Mourning online faculty: Creating communities of bereavement through virtual memorial services

Presentation for the Council on Social Work Education's 66th Annual Program Meeting. As online social work education expands, programs need ways to support geographically dispersed communities when faculty members pass. This workshop will describe the role of technology in creating digital legacies, identify ways to support online communal grieving, and share a virtual memorial service that provides an example for other programs. At the completion of this workshop, participants should be able to: **Describe the social media mourning model and how it can be modified to include communal grieving that occurs in an online learning community when a member of that communities dies; **Define disenfranchised grief, the concept of a digital legacy, second loss, and provide examples of these concepts; **Identify strategies that can be used to facilitate commemoration of a deceased faculty member and opportunities for communal grieving among colleagues and students in an online learning community