This session illustrates the challenges in transitioning design and delivery teams to build and deliver online-centric materials in online synchronous classrooms across corporations. From instructional design to classroom instruction, a rapid leap was made to switch from one system to another system. With dozens of countries and languages, transitioning online at a rapid pace presented extensive challenges to learning and development teams. From a corporate perspective, this session reveals insights into learning and development and also details lessons learned about the interplay between design and delivery teams and the interconnections among them. The session also depicts future insight into emerging learning and design trends among corporations.

The 21st century has forced us to incorporate the use of technology in all areas of our lives, particularly during the pandemic.  An increasing segment of this virtual reality is education. Virtual schools provide numerous advantages that traditional schools do not offer, such as class offerings, and auditory books on the internet.  A part of the overall student population is unlikely to achieve in a regular school environment and may be drawn to a virtual school. These students are generally of color and come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Opting to complete one’s educational journey via a virtual school has become the means of being more successful in a world that may have labeled one disadvantaged or at-risk, or failing.  The purpose of this study was to determine whether a virtual school serves today’s students.  Serving, in this inquiry, means assisting and supporting students in their efforts to be successful in completing their high school education. The strategy was to seek congruence regarding the responses of teachers, staff, and students to determine areas of agreement and difference. The study found significant differences in race, age, maturation, and satisfaction of students.

Summer 2020 - the perfect year for summer camp! It may sound ridiculous, but that’s exactly how nearly three hundred faculty and staff across the 10-campus University of Hawai‘i system and beyond spent a week of their stay-at-home summer. In this session, we will share how the global pandemic yielded an opportunity for hundreds of educational professionals to come together…apart…for a week of online summer fun! Hosted by Kapi‘olani Community College in Honolulu Hawai‘i, the virtual summer camp came complete with session formats including fireside chats, group excursions, open swims, and camp counselor sessions. Engaging conversations and participatory webinars focused on everything from teaching and learning online and supporting peer mentors and tutors, to fostering healthy workplace relationships and personal health and wellness. This week-long professional development event was free of charge and hosted entirely via Zoom meetings with a total attendance of 1,431. Specifically, 43 sessions were created and delivered by 4 featured keynote speakers and 35 presenters, along with the participation of 18 facilitators who helped host and monitor the synchronous sessions. In this session, we will share our relevant data, strategies, and lessons learned from marketing, communications, scheduling, facilitation, logistical coordination, and developing a robust sense of place and community in a fully online context.

The rise of remote workers has demanded a change in the way employees work together. While teams have contributed to organizational success for many years, and will continue to play an important role, the new paradigm necessitates that teams complete a greater portion of their work virtually. Educational institutions will need to educate employees on the new skills that are required. Incorporating team projects and providing support for team success in the classroom will be instrumental in helping organizations continue to achieve success in incorporating virtual teams into their workplace and culture.

Educational technology companies hailed themselves as saviours during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Private Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like Google for Education or Microsoft Teams for Education saw their user base grow exponentially thanks to the open endorsement from governments worldwide. This governmental decision in education in response to an unpreparedness to a full pivot to online learning enabled Edtech services to launch fast implementation to facilitate learning during this period. Google for Education rose to the challenge and has regularly updated their tools to reinforce their position. Yet a rushed and uncautious implementation of a private LMSs can be seen as naive and short-sighted, given Alphabet Inc’s lack of ethical considerations regarding data privacy. In this paper, the rise of Google for Education as a solution to online learning is reviewed by two primary users/teachers with a holistic view of the prospective privacy and democratic issues. Furthermore the benefits and concerns regarding the uncautious adoption of EdTech tools provided by companies with tarnished ethical records are discussed.

The no-end-in-sight pandemic has given birth to nebulous unquiet apathy. A COVID slide in schools has wiped away 70% of learning advances in schools. Athletes find themselves staring at empty calendars, no competitions in sight; with plans to enter Olympics or pro sports on indefinite hold; “unadulterated emptiness (has no) active, competitive environment(s) in which to feel at ease”.
This is acedia, an unrelenting horizonlessness going beyond anxiety or distress.  Caused by a sense of uncertainty, itself caused by a sense of futurelessness. the immobilizing fatigue of acedia comes to us from ancient Greeks, who named it in a negative way; “a-“ means without or lacking; and “kedos”, means care or concern. Those who suffer from it are at once sad and anxious, frustrated and conscious of a block in the path to growth, understanding, action, or even a tomorrow.

This presentation discusses acedia, using and applying the iterative three-part Rolfe model: What? So what? Now what? The problem will be defined and recognized, its causes considered, and possible ways to educate it away reflected upon.

What is it, what are its features, causes, effects, consequences?

So what? What actions can be taken to address it, to eliminate or attenuate its causes and its immobilizing consequences?

Now what? Synthesizing the what and the so what, participants can plan together ways to address specific aspects of acedia comprising blocks to progress that we can remove together.

Round table will offer a forum for description, analysis, and discussion of mentally blinding effects of overlapping social psychological phenomena influencing decision-making and learning amid a fast-paced, updated multiply mediated information flow.

Confirmation bias, fixation, mental shortcuts, motivated reasoning, and online echo chambers have borne worldwide myopiedémie (myopiademic), as researcher Lamontagne calls the mental blindness epidemic.

The blindness to alternative points of view, solutions, change, has been internationalized. But because of its birth and growth online, it can be addressed online; it has been depicted as a “filter bubble.”

A background of “filter bubbles,” popularized by E. Pariser will serve as the shell of the presentation, a graphic of what happens when common social psychological conditions are manifest online:

Word associations and word clouds show the bubbling.

Five objectives:

1. Define parameters of myopiedémie, myopiademic, particularly as exacerbated during pandemic
2. Describe and define the filter bubble as a graphic description of myopiedémie
3. Evaluate online resources for objectivity via MIT Media Lab, Mayo Clinic, Lead Stories, FactCheck, ProPublica, and Snopes
4. Learn and argue an alien perspective, playing devil’s advocate
5. Understand how and why people of languages and cultures other than their own inhabit alternative, still-blinding, filter bubbles.

In response to the Coronavirus pandemic, we transitioned a STEM Pedagogy course for pre-service teacher candidates in an undergraduate elementary teacher education program to be taught fully online.  In this session, we will present the overall design of the course and the strategies we used to engage pre-service teachers with integrated STEM teaching and learning.  These included opportunities for pre-service teachers to work with home-based materials to engage in STEM tasks from a learner’s perspective while also exploring digital tools they can use as teachers.  We will share examples of asynchronous modules we designed to prepare pre-service teachers for zoom sessions with the goal of integrating data collection and the engineering design process as seamlessly as possible.  Next, we will discuss the challenges and lessons learned.  While pre-service teachers had ample opportunities to explore integrated STEM education as a learner, these opportunities did not always translate to success with planning their own STEM lessons.  As a result, we intend to build in opportunities for pre-service teachers to more explicitly develop their knowledge for planning integrated STEM lessons in future course iterations.  Last, we will open up the session for a discussion among other teacher education colleagues to consider successful, class-tested strategies to help teacher candidates learn STEM pedagogy from a distance.

In this presentation, we share how we designed and implemented an e-portfolio assessment in five sections of a technology course for pre-service teachers. The impetus for using portfolios began during the COVID-19 pandemic. The course had several in-class activities, some graded, that felt potentially overwhelming when incorporated into a remote class. Whereas on campus students simply showed up and participated, remote learning complicated the process. Getting students to show up, interact, and succeed with the learning activities on their personal (rather than lab) computers, was a little less predictable. The instructional team worried that the class as previously taught had too many moving parts for smooth remote delivery and management, but still wanted to retain and assess many of those activities. By shifting to portfolios and providing students with a list of competencies to demonstrate, students could master competencies during synchronous sessions or on their own. Competency lists included both required elements and choice, and varied levels that corresponded with different grades. Proof of mastery could be demonstrated via screen shots or videos and comments, all of which were collected on cluster.co. A post-course survey found that overall students deemed the activity worthwhile in multiple ways (learning skills, demonstrating skills, career preparation), and felt they had sufficient support to succeed.

The Loyola Notre Dame Library’s makerspace, The Innovation Station, launched in 2017-18. After seeing nearly three years of dramatic growth both in terms of equipment use and in consultations, use of the Innovation Station came to a halt with the closing of the physical building due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Library’s Technology Services Unit, with partnership from colleagues in Access Services and Research & Instruction, developed a plan to safely reopen as much makerspace functionality as possibly in the fall, while also implementing procedures that limit the need for face to face interactions, encourage social distancing, promote virtual services, and facilitate the cleaning of touch points. These procedures include expanding virtual offerings, such as library chat, virtual chat, web-conferencing based class tours, and video tutorials. These virtual service points will prove to be invaluable, not only during the crisis, but post-crisis. The Innovation Station will emerge better than before.