At UCSC, in the face of campus closure and a shift to remote instruction, we solved two problems with one solution. We had a host of student workers whose were potentially out of work and we had a host of faculty forced into delivering remote instruction without any preparation to do so. The solution started in Humanities, where I wanted to provide continued employment for my 9 student workers. I devised a plan to repurpose them as zoom assistants for remote instruction. What happened from there is where it gets interesting. My colleagues saw my plan and thought this would be useful for evening support for all faculty and asked that I expand it to serve the entire campus. In concert with that request, they offered their students to expand my effort. This was the birth of what we call the "zoom corps". It is a group of loosely governed students who get paired with faculty to provide in class zoom technical assistance and community management so faculty can focus on delivering instruction. These students were still employed by their original employers and their time was donated to this program. We used a slack channel and daily stand ups to manage the work flow where students would take on "pairing opportunities" in a gig economy fashion (by volunteering for the opportunities as they appeared on the channel). We developed a training process that was mostly peer provided, offering additional professional growth opportunity for the students. We eventually expanded the service to help with events and in researching and documenting various problems related to remote instruction. Supervisors who donated their students were from a variety of departments across campus. Staff who volunteered to help were also from various department. The zoom corps was more or less a spontaneous and generous act of community in response to a crisis. It was a novel solution to a novel virus.
This program has been so successful that we plan to grow it into something new when we return to campus. While the generous gift of students cannot persist, the idea of a student labor pool that can be drawn upon to provide a variety of services has merit in the long term, as does the need for remote session facilitation as a service.
I would like to offer a brief description of how the zoom corps came to be and then engage in discussion about how campuses might model a shared labor pool and employing students on an hourly wage with this gig or salaried type work flow. I would also like to include one of the zoom corps students who could share about their experience.
This session is proposed specifically for August 11, 2020: THEME: The UC Response to COVID-19