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myself i'm nate angel i work here at hypothesis which as you know is the organization dedicated to stewarding and developing annotation technologies and practices or something like that that's our
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tagline so um these slides are available at that bitly link that you see down there in the corner in case you want to get to them there's not really much here though because this today is really all about a conversation
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as opposed to uh any kind of presentation um and so one of the things is we actually would really like to involve you all in the conversation um but we're in this webinar mode that uh
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that zoom offers and um it doesn't really allow for as much participation as we might want and so uh one thing that we would really like to encourage people to do because you can't
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you know as an attendee you can't see who else is here if you feel comfortable making your presence known go ahead and use the chat to introduce yourself and say a little about it and please keep up feel free to keep a lively discussion
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going in the chat as we go along note that in zoom you you have to make sure who you're chatting with and so there's that little pull down menu uh to pull it down to make sure that you're chatting with all panelists and attendees otherwise it will just go to
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the panelists up here and you know you don't want to talk to just us probably i mean if you do that's fine but uh definitely feel free to take it out a little bit lighter and then we're going to use you know zoom's usual tools
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for communication like the chat and the q a if you um come up with questions that you might want to pose to the panelists and we also can turn on people's mics and and cameras like if you come have a
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question and you really like to come on stage if if it you know as as it were and say that out loud and be on camera um we'd happily invite you up when we get to the q and a part i really like how my colleague jeremy
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dean uh talked about these features of zoom as themselves kind of forms of annotation kind of annotation on top of the meeting itself right and so chat is sort of like the informal annotation that you might
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do kind of the little asides back channeling kind of stuff and q a is the formal i'm actually submitting the sanitation to the teacher kind of thing so i think that's a nice way to think about these uh tools in the context of
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of annotation so um i'd also like to announce that um you're you're at a very special meeting today um because uh we decided that hypothesis we just have so many
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interesting things happening in our community that we uh feel that we need to do a better job of getting them in front of people more quickly and so we've decided that we're going to try to do a weekly show um about um
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all things annotation if you will and uh the social learning around that and all sorts of different topics that come up in our community and so we were just chatting about this before we we hit broadcast um here with the panelists and we coming
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up with a name for something is one of the hardest things that uh that you can do and so um we went through a long process of trying to figure out what to call the show
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and here's a few of the names that didn't quite make the grade i was um i was pretty uh pretty psyched for a couple of them i i when margins
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last on the door yard bloomed i thought was a pretty good title or maybe even puff the magic margin um i'm actually decided that i'm pretty much going to be known now as the sheriff of notingham which isn't really a great show name but
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i thought it would be a cool title but anyway none of these none of these names for the show made the cut um and so we ended up with tada you are at episode 1 of liquid
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margins and that is the name of our show it's going to be every friday at 9 00 a.m pacific time they might have some special shows at other times or something but that's that's the plan um and so
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uh welcome to being a part of the inaugural uh group that uh kicked off this liquid margins experience uh and i would then also like to invite you
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to perhaps come and participate in episode two which is going to be next friday um and we're going to focus in on annotation in the composition classroom uh and you there's already an rsvp link uh which we will
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also share in the chat for you um but uh this will be an every week kind of thing you can come live or you'll be able to of course um come view recordings uh either audio or video after the fact
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if you can't make it and please share that out as widely as you want with with other colleagues or folks so um that's really all the housekeeping kind of stuff i had today um and i wanted to um take a moment
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just to introduce who's who's all here kind of on stage if you will um and so in addition to that the actual guest that we've gathered to talk about piloting today i've got a couple of my colleagues here
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from hypothesis and so i wanted to give them a chance to introduce themselves and so i i'll start with frannie who's going to actually serve in the role of the producer of
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liquid margins and so frannie uh why don't you tell folks where you're where you're from and and why you're here today okay uh hi there everyone um first welcome to our guest and
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welcome to the many people here in our i guess i'll call her our audience but it sounds too formal but thank you all for being here um i just started with hypothesis a couple of months ago i'm on
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the marketing team um i have a background in education and i was an english major undergrad and i got a master's in english so you know i can fly across the country for like 800
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so that's good so i got a lot of benefit from that um i live in portland oregon and yeah that's it
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okay i'm so so happy to have franny uh you're with us and then um also uh paula smith hughes i think i have pronounced her nas last name right for the first time in my life is also part of our team um and holla
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does a lot of work at hypothesis on but she'll be on focusing in a lot of the post production work for the show for liquid margin so hollow tell us about yourself um my name's holla i live in portland as
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well with franny and nate we actually all happen to live in portland even though the rest of the team is kind of all over the place um i have a background in graphic design and social media strategy i've been a freelance social media strategist
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for about 11 years um i have two little boys and i also if you see behind me i am a textile designer and i design blankets that are inspired by places
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i've traveled so that's what this office is kind of a shared office for my work with my hypothesis and my other business yeah and it i it always looks a little bit like maybe paul is calling in from
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like the laundry room where all her dogs are stacked or something so it's good to have a little explanation i have to explain it yeah also we're the little team that's going to be bringing you uh liquid margins from now on um
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me the sheriff of nottingham and uh the other musketeers here um so uh thank you thank you all for helping to make this possible so now without further ado let's turn to the actual topic and
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conversation of today's show and uh if you you might have seen the memo uh some of you who registered early uh might have been expecting a half hour long show because we wanted to keep this kind of brief and casual but we actually
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realized we weren't going to be able to do it in half an hour so we extended the show to 45 minutes if anybody needs to take off early go for it don't worry about that that's great um you'll be able to you'll we'll email you when the recording's ready you'll be able to come
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back and view the rest of stuff so um i'm really really uh pleased and honored to have the three folks here today um that we have as guests um and uh i won't i won't throw the slide
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back up uh with their names on it because you see all their names there and soon but um aaron barker joined hypothesis fairly recently and um her title doesn't really describe very
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well what i think that she's she's here to do and she is really leading the work that we do with people at schools and different kinds of colleges and universities and some k-12
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institutions as well to help them be successful with annotation collaborative annotation and hypothesis getting it up and running uh kind of on on both a pilot and uh
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in an ongoing way and so she is really at the center of that work um and so uh aaron do you wanna um come in and tell us a little bit about yourself yeah thanks nate i'm erin and i'm the
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customer success specialist for hypothesis and as such i am in charge of all of your pilots and i am really excited to see so many of my partners attending today's
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show if i didn't give you a shout out or i haven't given you one yet then know that i do see you and i'm excited that you're here um and i actually come at you from carbondale colorado on the western slope and i'm a former
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portland resident so i don't know what it is about portland uh for all the attendees on this show we must just have like be connected in a previous life or something so i'm very excited to be here
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um and to talk about piloting today great so glad to have you not only here today but on the team aaron here here at godsend um so uh kyle europe i i think you're up next for in my mind
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and i you know kyle i don't know kyle well actually but um kyle is at wake forest university and wake forest is really just kind of blown off the charts with collaborative annotations just
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doing so much uh interesting work and activity there and so i wanted to make sure kyle was here to kind of bring that perspective kyle where are you calling in from yeah hi everyone i'm kyle dunlinger i'm
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actually in winston-salem north carolina so on the other side of the country from most of you all here i've been to portland once so i don't know if that counts um but yeah i'm the digital pedagogy an open education librarian at wake forest
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and have been at wake since 2012. as a librarian i both teach and do faculty support um so have been very very busy since march and everything since everything hit the fan
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with covid um and i'll probably get into this into this later but we have like nate said have been doing a ton of work with collaborative annotation with our pi with our hypothesis pilot in canvas
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through our faculty training institute that we've spun up so i'm excited to talk more about that thanks for having me great thank you colin i think winston-salem is the portland of north carolina isn't it that's what they say yes yeah yeah so
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you're you're you're good you're part of the part of the group and then um michael mcgarry is uh somebody that we've worked with for a really long time he's at um at cal state channel islands and you know i think cal state
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channel islands was the first school to really formally pilot hypothesis in the learning management system and i'll apologize in advance that both of these schools use canvas which means that we're going to be a
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little canvas focused today maybe when we when we reference hypothesis but we are talking about kind of piloting in general so michael do you want to uh jump on screen and say hi yeah sure um my name is michael
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mcgarrett thanks nate for the intro um i'm the instructional technology lead uh at cal state channel islands part of the teaching and learning innovations team um so we really focus on working with faculty
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and enhancing the online instruction experience for not only them but mainly for our students so getting them on boarded with different tools and stuff that can really help elevate that online learning space which
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you know that we used to have kind of our little core group that we met with and worked with and then since march as i think we can all uh all agree with it's exploded so now we're supporting the entire campus
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but it's been it's been a great opportunity for us to um you know get into the trenches and work with a lot of folks that we don't typically get to work or hadn't previously got to work with so um you know a weird crazy time but it's
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been it's been pretty good so for uh yeah it's a weird crazy time for everyone right mm-hmm and maybe that's a that's a great way to kind of key up the conversation we want to add i'm just gonna
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you guys have probably all seen it because you went to this blog post to um to rsvp for the for the show today um but in that blog post we kind of tried to outline some um kind of best piloting practices that we
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sort of gleaned along the way a lot of them came from michael's thinking for instance um and the experience of general islands um but you know we could we could talk about piloting in the normal world
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if we wanted to but uh as everybody's made clear like we're not in the normal world now we're in we're in an extraordinary world and it's not just that there's a global pandemic going on it's also that that global pandemic caused a huge
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shift in what was happening in education right and i think you know it's a time when we uh are kind of faced with the possibility of trying out some new tools and uh you know people whether it's
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people individuals trying them out for the first time on their own or whether it's institutions adopting new tools and so this question of of piloting things is uh maybe something substantively different
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today sorry it's still relatively early for me here in portland um so uh i thought i might uh kick things off by uh handing the baton to aaron um you know and in your work uh in your work piloting so
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many different piloting with so many different institutions not only with hypothesis but in other work that you've done and i'm wondering if you know how you're thinking about piloting now in the time of covid and then maybe
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you can use that as a bridge to bring uh kyle and michael into the conversation around that same question yeah from the hypothesis perspective i think i'm frequently thinking about how
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do we get the message out to faculty during this weird time when we're not meeting in person necessarily um because i have ideas about what makes a successful pilot
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from the hypothesis perspective um that's i think the biggest barrier for me um and within a piloting scenario but i'm curious from michael and kyle what on your end are some
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attributes that make for a successful pilot right now um i think so piloting stuff uh we try to always approach it at ci from uh as you guys noted in the blog
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post really looking at it from an angle of trying to solve a problem not just hey this is a new shiny tool let's try it because it's new and it's there we really try to get ones that are going to solve
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some sort of pedagogical issue and we've we've tried to do that from the get-go when we're piloting new stuff which you know sometimes is seen as with some of our faculty can be seen as
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kind of like annoying in a sense because it's like well there's this new thing that i want to use why can't we use it it's like well we have to explore it a little bit um but we're we're fortunate on our campus to have uh
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a lot of faculty that are really into looking at new things and looking at it so we're in a fortunate space in that sense but i think having having that sort of focus on doing it with some care and not just jumping at the new things
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just for the sake of them being new because at the same time we don't want to pilot a bunch of stuff that we're not going to look at eventually adopting to i think longevity is part of something we got to look at when we're looking at new tools like
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if we're going to try this thing out let's look a couple steps ahead and look what eventual adoption would look like is it feasible otherwise you end up running the risk of getting a bunch of people hyped on something and they had it for a semester and then
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you can't support it moving forward which doesn't help anybody um yeah so i'll kick it to kyle to chime in yeah michael's last point is pretty relevant at wake um
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so our i want to say our organization around it adoption is pretty loose and community oriented there's not a whole lot of top-down hierarchy so when someone's interested in the tool
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just trying it out integrating into canvas or whatever if they have the right relationships as i'm sure this is i'm sure this is the same way at many other institutions if you have the right relationships you can basically find out a way to
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get a plugin or something installed in like a short individual private uh pilot um but we do run that risk like michael said of getting people really hyped about something and then not having the
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the resources to sustain it long term um but with hypothesis that was something that i personally had been using for a number of years both in my own teaching and some faculty support
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this was prior to any lms integration and when covid hit i knew that my uh the director for our teaching and learning center center for the advancement of teaching
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rather was also a hypothesis enthusiast and we were faced with this scenario where we had to figure out a way to train all of our faculty to teach online
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so what happened for us was we had so we had basically a thousand faculty that we had to train to teach online and there were maybe 12 people on this loose team of it
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adjacent support and because i had that buy-in from our teaching center director because i had such expensive experience using it we were able to basically make a very easy sell
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to the powers that be to integrate um with hypothesis and get that the pilot kicked off and in doing so we were able to integrate it into the course that we built for
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a small cohort of 65 faculty trainers from their departments so they applied to participate in this faculty learning community they spent two weeks intensively learning about the nuances and
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intricacies of online education and then they're currently engaged right now in developing their own faculty learning communities that they will then turn around and deliver to their departments so in one way it's kind of like 12
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people are training 65 people who are training a thousand people so because we were able to integrate hypothesis into that initial cohort we were able to expose people to this new practice of
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digital annotation of social collaborative annotation um hypothesis is the tool that we chose because it was the one that we had the most experience with but it got people thinking it got the faculty thinking that you know
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online education doesn't have to be discussion boards they can engage with text more deeply and just this idea that practices online can be substantially different
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they don't have to be a transition or just a shift of modality there are different affordances that um that are available when we when we move to online and that gets them thinking differently about how they
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teach and now because they're designing those cohorts those learning communities for their fellow faculty members some of them are integrating that into their own communities and thus exposing
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more people to it um so it's been a tremendously successful thing for us um i have overwhelmed myself with support requests now but that is kind of the nature of the beast it is um
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it seems like every day i'm answering so many support questions for hypothesis but it's a great opportunity for outreach and i think our students are really going to benefit in the fall from this new experience of engaging with texts
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so i really like that you talked about this idea of creating these learning communities for faculty and then essentially those learning communities creating their own or those faculty creating their own learning communities and passing that knowledge
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on um especially in terms of thinking about pilots and how do we get faculty to try these different tools right that we are implementing and that we found pedagogical value in um what do you michael and kyle think
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is the most difficult thing about piloting during this time as you think about the context of trying to get faculty to try so many different tools um in such a weird
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time when they're all they're learning so many other things too i think one of the most difficult things really is now everyone wants a different tool there's so many tools out there and
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because we know we're going to be teaching online or at least in some capacity people are making requests for every tool under the sun and we know we don't have capacity for it we don't have the funding for it we
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don't have the support infrastructure in place um so we're having to say no a lot and you know to be clear i don't have any decision making power i'm not the person who controls the budget or anything like that but they come to me a lot of them do because they have a
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relationship with me um and you know i'm able to temper some of that expectation sometimes and point them to tools we already have existing relationships with but that's our biggest challenge right now is like
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just the overwhelming demand for new and various things that we just don't have the capacity to support i'd second that for sure i don't think i've had any single semester with as
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many integration requests as i've had um these past couple months and it's it's on the one hand it's great to see because people we know that our faculty are going out they're finding new stuff but it does it it sucks to have to
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say no um and we're not typically in the business of saying no but there's you can only do what you can do right and we're we have a really small but mighty team at ci it's like six of us really
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that are driving this whole thing and now with the support for the whole campus it's really just trying to make sure that we can best support the tools that we have while still hopefully being able to
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adopt new stuff i think the other uh one of the other big issues as you mentioned aaron is just the fact that people are already starting to learn so much that's already
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been there but you know we had like canvas for instance is a new ballgame for some of our faculty because they were doing face-to-face classes they didn't rely on an lms for very much if anything at all now all of
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a sudden they're in a situation where they're having to learn that and the basics of it they're having to learn the basics of um you know some of the tools that we've had for years and so to throw like all these things at once it's
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it's it's a delicate balance right between use these things and then also we have all this stuff and it's like it can become overwhelming really quickly um and so it's it's finding that balance
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of really trying to meet the faculty where they're at and meet their needs and then so listening to what they're trying to do first and then figure out what tools are available to help them do that as
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opposed to just saying here's the open toolbox and all these things we teach how to use all of them because then again it can be overwhelming and then you know just you want to avoid burnout
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from all this switch i think another complicated thing um at least from my perspective on campus i've always been the squeaky wheel with the ethics of the technologies we choose um
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and because all of our classes are going online or many of them um there's increased demand for things like proctoring software and i don't want to throw that practice under the bus but there's not not often enough a
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consideration made for all of the implications for adopting a technology and there's like a lot of tension for me right now where people are are requesting things and they have perfectly legitimate pedagogical uses for them or even are
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required to use something like that for accreditation reasons and i'm not sure of my role in being able to step in and like say okay that's awesome but let's pump the brakes a little bit
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because what are the implications if we roll this out across all of campus are we going to do bad things faster by integrating something like that so or just you know are we going to allow
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our faculty to think that i could just take my face-to-face course copy paste it into an online environment and still do closed book exams which maybe but um that's a that's a point of tension
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for me right now it's figuring out how to insert myself into those into those conversations without like i don't know putting too much value on my own ethics
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so it's complicated but important i would add to that because we have that conversation is a tense one on our campus too and we're constantly resistant to it um we actually as
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part of this whole piloting in a storm uh topic is you know you want to adopt stuff quickly that can meet where they are so that was actually one that we jumped into quickly is because respondus offered something for free and
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we were like cool we're gonna get hit up for this let's go ahead and roll it out and it did a lot more harm than good and we didn't do our normal kind of cautious and you know at least mindful
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uh deployment of a tool and it it bit us for i mean unfortunately it was something that it ended up being it wasn't an equitable tool there was so i think the ethics part of it is important
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um and just because we are in an emergency type of situation i think it's important to still take that mindful approach into adopting a new thing instead of just being like well it's free and people are gonna need it let's turn it on
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we we did it we thought it was the best move and it unfortunately didn't end up that way um not to say that that's not something that faculty are needing it's not a valid point because sure it is but
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a tool like hypothesis has been able we've been able to kind of steer folks towards a little bit more authentic assessment um with something like that so i think that's you know it's something to be mindful of for sure
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in thinking about this idea of and i love what you said kyle about doing bad things faster um and concurrently i i would assume that many schools right now are getting lots of offers for
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piloting or lots of offers for free trials from various companies so you guys have kind of touched on how you choose which trial or pilot that you might do how do you
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decide that that pilot or trial was successful what are some factors that you might use to you know you get to the end of the trial or pilot and say yes this was successful and we'd like to continue with this um what what are some of those factors
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you might use i mean having a dedicated pilot group and then consistently gathering feedback along the way was is something that's integral for us to kind of figure out whether or not this was a
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good move obviously there's budgetary concerns as well that have to be factored in but try not to make those the primary it's really getting a group of faculty involved with the tool get them actively
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using a tool and then questioning you know just ask them along the way and survey them to see how is this going are you liking it what's the student response been like are you seeing a value in this does
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it meet the expectations that you were expecting like those are some of the questions that we try to really gather um and then i like from there with the smaller initial group if things look good you can expand it a little bit
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further before necessarily so it's like a pilot phase one and a phase two before full adoption kind of deal just to kind of gather it and i mean if the if the overwhelming feedback initially is just like yeah
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this is great everyone needs to use it then you know we can push but i think gathering that feedback both from the faculty that are involved and also doing student feedback on the tool is really important because if it's
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something that's like it seemed really cool and it had some decent functionality but the students couldn't use it or i had to write my own instructions and by the third assignment i hated using it because no one could figure it out
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you know it's you know to gather that kind of input is important i think along the way yeah um being at a smaller institution um
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we it's kind of a blessing and a curse right so we are small enough we're kind of too small to have an established process for evaluating the effectiveness of a pilot because there's just so many things going on and there's so few of us
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um so i would love to be gathering data about you know usage and the success individual faculty are having in their involvement with that pilot how it's affecting our learning outcomes all
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of those things i would love to have more formalized but on the flip side of that we are small enough that we have pretty close relationships with many of our faculty and those that are interested in violets already have reached out to us because
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that's how pilot usually gets kicked off um so we're able to you know sit down with them and have conversations how what does this work in your classes and often you know we're even involved in their classes uh kind of co-teaching in some ways
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so we don't have formal criteria for whether something was exist whether a pilot was a success or not but um i think maybe if there was a criteria it would be how many people would we make mad
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if we turn this thing off so that's not like the best metric but it is uh something that we do take into consideration but really we do only try to get into those pilots where we
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are ourselves invested in the tool and seeing it and invested in seeing it succeed on campus because we know that it will have really positive benefits to our students learning so that said thinking about you know how
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we gauge the success of pilots from the school perspective and from the partner perspective or the ed tech partner what are one or two things you wish that your ed tech partners knew
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about piloting from your school perspective um you guys are like wait hang on let me be careful what i say yeah that's a really good question it's a
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really good question and like i said earlier i'm very much the squeaky wheel on ethics and i'm slowly starting to instill that kind of thinking in my the various partners around campus that
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we need to pause and think about the implications of adopting a tool and because they know that if they don't i'm going to make some noise about it and i think maybe out of a
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right now it might be that they're thinking about these things out of a concern for just like keeping everything calm but eventually i'd hope it would become something more like we're going to stop and think about these things because they're really important and we need to build that into our
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process um i don't have anything else other than that right now but because it's a small pretty tight-knit group but yeah i want us to be mindful and
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thoughtful about our adoptions and not just like michael said just turn things on because they're available and free yeah i mean i'd i said it i don't know if it's necessarily an issue
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um but i i really appreciate when we're able to get vendor partnerships where it is just that it's actually a partnership um there's nothing worse than having someone it feels like you're literally getting a sales team you sign on and
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then they disappear um we have a couple you know there's there's a couple big name tools that we have that come to mind when we think about that um hypothesis is the polar opposite of that right
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um we actually just did a webinar this week with our faculty and you know we got a demo from hypothesis they came in they showed how the integrations worked and we were able to work together to actually really tag team that experience
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um and that's the kind of stuff that we really look for when we're partnering with a with a vendor i think unfortunately that does get lost some of the time um but
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it's really valuable to have so looking back on this whole past term where we all went virtual immediately with very little um preparation i think what would you
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kyle and michael have done differently in terms of piloting any new tools honestly i don't know that we would do much differently um i mean things happened as they did it was very much on an accelerated timeline
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i think we had always intended to integrate hypothesis um one thing i haven't mentioned is that we are still currently technically in the midst of an lms transition so we're like we were on sakai
00:34:09
and basically uh the understanding was that in the fall this coming fall no one else would be teaching new classes in sakai so like we're right at this cut-off point so we're transitioning all of our faculty not only to online teaching but
00:34:22
to a new brand new lms so all of these integrations and all of these partnerships were going to happen this spring this summer anyway and i think that the the hypothesis
00:34:34
partnership um came right at the right time for us so that was great um we're also for the first time exploring a video management platform uh which was something we had planned to do
00:34:46
further on down the line on an expanded timeline but now since everything is happening so quickly that has been shortened up so if i could do anything differently go back in time and not have a virus but the and extend our timeline
00:35:00
but that's impossible so um yeah i don't know if if there was something else maybe we'd have a more formal process for requesting tools and more clear criteria for how to measure success
00:35:14
clear communication about what kinds of resources we have and which tools get priority um but again being at a small institution it is much more of a community
00:35:26
and it's sometimes who you know or you know how you personally are able to sell something to those that are making decisions i just want to applaud you kyle for going through i can't admit we did our
00:35:41
lms transition a couple years back and i can't imagine doing that in the midst of all this so kudos to to be clear we also we had just hired on our lms manager um
00:35:53
about six months before the virus or maybe a year before so she's been very busy training everybody and yeah so yeah it hasn't been me fortunately touching the lms
00:36:05
it's a huge move yeah i mean i don't know that we would necessarily do anything different i mean as i talked about earlier like we did pull the trigger on something quick and i think that was a learning experience for us was um
00:36:19
you know even though we are in this situation i think just taking a step back and really asking the the normal questions that we would um and treating pilots as we we've developed
00:36:31
a pretty good process of it um it's evolving it's very young i mean we didn't have any sort of process at all and now we have i wouldn't even call it a formalized process so much as a framework
00:36:43
in place but um sticking to that when we have something i think would just be the main thing instead of and don't let the nerves of a panic switch gut reaction happen i mean it's it's really easy to do and you know the circumstances that
00:36:57
we're in um i think we've learned from it i mean as long as you continue learning about how you're doing things and evolving things forward you know it it is what it is these are crazy times for everybody
00:37:08
um so wow what a great conversation i uh i didn't expect all the twists and turns um and yes kyle you should you and everybody there at wake should probably get some sort of you know metal or i can't even imagine
00:37:25
that um lms transitions are enough under normal circumstances so a couple of things have come up in the chat um with with the participants one of them is kathy was wondering if
00:37:37
anybody has any um instruments that they use like to survey faculty or students who are piloting things that they would be willing to share and i know aaron hypothesis probably is
00:37:49
has something that we can share that we we work with um all the schools that we pilot with to do some common surveying i don't know if kyle and michael if you guys have instruments that you would be
00:38:01
willing to share too maybe no surprise that we don't but um yeah yeah we have kind of ours was a i actually have to go back and find it we it was pretty much we created a form
00:38:15
that we were using and sending out and that form has kind of evolved as we've done different ones so again we're in a framework stage more than a formalized process of sorts but i think
00:38:27
being adaptable to some of them too is important and i think we at hypothesis have our own tools for student surveys and faculty surveys that we um are actually revamping for the
00:38:42
upcoming term but are always happy to share those with any of our partners prior to sending those out to faculty and students um but we also take feedback
00:38:55
on those from our partners too and i i think we're probably willing to share them even more openly than that like we have so yeah even whether you're a partner or not so we'll look into getting that into your hands and you
00:39:07
email anybody who um rsvp'd about that hey another topic that's come up there's been a couple really juicy ones but another one is kind of uh probably really pertinent for everyone and it might be interesting to
00:39:20
hear kyle and michael how you guys are dealing with this but you know there's a lot of concern about budgets now that are that are tied to you know related to what's going to happen with enrollments related to the pandemic and so on and so on
00:39:32
and you know obviously that ties into also to tool choice and tool use because you've got you know these tools saying hey we're free right now but you know it might cost later or whatever um how how is how are budget things
00:39:44
happening uh you know how is that conversation or thinking about budget happening um at wake oh gosh fortunately i don't hold any purse strings so i don't
00:39:57
get to make any of those decisions um and again very much like many of my other answers it's generally word of mouth again we're a small net community close-knit community and when things
00:40:12
are too expensive or when basically we've been tapped out generally those that need to know are made aware of it and we're able to communicate that back to those folks that are requesting those tools but yeah
00:40:24
i'd imagine it's very much the same like anywhere it's um although we are a private institution um and in a much better position than i imagine many other institutions are we're we're
00:40:36
feeling it too the international student announcement this week was a devastating thing for us um so we're scrambling to figure that out and you know the conversation changes day by
00:40:47
day in terms of budget but again i don't touch the budget with anything so except for like my personal budget for my departments but that's not relevant to this conversation so yeah i mean
00:41:01
it's it's a difficult spot there's no way around it i mean budgets are getting slashed everywhere we were fortunate enough to secure some msft funds uh right at the onset of
00:41:15
this so it was a grant fund on our campus that we were able to secure specifically for piloting new academic technologies so i mean trying to find if campuses are have any things like
00:41:27
that where you can propose put forth proposals to get you know money to fund stuff like that um we were lucky we put forth the proposal and it got accepted so we were able to
00:41:40
get a secure little chunk of money specifically for this effort that makes sense and you know we've just got a couple minutes left and i i want to um close out by plugging the
00:41:51
next episode again but um one other uh question that's come up in the chat has been around um security practices too in choosing new tools and i think it maybe dovetails back to that ethics conversation
00:42:04
too in a sense like you know one doesn't want to just adopt things blindly without some careful considerations for all the implications they might have for privacy security accessibility ethics in general and i know that uh in
00:42:17
my community i've come across a couple of institutions that have some pretty interesting kind of published documents about how they how they address security and ethics in general um just in
00:42:30
all their tool choices i'm wondering you michael do you guys have any kind of like written uh stuff around that in your framework or is that uh is that on a case-by-case basis around security um i mean when we want to do anything
00:42:42
that we want to formally pilot and integrate to our systems we have a standard process that it has to go through for procurement so it we require um a vpat and heck vat so that's the accessibility form and we
00:42:55
require a security review so before we can even throw anything in they have to go through and clear those um so that's that's kind of so that part is super formalized with our it department
00:43:08
um that that's yeah that's a little beyond the framework part that's set in there if anybody wants to work with us we need those yeah got it what and that wake yeah it's very much the same here yeah we have a information security team
00:43:21
that every single thing that goes through procurement has to go to the security team before it gets implemented and yeah that's one of very few things that are formalized in that way got it well hey thank you all so much
00:43:34
for this conversation i will um share out with all anybody who registered the documents that i'm thinking about that address um ethical policies um that might be of interest to the panelists as well as the attendees
00:43:46
right um and thanks everyone for coming and i'll just plug one more time that our next episode dex friday at liquid margins um if you choose to come or tune in after the fact uh we'll be on
00:43:58
annotation in the uh in the composition english composition environment also really interesting we're lining up a couple of really cool guests for that too so um tune in next week if you will and big thanks to aaron kyle
00:44:10
and michael for being here today
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