3/26 email
From: Faculty <faculty-bounces@lists.csimediaculture.com> on behalf of Michael Mandiberg <Michael.Mandiberg@csi.cuny.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2020 11:45 AM
To: faculty@lists.csimediaculture.com
Cc: mmandiberg@gc.cuny.edu; sgonzalez1@gc.cuny.edu
Subject: [Faculty] CUNY Distance Learning Archive / Request for Contributions
Hello All,
I hope you are holding together in this upside down time. I know we are all overwhelmed with emails, and pauses and recalibrations – so I'm actually writing about those destabilizing disruptions and disorienting new conditions:
I'm writing to share some information about the CUNY Distance Learning Archive project: http://cuny.is/cdla. And to ask you to 1) share this info widely 2) share materials with the archive – especially materials that document your experience over the past three weeks.
I am particularly keen on ensuring that programs like ours document the specific challenges that we have faced as we have confronted the challenge of moving media + production courses online.
Created over the week following the move to distance learning, by a group led collaboratively by the Ph.D. Program in English’s Knowledge Infrastructure class and the Interactive Technology & Pedagogy certificate program (ITP), the project aims to make space to build an archive documenting the ways that members of the CUNY community are responding to the rapid pedagogical shift to remote learning in response to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). The group is working on several fronts, including archiving social media and official emails from each college administration, capturing the changes to college websites, and writing reflective texts.
My co-teacher this semester Sonia K. González and I are working with current students from the ITP class, to collect writings from students, instructors, and staff, including specifically HEOs and CLTs, about this moment. We seek responses that reflect on the planning, implementation, and impact of rapidly moving courses to online forums throughout the CUNY system.
Our request:
We are asking for your written contribution. We have drafted a set of writing prompts: You may choose to write short responses to all of these, or focus on just one. We welcome all approaches. We have no word count expectations; write as much or as little as you feel is appropriate.
Please send this to everyone you know at CUNY. We welcome contributions from students, faculty, and staff, including specifically HEOs and CLTs.
Please signal boost on social: @cunyarchive has accounts on Insta, FB, and Tw: https://twitter.com/cunyarchive/status/1238971426905915398
We are interested in written contributions — short and long — from all members of the CUNY community. Contributions from students, faculty, and staff, including HEOs and CLTs are all welcome.
Please submit your text as a word document via the submission form on the CDLA commons site: https://cdla.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ Look for “Upload your file here.”
Sonia and I are happy to answer any questions.
Thank you! Michael
Do not feel obligated to respond to all of these. Feel free to submit another written reflection about how COVID-19 has impacted your CUNY courses. For example, if you have emailed students, staff, or faculty since this public health crisis began, please submit that, or include it in your response.
Who are you (questions for all)?
Are you a student, staff, faculty, or more than one?
At which CUNY campus(es) do you teach or learn?
What academic discipline(s) are you in?
At what level do you teach, work, or learn: community college, four-year college, graduate school, etc...?
What is your position: adjunct, administration, undergraduate student, etc...?
Questions for all:
We want to understand your plans for your classes as they move to online platforms. From your perspective, how much did the courses you are taking, teaching, or supporting have to change in order to move to a remote learning environment? Are they still the same courses?
What do you anticipate are the potential advantages and limitations of an online class in your discipline? If your discipline has specific experiential learning, can it be recreated in an online environment? What might be possible with online learning that was not possible in your traditional classroom? If you are an instructor, what is your plan for adapting your course? If you are administrative or instructional staff, how is this impacting the work you are doing or the courses you are working with? How are you being called upon to adapt in this moment? As a student, how has your course changed, and how will you have to change your study habits, work schedule, and other life responsibilities?
How will this process affect access and accessibility of higher education? If you are a student, do you have sufficient access to technology, software, devices to complete the rest of your semester? If you are staff managing a lab, how is your program supporting access to this infrastructure? If you are an instructor, how have you made accommodations for students’ different degrees of technological access to avoid exacerbating these inequities? How will this experiment impact the accessibility needs of students with disabilities?
Questions for all:
From your perspective as a student, staff, and/or instructor, do you feel prepared for online learning? How has this abrupt shift to online learning affected the kind of work you do, and how much you are doing? Is it an increase or decrease in: studying, teaching, preparation, intellectual labor, emotional labor, physical labor, etc...? How has your definition of educational success/failure shifted as a result of the unexpected transition to online learning? How have course expectations shifted in a remote learning environment? Do you think these expectations are different for students, faculty, and staff?
Questions for all:
How and where are you seeking, teaching, and learning support as classes move to online platforms?
How have you supported others as courses move to online platforms?
How are you addressing the possible changes in the health and wellbeing of those around you? How do you translate this into your communications with others: students, staff, faculty, etc…?
Where and when are you engaging with your online class? How does that environment enable you or prevent you from engaging, in comparison to the face to face environment?
How do you think this experience will change education overall, and how society views traditional and online education?
Do you think this will result in more or less online courses in the future?
As a teacher or staff member, have you found that you need to engage online with students’ emotional responses to the changes — personal and educational — wrought by the COVID-19 crisis? As a student, have you found that faculty and staff are engaging with you in this way, and if so, is it welcome or unwelcome?