-: All right. Well, hello everybody.
My name is Tam Perlman and I work at Macalester College.
I am an academic information associate,
which basically just translates
to I am an academic technologist at Macalester College
and I will just start by sharing my screen.
(Tam hums)
So, I guess I basically wanted to start out,
I wanted to say that I did put my Twitter handle on here
because there was a space for it,
but I'm basically a lurker.
So if anybody goes there, I do not participate
but I do watch on Twitter quite a bit,
and I'm trying to break that habit.
At Macalester, we developed tech kits for our teachers
and I'm sure that many of you have as well,
so I'd love to hear from you as we go through this process
over what we did and what succeeded and whatnot,
and I'm going to...
I had a lot of the same experiences as Dr. Miyagawa,
who I was just was just talking about.
And I also just wanted to acknowledge that,
I feel like we're sort of
in this phase of euphoria right now
and as I was writing this presentation, I was like
this feels so joyful, which was great
because we are feeling like we've come out the other end
but this was really hard.
This was such a hard year.
And I know that we've all worked so hard.
So I just wanna just take a moment
to just thank everybody here.
I don't know what we did,
I know we've all played separate roles
but this was a long year and it was a hard year.
And now we're kind of at this point
where we can have optimism
and we have the time to look at the lessons we've learned
and there are some really great things to come out of it
but I'm sure we all have way more vacation time
than we would like to have.
And I think we should just say,
give ourselves a little moment
of thanks and a little pat on the back.
And so I will just carry on from here.
First I have to move everybody as well.
So I work at Macalester College, we're in St. Paul,
Minnesota, and we have, sorry
I have to grab my little notes here
because I can never remember numbers.
We have around 2100 students
and about 1500 of those live on campus.
And about 15% of them are international.
We have about 250 faculty and 112 physical classrooms.
And that's kind of where we come from
which I know is quite different
from the university of Nebraska system, which I attended
for a little bit when, after I graduated,
because I grew up in Omaha.
For our classrooms, our campus technology,
we don't have online classes, or hybrid classes,
we are just an in-person school.
Classes are small and they're primarily discussion-based,
our AV set up in the classroom consists
of this rather sort of unruly bundle of cables
that has an HTMI cord, ethernet power until recently VGA.
And now we're kind of moving over
to USB-C connections and faculty bring their laptops
into the classroom and faculty get the choice
of using either a Mac or a PC laptop, so,
the troubleshooting kinda runs the gambit
of everything when we do it.
At the academic technology department,
we have our six members.
There's five academic technologists,
or academic information associates.
And we're sort of unique in that we're embedded
in the building for the people that we serve.
So I serve languages and fine arts.
So I live in the humanities
in the building where all the languages are
and it's connected to the art department
and the theater and the music department
and my colleagues live in the science building
and the humanities building, and then the other sciences.
So we kind of live with the people we serve.
And so we develop really close relationships with them
which is really, really great.
And then there's just five of us,
so we're able to really work closely together.
And then we also have someone
who is the manager of our digital resource center
where anybody on campus can come to check out materials.
Our student workers are excellent
and they can really help people, whether it's with software
that students are working on projects,
or learning how to work the cameras or tools they check out.
So it's kind of a small team.
We do a lot, but it's a good team to have.
So as we began planning over the summer, I mean
we had gone onto zoom as we all did
and for the spring semester.
And then we had to sort of start figuring
out what were we gonna do for the fall?
And nobody knew, nobody knew where we can be in person,
we're gonna be completely remote,
what was going to happen.
So we began trying to figure out what tools we would need
and how we would lead everybody in the fall
because it was gonna ultimately fall onto the AIAs.
Like how we're to train everybody.
Ultimately, we knew we had to provide tools
to individuals rather to an adapt their classrooms.
It made no sense to update rooms for something
that we hoped would be for just one school year of need.
And we wanted something faculty could use anywhere
and would be of use beyond the pandemic.
And that also is just flexible because already
over the summer, people were going to be with, you know
they were leaving the state,
they probably weren't coming back.
We had no idea what they were gonna do.
So we had to come up with some tools to give
to people that would be more flexible.
And it also ended up being much cheaper
than retrofitting classrooms for,
with microphones and whatnot.
Although we did ultimately do one room in each building
where we gave them microphones
and we put microphones in the ceiling.
So that in the future, you know
they were a little bit more expandable
in case we had speakers
or whatnot come in to speak.
But ultimately we focused
on empowering individuals rather than the rooms.
We created a list of four simple tools
that would let faculty essentially come from anywhere.
And these tools let people whiteboard,
lead collaborative work, grade paperlessly.
And also, as I said earlier, because we are a Mac
and a PC campus, everything had to work with both.
So what we ended up giving them were the iPad,
the Apple Pencil, the webcam and the tripod.
I'm just curious.
Did anybody else do that at their school?
No, yes?
So we gave everybody these tools and they were,
it was the idea
that they would go with the laptop and the bundle.
And then also people would have these adapters
that would make the new iPads
with only the USB-C ports, more adaptable.
So the way we went about it is
that we used a Google form to collect requests
from the faculty.
And it was sort of an a-la cart version.
Since some people already had iPads
and other people didn't want cameras or whatever.
So we did a form,
once we got everything,
which was probably the largest challenge,
we inventoried everything,
but we did not manage the iPads.
We did not put anything on them.
In fact, we did not even turn them on before we handed them
over to faculty, we basically gifted them to them.
And so far we have handed out about 300 of these kits,
or some version thereof, to faculty and staff.
And we still have some leftover
and we continue to give them out on a weekly basis.
And then once we would put them together,
we would deliver them to the offices.
And then we would send them an email that said,
it's waiting for you.
And here is a whole bunch of resources on how to use this.
We did a lot of work to try to sort of ease the transition
into remote teaching as much as possible.
So, as I said earlier, the iPads are not checked out.
They are taken care of by ITs,
they were gifts to the faculty and you didn't have to be
if you were coming in and you were teaching
for the fall semester and then you were never teaching
at Macalester again, we were still giving you the iPad
because we wanted everything to be as easy as possible.
And I think that just having something nice happen
during this time was really great, but also
it was a good idea to just give them
to everybody because it took a lot of pressure
off of everybody on us having to maintain it
and them having to like use it nicely
and bring it back and, you know, keep it clean.
We offered a lot of training on how to use everything.
We spent the entire summer training and talking
to people and also well into the fall.
We adapted and updated our tutorials constantly.
And we made about to respond to faculty
as quickly as possible every time they had questions
because we didn't want anybody to feel frustrated
or left behind.
And so we spent the summer basically just
like responding as soon as possible
to people whenever they had the little questions
and spending our entire days on zoom, just walking people
through iPad, setups, learning how to use Moodle
which we've had at Macalester for years and years and years.
But several people did not ever need to use Moodle
or chose not to use Moodle.
So all of a sudden there was a lot
of crash course training on Moodle.
And we also spent the day, you know
made a lot of recordings and how to videos.
So for our trainings, one of our priorities was to sort of
model the teaching styles that we were encouraging.
So we created a synchronous resources, recordings
of workshops, short how to videos, written tutorials.
We did summer zoom workshops.
And I have to say that we have for years and years
we'd always be like, we're having this training on this.
And not very many people would actually come to them,
but for the summer zoom workshops
we did two trainings for the tech kits.
And we had 80 participants
for each training, which is unbelievable.
And sometimes there were double, people would come
to both of them just to make sure they had everything right.
But the trainings were great.
And we were so pleased to have so many people actually come.
We would also, the academic technologists, we would go
into the classroom and do sort of these hybrid
in person trainings with the different academic departments.
So they could experience what it was like to sit
in a socially distant classroom and talk
to somebody that was also sitting at home
and to stand at the front of the classroom
and try to manage both the students
on the screen and the students in the classroom.
And we spent a lot of time training
our help desk staff and our student workers
in the DRC who would then ultimately be responsible
for the panicked calls that would come
in that did not come to us.
Did we solve everything?
No, absolutely not.
You know, and I think that's true for everybody
that despite all of our tests and everything,
once you get mass students, socially distant students
in the classroom, no matter what mic you have,
no matter how high you turn it up,
it's still gonna be hard to hear those students.
And we tried the best we could
and because I support languages,
I feel like maybe the mumbling factor increases a little bit
because there's the insecurity
of speaking a foreign language loudly, but we worked.
And once the students real...
I think the students realized when we would come in and talk
to them about it, that they did have to speak louder
so that there are students who were hybrid could hear.
Some faculty were overwhelmed
by the thought of having their laptop and their iPad.
And they tried to just teach from the iPad
which inevitably ended up not working out very well.
And for the AIAs keeping
up with the online tutorials has been sort
of our constant little hamster wheel
that we've been running through because zoom keeps changing.
And as real time use situations arise,
people have questions
we never imagined that they would have.
And also, I have to say that our laissez faire approach
to the iPod apps,
maybe didn't serve us the best in the end
because we ended up with, excuse me,
a ton of applications that we had to learn about.
And also people were sometimes using applications
that were maybe not the best ones
that they could have chosen in the long run.
So we really should have developed a page
of the suggested iPad apps for people to download
rather than just kind of let them go
and decide on their own, because it was just
another added thing that people had to figure out
in a time when they were
already figuring everything else out.
Was it worth it?
One thing that I forgot to mention is that, you know
we weren't obviously working in a bubble.
We worked with people
across campus that we had not worked
with before, or not worked with as much.
We had a head tech committee, we had a classroom,
we had a classroom committee
so that people would figure out the spacing
and these do all this microphone testing for us.
And we were sharing all kinds of new information
about teaching and pedagogy and new ways
of doing this and new ways of doing assignments.
So it wasn't just these, like here are four items
and this is what you're going to do.
We were kind of helping along the way
to change the whole sort
of campus culture on how faculty were going about teaching.
And we did that with other faculty
and the faculty enrichment center, and facilities,
and the library,
and everybody else who all came together to work
to kinda create the shift on campus.
And we got some really great results from that.
One is that the digital literacy, not only of faculty,
but of the staff as well, just like shut up.
Everybody learned zoom, of course.
And most people learned voice thread
because once they learned that that would close
caption their videos that they made for class,
and they could just throw that up on Moodle,
that changed everything for people.
And also Caruso became a really great tool
because it was one of the new ways that people could sort
of create conversations and do some collaborative work.
And as I just mentioned, we got these depend partnerships
with people and we've been trying to figure, you know
we got to work closely with so many different people.
And they were really the ones who kind of, we got each other
through the whole summer and we got each other
through the fall as well
and we continue to rely on each other greatly.
And it was great that faculty kind of understood
the things that, as academic technologists,
what we could help them with
because, we do help several faculty
already with everything from the cord wiggling
in the classroom to coming in and telling students
how to use audacity, or then working
on these huge, like semester long DLA projects.
But we kind of had this core of people we always served.
And then all of a sudden in the fall,
everybody was coming to us with these ideas
as they were changing how they were doing assessment
of I wanna do a Google site
or I wanna create a timeline,
or I don't want my students to write a 15 page paper,
what can you help me with?
And so that was really fun and really great.
And also again, very tiring, but I did find
that we did find that in the spring
like people were still doing these projects
but I think there was a little bit
of fatigue that had set in.
And so we worked to kind of reach out to people to be like,
oh, remember you can do this,
and you can do that.
So that we reminded people
that there are other ways of assessment as well.
And then this increased participation that I talked
about to have so many people come
to our trainings was really great.
And we have to figure out how to maintain that participation
as we move forward.
And as we look to the future,
there's a lot of things that we need to look forward to.
I mean, our tech kits now, part of what we supply
to faculty and are they a permanent part of our teaching.
And I think
that this upcoming year will help define that for us.
I mean, once you get to go back in person,
will people just set aside those set aside
those iPads then not look at them anymore,
or is it been worked into their way that they grade
or the way that they whiteboard or jam board or whatever
that they'll continue to want to use those
in their teaching.
And I think that faculty have really
enjoyed these tools and really liked these tools
but it's so easy,
once things go back a little different to just set something
down one day and you never look at it again.
So it will be interesting to see what things
that people have learned
that kinda carries along with them.
And again, as I said before
Macalester has always been an in-person environment.
And now what will the expect the expectations be?
Will we be expected to be able
to provide a hybrid experience ever?
You know, occasionally somebody will
break their leg and we'll do it.
But what is the expanded definition of that now?
And also we want to be able
to continue introducing new teaching
and learning technologies without creating burnout
because everybody has already given so much
to be really, master in many cases,
a lot of these new tools.
We just spoke week and a half ago to our faculty to learn
sort of get a wrap-up of the year and faculty as again,
Dr. Miyagawa is talking about,
really enjoyed the recorded lectures
so that they could go right into discussion
and many intend to keep those,
many people also like the syllabi, because we went
from a semester system that was 16 weeks long
to two, eight week modules per semester.
So faculty were already learning everything
and then they had to cut their syllabi
in half what they were teaching.
And a lot of people,
you created a flexible syllabus where they would talk
about it at the beginning of the semester, kind
of state their goals, student might give some input,
and then they would go back
to it and alter it as the weeks went on.
Because no matter how much you try to adjust
to cutting your course in half,
you're always gonna have too much,
plus with pandemic and the death of George Floyd,
there was a lot going on here.
And there was a lot of, there was, it was hard.
It was hard for everybody really to concentrate,
not only because of the pandemic,
but because of the murder of George Floyd.
And then later, earlier in the semester, Daunte Wright.
And so being flexible was really important this semester.
People also, not everybody, but many people fell in love
with paperless grading that was enabled by the iPad.
They liked the organization of it,
of using the Moodle grader.
Some people preferred to do commenting in the Google docs,
but there is people really like that.
And also the multiple points of access
to materials ended up being really a powerful thing
that faculty discovered that again,
as Dr. Miyagawa was talking about,
like how the quiet students suddenly use the chat
or the forums, or would leave their comments
on voice thread and the relationships that we created.
We knocked down silos we didn't know existed.
And again, it's that thing that we're gonna have to work
to make sure that we don't let those silos close again
or go up again.
I guess that's what they would do.
We still need to figure out a way
to capture that spontaneity
of the classroom to help the students is in languages
and music and math do hand written work more easily
and find more tools for multilingual captioning.
And those are some of our goals
for the upcoming school year.