Derek Bruff and Stacey Johnson

[00:07] DEREK BRUFF: I'm Derek Brough. I'm 45 years old. Today is November 2, 2021. I'm here at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, talking with Stacy Johnson who I work with here at Vanderbilt.

[00:22] STACEY JOHNSON: And I am Stacy Johnson I am assistant director of the center for Teaching, and I also teach Spanish and related courses here at Vanderbilt. And I don't just work with Derek He is actually my director. He's my boss.

[00:40] DEREK BRUFF: So, Stacy, thinking back to 2020, I think about.

[00:45] STACEY JOHNSON: Was that 10 years ago, right?

[00:48] DEREK BRUFF: I think so, yes. Yes. March 2020 lasted about 10 months. When did you know that this was not just, I don't know, like, a flu outbreak that would be over in a week or two? When did you know this was going to be something really different and really hard?

[01:07] STACEY JOHNSON: So I actually, I have. I have two stories. One is when I knew personally that this was going to be a big deal. And one is when I knew professionally that it was going to be a big deal. So at the end of February, thinking we might have a lockdown, like, just from listening to the news and hearing reports about things that were happening in study abroad trips and Italy, I thought, oh, we might have a little lockdown if there's an outbreak. So it was the end of winter, and I'm really like a food person. So we're like fresh farmers market in the summer and stored food in the winter, and it's like the end of our winter storage. And so I went to the store and just, like, restocked up on some of our grains and beans and things like that that I thought we might need for lockdown. And I also. It was like, where you pick up the groceries in your car, they load your car for you.

[02:00] DEREK BRUFF: Okay.

[02:01] STACEY JOHNSON: And I had ordered two ginormous packs of toilet paper in that order. And when they brought it out, it was not the brand that was on sale. It was a different brand. And they said, we'll just give it to you for the same price. And I said, you know what? I didn't even really want the toilet paper. I just got it because it was on sale. Just keep it. Just take it off my order. And I went home. And then a few days later, I had to run into the store to get something, and there was literally no toilet paper in the whole store. And I was like, oh, no. For months, there was no toilet paper. But when I ran in and realized that toilet paper was the first death in the grocery store, I was like, what have I done? I gave up 24 rolls. So that was my first.

[02:49] DEREK BRUFF: Yes, because we'll run out of, like, milk and bread if there's a snowstorm. But toilet paper.

[02:55] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah, but you can drink water and you can make bread so those don't feel like going out to gather moss is a whole other thing. It didn't come to that. Don't worry. I am a compulsive hoarder. Not really.

[03:10] DEREK BRUFF: You were prepared, though.

[03:11] STACEY JOHNSON: A compulsive stalker upper. So we were prepared, but I just was like, oh, I could have had 24 rolls. And I gave them up. And then, you know, toilet paper was a really big theme. The whole summer. People were talking about toilet paper and we were watching the supply chains. In my whole life, I've never spent so much time thinking or talking or bathroom tissue is more appropriate. Of course. And then professionally, we were kind of on high alert. I manage the BrightSpace support team, which is our course management system.

[03:41] DEREK BRUFF: So this is the tool that professors here use to teach.

[03:46] STACEY JOHNSON: There's always some sort of an online component, even when you're teaching face to face. But this course management system becomes the whole course when you teach online. We are a mostly face to face campus. And so people were just using it sporadically for different things. And I managed the support for that tool and training faculty how to use that tool. So we were sort of on high alert at the end of February also. But in my mind, I kept thinking, we just have to wrap all of this stuff up before the week after spring break because I had a big family reunion planned. We were all traveling from all over the country to go on a trip together. And so I was thinking, you know, we'll put two or three weeks into this, really get everything ready to go. So faculty will be fine, and then I'll be gone for 10 days and it'll be fine. And the day, it was probably March 7th or 8th or something like that. The day when we had to cancel vacations and be like, no, no, it's picnic stations, it's all hands on deck. No, no one takes a vacation. And our vacation got canceled because of lockdown anyway, so.

[04:51] DEREK BRUFF: Right.

[04:51] STACEY JOHNSON: That was when I figured out professionally, oh, we're just going to be managing online teaching and figuring out this remote teaching thing for the indefinite future for.

[05:00] DEREK BRUFF: Yes.

[05:01] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah, for years and years. How about you? When did you know?

[05:07] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah, so we. There was the talk in February of, oh, we have some students studying abroad in Italy and they might have to come back and be quarantined for a time. So how are we going to help them keep up with their classes? Right. And so there were some initial meetings and then lots of meetings over spring break. And I remember the Monday after spring break, we had a dinner with our junior faculty teaching fellows at our center, and that was the last normal dinner because we had finished and some folks were sticking around. Just as the dinner was over, we all started checking our email, and the provost had emailed and said, classes are canceled for the rest of the week and we're gonna send the students home. And I forget exactly which email that was, but it was the one that.

[05:58] STACEY JOHNSON: Said it was the big one.

[06:00] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah, we're moving to remote. And we were all just kind of in shock. I remember.

[06:05] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah, I was at that dinner, too.

[06:07] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah. Yeah. And it was this moment, like, up. And. Like, the dinner conversation was normal and fine. I don't even think we talked about the pandemic. We just had a pretty normal conversation with our colleagues. And then we all got the email, and we're like, okay, this week is going to look very different.

[06:23] STACEY JOHNSON: This week.

[06:23] DEREK BRUFF: This week. Yeah. But then I remember how much it accelerated from there because we had, I think, our first workshop for faculty on how to move their courses online was maybe that Wednesday.

[06:37] STACEY JOHNSON: Right. I don't. Yeah, I don't remember the days of the week anymore. We should get our calendars out to make sure it's all accurate. But I remember that we were also in transition. So we didn't have, like, a virtual classroom platform like Zoom, or now we have Zoom, but we just had the one that was built into the course management system, which didn't do all the things that we would have hoped something in that condition, in that situation would have done. But that's all I had to teach people about. And so I went to those workshops like, okay, let's look at the tools we actually have. Maybe tomorrow we'll have Zoom. It's hard to say.

[07:15] DEREK BRUFF: Right, right.

[07:16] STACEY JOHNSON: But this is what we have now.

[07:18] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah.

[07:19] STACEY JOHNSON: But I think people were grateful for just even a little bit of knowledge about what tools were available, even though it wasn't complete at that point.

[07:27] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah. And I think we had planned a workshop for faculty, and we knew there'd be a lot of interest because, again, our professors generally haven't taught online, hadn't taught online before then. And so we knew they would be interested in learning some tools and figuring out how they're going to do this. And we planned a workshop in one of the big law school classrooms, thinking that we might have 100 or more people there. And then the next day, the provost said, no gatherings of more than 25. And so then we had 25 people in a giant classroom, which kind of worked because at that point, social distancing had entered our vocabulary. But I just remember, I think by the next day, and we ended up having a lot of people kind of in an overflow space for that one. And then the next day we had another workshop, and there were 25 people in the room and like 100 faculty on Zoom. And I was fielding questions from the Zoom faculty in the back of the room, and you were at the front of the room leading. And neither of us were used to life on Zoom at that point.

[08:34] STACEY JOHNSON: No. I've done a lot of online teaching, but none of this sort of synchronous do what we normally do. Just do it on Zoom style teaching that we've been doing since the pandemic. And so it was like the number of things to keep up with. The very first time you've ever done anything on Zoom and you're doing it in front of a group of 125 of your peers who are looking to you for guidance, it was really stressful. One thing I remember is that over and over I would read a question, or someone in the room would say a question, and then you would chirp up right afterwards. Stacy, would you mind repeating the question for the folks on screen in the microphone?

[09:14] DEREK BRUFF: Yes.

[09:14] STACEY JOHNSON: This is the hardest thing to get used to. All the folks in the overflow room could only hear if I repeated everything that was said into the microphone.

[09:21] DEREK BRUFF: Oh, my goodness. And there was one guy in one of the workshops, I remember you said, okay, pull up a web browser and type in this address because you had a resource page you wanted them to start on. And this older faculty member put his hand up, and I kind of scurried over, and he didn't know how to do that. And I thought, oh, we're going to teach online next week.

[09:42] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah, good.

[09:44] DEREK BRUFF: I think that's when I had a sense that, like, our jobs were going to get really challenging, helping a thousand or more faculty figure out how to make that transition.

[09:55] STACEY JOHNSON: So that was like a week of. And we didn't have to manage the logistics of those workshops because the Faculty affairs office did all of that, which was fantastic. So we could just focus on delivery.

[10:05] DEREK BRUFF: Right? Yeah. Jermaine was like my best friend by the end of the week.

[10:10] STACEY JOHNSON: It's also. That was before we understood the idea of this being airborne. And so no one wore masks or knew that we needed masks. So it was all just like, obsessively hand sanitizing 20 seconds.

[10:22] DEREK BRUFF: If you wash your hands for 20 seconds, we can beat the pandemic.

[10:25] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah. So we were doing the best we could for like a week to just get as much information to as many people as possible. But then when everyone actually started teaching on Zoom, like a week and a half later, we did have Zoom at that point.

[10:39] DEREK BRUFF: Right. And the most rapid adoption of a major technology platform in Vanderbilt history, I.

[10:47] STACEY JOHNSON: Think, like 48 hours from beginning to end. Yes.

[10:49] DEREK BRUFF: We worked that through in record time.

[10:51] STACEY JOHNSON: Thank goodness. That is not our usual adoption policy. We usually vet our tools a little better.

[10:56] DEREK BRUFF: Months or years.

[10:57] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah. After that, we started thinking less about how to get people reproducing exactly what they normally do and finishing out their semester on Zoom instead of face to face. And as a center for teaching, we started thinking more about designing courses that were actually sustainable for faculty and students and took advantage of some of the affordances of actual online teaching.

[11:25] DEREK BRUFF: So I have one more comment about that week, though, because this was the other part where I realized it was like something out of a movie. It was how the situation was changing from day to day. Right. First we were going to have a big workshop, and then we were going to have just 25 people, and then we're going to do it on Zoom. I think by Friday there was maybe we had 12 people, I think, at the CFT at the time, the center for Teaching. And I think by Friday we had maybe one person who was working in the office. And then that was our last day. Like, we went from fully staffed, in person work on Monday to everyone working remotely. And I remember you hearing about some of our Brightspace team and the choices they were making to kind of keep themselves safe. And, you know, we thought, well, faculty might want to come by and ask questions and talk with someone. And like, within 48 hours. No, no one's coming by. We can do our work remotely. We're gone. And then, you know, our office space, no one went in for months.

[12:28] STACEY JOHNSON: Right. So the last day we were in the office, it was right after the last faculty affairs workshop. That one was over in nursing. And even though I know we still did social distancing there, it seemed like so many more people. I guess the room was just a lot bigger.

[12:43] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah.

[12:43] STACEY JOHNSON: And the overflow space was just bigger. It was just our biggest one was the last one. And after that, the Brightspace team and I, that's at the time, it was three people. We went back to the offices and we realized we were the last ones off the ship.

[13:03] DEREK BRUFF: Right.

[13:03] STACEY JOHNSON: Everyone else was so we went through the fridge and threw away like, because we had had that faculty dinner a few nights before. So all the leftovers from the faculty dinner were in the fridge. People's lunches from the day they had left the office were still in the fridge.

[13:17] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah.

[13:18] STACEY JOHNSON: So we just emptied out the fridge.

[13:20] DEREK BRUFF: Joe's turkey, maybe. I don't.

[13:22] STACEY JOHNSON: We left Joe's frozen turkey in the freezer that he later retrieved at some point. And we just, you know, my system with coffee cups is to let them accumulate in my office during the week and then do a clean out operation. And so we went through all the offices that we could, you know, look into, collected coffee cups and put them in the washer and started a load. And it was a really weird feeling because Even though the BrightSpace team, more than anyone else at the center for Teaching, we had experience with working remotely because we often work until 11pm or on Saturdays or Sundays. And so some of us had some remote work experience already doing it 100% of the time with no face to face meetings, not come into the office at all. It's just not the Vanderbilt way to do everything remotely. And I think our team was pretty split. About half of us thought, can we do this forever? We love being at home all the time. And about half of us thought, I have to go back to the office, I can't take it anymore.

[14:32] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah. And then I went on vacation. I did go on vacation.

[14:37] STACEY JOHNSON: You did go on your vacation? How'd that go?

[14:39] DEREK BRUFF: It was. I'm glad I did. It was. We were going to go skiing with my wife's family and we got all the way to Kansas and checked into the Airbnb and we were going to be in Colorado the next day at the mountain to ski. And that's when the governor of Colorado closed down all the ski resorts. So we're like, well, let's take a left turn to, well, Albuquerque. It was Santa Fe, actually, but we went to New Mexico.

[15:02] STACEY JOHNSON: Santa Fe is beautiful.

[15:03] DEREK BRUFF: Spent a few days kicking around Santa Fe and doing lots of outdoor activities where we didn't have to be inside. And it was, it was weird because, I mean, on the one hand everyone I knew at Vanderbilt was working remotely that week. And so the fact that I was not in Nashville was not different than anyone else. And I was. I remember checking in on email and it was that first week and I. Anyway, I felt a little bad not being fully attentive that week, but I.

[15:35] STACEY JOHNSON: Don'T think I've held it against you, but I'm starting to Feel resentful now.

[15:38] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah.

[15:38] STACEY JOHNSON: Just kidding.

[15:40] DEREK BRUFF: It was. My family needed it. I think it was a good week with my kids.

[15:45] STACEY JOHNSON: Well, at that point, just in contrast, I was working like 16, 18 hour days, but I could have been working 24 hour days if I were capable of it because the level and all of us were working overtime. All of us were working as much as possible. Now most of my team is actually hourly employees, so unless overtime was expressly approved. Approved. They had to just work their hours. But there was such an intense need for support. We've handled some real transitions where the support just spiked and we, you know, came together for it. But it was weeks all through the summer, really, of just constant, constant brightspace support needs. Yeah. Anyway, but, you know, I have a really great team. I like things like that. I like that cycle where something happens and work ramps up and then kind of the ebb and flow, rather than everything being slow and steady, runs the race.

[16:52] DEREK BRUFF: I like having the clarity that this is what I need to be working on right now. This is clearly the most important thing and I don't have to worry about my to do list. There's like one item on the to do list.

[17:03] STACEY JOHNSON: Nothing matters except answering faculty questions.

[17:06] DEREK BRUFF: This is the work I need to be doing right now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you were gonna, I think, move us to the next phase.

[17:14] STACEY JOHNSON: Well, I actually was gonna ask you a question about organizing the big online course Development Institute, because I think that was our. As a Center for teaching, that was our major accomplishment.

[17:27] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah.

[17:28] STACEY JOHNSON: And I haven't actually been a part of something exactly like that before. When I run projects, I tend to project, manage them myself and imagine all the pieces and other people contribute. But I think all of us, the senior staff in the center for Teaching, we all sort of manage our own projects.

[17:48] DEREK BRUFF: Right. And so we worked pretty autonomously.

[17:51] STACEY JOHNSON: No one actually managed that project. We were just all doing as much as we could every minute to get it rolling out new. And it maybe is the thing I'm most proud of from the entire time I've worked at the center for Teaching such a great course. So I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how that happened and how we. What it actually was.

[18:12] DEREK BRUFF: Right. Well, once we got towards the end of March and our faculty had a couple of weeks experience teaching on Zoom and online. Yeah, I realized, I think at that point it had been decided that all of our summer courses would be online, which was a new territory for Vanderbilt. And fall was completely up in the.

[18:33] STACEY JOHNSON: Air, but we assumed it would be.

[18:36] DEREK BRUFF: Some combination of online, online, remote hybrid, something. And so initially it was thinking about the summer and how can we provide something to help our faculty teach well this summer online? And then later it became about, oh, we need fall semester to work. And faculty are gonna need a lot of time and support in getting ready to make fall semester work, no matter what it looks like. And I realized that, you know, we have like a thousand faculty teaching this fall. And.

[19:07] STACEY JOHNSON: Like, I'm not sure that people outside of teaching as a profession and like college teaching specifically understand the amount of ramp up that there is to a course.

[19:18] DEREK BRUFF: Yes.

[19:19] STACEY JOHNSON: You don't just like pick a text, show up to class sometimes. We spend years developing courses and we teach them multiple times before we feel like we got them. And so to all of a sudden have a completely new modality. Nothing we'd ever done before would work.

[19:34] DEREK BRUFF: Historically, at most institutions, if you're going to teach a course online for the first time, you take an entire semester of not teaching a course so you can get ready for the one that is coming online. And we didn't have that luxury.

[19:46] STACEY JOHNSON: Or you get paid to develop it, right?

[19:48] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah, it's a ton of lifting. And that's assuming that you kind of know what you're doing, that you've done it before. And so we, as a senior staff at the center for Teaching, spent all of April putting our heads together and we had some existing stuff. We had a course design institute, we had other resources, but we had never offered a course design institute specifically about teaching online.

[20:12] STACEY JOHNSON: And at that point, most of us had actually not taught online. That's why we hadn't offered anything like that.

[20:18] DEREK BRUFF: I think you and maybe Heather were the only ones who had actually taught a course online.

[20:22] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah.

[20:23] DEREK BRUFF: And so it was a lot of work for us. And I've seen this sometimes with our senior staff before where we're all working on the same project. And it's some of my favorite moments of the work because we do each bring so much to the table and we have very different opinions and perspectives and expertise. And when we can all point in generally the same direction, we can create something pretty amazing. And that's what we did that April, and then we launched it in May. It was a two week experience for faculty, three or four hours a day, a mix of asynchronous work and then synchronous sessions on Zoom for faculty, many.

[20:57] STACEY JOHNSON: Of whom were at home with students who were doing remote k12 school.

[21:02] DEREK BRUFF: Right.

[21:03] STACEY JOHNSON: Were taking care of family members who were, for one reason or another, weren't able to be where they normally were. So the faculty giving us three or four hours a day were also like doing a heavy lift under really incredible circumstances.

[21:16] DEREK BRUFF: Exactly. And we launched it in May, and we ran it every two weeks all summer long with about 60 to 70 faculty in it, each offering. We ended up having 500 faculty and other instructors go through this two week course design Institute by August.

[21:38] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah.

[21:39] DEREK BRUFF: And you've heard me say this before, but it's like 10 years of center for Teaching work packed into four months. Yeah, it really was. And I am really proud of it. I mean, I'm proud of how we collaborated as a staff to pull that off, to put it together, to launch it, to revise it, to change it, to make it better every two weeks.

[21:58] STACEY JOHNSON: Every two weeks.

[22:00] DEREK BRUFF: How much time and effort it took just to run it like once. It was in pretty good shape. It was still a ton of effort to run it again and again and again. And to work with so many faculty because we were meeting with them generally in groups of five or six small groups.

[22:14] STACEY JOHNSON: It wasn't just like a self paced online course. It was an intensive cohort experience facilitated by someone who knew what they were doing.

[22:23] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah. And I'm thankful for the faculty who came back and helped to facilitate. We couldn't have done it without them.

[22:30] STACEY JOHNSON: And grad students too. We had a couple of them.

[22:32] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah. Yeah. And. And again, there was. I mean, I have all these memories of sitting on my back porch working on this course or leading a zoom session or somehow. I mean, this was most of what we did that summer. And it was that clarity of knowing this is what I need to be doing. Like, none of the other priorities really matter at this point. This is what I need to be doing with all of my work time. And I like that clarity. I'm also really grateful we had a mild summer. Like, the weather was nice pretty much all summer. And I could do a lot of work outside. Yeah.

[23:14] STACEY JOHNSON: Right. I don't have outside space. And I also discovered when we started doing stuff over Zoom, like the online course Development Institute, that I don't have good lighting in my house either.

[23:25] DEREK BRUFF: No, you do not.

[23:26] STACEY JOHNSON: And everyone was snapping up zoom lights. And I'm like, y'all are just going to get used to seeing my face in the dark. Just a vague outline of Stacy.

[23:35] DEREK BRUFF: Stacy Witness Protection Program.

[23:38] STACEY JOHNSON: It was a little bit of like, in hindsight, it was a little bit of rebellion against the idea that, like, I really show up to work without putting a lot of thought into what I look like. I just am who I am. Enjoy this, I guess. But on Zoom, I felt like there was such a heightened expectation for appearance. And I, having not taught synchronous online classes before, my online teaching was all asynchronous and focus on course design. I felt like this is not a part of the online teaching experience that I want to embrace. And so, yeah, at this point, I have bought a ring light, though my rebellious phase ended eventually with some better lighting.

[24:22] DEREK BRUFF: Yes.

[24:24] STACEY JOHNSON: So I have another question. What do you miss most about life at Vanderbilt before the pandemic? Is there any. I know we have a blog series called, like, Never Going Back about things that we embraced during the pandemic that were not going to change.

[24:41] DEREK BRUFF: That really work, right?

[24:43] STACEY JOHNSON: It really works, and we're going to keep doing these new good things. But what do you miss about life.

[24:47] DEREK BRUFF: Before or work before work before the pandemic? That is a good question. I do. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is having reasons to walk all over campus. I'm much more sedentary now, even now that I'm back in the office full time. Most of my meetings are on Zoom.

[25:08] STACEY JOHNSON: No one wants to see you face to face, even if you are in your office.

[25:12] DEREK BRUFF: Right. And so I, you know, honestly, working from home, I could sometimes schedule in or take advantage of time and take the dogs for a walk and get a little bit of fresh air and exercise. And I find that I'm actually walking less now that I'm back on campus. In the old days, I would have meetings at Kirkland or at Butcher or Calhoun. I'd have to walk across campus and, you know, run into people. And I'm not the most outgoing person, really.

[25:39] STACEY JOHNSON: I think of you as a sparkling conversationalist.

[25:44] DEREK BRUFF: I can hold my own. But just, you know, crossing paths with people that I now almost never see anymore, I kind of miss that. What do you miss?

[25:56] STACEY JOHNSON: Well, one more thing. Do you count your steps?

[26:00] DEREK BRUFF: My phone does it, but I rarely look.

[26:02] STACEY JOHNSON: So before the pandemic, I mean, I resonated with your answer a lot. Before the pandemic, it was rare for me to get home at the end of the day and have less than 10,000 steps because our campus is a little sprawling. And so to go to a meeting, you just had to walk, and you didn't have to put any effort into 10,000 steps. It was just part of the job. And there were most days during the pandemic where I would look at my phone at the end of the day, and it was like 900 steps I was like, what have I done? What's happening? It's actually really hard. I'm trying to rectify that now that I'm reintegrating myself into life outside my home. And it's actually turning out to be really challenging. I'm up to about 6,000 a day regularly now without a lot of effort to get back up to pre pandemic levels. It's going to take work.

[26:54] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah. Yeah.

[26:56] STACEY JOHNSON: Sorry. So you said something.

[26:57] DEREK BRUFF: What are there things you miss about?

[27:03] STACEY JOHNSON: I don't know that it's something that I miss, but I do. On a personal level, I do feel like I lost family time. Like, I know we were all stuck together in the house and it was really intense time together and we did a lot of things in those moments that I cherish and would not give up. But at the same time, you know, my kids had to give up sports for a year. We had to give up vacations multiple times. Like the things that we did that were like memory making activities.

[27:35] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah.

[27:36] STACEY JOHNSON: I feel like we just sort of were in a stasis for a year and a half. Some kind of limbo and we. I kind of, I feel a little bit like I kind of missed some of my kids childhood, but I didn't miss any work. I was always at work. But somehow I missed family life, which is weird because we were at home. How did I miss family life?

[27:56] DEREK BRUFF: Right. But the things that you do intentionally to really create those memories and those.

[27:59] STACEY JOHNSON: Experiences, it was harder to do.

[28:01] DEREK BRUFF: You know, we did what we could. Yeah, I remember we, you know, Emily and I were just figuring out homeschooling. Right. The district didn't provide much to do and so we had science day and I thought, what can I do for science? Well, we can put some Mentos breath mints and some Diet Coke and watch the explosion. And you know, my stepdaughter still talks about that. You know, that's something. I also think the nature of our work and how we interact with our colleagues here at Vanderbilt has, has changed. And I don't know if it will ever revert back. But you know, we, we do a lot of, not just meetings, but we'll do workshops and conversations and panels. Opportunities for faculty to get together and talk about their teaching. And this semester, right now, in fall 2021, when we try to do that in person, people don't show up. Yeah, the Zoom workshops are working fine. And I miss having 25 people in a room to talk about teaching together in person. And you know, like, it's not the most Important thing. But I do miss that type of.

[29:16] STACEY JOHNSON: Community, you know, and there's pros and cons, because the online panels that we do now, we can record them, make them publicly available, put captions on them, like, yeah, and they're so much more accessible to more people now than they used to be. But also, we are not shaking people's hands anymore. We're not having that experience of, like, sharing quiet spaces. Everything's really structured on Zoom.

[29:43] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah.

[29:45] STACEY JOHNSON: It's different. I'm sure things will be different again in the future. I'm sure this isn't the last different we'll run across, so don't get too attached to the new normal.

[29:54] DEREK BRUFF: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

[29:58] STACEY JOHNSON: Well, Derek I had a really good time chatting with you and reminiscing about the most intense work year of my entire life.

[30:07] DEREK BRUFF: It was. Yes. Yes. And, you know, I. One of the things I've told people about how we were able to pull off an online course Design Institute for 500 faculty in one summer. We, as a senior staff at the cft, have been together for, I don't know, four or five years. At least. We knew each other. We did bring a lot of different perspectives and expertise to the table. I mean, there were definitely moments that April, where we were working together on this thing and designing it and building it, and if we had not had some history together, it would have been really. There would have been harsh words spoken.

[30:42] STACEY JOHNSON: I'll just say, yeah. I mean, anytime people are working closely together under such intense circumstances, there's going to be tension. And I think genuinely liking each other to start with sets a firm foundation for navigating that tension. Because I could be like, I do not like you right now in this decision you are making right now, but I have a sense that I like you most of the time, and that will get us through this.

[31:06] DEREK BRUFF: And I think a shared sense of mission. I think we're committed to supporting teaching at Vanderbilt, and we have different ways of going about that, but that shared sense of mission helped us pull off something pretty amazing. And, yeah, I'm super proud of what we did and the ways that we helped so many faculty and so many students.

[31:23] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah, I agree.

[31:25] DEREK BRUFF: I'm glad we got to do that together.

[31:27] STACEY JOHNSON: I am, too. I don't think I have ever experienced anything quite like that in my work life, and I don't think we'll be in a position to do anything quite like that again. And that's something I'm also pretty proud of, because the work that we did fundamentally changed the interactions that people have with technology at Vanderbilt, so that something like the Course Design Institute actually wouldn't be necessary again, which is amazing. Like, it's. What a cool thing to, you know, add to the old cv, help to change the culture around technology.

[32:03] DEREK BRUFF: Massive culture change over one summer.

[32:06] STACEY JOHNSON: Yeah. That was great. Well, thank you so much.

[32:09] DEREK BRUFF: Yeah. Thanks for chatting, Stacy.

[32:11] STACEY JOHNSON: My pleasure.