OLDaily

Four Core Priorities for Trauma-Informed Distance Learning
Kara Newhouse, Mind/Shift, 2020/04/06

No doubt educators are being flooded with advice on how to teach online in a crisis. I'm trying not to add to this deluge, but also to highlight tose articles that are genuinely worthwhile (at least in my own opinion). This is one. Kara Newhouse draws on the expertise of Alex Shevrin Venet, who facilitates professional development on implementing trauma-informed practices. The four priorities (pointedly not 'strategies') are predictibility, flexibility, connection and empowerment. Each responds to something trauma can disrupt or take away entirely, and which are important to well-being and resiliance. It's a well thought-out presentation

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Accessibility Suffers During Pandemic
Greta Anderson, Inside Higher Ed, 2020/04/06

What's unfortunate about this result is that we've had decades to adopt an accessible-first approach to online learning and appear to have failed. In the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law in 1990. It's remarkable. Thirty years later, "although some faculty members may have discussed digital accessibility in the past, they might not be aware of the importance of ensuring it for all students and may not understand that it goes beyond making special accommodations for individual students that specifically request it." Even after all these years we read of needing to make accommodations for a recalcitrant faculty of teachers and professors. At a certain point, though, they cease being merely recalcitrant and start being just wrong.

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Reflections Week Three: creativity and compassion
Lawrie Phipps, lawrie : converged, 2020/04/06

This is some much-needed pushback against the widespread purchase and deployment of online proctoring systems. "Do we need proctoring? I like Ken Bauer Favel’s response: 'I prefer and suggest that we start with trusting our students and their desire to learn.'” Quite so. And as Lawrie Phipps goes on to argue, " We need to stop buying into the vendor driven narrative that starts with the premise that all students cheat. Stop it. Enough."

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Best of EVO 2020
Vance Stevens, Learning2gether, 2020/04/06

One of the problems with live events is that they take time. Sure you can speed up the video a bit, but you're still committed to a discrete block of time, and when the event is a two day online conference, it's going to take at least a day. In the physical world we account for this by blocking out some time to actually leave the audience. Then, while attending in person, we fill the gaps with email, Twitter, and socializing in general. Yes, you can do this online, but it's less easy to divide our attention this way. All of this is a way of saying I did not review everything from this conference. But I still think readers (who have the time) will find them interesting.

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