FACE COVID by Dr Russ Harris
A great reading resource to help in those trying times that is very practical easy to use and follow a set of steps to a healthy mental state.
F = Focus on what’s in your control
A = Acknowledge your thoughts & feelings
C = Come back into your body
E = Engage in what you’re doing
C = Committed action
O = Opening up
V = Values
I = Identify resources
D = Disinfect & distance
If you haven’t read it, the original can be found here (Harris, 2020a) and Youtube video (Harris, 2020b) can be found below:
How to work effectively at home by Erik Devaney
A fine list of 20 or so tips (Devaney, 2018), with extra comments from people who experienced the environment first, handed making them so much more human and relatable. A great addition are the links expanding on some of the topics like usage of video game soundtracks.
From my personal experience I would suggest several more ideas:
- Create office space – Working from home does not equal being at home. You should move your computer desk space around to ensure there is no backlight entering the camera (either from windows, balcony, lightbulb).
- Invest in your equipment – working from more than 1 screen increases your productivity, having better quality mic and camera helps with communication
- Look after your health – having comfortable work chair/desk at right hight are also crucial, but even accessories like vertical mouse, arthritis gloves or protective glasses (like Gunnars) can make your work pain free.
- Use Calendar and Task manager tools like Planner or Trello to stay on top of your game.
- Air your space – make sure you have fresh air indoor, this always calms down and helps to focus on tasks at hand
Virna Rossis’s ‘Fast Switch’ video tutorials
The materials provided are created in a good faith with many valid points raised through the series of dozen or so videos (Rossi, 2020), and yes I have watched them all. Those materials surely will serve as a great guide to those who never explored digital teaching and learning. However, there are several downsides with the approaches taken:
- The Pandemic was in the making from December/January and unfortunately, too few people started preparing for the potential outbreak at that point (including myself), I have juggled my materials around to deliver all teaching materials while in class, focus on basic practice only and expand my out of hours support via emails/one drive
- Vimeo has certain limitations that make it difficult to work with – no video speed control, no autogenerated captioning, no automatic roll between movies (playlist, as movies, play in reverse – from newest to oldest) no sectioning/titling within the video.
- As much as I agree that creating a fully online course in academia takes years of preparation I do believe this is not the case in the industry as proven by dozens of successful and coherent online providers via YouTube, Udemy courses and Khan Academy but rather a matter of lack of will and funding, rather than capabilities or technology.
- Focusing on temporal measures and ad-hoc fixes to deliver “minimum viable transitioned course” is not a solution, unfortunately. The focus should be on delivery of high-quality courses with re-training and re-assigning staff where necessary to support this. All Digital Learning teams are underfunded and understaffed to provide basic assistance to the whole of University and now putting everything on those small teams is unfair and unpractical.
- Believing that there will be Post-COVID is naive. This type of diseases do not disappear overnight, have cold and flu season for generations, now it will be expanded by COVID and we have to learn how to live with it as there is no coming back to what was before.
Benneth & Barp 2008: Peer observation – a case for doing it online
A good read into benefits of peer learning as a teaching and learning technique which can be explored online (Bennett and Barp, 2008). On my own course, we do peer learning on year 1 in a very specific matter, we actively discourage students from working together on the same piece of work – as we are teaching them a new language, students should not write anything for each other. However, we do encourage them to have conceptual conversations about their work, discussing potential solutions and critique of each other’s work.
As we are a high-tech course we use mainly Moodle as our go-to space for all discussions, presentations and activities and every year as Digital Learning adds more features we explore their potential to assist us with improving the quality of teaching and delivery of our sessions.
References:
Bennett, S. and Barp, D., 2008. Peer observation – a case for doing it online. Teaching in Higher Education, [online] 13(5), pp.559-570. Available at: <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562510802334871> [Accessed 26 November 2020].
Devaney, E., 2018. How to Work From Home: 20 Tips From People Who Do It Successfully. [Blog] HubSpot, Available at: <https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/productivity-tips-working-from-home> [Accessed 24 May 2020].
Harris, R., 2020a. FACE COVID Let’S Now Explore These, One By One…. How To Respond Effectively To The Corona Crisis. [ebook] Available at: <https://www.actmindfully.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/FACE-COVID-eBook-by-Russ-Harris-March-2020.pdf> [Accessed 24 May 2020].
Harris, R., 2020b. FACE COVID – How To Respond Effectively To The Corona Crisis. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmvNCdpHUYM> [Accessed 24 May 2020].
Rossi, V., 2020. Fast Switch To E-Learning Videos Series For Teachers On Vimeo. [online] Vimeo.com. Available at: <https://vimeo.com/showcase/6967044> [Accessed 24 May 2020].