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Hi everyone my name is Allan Gyorke and I am here to talk to about Pandemic Planning at Penn State.
I work for the Teaching and Learning with Technology Group which means my main focus
is on what faculty, students, and staff are going to do to adapt
the teaching and learning process so its continuous if there is an outbreak.
So what we are really talking about here is the Swine Flu or the H1N1 virus.
Which in the spring started to pop up around the country.
Over the summer there were some concerns that when students return in the fall there would
be a larger outbreak and that could disrupt a university like ours.
So we had some questions, one was, What should we expect? What will faculty need?
How prepared are we? and then more importantly, How prepared can we be by September?
Which was towards the beginning of classes and before things were suppose to hit.
So one question at a time here, What can we expect?
Probably not something like this. This is the nightmare scenario where everyone is
sick at once, it's a worldwide population. There's you know people being
quarantined here and there. I didn't think that we would run into that because as we paid attention
to the CDC it should be more something like this.
Most students who will get affected will get sick it will feel very much like the seasonal flu
which is also going on at same time. They will be able to recover from it without
any serious consequences and eventually there will be a vaccine available
for both the seasonal flu and the H1N1 virus. But our expectations was for really
a "rolling outage" of sorts. So what happens during this "rolling outage?"
Everyone will be affected in some way but not at the same time.
So we are talking about students, faculty, staff, and then people who need to take care of their sick relatives.
People who are sick will be sick for seven to ten days maybe on the outside
and some may get very sick and may need to be hospitalized.
The scenarios led to a couple of cases here that we've worked through
and one of them was a large number of students were out of class at the same time, but others can attend.
So you can imagine the faculty member teaching in front of a class that's half full
maybe they are recording their lecture so students can catch up as they are
able to, as they feel better. Another situation the faculty member
was sick or taking care of sick relatives and may want to continue teaching
or directing a research team. Because some research can't stop, depending on
a time based nature. Technology support staff who were supporting
things that help faculty teach on line, like Adobe Connect
or ANGEL might be sick and then how do we basically back-fill their positions.
And the last scenario is
because of the spread of the virus to control it students and faculty were asked not to attend class to stay home
But everybody is still feeling ok
and how does that teaching and learning process continue. So what we decided to think
about what faculty would need in these situations and we thought they would need to share their materials
and present ideas, present their lecture directly group discussion
that sort of thing. They may need to record their class for later viewing by a
student who can't attend. They may need to create mechanisms for communication and discussion
both small group activity and if groups are working on projects together
that sort of thing. They'll need a way to assess and evaluate student progess
and they'll need both asynchronous and synchronous options.
The asynchronous would be things like ANGEL where you post something, you go back a few hours
later somebody else has replied. The synchronous discussion would be more like
simultaneous connection like you can do through Adobe Connect.
So how prepared can we be by September? Well we decided to use centrally supported
tools that, because they have existing faculty guides
the help desk here will support all those tools.
We have articles in the Knowledgebase that people can look up commonly asked questions
We have second-tier support in groups like ours who can go off and research a question or particularly
problem that people are having. And then typically with centrally supported tools we
a strong vendor relationship, so we can go back to the people who write
the software and ask them questions if we're having issues.
The supported tools that we already in place are things like ANGEL,
Blogs at Penn State, we're doing Web Conferencing though Abode Connects
but other people are using Illuminate Live. And then we also have some options for
pre-recorded lectures. You could use on the Windows side Powerpoint and use
the Adobe Presenter plug-in. On the Mac, which I'm doing right now, you can do a Keynote
presentation and then record audio as you go through the slides.
You can use this tool called Jing, which lets you record five minute segments
but it's free and then you can post those online and most of these you can post
through iTunesU and that's especially important if you have a
audio clips or video clips or images in your materials
that need to be restricted just to the class to comply with the Teach Act.
So we already have these tools in place, we have these tools, but not in one place.
So we created this teaching during a pandemic page on the
TLT website and that's the address at the top. This includes most of these
tools and then links to where you can go for training, how you get started
videos, and it includes things
that are not just the classes and not just how-to guides
but also pedagogical issues. Such as fostering a
discussion in ANGEL. The faculty feedback that we gotten
from this page we did get one request to add a video to explain how to
annotate slides, which I've added. But the
feedback that we've gotten is that it is a comprehensive list of resources. We got several people
saying you know thank-you for putting this together and then the faculty
which responds to this and giving feedback said that they felt confident
that they could use these materials if they needed to, to teach online. So these
resources may not needed this year, but this is certainly not the last
pandemic that we'll see and these materials can also be used to teach
a remote group of students who might be at another university, collaborate with a team of researchers,
who might be imbedded doing field research or in industry
Communicate with students who are on an internship like a student teaching or
or even if their on a study abroad experience, that sort of thing and then
if you happen to need to go off to a conference or do your own field research you can
still continue teaching a class that's here at University Park
or at another campus without having that guilt of abandoning them
to go off and pursue your professional needs. So if you have any questions,
you can contact me, my name is Allan Gyorke. That's Allan,
allan@psu.edu, Thanks!