Janice and I got tested for COVID-19, because we had coughs and respiratory symptoms. The process was quick - at the old Children’s Hospital building, using retired the ambulance bays as drive-through testing stations. Stay in the car. In and out in under 5 minutes. Had the results first thing the next morning. Negative. Whew!

More online exam proctoring project - demos from vendors, project meetings, preparation for a steering committee meeting next week.

I realized this week that Zoom Exhaustion isn’t about Zoom (or Skype or Teams) per se, but about having meetings back-to-back-to-back all day every day. In the before-time, even with back-to-back meeting days, the meetings often wrapped up 10 minutes early so people could move to other rooms or buildings or campuses as needed for next meetings. Now, meetings start at 9:00am and run to 9:59:59am, followed by another meeting at 10:00:00am that runs to 10:59:00am etc. Not even a chance to stand up, never mind move, never mind being in a different location with different people. There is no downtime anymore, and that’s where the exhaustion comes from.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and learning about online exam proctoring, to prepare to act as the “business lead” for an online exam proctoring project that ramps up this week, aiming to have a pilot in the summer and a tool available for use (as a last resort) in the fall.

It’s a complicated solution to a complicated problem. Not all courses are able to adjust assessment away from high stakes exams, and those don’t translate online in all contexts without some form of proctoring. Yes, it’s better to redesign a course to use more interesting forms of assessment. Yes, high stakes exams are problematic on their own. Yes, the concept of surveillance makes me twitch. And the idea of pushing that surveillance into our students’ homes is the stuff of privacy nightmares.

I’ve been using Hugo for about 6 months now, and it’s been working really really well for me. But the one thing that’s been bugging me is how clumsy it is to create new posts.

For example, here’s the command line stuff that would have created this post:

cd ~/Documents/Blog/blog
hugo new posts/2020/2020-05-05-Automating-Creating-New-Content-in-Hugo.md

All posts are plaintext markdown files, organized in folders within a content directory. The Hugo application has a command line tool to create content - but, almost every single time, I need to look up the syntax so I don’t goof it up. It’s a trivial command, but the syntax doesn’t seem to stick in my brain for some reason. Did I goof up on the date format? Did I get a dash in the wrong place? Typo in the file path? Accidentally left a space in somewhere and it breaks?

This week, the steep cuts in provincial funding hit IT hard. Many people I’ve worked closely with for years, gone. The entire IT Partners group, gone. A third of our com/media AV support team, gone. And we’ll be facing another round of deep cuts after the next provincial budget is dropped. We’re all pretty much stunned and shocked and trying to figure out how to keep moving in the aftermath. They are all great people, and were doing great work. It’s kind of an eye-opener, how integrated these IT folks had become in our work at the TI. That’s a great sign, showing how strongly IT and TI (and faculties) have been working together, but it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to build relationships back up.

When we talk about processes, there’s a balance between traditional Project™ “waterfall” approaches - dependencies, critical paths, charters, etc. and what happens in practice - rapid prototypes, DIY experimentation, communities and networks, and emergent designs to support practice.

I keep saying “hey, at least things will be better next week.” And I keep being surprised by just how much worse each week gets.

Monday started with announcements of 2 key terminations in IT, restructuring as a result of the deep cuts in our provincial funding. One was my counterpart in managing our online learning environments - and he was absolutely key in our successful rapid adoption of Zoom last month. The other was a colleague I’ve known for almost a decade, who started as an IT Partner back when I was in IT. There was an announcement that up to 150 terminations will be coming in the coming weeks, but these 2 were the director-level first moves to set the stage for a full IT re-org.

Now that the Winter 2020 semester is wrapping up, I took a look at the stats for our various online learning technologies to see what effects the whole COVID-19 Online Pivot had on our technology stack. Each platform has their own sets of data to describe activity within the software, and they’re not directly comparable. A simple “logins” comparison wouldn’t capture activity in some platforms where only instructors login and students are anonymous (like YuJa). I’m just looking for interesting spikes or patterns in the data to see if/how people in our blended and online courses have shifted their use of these applications.

I keep hoping things at work will calm down and I’ll be able to catch my breath. It’s just not happening. Maybe next week, finally? Surely, there won’t be another urgent emergency or string of related urgent emergencies or a completely new urgent emergency that must become the new focus…

I’m struggling to get everything done - back-to-back-to-back meetings that I need to be included in, for the entire day. Every day. Also, find time to do the actual work. I’m having to neglect my team because there isn’t time to do both sides of my job and the Urgent Emergency demands that I shift my focus to making sure a community of almost 40,000 instructors and students have the tools they need to finish the semester (and start the next one).

I was interviewed by John Dujay (from HR Reporter) for an article on digital credentials and blockchain applications in higher education.

Micro-credentials indicating courses and competencies that have been successfully completed are also offered by the University of Calgary, in the form of badges.

“On our badges platform, [students] log in with their UCalgary email address and it’ll show any of these recognitions that they’ve accumulated over their career as students,” says D’Arcy Norman, manager of technology integration at the institution.

Not sure why I’m bothering to keep doing these reflecty things. I was hoping to get into a more reflective practice, but it’s just not doing it for me.

⚙️ Work

More zoom. I sure do enjoy the flurry of thoughtful “hey have you considered this totally legitimate and viable - and most certainly new to you - article on zoom security vulnerabilities? you should definitely get on top of this!” emails.

Since we launched Zoom as a campus platform on March 13, 2020, there have been 36,439 meetings conducted by our community. And 3 reports of ZoomBombing (so far). There may have been others, but we have only 3 reported cases at this time¹.

We have spent much time and effort adjusting the configuration of our campus Zoom account to address security and privacy concerns. Default settings for meetings have been modified, making it more difficult (if not impossible) for intruders to barge into a meeting/class and ZoomBomb it. But, since making those changes, we’ve still had reports of ZoomBombing in classes - which should be impossible if we were looking at a simple “external people finding unsecured meetings for laughs” situation.