Hi everyone,

For the past 15 years I’ve worked as an educator with adolescents and youth ages 14-25 in emergency contexts. Since Wednesday afternoon when received the news that we would move our classes on line, as students and as professors, I’ve been thinking more and more about some of the things I’ve learned through this work. I’ve especially been thinking about how I’ll use these lessons in my online teaching.

As an exercise for this class, I thought I would write them up as professional practice for myself – as a humanitarian responder I’m supposed to be quick with ready, practical, reliable guidance for other educators, so I’ll give that a try and see how I do in this emergency (more about the term “emergency” below). I also thought it would be interesting to think and write about how I can try to put some of the lessons I’ve learned into practice in designing and carrying out my undergraduate class online. I hope what I’ll come up with might be interesting and even useful reading for the you.

In this post I’m offering an outline of the key points I’ve include in my draft. For my explanations, examples of how this has worked in other contexts, ideas about how I’ll work these into online teaching, and a whole bunch of caveats, please see the draft attached.

That attachment is DRAFT and I know it is a rough one! I’ve written this as quickly as possible to get it written. In case you might find it helpful I wanted to share it with you – and I’m wondering if you think I should edit and refine it to share with others. I’ve found it helpful to write it (so thank you if you read it, and thank you if you can find patience with anything you feel I got wrong). Also, please please forgive me if my tone is off – sanctimonious or patronizing – I don’t mean to position myself as an “expert,” just trying to share things I find helpful. (Feel free to share feedback on my tone to make it better in the draft).

Please also share any further feedback if you feel I might work on this and make it a resource for other educators. I would also LOVE your ideas about whether or how you might put these into practice ein your own online teaching.

Finally, all of this comes with one big caveat that I’ll share here: Many of these lessons are designed especially for educators like me who do NOT have formal training in psychology, by people who do have such training, and have worked in emergencies. And I know many of you are studying psychology, and know more than I do. If you are a psychologist or psychology student/specialist, please read these in context; please correct me if I got anything wrong.

Here are my key lessons:

1) Psychosocial wellbeing – young people’s emotional wellbeing and social roles and relationships – is most immediately and negatively affected when students’ formal education is disrupted. Conversely, education in an emergency can be designed to play a key role in fostering and supporting their psychosocial wellbeing.

2) We and our students are under significant stress, and it is affecting us all right now.

a. We are dealing with significant worry and uncertainty about the outbreak itself, and how it will affect our lives in the coming weeks and months.

Education in an emergency be a powerful tool to operationalize young people’s human need to feel hopeful and feel a sense of productive agency over their future.

b. Our roles, relationships and routines have been completely disrupted through the closure of “regular” school.

Education in an emergency can recreate and restore this space for young people, giving them a negotiating tool to make time for themselves, and an opportunity to connect with their peers.

c. We are all facing more social isolation than usual, and this may increase. And social isolation can be much more stressful and unhealthy than we realize.

Education in an emergency can reintroduce these opportunities for students to take at least some time to themselves, possibly connect with others and have something to look forward to in an otherwise boring, isolating day.

3) Normal responses to intense and sudden onset stress fall into two categories:

1. Extra-energetic feelings, such as being jittery, forgetful, crying, irritable, angry, jumpy, talkative, laughing or crying
2. Feeling exhausted, lethargic, depressed.

Again, these are NORMAL responses to intense stress. We need not see them as signs of mental health problems that will have long-term consequences for our students (more on that, below).

Education in an emergency can accommodate students’ intensified feelings and behaviours, giving them some helpful ways to cope with these feelings without pathologizing them.

4) Education during and after an emergency can recreate helpful structure and routine for young people, giving them some possible solutions for the practical problem they are facing, and relieving stress.

5) Young people benefit when their education during and after an emergency gives them the option to take a break from the “emergency.”

6) Educators can be most helpful and avoid harm by using education practices they know well, while avoiding improvising with psychological diagnoses, terminology and clinical practices in an education context (unless they have relevant, specific training in those areas of psychology). It is especially important to avoid the term “trauma” in our own thinking, in our assumptions about how emergencies are affecting us, and in the way we talk with our students.

7) Friendships and peer relationships are especially important and helpful for young people during an emergency, and education create opportunities to build and strengthen these relationships.

8) Educators who work directly with young people in emergencies are among the people positioned best to connect them with other essential services and supports they may need.

9) Young people have the ability and the human right to make an active, positive difference in an emergency. Education can open opportunities for young people to formulate their own ideas and opinions with respect to their situations, and take action to pursue their priorities.

… and being helpful to our students can help us as educators, too. Thank you for reading this, and thereby giving me a chance to feel better by feeling helpful!

I hate Blackboard, but for the time being I’m using it with my students in my undergrad Education class anyway. Our readings and class discussions, especially last week, gave me a lot of very helpful strategies I can use, and am using now, to try to make Blackboard work as well as possible for my students. If you have any practical tips for what you do (or don’t do) to make Blackboard actually work well as a learning tool, I would love it if we could gather and share them here.

Meanwhile, I’m especially thankful to Ayo for the reminder that the best way to find out what works (and what doesn’t) for students is to ask them, so I did that today. By doing so I learned something very useful that I thought might be helpful to others:

Apparently when students are using Blackboard on mobile devices they can’t access any Word documents or PowerPoints that are uploaded. However, they can access PDFs. I didn’t know that – and had uploaded all kinds of assignment guidelines, my syllabus, etc. that were either in Word or PowerPoint. So, now I’ll be converting all of those to PDFs and re-uploading them – and making sure I convert to PDF any other files I might share in the future.

As I mentioned in class, another strategy I use is NOT to require students to submit any assignments on Blackboard – they’re required just to e-mail them directly to me. This seems to work well for everyone, including me.

Apologies if any of this is very obvious to some or all of you – I’m guessing that I may not be the only one who is new at this and still figuring it out. Thanks!

Hi everyone, I’m starting this thread so we have a place to share any websites or other projects and platforms that we find in our travels – including any that might be directly or indirectly related to the research or project concept that one of is is working on, or just any that are interesting or inspiring… I will share a few I’ve found below, and would love it if you would do the same!

The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, an online training module presented by the National Endowment for the Humanities, offers a project planning guide for anyone designing a “web-based, user-facing, digital humanities project.” Poking around on the site a bit, I was curious to notice that it was hard to find any explicit mention on the site of who, exactly, the site and training program are intended for – maybe a bit surprising, since one of the key recommendations offered in the modules is that project planners should identify the “designated communities” of users for their products. Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear that the training is designed to be useful for individuals or teams working in a wide range of settings (academia, arts, public service, entrepreneurial, any combination of the above), and is relevant and helpful for us.

A key principle and purpose of the training program, as indicated in the title, is to support project planners in planning for the sustainability of their products. Coming from the world of humanitarian aid, I feel a special appreciation for their emphasis on this principle, as well as admiration for the concrete, clear approaches they offer.* Section A, the Project Survey, begins by recommending that we begin by determining what “sustainability” could and should look mean for our projects, and planning toward that vision from inception. Module 1-A, then, gives us a translation and application of the concept of “sustainability” into even simpler and more specific terms by naming and discussing the phases and sub-phases of the typical arc of the “life” of a digital product or platform. I found the descriptions of what these phases might look like especially useful in imaging concrete possibilities for my own project.

A second principle we have started to discussion, and that I see addressed in the design and purpose of the training program, is “failing well.” The “About” page of the site explains that the concept of the program originates from experiences with MedArt, a digital collection of medieval art and architecture that was a great success in the first phase of its availability and use, but which over time had become less frequently used and updated. The Sustainability Roadmap doesn’t actually use the word “fail,” but I was still impressed that the training program had been developed through a process that began with their team’s recognition and acknowledgment of a project’s flaws and limitations, and then synthesizing and sharing real and applicable lessons from that experience.

Here are a few questions that I hoped we could discuss to compare our experiences as we worked through Module A:

1) What are some of the questions from any of the module that you would have expected, were already thinking about and/or felt well prepared to answer?

2) What are some of the questions, from any module, that you didn’t expect, and/or addressed issues that you had not (yet) been thinking about? Of these, which did you find:

• Helpful, inspiring or evocative? (I could also say “generative” but am tired of that word at the moment, no offense to anyone who likes it. Include it if it works for you, though.).
• Overwhelming, discouraging, or confounding?
• Not relevant or applicable to your project?

3) Our readings on project planning, most of which are addressed to software design projects, give quite a bit of attention to questions around who the end-users of our projects may be, and their experiences in using what we produce. In my post for last week I mentioned that I especially like the idea of thinking about who the users or “designated communities” of research findings might be, especially because with respect to my own work, it seems like a strong way of operationalizing my accountability to the people (youth, communities) that I’m ostensibly working with and for. I’ll add that I was fascinated and inspired to learn more about everyone else’s projects, and especially to see how many of you are working on projects that are very explicitly intended to be practical, useful tools and resources to benefit educators, students and others, within and beyond the academy. (And that’s not meant to imply criticism for anyone who’s projects focus more on studies and uses within the academy). To continue that conversation:

• Has your thinking about who your users or “designated communities” may be changed or evolved in the past couple of weeks?
• Are there new potential “unintended” communities that might use or benefit from your work?

In his blog post “Context and practicalities,” Christopher Stein offers his students (and us) a clearly structured, easy-to-read overview to approaches to product design, and especially software design. The post provides guidance that I found practical (as promised in the title), relevant and useful in understanding the software and digital platform design process, and thinking ahead to possible and certain future projects. Equally helpful is his historical (or at least narrative and sequential) description of the iterative developments of of the Waterfall Method, Instructional Systems Design, User-Centered Design, “agile,” all terms from the design world that I have heard often, but had not seen defined and explained so clearly. (I believe this post was written before the further development of Human Centered Design that arguably has evolved from User-Centered Design; for anyone interested here’s a quick explanation of the difference and relationship between the two).

Having never designed software, and imagining that the same is true of most of us, I thought it might be useful to relate Stein’s post to at least one areas that is more familiar to all of us, namely, research.

In this regard I was I interested to compare the guiding questions that Stein recommends in the “Five W’s and one H,” as well his description of the Waterfall and User-Centered Design processes, with the questions and steps we each may typically take in initiating and planning a research project. As a thought experiment, I considered how an educational research study might work – and possibly be enriched? –  if it were carried out as if it were a software design project.

Several of the questions and steps Stein describes (“What are the goals of the project? What need or problem Will it satisfy?”; Analysis, Design, and Testing, respectively) seem more or less analogous to those built into a typical research process. The most significant difference in the two types of processes that jumped out at me was the emphasis on purpose and usability (or just usefulness) that is integral to the software design process, and not always given weight or even present in educational research. I find the idea of an educational research project and process that tests whether findings are purposeful, usable and useful (or even used) compelling – especially if that testing process were guided by the perspectives and experiences of people who are meant to benefit from that research. This line of thinking also brought to my mind Leigh Patel’s guidance for researchers to decolonize the research process by beginning with the questions, “Why this? Why me? Why now?” (Patel 2016) – and the hopeful possibility that some of these questions might be answered not only through our own reflection as researchers, but through practical assessment by the people whom we intend to serve through our research.

Could Stein’s “Five W’s and one H,” and/or the Waterfall or User-Centered Design processes be applied and/or adapted to a research project in your respective disciplines? How would those differ from or alter your typical research process? How might applying or adapting these questions or steps to  your research process affect the relative validity and quality of the results and/or product of your research?

If the results of one of your studies were tested by an “end user” of your research – who would you want that end user to be, and how and for what would you want them to test the results and products of your study?