And that stage could be as short as one day and as long as a couple of weeks, depending on all kinds of local factors, such as the timing of spring break. So that made an interesting difference. I had to just send a shout out here, please, to all the instructional designers and academic computing folks who have been just working unbelievable hours, just doing heroic work to get all these campuses fully migrated online.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: That's an incredible story.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, in terms of some of the logistics, and Polly, you started to step into this, what are the kind of issues that faculty are interested in seeing in terms of support? And have you seen some best practices develop both at your institutions or at others?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Go ahead. Go ahead.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: You were talking to me? I was just going to-- I wanted to back up a little bit and say, you know, almost any emergency planning I've ever seen, any plans that I've seen in an office when I start to occupy it is kind of like they're always like hopefully obsolete, hopelessly obsolete. They're really, like, just leaping through them, might suggest some abstract ideas, but they have to be sufficiently abstract ideas about coping in an emergency, because every emergency is so different.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: I learned from the-- I was at Fort Collins, Colorado University-- Colorado State in Fort Collins in '96, I think it was, when there was this huge flood that wiped out the periodicals collection from the library. And from that experience, it became clear that libraries and network are very powerful and that the collaborations that we build are the most useful in emergencies.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: And I think we're finding that here, too. Out of that flood effort, rapid ILL was developed. It still is with us today, and that was just a formative emergency event in my professional career that led-- I think just led to this, like, notion that collaborations are the best device-- the best organizational configuration to bring to any emergency.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE:
TODD CARPENTER: Derek, Michael referenced you and your organization's work in this area. Could you tell us a little bit more about the issues that you've faced and the kind of resources that you-- the thinking that you've put into situations like this?
DEREK BRUFF: Sure, I'm happy to do that. So we kind of tried to take a couple of different directions at once. We knew that a lot of our faculty who had very little teaching experience online, to make the transition would want things to kind of feel as much as possible as what they had been doing in person. And so for those faculty, we looked at tools like Zoom and virtual classroom and screencasting tools that would allow them to continue doing virtually what they had been doing in person, mainly because, I think for those faculty, the idea of kind of totally redesigning their course to teach online was not something that they were ready to do, nor did they have time to do.
DEREK BRUFF: But we also had another thread, where we're trying to help faculty who maybe aren't as worried about that kind of teaching continuity piece and maybe have more experience working with some technology tools. Really quality online course design doesn't center itself on Zoom, right? There's lots of tools in the toolbox, and a lot of asynchronous and low bandwidth tools are really effective for quality course design.
DEREK BRUFF: As others have noted, we didn't have time for quality course design. We were just trying to kind of do some just in time online teaching. But some of our faculty, either immediately or in the last couple of weeks, as they've gotten their feet under them, have kind of shifted to thinking about other options, other tools, more creative, intentional ways to do online teaching other than just synchronous video sessions.
DEREK BRUFF: And so we've tried to create a lot of resources for both. We initially did some workshops on campus. We had about a three-day window-- excuse me, four days where classes were canceled, but we hadn't started the online classes yet. And so we loaded up as many workshops in person and via Zoom as we could. We ended up with, I think, 450 faculty or so through those workshops.
DEREK BRUFF: A lot of the faculty who were most nervous and needed the most help really wanted the in-person workshops, so I'm glad we had a small window where we could meet those faculty in person, even while we made them sit 10 feet apart from each other in the lecture hall. We also ramped up a whole lot of online resources on our website. And I think that's what Mike was referring to. So we had some existing resources, because we do course management system support through my center.
DEREK BRUFF: But we beefed those up rather quickly. Again, a lot of them around tools for synchronous video work or screencasting, but also asynchronous and low bandwidth tools. One of the things that I think is interesting that Stacey Johnson-- she's our assistant director for educational technology-- said yesterday, a lot of our faculty, they'll come to our support team with a specific question, and we've already written a guide to walk them through that very thing.
DEREK BRUFF: But they didn't know where it was. They didn't know it existed. I think our faculty are seeing a lot of resources coming at them, and it's hard for them sometimes to find the answer to their question in that sea of resources. And so I think there's still a role for just kind of directing folks to things that are already there.
DEREK BRUFF: The other thing that we did-- I'll mention briefly-- is we appointed some what we call Brightspace deputies. Brightspace is our course management system, and so these are faculty and some grad students that we knew were fairly tech savvy and would be willing to help their colleagues learn these tools as they moved online. And so we deputized them and gave them some additional resources, training courses they could use with their peers, an email listserv where they can ask each other questions.
DEREK BRUFF: You know, we have a fairly robust teaching center. There's 12 of us working full time, but we've got over 1,000 faculty. And so it was great to have some colleagues among the faculty do a lot of peer-to-peer work to extend our reach.
TODD CARPENTER: Does anyone else have any other thoughts about best practices at this time, and what your institution's doing.
JON SHAW: This is just Jon from Penn again. Just to add one thing-- and Derek's program is fantastic-- one of the things that we did was faculty and focus groups early on, so that first week. And that helped us anticipate a lot of the questions so that our guide was more proactively made through the focus group sessions rather than what questions were coming in. And then we used the questions that came in once people were preparing our online classes to refine our guides.
JON SHAW: Another way of how we were able to get this out to faculty, so our learning management system is Canvas. We would embed those announcements within the guide, and so at the top page, so that they could go back to the resources and build the classes as they were within the tool to work on their classes. So those were two things that we found to get them as they're in this very fast moving upstream as possible.
JON SHAW: So-- but thanks, Derek. That was great.
MICHAEL REESE: This is Mike. I'll jump in just with some other ideas. We also reached out to a cadre of faculty that we knew that had expertise in particular tools like Respond is the lockdown browser, because while the initial questions were coming in about content delivery and engaging students for the typical type of courses, we were looking ahead to how were labs going to be handled, eventually, assessments as well.
MICHAEL REESE: And so we were partnering with faculty to develop help guides. And while we didn't officially deputize them like they did at Vanderbilt, we asked them to specifically start working with people in their department that we identified would likely need additional help, because they were offering unique courses like a design course or a lab course and would need unique perspective-- unique ideas for continuing to offer their course remotely.
MICHAEL REESE:
TODD CARPENTER: And as we've moved forward here, I mean, I know there's been a lot of talk of Zoom and privacy, but have you noticed any other issues about privacy and security that you've encountered along the way or things that we should be aware of? Anybody want to jump in?
MICHAEL REESE: I'll jump in again. This is Mike, again, from Johns Hopkins. What was interesting is the provost's office, last week, based on concerns that were coming in from the schools, quickly developed some guidelines for recording class sessions based on FERPA concerns. So this is not something that we had been talking about on our campuses, but quickly came to the forefront with faculty recording lectures, sharing them, or even conversations with students.
MICHAEL REESE: And so last week, very quickly, the provost's office led this initiative with general counsel and representatives from each dean to develop guidelines for recording any course interactions with students where they would be identifiable.
TODD CARPENTER: That's interesting. Bryan, have you been hearing anything?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Yeah, this is Bryan Alexander. The biggest concern is around Zoom bombing right now, But I do want to [INAUDIBLE] my colleague and raise the question of technology and student privacy. I'm seeing two very, very conflicting narratives or arguments in play. One is arguing that what we're seeing is this enormous experiment or an enormous project with vast amounts of data, both quantitative and qualitative.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: We've never had so many people all teaching and learning online at once. That's a fantastic treasure trove of content to explore, mine, and learn from. And opposed to that is the narrative or argument which holds that this is actually not a good experiment, that this is a kind of humanitarian disaster, and that it is the wrong time to analyze or study or treat this as a pilot project or as an experiment.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: I think these two are pretty completely opposed, and both of them turn on part to the questions of privacy. You know, the former, who want to analyze this, have to go through FERPA as well as other regulations and policies. And then the other side thinks, no, this is something that can't be done very well. In the chat, Carmen asked, what is Zoom bombing? Zoom bombing is when somebody in the Zoom video conferencing tool either floods the chat box with repellent content, or they turn on their video, and in their background they display something equally repellent.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: The content I've heard and experienced has either been racist and abusive or pornographic. And you can easily disable this from happening with a few different settings in Zoom, but they're not default settings. People have to do it. Good question, Carmen. But it got to a point, I think we have to think really hard about this question of data and privacy, and to what extent can we learn from the experience, and to what extent is this an experience that we really shouldn't be focusing our attention on in terms of research, but instead more support for faculty, staff, and especially students.
HEATHER REID: This is Heather from Berkeley. We have had some instances also of Zoom bombing in classes and some subsequent advice from our technology resources team on how to set up and configure our Zoom session to at least minimize [INAUDIBLE] not completely avoid it. Another issue that has come up, which isn't exactly privacy and security, but I think is somewhat related is questions around IP, intellectual property.
HEATHER REID: So we have had some faculty express concerns about the intellectual property issues around recording their classes. And this is [INAUDIBLE] particular [INAUDIBLE] an institution like Berkeley, where the faculty are often using, incorporating, in some ways, their own artistic works into their teaching. So we do have a very newly released IP policy at Berkeley that, luckily for us, foreshadowed some of these issues and we're able to point to.
HEATHER REID: But that has been a concern on the part of some of our faculty.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, intellectual property rights are an interesting problem at the moment. You know, for example, my wife is a professor of theater, and they have the rights to put a show on a stage, but they don't have the rights to show a performance via video. And what are the rights with regard to performance for the students in terms of a virtual, say, class presentation or via Zoom? It's kind of some interesting intellectual property rights challenges at the moment.
TODD CARPENTER: Anyone else have any thoughts on that?
DEREK BRUFF: Yeah, this is Derek from Vanderbilt. On the question of privacy and security, I might add that a number of vendors of various educational technology tools have made their tools available for free for a limited time. And so it's been a lot easier for faculty to start using new tools that they think might be helpful. On the other hand, we do have FERPA concerns and student privacy concerns, in the United States at least. So we've tried to have our team from the registrar vet the privacy documents and statements from these tools as much as possible so that at least we feel more comfortable recommending faculty use some of them.
DEREK BRUFF: The other issue I'd point out is that as lots of activities in higher education move online, we're becoming a bigger target for hackers and vandals and such. It's not just Zoom, but I think all of our systems are under more kind of cybersecurity pressure right now. And I know our IT team is kind of doubling up everywhere they can in terms of cybersecurity.
TODD CARPENTER: And there is a question that came in about Zoom bombing. And I-- and what sort of tools and resources exist that people can help avoid that situation. Mike posted a link to some US fee resources. We can share that in the Q&A response.
TODD CARPENTER: But there are a couple tools or a couple of explainers on how to get access to that technology, those settings and how to control some of them.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: This is Bryan. To go back to your question, Todd, I'd say one of the things that we should point out is that-- and to build on what Derek was saying-- many vendors of all kinds have been opening up more and more content. I mean, we've seen this from newspapers. We've seen this with scholarly publication. We've seen this with a wide range of educational publishers.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: And part of that's under pressure. There are a lot of activists who've been calling out for help. And as a result, you've seen companies like Elsevier and Wiley, who've been putting forth a lot of content in the open that has to do with COVID-19. And you know, there's some pushback about this saying that these are either too little too late, or that they will be-- they're basically a kind of marketing ploy to induce people to consume their products.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: And then when the paywall comes back up, they'll be forced to pay out. On the other hand, it's pretty useful. My new book came out in January, Academia Next, for Johns Hopkins. And Johns Hopkins, with Project MUSE, very kindly put the whole book available on the project news site for people to read in their web browser. And as a writer, I'm always happiest when I'm being read.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: So that's a very good thing. So I just wanted to acknowledge that boom or boomlet in open content.
TODD CARPENTER: Do others have any experience in changes in licensing technology or problems that they've had in terms of licensing technology or content to support remote instruction?
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: Yeah, hi. This is Polly Thistlethwaite from the CUNY, City University of New York, Libraries. And following what Bryan said, I just want to say that this little boomlet of open content might appear to be, like, you know, beneficial in some ways, but what I'm seeing vendors doing is, like, taking an end run around the institutions, the libraries that are generally providing the licensing, making the content tracks to provide this content to our readers, and doing an end run to the end user.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: And as Bryan said, the paywalls go back up in June, and we'll be left-- faculty will have to rework courses if they've provided links to that temporarily open content. But I think, you know, we're in this time of crisis right now, and we have this opportunity to sort of like rework our relations with content providers and institutions.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: Instead of sort of like having this end run to the end user by content providers who don't seem to appear to be moving in the end user provision direction, what's really going on? I think it's an opportunity for us to shore up the kinds of collaborative arrangements we have to provide access to the content, rather than to sort of divide and compete.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE:
TODD CARPENTER: Jon, do you have some other thoughts on that?
JON SHAW: You know, I think I could echo a lot of what Polly has said. And I think it goes back to something what Bryan was saying earlier. I mean with all this free technology and content coming out, it's not an adequate pilot phase. I mean it's mostly a reactive phase to it, and this is not how we would run pilots on any of these technologies. Yes, many of them are useful, but I think the thing to do right now with a lot of the technologies that we may be adopting or students maybe adopting is how can we track that in a fashion that respects privacy and security.
JON SHAW: And so I mean this is not the standard times for initiating new technology licenses or exploring new content. But it actually is the time that we're doing this, and how do we balance that going forward? And so I think I think we are at a critical pivot point, where we rushed to move a lot of things virtual, and now is the time for us to start being strategic about what is a short, medium, and long term future with the coronavirus out there?
JON SHAW: And how do we start thinking that way as opposed to the reactive way that we've been thinking towards a lot of this?
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, there's an interesting comment here from one of the participants saying that it's interesting about all of the free content that's available now. But are students going to be lulled into thinking that everything is free online, and the battle [INAUDIBLE] remains so, are we creating unrealistic expectations around students' satisfaction?
HEATHER REID: And this is Heather from Berkeley. We've had ongoing, pretty persistent challenges, particularly around video content, where very often, there's some of that content that is available from licensable training platforms. But there is really a lot that is not, and there aren't really easy solutions for folding those materials into online teaching.
HEATHER REID: That's probably been one of the most persistent questions that we're getting from faculty. And we oftentimes, unfortunately, don't really have great legal solutions for them.
TODD CARPENTER: And there's a specific question for you, Heather, in terms of your role at Berkeley. This is a question from a music librarian. Are there ways in which the library is working to support performance-based pedagogy, or has it changed in any way?
HEATHER REID: That's a really great question. I think, writ large, Berkeley is an institution that is really-- I think it's the biggest challenge in front of us as an institution at this moment is we do, indeed, have a very much performance and practice-based pedagogy, and how does that translate to the online world? It's really-- it's a very specific-- I know there are lots of challenges across the board here, but it's really a very specific and, I think, steep hill to climb for the institution.
HEATHER REID: So I would say we are still figuring out how the library fits in in the new world, where that pedagogy is shifting online. Honestly, I think it's going to be a different challenge as we face the increasingly likely, indeed, certain situation that this is not a short term situation that we're in. So I think, initially, there was a feeling that we could kind of, you know, duct tape and glue some things together and that the faculty could work aligned with a lack of access to library materials, particularly course [INAUDIBLE] books [INAUDIBLE] sheets.
HEATHER REID: But that's going to be a different matter entirely if this is our situation, as it looks almost really certain it will be, through the summer, and who knows, perhaps, into fall. So I think this is something that we're just at the very beginning of, and I don't have a kind of wrapped up with a bow answer to that great question.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: Yes, this is Polly from City University of New York again. Just to echo Heather, I mean I think we've got every reason to believe that our economic landscape is going to be irrevocably shifted here. And this is not only an opportunity to rethink how we support and fund access to archival and scholarly content, but really, if we want to continue in recognizable form, we need to get-- we need to shift our models here.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: It's almost like we have to be reactive about thinking about the long term, so to echo what I think it was Jon who said this morning that it really is a time that we need to think about how to stay afloat, how to keep providing content, and to shift-- necessarily shift the way that we license and support access to it.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE:
TODD CARPENTER: Polly, Polly, I think that's fantastic. And, you know, that's a nice segue to the next question. And a lot of people have been talking about, what does the future of this look like? Does everyone go back to campus in the fall? Is this something that-- is online instruction all of next year, or is this something where we come back for a little bit, and then we social distance? And some people have been calling that the pumping the brakes on ice method.
TODD CARPENTER: And I think one of the things that as we've started getting a little bit of headspace in the last week or two, how do we start doing scenario planning around this? And this is where I'm really curious of seeing what some of Bryan's foresight approaches to this would really help institutions. And how can you start scenario planning around this so that you can be prepared for the long term?
TODD CARPENTER: And you have to prepare for the worst case scenario always, and then all the alternatives to that.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Well, just-- again, this is Bryan. Just to be clear, people speak of this event as a black swan or as something that we were completely unprepared for. And that's not quite true. The futures community has been simulating gaming, building scenarios, analyzing pandemics back to the 1960s. It's a pretty thoroughly understood possibility that we've worked out. And so we're still busy on this panel.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: I and others have been publishing scenarios, so for example, one of the questions is, how long does the pandemic less? Do we have a relatively short term experience, such as what China and Singapore seem to have done, where the virus rages and then gets burned out or controlled within a few months? Well, that's possible, so we could imagine, say, in May, in the United States, that we have it under control.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Another possibility, the flip side of this, is that it lasts for a long time. We're talking about a vaccine, and the timelines are variable, but people are talking about some time in 2021. And it may be that the virus continues to mutate into more virulent forms. And it may be that we experience a great deal of secondary infections. So we may have the next year of continuous lockdown due to the coronavirus.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: The third possibility is that it comes and goes in waves-- for example, a similar, but not that similar disease, 1918, the Spanish flu did that. It came and went in huge and terrible waves, and it may be that we then, in higher education, have to model our responses based on these three options. Either we prepare for summer, which is going to be online, but then in fall, we'll come back, in which case, we have to figure out how to tempt all the students as well as staff and faculty back on campus.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: They may be used to being online. They may be more comfortable, and they also fear infection, either from the facilities or from each other. If, on the other hand, it's going to be a long plague, a long, long pandemic, then we have to make preparations for what does it mean to teach multiple semesters in a row. And then that ricochets up and down the academic chain. What does it mean for people with their PhDs, undergraduates and graduation, people starting new programs, and so on?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: Or if we go with the wave pattern, then it may be that we basically can toggle a switch back and forth-- on campus for a month, and then off campus for two months, and that kind of thing. All of these have ramifications for, perhaps, one of most important things, which is economics. If the US economy is clobbered into a recession for multiple quarters, that's going to just gut campus budgets for the next two years for a start, everything from what happens to endowments to what happens to state budgets to family willingness to pay.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: And that we have to figure out. And I'm already tracking this in campuses that are either shutting down completely or are talking about mergers or ending programs that are just not enrolling enough. So I think that's a good starting point for scenario planning is where we think the plague itself will go.
MICHAEL REESE: If I can jump in, this is Mike, I actually just left a conversation that was dealing with those ideas but in a very specific way. Our public health experts were on our academic continuity call talking about Washington state seems to be beginning to come out of the first phase, but only 3% of the population was infected. So there's still a lot of vulnerabilities, so we're assuming this is going to come in waves.
MICHAEL REESE: We're also seeing that we enacted-- I should also add that there was a report we were trying to verify that for international students, Beijing, the next available visa appointment is late November. So we're beginning to think about our international students might not be able to get here even in the spring semester of next year. And that's still-- this was a report that came up, and it was in some international journal that the group was trying to verify.
MICHAEL REESE: But the issue that-- the way we were transitioning in the conversation was we just enacted a pass/fail grading policy for the undergraduate programs, and students, some of them, are very upset, especially our premed students. And they're not going to stand for that in the fall semester. So we're already talking about how the way we're teaching now is not going to be able to stand in the fall.
MICHAEL REESE: We're going to have to do not teaching remotely, but truly teaching well-designed online courses, if that's the way we go, so that we can pull away from our pass/fail grading policy that we're using for this semester, because students aren't going to be interested in coming back if they can't be-- if they can't receive a true letter grade.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: I think that's very true. Again, this is Bryan. I think this is a very, very important thing to keep in mind. One of the most decisive factors is going to be the kind of aggregate response of students to this experience. Will they find it to be inferior? And if so, how will they react? Will they, for example, demand refunds?
BRYAN ALEXANDER: We've already seen that, people asking for refunds for room and board as well as for certain fees. But we've also seen this with an analysis from last week looking at MBA students, who are asking for a discount to their tuition, if their tuition is going to be for wholly online programs. On the other hand, will students find this to be adequate, if not better, in certain ways? I think a lot-- we don't really have a good way for all this to be carefully thought out.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: I mean we can do some polling, but higher education in the US, as we all know, is so disaggregated and disintegrated that it's hard to track all those opinions. One thing we should watch for are stories that circulate widely from, say, Chronicle of Higher [INAUDIBLE] Higher Ed, as well as NPR and the New York Times. I mean I'm waiting for video clips to go wild on TikTok or on YouTube showing faculty members fumbling Zoom or students having a good experience.
BRYAN ALEXANDER: But I think you're absolutely right to draw attention to the student experience. That's going to be critical.
TODD CARPENTER: Derek, have you-- what has been your experience in this regard with regard to planning ahead? I mean, I know you've done a lot of-- you have already done planning. I'm thinking about where you're headed with your planning for the fall, multiple rounds.
DEREK BRUFF: Yeah, and I'll just concur with Bryan's assessment of these kind of three possible futures. There are others, but those seem to be the big categories. And you know, I'm glad that for the summer, when we move fully online, we'll have more than four days to get ready for it. So we're planning on doing a lot of faculty development with our summer instructors in May to try to help them move closer to robust course-- online course design to avoid some of these issues that Mike mentioned.
DEREK BRUFF: I'm also imagining a kind of a-- something like a pivotable, if that's a word, course design, where we're hoping to work with faculty this summer. As I think about fall classes, if we are in that kind of middle ground where we need to be ready to move online in a hurry, we can plan ahead to be ready. And so I'm imagining helping faculty use more online tools in their teaching.
DEREK BRUFF: A lot of our faculty were maybe-- you know, 5% to 10% of their course had some online component to the course management system. You know, if we can get that up to 25%, then it's going to be a lot easier for them to go to 100%, if they're already using a course blog or they're using Zoom occasionally or they know how to do a screen cast. And so thinking about kind of increasing the amount of online activities in a course so that if it needed to go higher, we could.
DEREK BRUFF: Or planning our course to say, if I'm-- you know, for this aspect of the course, for this learning objective for these activities, if we're in-person, we'll do it this way. If we're online, we'll do it this way. That's a lot more work, certainly. But I think that may be what we need to do in order to get ready for an uncertain fall and spring.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, it's definitely a time of significant changes. I'm noticing the time. We had-- in the preparation for this session, we had more than two dozen questions and about six pages worth of notes, and it didn't surprise me that we only got through maybe a third of it. Does any-- I want to go around our virtual table and ask if people have any final thoughts before we wrap up.
TODD CARPENTER:
JON SHAW: I just have one, Todd, is, you know, as information continues to come out and the situation changes almost by the week in terms of our knowledge of it and where we see it going, I think forums like this in an ongoing fashion, rather than one-offs, would be useful to people. And then hearing how a variety of vignettes are informing or how people are doing things. I also think that resources like the stuff that Bryan put together for instructional continuity plans for institutions, those are good to share with a large audience of people just so that we're not all inventing wheels, that we are all relying on each other.
JON SHAW: And I guess the great hope for all this is greater collaboration. I mean a lot of people are asking questions about, the vendors are not changing. How does improvement [INAUDIBLE] access change? And I think it's going to have to be through greater collaboration going forward at the university, national and international, level.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: This is Polly from City University of New York. I totally agree that collaboration is the key, and we need to continue to provide access to content, course content, scholarly and archival content, based on our values and our principles, not widening the gap between the access that people who are privileged and have access to high subscription libraries versus the people who rely on the public spaces for access to physical books and Wi-Fi or computers.
POLLY THISTLETHWAITE: We need to think about how to keep our access aligned with the principles that we embrace and think about what the cutting off of physical spaces means for that access and speaking to that gap.
MICHAEL REESE: This is Mike from Johns Hopkins. I think the challenge that we're seeing with our students are twofold. It's technical, and then, of course, the socio-emotional. And it's actually been the latter that has been the most challenging. Students have their parents are losing jobs. I have a grad student who's now a faculty member who just-- former grad student, who reported a student-- the first student whose parents passed away from COVID-19 complications.
MICHAEL REESE: And those aren't going to change over time as the economy continues to suffer. And so a unique solution that I saw is that we moved our support of students to advising, so they can triage the issue as either a financial issue, a mental health issue, or technical. Normally, my staff would be on the front line, but it was decided to pull it into advising so that they could work with the students directly and figure out, is this something where maybe financial support can help if the university is in a place to give that, or we need to provide mental health services, or it's a technical solution that can be solved by one of the edtech groups on campus?
MICHAEL REESE:
HEATHER REID: This is Heather from Berkeley. I would say the thing that I'm thinking quite a lot these days is the broader question of the long term impact here for higher education as a sector and the economic implications of what we're seeing here. And I know at Berkeley, a lot of thinking and planning around that is happening right now with regard to the fall semester. And some of the issues that have already been mentioned here are parents' ability to pay, students' ability-- international students' ability to actually get to the United States, whether we'll be in a position to actually run a sort of, quote unquote, normal fall semester.
HEATHER REID: I think for all institutions, the economic consequences are going to be significant.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, this is a pretty significant and challenging period. I'm noticing the time, and we promised to keep this to an hour. One thing-- and I think it was Jon who mentioned it and seconded by Polly-- this is an era where collaboration, communication, best practice sharing is really important.
TODD CARPENTER: I hadn't thought of this until just recently in the last couple of 15 minutes or so. We might consider this as an ongoing-- this particular program, we might consider reprising it in a week or two, maybe not next week, but kind of explore some of these issues in more depth.
TODD CARPENTER: It's something that the community, I think, needs. And I'm grateful for the comments and the chats. It seems like there's been a lot of engagement in this session. We have been recording this session. We will post the recording. I'm hearing that it's taking Zoom a little bit longer to process the files and post them back to us, so hopefully, by Monday, we'll have the video of this posted.
TODD CARPENTER: But we will send information to all of the people who registered for how to get access to the recording early next week. We'll also post it freely on the NISO website for this event, and the URL is there on the screen. So with that, I want to thank everyone for joining us today. I hope you are all well. I hope you remain safe and healthy. And want to especially thank our speakers, Bryan Alexander, Derek Bruff, Michael Reese, Heather Reed, Jon Shaw, and Polly Thistlethwaite for joining us.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you so much for your leadership and your ideas, and it is much appreciated. So with that, we'll draw today's session to a close, and wish you all a very pleasant afternoon. Thank you. Bye bye.
SPEAKER: Thank you all to our attendees as well as to our speakers. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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