ACADEMIA Letters TALON and #Take5: Online Initiatives Fostering Reflection About Teaching and Learning in the Now-Times Sandra Abegglen Tom Burns Martina MacFarlane Mac McGinn Fabian Neuhaus Sandra Sinfield Introduction With the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns, many academics across the spectrum have been forced to deliver their classes online. What started as an emergency measure by many higher education institutions in Spring 2020, has now turned to a default: university classes are delivered remotely, with no or only very limited in-person interaction. While this poses many challenges, for example increasing the workloads of already busy faculty and academic staff, it also creates opportunities. It was in this context of exploring the potential of online or distance learning that TALON, the Teaching and Learning Online Network, was founded by the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the University of Calgary in Canada to support lecturers in design with the delivery of their courses, and to increase student experience and success. The #Take5 initiative by the Centre for Professional and Educational Development at London Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom has had a slightly different genesis. #Take5 was developed with the goal of engaging with developments in teaching and learning at a grassroots level. In this current urgent climate, it has moved from occasional, collegiate reflections on learning and teaching to weekly publications Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Sandra Abegglen, sabegglen@gmail.com Citation: Abegglen, S., Burns, T., MacFarlane, M., McGinn, M., Neuhaus, F., Sinfield, S. (2021). TALON and #Take5: Online Initiatives Fostering Reflection About Teaching and Learning in the Now-Times. Academia Letters, Article 407. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL407. 1 helping academic staff develop their ability to teach remotely and potentially assess online. In this letter, we discuss the different ways in which the TALON and #Take5 projects support academics. Importantly, we outline how initiatives like these can help foster a “community of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and develop student and staff partnerships (Healey, Flint & Harrington, 2014) as well as cross-disciplinary and intercontinental collaboration. Recommendations are provided for those who would like to develop similar initiatives at their institutions with the potential to grow them into global networks (Cunningham, Tapsall, Ryan, Stedman, Bagdon & Flew, 1998) that help enhance online teaching and learning. Higher Education, Covid-19, and Technology Enhanced Learning and Teaching With the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the introduction of measures to contain the spread of the virus, higher education institutions across the world were faced with the challenge to move their teaching and learning online within a matter of days. For over two decades, there has been pressure on academics to develop technology enhanced teaching and learning environments (Gorts Morabito, 1999; Sinfield, Burns & Holley, 2009). The assumption was that technology is a ‘good thing’ and that it can improve teaching and student performance. Especially at the beginning of this push, little to no evidence was available to demonstrate that technology did indeed enhance teaching and learning (Bayne, 2015). While a few institutions managed to develop various forms of blended learning, the majority of universities struggled with the demand to embrace online education. With a typical top down managerial approach (Sinfield, Burns & Holley, 2004), most academics were not given the time nor the technology to develop online programs. Neither were they encouraged to engage with the ‘tech’ to achieve effective and engaging teaching and learning (McMurtrie, 2020). This limited academics’ implementation of tech to hardware advice and the provision of diagnostic checklists to solve technical problems. This was often supplemented by instructional sessions for learners to manipulate whatever software the university had invested in. This has now changed with everyone engaging in digital classrooms of sorts (Carey, 2020; Redmond, Abawi, Brown and Henderson, 2018). Technology in teaching and learning has changed over the last couple of years and even more so in the last couple of months due to pandemic restrictions. As the educational landscape shifted, the two projects TALON and #Take5 responded actively to engage with technology for change. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Sandra Abegglen, sabegglen@gmail.com Citation: Abegglen, S., Burns, T., MacFarlane, M., McGinn, M., Neuhaus, F., Sinfield, S. (2021). TALON and #Take5: Online Initiatives Fostering Reflection About Teaching and Learning in the Now-Times. Academia Letters, Article 407. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL407. 2 TALON TALON, the Teaching And Learning Online Network, was set up in response to the nationwide lockdown in Canada in March 2020 and the requirement to move university courses online. The aim was to create a ‘one-stop-shop’ platform as an interactive lexicon where University of Calgary lecturers in design could find out about available tools. The identified issue was not availability of tech but knowledge of how to effectively utilize software and apps for engaging teaching and learning. Quickly the project’s aim expanded to go beyond tools and explore how to enhance online education across the disciplines and in partnership with students. TALON employs now three graduate students as collaborators. Their task is to maintain the TALON platform, grow the resource list, and record voices from academic staff and students. The voices are an interview series capturing the reflection on recent experiences in the online classroom and beyond into the future of online education. This diverse content is published and promoted in a letter, the TALON Letter, that highlights top tips on course design and pedagogy, and provides additional insights into the virtual learning setting via articles and news items. The letter is distributed widely to foster a dialogue amongst experts, practitioners and learners. #Take5 #Take5 was conceived as an experiment in ‘staff development’ in a pre-Covid age of blended learning as academics were being exhorted to develop their ability to teach and assess online, and to use technology to enhance student learning. The project team explored the potential of asynchronous teaching/learning online while supporting academic staff. The aim was to see if professional development content can be delivered online in a way that made it engaging and useful. A blog was set up, providing ‘bite sized’ information (hence the name #Take5) supplemented by a ‘cache’ of resources already proven to work. Initially all the #Take5 posts were written by the team, but over time outreach to the wider learning and academic development communities and to disciplinary academics led to guest posts providing case studies and stories of engaging practice. This includes creative teaching ideas, covering everything from embodied ways to support academic reading, role plays and simulations, writing across the disciplines, developing visual practices and developing a digital student. In this way participants, writers and readers, could engage with pedagogy and technology dialogically rather than coercively. #Take5 is now the professional development blog of both London Metropolitan University and the Association of Learning Development in Higher Education reaching a wide readerAcademia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Sandra Abegglen, sabegglen@gmail.com Citation: Abegglen, S., Burns, T., MacFarlane, M., McGinn, M., Neuhaus, F., Sinfield, S. (2021). TALON and #Take5: Online Initiatives Fostering Reflection About Teaching and Learning in the Now-Times. Academia Letters, Article 407. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL407. 3 ship. Like TALON, it acknowledges the super-complexity of both academics and students’ lives and the teaching and learning contexts in which we all operate (Abegglen, Burns, Maier & Sinfield, 2020). As such, it promotes a critical reflection on technology and online education. Critical Online Pedagogy: Potentials and Transferability While #Take5 and TALON have developed at different times and in different contexts, both efforts recognize the need for teaching and learning practice to embrace technology while recognizing implications and the need for emancipatory practice. The successful online university requires methods and methodologies that embrace uncertainty (Cormier, 2012) and creativity (Barnett, 2004; Robinson, 2006; Sinfield, Burns & Abegglen, 2019) and that offer multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) into the conversations about technology and education. If those conversations and developments are held to one side - in siloes - by those predominantly interested in tech rather than in active and engaging teaching and learning, something important is lost. For it is in the collective “third space”’ (Bhabha, 2004; Burns, Sinfield & Abegglen, 2019; Gutierrez, 2008) whereby “being with” (Nancy, 2000), individuals can ‘become’, together. Thus, both #Take5 and TALON share their resources and insights while advocating for praxes and habits that foster collaboration, exploration and conversation. With this letter we invite others to develop their own projects and to create avenues for the formation of a “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Through this we can challenge, extend and support online education and help develop a critical (Freire, 2007) and democratic (Dewey, 1916) online pedagogy. The sharing of experiences and resources provides an important first step to create a transformative space where the ‘fixed’ and ‘fix it’ use of technology and the negative striations of ‘Internet schooling’ can be swept away. Together, academics can (re)define online education and create “a collective Third Space, in which students begin to reconceive who they are and what they might be able to accomplish academically and beyond” (Gutierrez, 2008, p. 148). References Abegglen, S., Burns, T., Maier, S. and Sinfield, S., 2020. Supercomplexity: Acknowledging students’ lives in the 21st century university. Innovative Practice in Higher Education, 4(1), pp. 20-38. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Sandra Abegglen, sabegglen@gmail.com Citation: Abegglen, S., Burns, T., MacFarlane, M., McGinn, M., Neuhaus, F., Sinfield, S. (2021). TALON and #Take5: Online Initiatives Fostering Reflection About Teaching and Learning in the Now-Times. Academia Letters, Article 407. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL407. 4 Bhabha, H. K., 2004. The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge. Barnett, R., 2004. Learning for an Unknown Future. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(1). Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0729436042000235382 Bayne, S., 2015. What’s the Matter with ‘Technology-enhanced Learning’?. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(1), pp.5-20. Burns, T., Sinfield, S. and Abegglen, S., 2019. “Third Space Partnerships with Students: Becoming Educational Together”. International Journal for Students as Partners, 3(1), pp. 60-68. Carey, B., 2020, June 13. “What we’re Learning About Online Learning”. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/13/health/school-learning-onlineeducation.html?referringSource=articleShare Cormier, D., 2012, March 26. Embracing Uncertainty: Rhizomatic Learning. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=95&v=VJIWyiLyBpQ Cunningham, S., Tapsall, S., Ryan, Y., Stedman, L. Bagdon, K. and Flew, T., 1998. New Media and Borderless Education: A Review of the Convergence between Global Media Networks and Higher Education Provision. Canberra: Department of Employability, Education and Training and Youth Affairs. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gorts Morabito, M. (1999). Online Distance Education: Historical Perspective and Practical Application. Dissertation.Com. Gutierrez, K. D., 2008. “Developing a Socio-critical Literacy in the Third Space”. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), pp. 148-164. Retrieved from http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/ xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdftsnR0mXbcJ.pdf Healey, M., Flint, A. and Harrington, K., 2014. “Engagement Through Partnership: Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education”. Higher Education Academy. Retrieved from https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/engagement_through_ partnership.pdf Lave, J. and Wenger, E., 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Sandra Abegglen, sabegglen@gmail.com Citation: Abegglen, S., Burns, T., MacFarlane, M., McGinn, M., Neuhaus, F., Sinfield, S. (2021). TALON and #Take5: Online Initiatives Fostering Reflection About Teaching and Learning in the Now-Times. Academia Letters, Article 407. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL407. 5 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMurtrie, B., 2020, 7 October. “The New Rules of Engagement”. The Chronicle for Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-new-rules-ofengagement?cid=gen_sign_in Redmond, P., Heffernan, A., Abawi, L., Brown, A. and Henderson, R., 2018. “An Online Engagement Framework for Higher Education”. Online Learning, 22(1), pp. 183-204. Robinson, K., 2006, February.“’Do Schools Kill Creativity?”’. TED Talk. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity?language=en Sinfield, S., Burns, T. and Abegglen, S., 2019. “Exploration: Becoming Playful - the Power of a Ludic Module”. In: A James and C. Nerantzi, eds., The Power of Play in Higher Education: Creativity in Tertiary Learning. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 23-31. Sinfield, S., Burns, T. and Holley, D., 2004. “Outsiders Looking in or Insiders Looking out? Widening Participation in a post-1992 University”. In: J. Satterthwaite, E. Atkinson & W. Martin, eds., The Disciplining of Education: New Languages of Power and Resistance. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, pp. 137-152. Sinfield, S., Holley, D. and Burns, T., 2009. “A Journey Into Silence: Students, Stakeholders and the Impact of a Strategic Governmental Policy Document in the UK”. Social Responsibility Journal, 5(4), pp. 566-574. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Sandra Abegglen, sabegglen@gmail.com Citation: Abegglen, S., Burns, T., MacFarlane, M., McGinn, M., Neuhaus, F., Sinfield, S. (2021). TALON and #Take5: Online Initiatives Fostering Reflection About Teaching and Learning in the Now-Times. Academia Letters, Article 407. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL407. 6