The University of Alberta, through the Provost’s Digital Learning Committee (PDLC), has created the University of Alberta Blended Learning Award, which provides faculty members from across the university the ability to receive support from the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) for the redevelopment of current undergraduate courses into a blended learning format. Interest in examining how the utilization of technology and the classroom could improve the overall teaching and learning experience is central to this initiative.
This presentation will focus on the overall vision of this award and the process that was undertaken to determine the multiple redevelopment projects that were selected and will examine the current status and next steps of this initiative.
Learning Outcomes:
• Examine the context of blended learning in a university environment
• Discuss the various projects that fit within the blended learning award
• Review the current status and next steps of the initiative
Audience: Anyone looking at implementing a blended learning initiative to those who are currently evaluating or engaged in the development of a blended learning course and/or program.
Educational research is supported by a well-defined collection of methodologies, but are there methodologies elsewhere that can provide fresh perspectives? The use of video games in learning is becoming more accepted, but are there other things we can learn from games?
Though there are fundamental differences between games and instruction, such as the fact that one seeks primarily to entertain and the other to enlighten or educate, it turns out that the practices, processes and theories behind playtesting games can in fact inform aspects of pedagogy—particularly those that relate to engagement.
In game design, the primary focus is on the player experience, and there has been considerable research into ways to assess and measure the player experience through playtesting. Playtesting is concerned with such things as whether or not the game is fun, which parts are too easy or hard, and whether and when people become bored. All of these properties have relevance to teaching and learning, even though they may not appear to be directly connected with meeting learning objectives. Rather, playtesting is concerned with the motivation of the player/student to continue the particular course of learning, which speaks to the success of the methodology in capturing the student's imagination. Sometimes, simply taking a novel approach to evaluation can yield insights that were not uncovered by more common approaches. This presentation will provide a brief overview of formal playtesting procedures and highlight ways these approaches could be used in the classroom as well as how this could inform pedagogy.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists
Concerns about the slow adoption of technology by teachers are not new, and rapid technological changes have increased the likelihood that teachers will have to grapple with unfamiliar technology. This presentation highlights for K-12 educators a framework of enablers for teachers to make sense of their experience with new and emerging technology. It is taken from the study, “Unfamiliar Technology and the Architect of Learning: A Case Study.” This framework outlines characteristics of internal affordance (teacher capacity), external affordances including dynamic professional development experiences, a collaborative culture of lifelong learning and inevitable constraints with something new. Constraints were not seen as barriers in opposition to the enablers. The study found limitations of time, infrastructure and opportunities for teacher learning challenged the teachers to engage with unfamiliar technology. The data also revealed a personal capacity to be open to the possibility that a new technology might present and a strong supportive ecosystem had a powerful impact in facilitating the process of sense making. A constructivist teaching and learning environment invited teachers as participants in the process of learning. As participants the teachers had the capacity to act within their environment, thus the weight of the constraints was diminished. The study also concluded that teachers who do not have the opportunity to see themselves as learners will find it more and more difficult to cope with the endlessly changing landscape influenced by educational technology. Teachers will benefit from participating in building personal pathways for making sense of new and emerging technology.
Of Interest to: K-12 educators, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
The world of online learning is evolving at an increasing rate, particularly in the number and variety of access modes available to students and instructors. In a world where online learning is accessed via screens both small and large, design research for the most commonly use media—text—is relatively sparse. In this presentation, existing research supporting text design decisions for online learning is summarized, gaps identified and implications for new and emerging distribution technologies discussed.
This presentation will benefit instructional designers and instructors who design their own online courses in making informed decisions about the design of text and textual elements. Attendees will be able to identify best practices supported by research for several aspects of online text design. They will be able to consider the relative abundance or scarcity of research evidence supporting specific choices, and they will be able to relate how this research might be interpreted to support mobile and other emerging display devices.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists.
Alberta Distance Learning Centre (ADLC) is working in partnership with the Woodland Operations Learning Foundation (WOLF) to deliver an innovative experience that combines face-to-face and distance delivery modes of education in providing a course that offers students both an academic and a vocational experience. The program combines online courses with industry simulators and a field experience to create a rich, multi-layered learning experience. ADLC has produced and has available five online Forestry courses. Also, ADLC offers a project course which extends and enhances competencies from the online courses in a flexible way. In addition, we offer a three-day camp experience led by forestry industry experts.
Students can develop competence in the area of Harvest Equipment Simulator Operation with time spent using WOLF simulators. The simulators are delivered and set up in schools for a one-week period and are supervised by and an industry specialist.
The ADLC field experience program allows students to earn high school credit. The Natural Sciences Field School program requires students and teachers to spend three days in a forested wilderness environment. This is an example of experiential learning at its best and nurtures the whole child. It enhances students' capacity for achieving their full potential—intellectually, physically, socially, spiritually and emotionally. The camp program incorporates:
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, K-12 educators, Educational technologists, Administrators
It is widely agreed that “Quality Matters” when it comes to online course development. While many excellent rubrics and models have emerged in recent years to support quality in online learning, implementing these models is not always as straightforward as it seems. With the growing practice of Universal Design for Learning and, in certain jurisdictions, the roll out of accessibility compliance requirements, additional elements of review have become critical. How can quality assurance be carried out effectively in contexts where multiple players such as faculty/instructors, instructional designers, multimedia developers and more are involved in the creation and delivery of online courses?
This presentation will offer insights into how the Digital Education Strategies team at The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, Ryerson University, has risen to the challenge of quality assurance in a dynamic team environment that produces up to 30 courses per semester. The team’s Quality Assurance/Quality Control process will be shared, including roles and responsibilities and strategies for ensuring as effective practice as possible. By the end of the session, participants will be able to identify possible strategies for supporting quality assurance in their own institutions’ online courses and how to assist all team members in optimal fulfillment of their roles.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Educational technologists, Administrators
Open online course design and development is now part of the higher education landscape of some institutions. The presenters were involved in an Open Educational Resource university (OERu) redevelopment project that involved the adaptation and customization of an existing introductory open art course so that a new open online course could be made available to OERu partners and any interested learners globally. ART 100: Art Appreciation and Techniques was repurposed from open educational resources (OERs) made available by the Saylor Foundation and has been redesigned with the intent of making it more flexible for reuse, redistribution, revision and remixing for different users and contexts. A big part of the course redevelopment project was to pilot the use of MediaWiki as both a development and a publishing platform for open distributed learning. Technical barriers and other challenges made the project more difficult than originally anticipated. Väljataga, T., Põldoja, H., & Laanpere, M. (2011, p. 67) point out that, “although open online course design solves many educational problems and challenges, at the same time it also creates new ones.” In this workshop, we will discuss several critical technological, and other, considerations and challenges of designing and developing a course for open online delivery, using OER. We will also outline some of the promises of such a venture.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
Stubborn misconceptions are common in many fields of study. They are the 'devils in the details' that inhibit a deeper understanding of a given subject. This presentation will explore the networked nature of learning and how the combination of formative quizzes and short online videos can be used to alter relationships among basic knowledge elements in order to banish misconceptions involving more complex topics.
Learners are first alerted to the existence of misconceptions in their own thinking by means of brief formative assessments. Learners are then directed to short online videos which address the misconceptions. This feedback-corrective procedure can have the effect of reconfiguring knowledge elements in the schemata of individual learners, which can then lead to deeper understanding of a topic.
The presentation is suitable for all educators and especially for distance learning faculty and course developers. At the end of the presentation participants will be able to:
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers
As Canadian post-secondary institutions grapple with declining enrollments within the traditional student demographic, many are actively discussing the multi-faceted concepts of student engagement, support and persistence. The present study focused on female adult learners, a demographic that is growing at Canadian institutions and one that will become more critical as the traditional 18–25 age group shrinks as a proportion of post-secondary enrollment. This study examined the lived experience of seven adult female learners as they (re)engaged with post-secondary education at a mid-sized western Canadian university, using the metaphor of claiming one’s space and, through this, the building of campus community. The study provided an opportunity for students to express themselves in their own words over a 13 week period and permitted an in-depth examination of how they constructed their learning experiences and own identities. Using van Manen’s approach to phenomenological hermeneutics, the study emphasized the interpretive analysis of actual life texts, writing as research and the development of pedagogical competence. The results produced three main themes of motion, emotion and connection. The implications of these findings were discussed for students, educators and researchers, with strategies for supporting the transformative learning experiences, and the subsequent claim on cultural space, for female adult students within post-secondary settings.
Of Interest to: Post-secondary education, Researchers, Administrators
This presentation will focus on the redesign of the Human Development distance learning course for social work students. Two faculty members from the School of Social Work & Human Service collaborated on the project as curriculum developer and consultant to revise and update the course. This redesign was informed by a need to update curriculum to reflect cultural diversity and difference, as well as to locate educational materials within local, national and international arenas. To achieve these aims, we used a variety of online approaches to our material: first, we used two textbooks—one a standard Canadian human development text, the other an Aboriginal approach to women’s development. These textbooks were supplemented by local author Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse, a fictional account of the impact of residential school on an Aboriginal boy’s development. Other innovative approaches included a lengthy interview with Richard Wagamese discussing Aboriginal development and the cultural impacts of colonialism, and short videos from the textbook focusing on intercultural and intracultural differences on human development themes. Curriculum designers, consultants, educators and administrators will be invited to discuss the challenges and possible solutions to incorporating differing worldviews and diversity within curriculum development.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists
In 2011, a course design pilot project was started for Athabasca University courses in the School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS), building on a development pilot initiated after a program review. The goal was to share an understanding of theory and effective practice for online learning and to develop guidelines to facilitate creative design and solution finding. At that time all SCIS courses were developed using one HTML design template. Initial changes were made to give each course its own visual identity and add course-specific resources. The next level of the design pilot looked for more effective ways to present content in the form of learning activities.
In 2013, a formative evaluation was undertaken of the content and presentation of courses and of the design process, with the goal of informing improvements in both courses and process. Each faculty member who participated in the pilot provided his perspective on design choices made to engage students in an online learning environment. The coordinator and course author, Terry Taylor, who was interviewed for this study, used some particularly innovative ways to convey content, and the evaluation team wished to know more about his approach to motivating learners. He was interviewed about his design strategies for online courses to support learner motivation. The results presented here shed light on his successful design process. The intended audience is learning designers and faculty designing online courses.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers
In November 2013 a new learning space, called the Discovery Centre, was opened in the MacOdrum Library at Carleton University, as part of the library’s renovations. This learning space was designed to provide a flexible environment with furnishings that allowed for easy reconfiguration, especially for group work. The 9,500 sq ft space included features such as large screen displays for easy switching between multiple laptop displays and treadmill desks. Besides the main open floor space there are three adjacent rooms, a gaming laboratory, a multi-media laboratory and a learning laboratory. The gaming lab has two gaming stations and two 3D printers. The multi-media lab has a large screen (approx. 18ft x 5ft). The learning lab provides an innovative classroom for 24 students (6 at 4 tables) that has an instructor’s screen projected onto two opposing walls, as well as a display at each of the four tables that allows 4 connections from laptops or tablets to the display screen. This presentation will examine the design and implementation of this new learning space, as well as the findings from running the space for six months. Details on the variety of uses of the space will be included. The presentation will be of interest to anyone involved in constructing and using learning spaces, including instructors, facilities managers, teaching and learning centres, administrators and librarians. The learning outcomes will be the knowledge of the furniture, technology and uses of a new learning space.
Of Interest to: K-12 educators, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
Interaction in one of several different modes (student-student, student-content or student-teacher) seems to be a necessary condition for student learning to take place. One way to promote positive student interactions and deep approaches to learning is to offer a structured ‘study buddy’ activity where students review each others' assignments prior to the assignment deadline. Deep approaches to learning are characterized by the appropriate use of high-level cognitive skills for tasks which require them. Students taking a deep approach seek to understand ideas in context and apply their learning to other concepts. Instructional designers, K-12 teachers and higher education faculty will understand deep and surface approaches to learning, why they are not the same as ‘learning styles’ and how student interactions can be structured to promote deeper approaches in a socially engaging context.
This will be a relatively high level overview of my MEd thesis with interaction coming from the participants in the form of questions and comments.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
In a recent online presentation, Charles M. Reigeluth said that the future of Ed Tech would require a change of the paradigm of pedagogy. Gamification, the use of game elements in non-game contexts, is one such new pedagogy that can be implemented without the need for institutional systemic change. Since the term’s first appearance in 2006, it has become a trending topic on many education forums. This presentation reports on the gamification of two university courses: one a graduate-level education course and the other a freshman computer course.
Reigeluth’s requirements for a new paradigm include a requirement for attainment-based, continuous student progress that is learner-centered, personalized and self-directed. Gamification, done right, is all those things.
The Gamification Paradigm includes:
This presentation will explain the structure of the courses that were taught, highlight successes and failures, and conclude with strategies that can be used to incorporate meaningful gamification into existing courses.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers
Describing, supporting and ensuring “quality” in online learning initiatives remains an ongoing challenge for the public higher education sector. This session will present a range of nimble strategies that aim to leverage existing university resources to improve quality during the design phase. The exploration of these strategies will be of interest to administrators, instructional designers, educational technologies and champions of online learning. As our paradigms for teaching and learning are shifting, so must our conception of online course design process within the university organization. While many of us have expertise in supporting high quality instructional design, what is equally important is development of a tool kit for knowledge mobilization that leverages products, events and networks for broader impact. In addition to providing guidance in the areas of learning theory and design process models, we are asked to support more comprehensive institutional strategies to ensure the quality of our online offerings.
During this session examples speaking to a range of online learning contexts, including fully online, hybrid and MOOC initiatives will be shared. Participants in this session will be provided with a framework for “scaffolding” quality in the design phase as part of overall capacity development strategy within an existing institutional structure and culture. By artfully amplifying the approaches necessary within a single course, we can make this work visible and replicable within our community or institution.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Instructional designers, Educational technologists, Administrators
INTS 3331: International Community Development is an online course that has been running at Mount Royal University for approximately ten years. The adoption of Google Apps by Mount Royal University, and the opportunity to redevelop the course, allowed for a re-imagining of how students could connect with each other, successfully achieve the course outcomes and stretch their creativity. The redeveloped course was launched in January 2014.
Upon completion of the session participants will be able to:
In our presentation, we would like to share with you our scholarly reflections on how the community-building exercises set the stage for students’ exploration of the field of ICD, as well as provided success and practice for building online “artifacts” as part of their assessment in the course. If you have a laptop, please bring it to the session. Wifi will be available at the conference.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Educational technologists
The Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Regina offered two blended courses as a pilot. Up to 50 per cent of the course was done face-to-face in the classroom and the remaining time was done online in an LMS. There were two reasons for the pilot: 1) to test the notion that blended learning equals improved learning as compared to face-to-face alone; and 2) more efficient use of classroom space where the face-to-face component of both classes was taught using only one classroom, essentially halving the classroom usage. This process is being repeated for two more courses in Winter 2014. If this works, it could be scaled up to help alleviate classroom pressures on campus.
Since all four blended courses were also developed and delivered fully online, ongoing research has compared the effectiveness of each delivery mode. Some factors that will be considered in the research include but are not limited to: 1) student academic performance—assignment and final grades, assignment completion rates and retention; 2) student and instructor satisfaction or perception; 3) level of student support for each delivery mode (instructor and other support); 4) student profiles in each mode of delivery which could factor into this; 5) costs and time spent on designing and delivering/teaching each delivery mode; 6) and a detailed description of what constitutes each mode of delivery (how each course is designed and taught). The presentation will provide some preliminary research results.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Administrators
This presentation will demonstrate an innovative, time-saving implementation for distance and open education online self-paced Spanish courses offered online by Athabasca University (AU) and delivered through Moodle. Spanish courses have always had very high enrollments, and their tutors have heavy workloads. As in any language course, an important amount of Spanish students’ learning takes place through the tutor marked written exercises (TMWEs). Traditionally, these assignments include many questions and sub-questions with variable answers, which meant they had to be graded manually. Previously, students were doing their TMWEs on paper or as Word files that went back and forth by post mail or by email, which made the grading work very laborious and repetitive. To overcome the bottleneck, we designed a new way to implement and automate the delivery and marking of Spanish courses in Moodle that eases the tutors’ marking burden by around 65 per cent. The time thus gained can now be used to guide students in other ways. Since question types in Moodle are somehow limited, we used Hot Potatoes to produce many other types of questions that can be imported and included into Moodle quizzes. This new method is being used successfully across all Spanish courses and now is being introduced to other language courses successfully. We are now enhancing and refining this successful method.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Educational technologists
The training of healthcare professionals has traditionally been based on substantial direct student–patient contact. Effective practitioners need to be able to apply reasoning skills gained from exposure to a variety of cases in order to develop diagnostic and therapeutic accuracy.
Virtual patients can provide students with a reliable, safe and replicable environment to practice diagnostic skills and develop clinical reasoning. In particular, virtual patients have demonstrated their use in healthcare teaching, learning and assessment and throughout a wide range of designs for learning.
While virtual patients are a useful component of healthcare education, they are seldom affordable. The range of virtual patients being produced is limited, with many essentially automated versions of problem-based learning (PBL) cases. These cases only proceed in a single direction, which prevents users from tracking down ‘wrong paths’ by immediate correction. This inflexibility limits the development of clinical reasoning, and is both unrealistic and unengaging. In real life there are often several ways to tackle a problem, but such multiple route scenarios can be very time consuming to model.
This presentation will demonstrate how UNBC is employing open source platform OpenLabyrinth https://github.com/olab/Open-Labyrinth/wiki to build online virtual patients. The development methods employ visual thinking and concept mapping techniques that are accessible, yet flexible enough to simulate real clinical decisions through non-linear pathways.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Educational technologists
It is becoming increasingly apparent that police officers, firefighters, medical personnel and other first-responders need improved trauma resilience skills in order to cope effectively with the many challenges encountered during traumatic emergency situations. There is growing evidence that trauma can have a long-term health impact on these workers. One of those impacts is the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can develop following the stress of emergency situations. In the framework of the first responders’ culture, where emergencies are the priority and finding time for training is sometimes almost impossible, the idea of providing online learning opportunities for training in the area of trauma resilience was analyzed and implemented.
A multidisciplinary group integrating police officers, firefighters and paramedics was linked together with instructional designers, multimedia developers and research experts to design and determine the effectiveness of online training for trauma resilience. Once the web course was developed, its efficiency was tested by a group of first responders across Canada. This presentation will share the amazing findings of this case study, the challenges of developing online learning resources for trauma resilience, the impact of the first responders’ culture on training possibilities online and the limits and opportunities of online learning for mental health in general, and for trauma resilience in particular. The audience will be able to learn from the experience and build bridges between this case study and similar training possibilities for mental health and other similar disciplines.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Program developers, instructional designers, LMS administrators and IT.
Human Geography 302 is an online, self-paced, undergraduate, three-credit course in human geography offered at Athabasca University. It is suitable for students who are interested in the vast geography, culture and sustainable development of Canada’s North. Regardless of the rich and diverse content of the course, students tend to focus their attention on a small geographical area they select to conduct their work, but do not expand their learning experience to other areas. However, this course was completely redesigned recently. The use of Google dynamic maps, which is one of the most significant new elements integrated in the course, aims to diversify and enrich students’ learning.
Coordinated by tutors and based on cooperative learning strategies, students across groups use and share the same online dynamic map to post assignments produced throughout the course. These assignments reflect the central discussions in the course and let students integrate a multidisciplinary analysis of a particular geographical area. Instructions for assignments are designed so that students’ outcomes are different from one another’s. There is a public approval process for assignments in which tutors ensure the focus and perspective of a student’s assignment differs from those of other students. In this way assignments shared publicly don’t pose any opportunity for copying or cheating. The approval process involves having students reading and analyzing assignments submitted previously. This cooperative learning strategy aims to expand, diversify and enrich students’ learning experience. It also provides students with an excellent opportunity for learning from one another.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Educational technologists
Video games are interactive by nature—people proceed in games by doing things, and this experiential quality lies at the very core of game design. Without interaction, it isn’t a game. Video games are popular precisely because of the experience—games designed for learning can do no less. However, to be feasible for use in formal educational settings, they must do more, and while we are making progress studying games in classrooms, there remain few structured approaches to analysing games that do not include classroom testing.
This presentation will outline the author’s Four Pillars of Game-Based Learning and show examples of how they can be used to perform a structured analysis of both COTS and serious games to assess whether or not a game has potential for use in the classroom.
These four pillars are:
Together these four pillars highlight the key issues associated with the use of games in the classroom.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
In nature, estuaries are meeting places. Fresh water, salt water and land come together, enabling productivity and biodiversity that is greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly, university faculty members and learning and development professionals may be able to create—or enable the creation of—what I refer to as “intellectual estuaries.” These spaces bring together often-unlikely groups of people for learning that can be greater than the sum of the knowledge they bring. The presenter has developed this concept over several years of research and practice. Design of these spaces involves boundary spanning or blurring, openness to possibility, productive tensions and inherent ambiguities. Intellectual estuary design is to traditional instructional design what the un-conference is to the conference. Examples will be shared from experience at Fielding Graduate University, where Malcolm Knowles was a founding faculty member, from Royal Roads University and from consulting practice. After introducing the concepts and examples, there will be round table sessions in which individuals can begin to apply the ideas to their own contexts.
Of Interest to: Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists
Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members are amongst the best trained military personnel in the world. This strategic advantage has consistently enabled the CAF to excel during all types of operations. The challenge is to maintain this advantage in the face of resource constraints and an increasingly complex and challenging security environment.
CAF Campus represents a fundamental shift from the traditional IT&E paradigm and is the first systemic rationalization of the IT&E system in the CAF’s history. Displacing the stovepiped approach of the current system, it empowers leadership at all levels and enables the strategic synchronization of plans, opportunities and investments to improve IT&E while reducing the burden on personnel and resources.
CAF Campus will initiate a culture of continuous improvement and deliberate, coordinated analysis to ensure the sustained effectiveness and efficiency of the IT&E system. Innovative approaches that fuse modern methodologies with the latest technology-enabled IT&E solutions will accelerate learning, improve retention, encourage critical thinking and enable easy access to realistic IT&E at the point of need. The improved efficiencies made possible by the implementation of CAF Campus will produce effects well beyond the IT&E system, including improvements to capability development and reduction of the overall operations and maintenance burden. CAF Campus will facilitate the goals of our members who embrace self-improvement and who have been limited by the current IT&E system. It also capitalizes on integration with collective training, joint training and all four pillars of the CAF Professional Development System, while making the best use of every training dollar.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists
The purpose of this workshop is to explore innovative assessments that will help students to develop 21st century skills. Participants will be introduced to some key assessment terms, including formative and summative assessment, as well as the difference between assessment and evaluation. A variety of non-traditional assessments will be addressed, with a focus on those that use digital tools such as blogs, e-portfolios, wikis, social media and multimedia projects. Participants will also be introduced to some best practices for marking a variety of assignments, such as the creation of rubrics that specifically link to learning outcomes. Participants will leave with some practical ideas for creating engaging formative and summative assessments that will allow students to demonstrate their learning in innovative ways.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Educational technologists
For many years, JIBC has been guided by an applied learning model that has resulted in a healthy use of simulations, exercises and role-plays in the design and delivery of its programs. However, when learning technology is thrown into mix it presents certain challenges to maintaining an experiential learning environment since many mainstream technologies (e.g., LMSes) are better suited to delivering content-driven courses characteristic of more traditional university programs. At JIBC, this challenge is compounded by a highly focused institutional mandate, coupled with a less traditional student body whose learning experiences transverse institutional, workplace and simulated places. This presentation will discuss findings from a JIBC student use of technology study that looked at formal and informal uses of technology, and how this informs (and doesn’t inform) learning technologies and innovation at our institution.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
What better way than online learning to support the student motivated to gain an education who is unable attend a traditional classroom. Thanks to the growing accessibility of the Internet, we can reach out to students residing in the remote corners of our world as well as those in the military or in the resource industries.
As educators we have the opportunity to provide education that is meaningful, relevant and readily available. Students studying online need our support on how to navigate our courses and participate in the discussion forums. We have the capacity to assist students to build their own online communities that will enhance and enrich their learning experiences.
The purpose of this presentation is to provide strategies and promote discussion that will facilitate online teaching skills based on the findings of a larger study undertaken to explore and describe the strategies and resources that nursing students used in their online learning. The students in the research study identified what they perceived as effective teaching that supported their learning. This presentation will address these findings, such as how to get your students connected online, how to develop discussion forums that stimulate learning and how to manage the online environment to enhance and support your teaching.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Researchers, Educational technologists
Thompson Rivers University (TRU) is mandated to provide British Columbia’s Open Learning programming, as well as offering face-to-face courses in everything from trades to traditional academics. Our comprehensiveness can result in both creative linkages and communication gaps.
Our project aims to foster those linkages (and thereby bridge gaps) by engaging the TRU community in creating a resource on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Although a relatively new field of research at the post-secondary level, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has rapidly become very popular; for example, over a dozen learned journals in Canada are devoted to dissemination of SoTL in higher education. What better way to connect members of a teaching community than through their shared interests in, and writing about, processes of teaching and learning?
We will describe the process we undertook to develop an inventory and resource of SoTL and SoTL-related articles authored by members of our university community. An electronic account of publications that can be easily updated, a component of a proposed institutional repository, and a source of information and inspiration for scholars new to writing articles about teaching and learning, our annotated bibliography can also promote teaching and research intersections.
Participants in this session will come away with:
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Administrators
The Graduate Certificate in International Business (IB) builds on previous post-secondary education to give students the skills they need to enter an exciting career working with people and organizations globally.
Offered by the Donald School of Business at Red Deer College, this post baccalaureate credential is the first of its kind in the Alberta post-secondary community and has, at its core, a blended model of delivery that will support the students in their studies, offer them the latest in access to IB experts (face to face and online), while giving them the technology environment that will promote their ability to function in a global economy.
Santiago Iñiguez, the Dean of Madrid’s IE Business School, in November 2013, supported the use of blended learning in business education, noting “It’s high-quality online learning combined with face-to-face sessions...Blended education is the future” (Jacobs, 2013).
Intended for instructional designers and post-secondary administrators, the learning outcomes for this session include understanding the global environment opportunities for learning, the reasons why the design team chose a blended model of technology enhanced executive weekends combined with wholly online delivery, and how this model supports the future design and development of business schools in Canada.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Educational technologists, Administrators
SMART™ discusses why student collaboration is more relevant than ever and how to seamlessly integrate in your digital environment. In an increasing world of 1:1 digital learning what happens to real-time student collaboration? The digital classroom is growing at a faster pace than student enrolment: iPADs, cloud apps, smart phones, tablets, laptops, remote access, projection devices, interactive devices. Administering; class lists, class notes, opinion polling, formative assessments, whole class, small groups, collaborative and 1:1 learning …so much to deal with, so little time, so little training.
While one solution doesn’t fit all, and, we need to make-way for multiple technologies inside and outside the classroom; a good starting place is with an open-platform, a foundation that allows pedagogy to lead the way to student learning, not technology.
Educational culture develops within a framework of learning. This is created through agreed-upon rules between teacher, learner and content. In this workshop, participants will examine both the framework and the experiences that inform the rules through a Learning Circle—a method of cooperative, oral reflection. Learning Circles are a way of sharing history, knowledge and decision making. The Learning Circle process changes the emphasis from teaching and coaching to encouraging flexible learning and finding answers from within one’s own lived experience. A Learning Circle is central to the notion of scholarly practice as it is based on inquiry and reflection. Through the experiential nature of a Learning Circle, there is an opportunity to allow patterns, themes and deep questions to surface about the practice of teaching and learning. It is within this space that innovation and creativity lies. Participants will be invited to consider the basis of their opinions and discover insights about their own practice. Christina and Dian have used Learning Circles extensively as a means of inquiry and exploration. The workshop will be limited to 25 participants.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
Authentic, meaningful and engaging education of pre-service teachers is of utmost importance in our increasingly complex educational landscape. If education students are to be prepared for the challenges of 21st century learning, they need to learn in authentic environments, working with not only university instructors, but also children and adolescents, teachers and administrators in order to develop deep understandings of the skills, knowledge and dispositions they will need for their chosen profession. In this symposium we talk about changing the culture of pre-service education as we explore new spaces and places for learning—for students and instructors alike.
In this presentation we will share a collaborative cross-sector approach to teacher education in a post-degree program. Working with two cohorts of secondary teacher education students, instructors based both on campus and in schools worked collaboratively to integrate their courses to enable students in their first term to learn about learning and teaching. These groups of students experienced situated-learning through weekly visits at a local secondary school, a seminar course led by secondary teachers from the same school and a collaborative teaching model with instructors from UVic, including a teaching team of instructors working in the Ministry of Education.
In this session, we will discuss the collaborative model and how it informed the design of the course experiences. The presenters, university instructors and students, will share their experience in interdisciplinary team-teaching and how they structured the courses to embody authentic learning through collaboration with various education partners.
Of Interest to: Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Researchers
Or, “Harnessing common sense and the blatantly obvious to foster community involvement in boring software implementation”
The University of Calgary undertook a three-year process to fully engage the university community in order to identify the next learning management system to be implemented on campus, and to manage the migration to the selected platform. The continuous engagement model that was implemented ensured that diverse voices and perspectives on blended and online learning were integrated into the decision making process.
Fourteen different faculties, each with its own academic models and signature pedagogies, provided strategic direction for their implementation, and the manner in which centrally provided services would be shaped in order to meet their unique needs. Key milestones were aligned with the academic calendar, and iterative pilot projects ensured that the platform was deployed and integrated with university systems in a reliable and sustainable manner, while informing the development of instructor training programs and course migration support. The LMS was framed as just one component of a cohesive and evolving online learning environment.
While the migration to a new LMS could devolve into endless discussions about the tools and their configuration, this engagement model focused on the activities that compose diverse teaching and learning practices. This focus resulted in a deeper connection and acted as the seed to initiate the development of a robust community of teaching and learning practitioners.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Educational technologists, Administrators
This session will look at the ways in which identifying and describing our students can or should influence the design of blended and/or online courses in a post-secondary environment. As institutions move to more student-centered pedagogical designs, the clearer articulation of who the student is impacts this process.
Learning Outcomes:
Audience: Anyone who is looking at designing and implementing blended and/or online courses or programs.
How can traditional higher education programs learn from competency-based assessment strategies? Existing assessment models remain suspended in traditional frameworks and have not kept pace with the high-tech environment distance education students currently demand. Competency-based education will disrupt these instruction models by offering more flexibility, reduced cost and an accelerated path to success. In today’s hyper-connected environments, students have access to a plethora of online learning resources. Educators and institutions must develop a secure structure for assessing knowledge in a manner that reduces the spiraling costs of face-to-face learning. A competency-based model offers a self-paced approach that meets the needs of nontraditional students seeking skills for the highly competitive, worldwide workplace.
Attendees can expect to learn the following:
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
SMART™ discusses why student collaboration is more relevant than ever and how to seamlessly integrate in your digital environment.
In an increasing world of 1:1 digital learning what happens to real-time student collaboration? The digital classroom is growing at a faster pace than student enrolment: iPADs, cloud apps, smart phones, tablets, laptops, remote access, projection devices, interactive devices. Administering; class lists, class notes, opinion polling, formative assessments, whole class, small groups, collaborative and 1:1 learning …so much to deal with, so little time, so little training.
While one solution doesn’t fit all, and, we need to make-way for multiple technologies inside and outside the classroom; a good starting place is with an open-platform, a foundation that allows pedagogy to lead the way to student learning, not technology.
The Canadian eLearning Network (CANeLearn http://canelearn.net) is a newly registered Canadian federal not-for-profit society. CANeLearn's mission is to provide leadership that champions student success in K-12 online and blended learning. It provides members with networking, collaboration and research opportunities.
The organization is in its infancy and is looking to strengthen its network through affiliations with other Canadian-based organizations, and we see an important fit between CANeLearn and CNIE. With a specific focus on the K-12 sector, and technology-supported education in both online and blended learning environments, CANeLearn shares similar goals and brings with it a growing network of K-12 online and technology-oriented educators and leaders within school programs.
This session will provide delegates with an overview of CANeLearn and invite conversation into how the new network can work with partners in K-12 and post-secondary in supporting online and blended learning. Examples of projects CANeLearn members are taking a lead in through its Centre for Innovation will be discussed, and delegates be invited to share in research and initiatives underway or under consideration.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Researchers, Administrators
This presentation looks at the affordances of technologies employed for teaching and learning in distance education. Specifically, it looks at LMS systems and their support for group learning. It then examines the need for networked and set-based learning and the tools that best support these in formal education and lifelong learning. Building on the ideas of our 2014 open access book, Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media, we illustrate with demonstrations of our Elgg-based social network, Athabasca Landing, a next generation of distance education tools. We argue that social networks create spaces that allow for generative learning that is owned by learners and persists beyond the end of a course. Rather than use commercial systems such as LinkedIn or Facebook, we argue that institutionally owned “walled gardens with windows” offer a more effective and more controllable environment to support networked and set-based learning.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists
Experiential Learning Theory describes learning as a process that involves transactions between the person and the wider, “real-world” environment in contrast to the traditional, “limited by books, teacher and classroom environment” (Kolb, 1984). Such an active involvement in authentic language experiences is crucial for language development. Thus, moving language instruction beyond the classroom becomes a significant educational tactic for language instructors.
In the experiential learning environment, students take on the “new role” of a “language ‘user’ outside the classroom,” compared to their common role of a language ‘learner’ in the classroom (Springer & Collins, 2008). Such a participation, the first phase of Kolb’s experiential cycle, then leads to the next two phases: reflection and meaningful application of the learned language skills.
Based on recent research and data collected in an English for Academic Purposes classroom, this presentation will discuss cognitive and sociocultural aspects of task-based language teaching and learning and will explore how incorporating on-campus events and activities into the formal ESL instruction can create a new “real-world” learning environment for second language learners and help them expand their language skills.
Of Interest to: Post-secondary education, Instructional designers
Amidst all the chaos of day-to-day life within your education career, what CNIE activities can (or could) we do for you?
We will examine a survey done to determine numerous demographic details to describe your type of employment, language preference, geographic region, etc. We hope to learn whether your professional interest is in K-12 or post secondary; if post secondary, would that be University, College, Cégep, other? Is your educational modality distance, face-to-face, online or a blend of these?
We hope to have the results of a membership survey that captures: (1) your interests in response to a broad range of questions, (2) input from Board members, and (3) a survey of other organizations similar to CNIE.
The session will close with some discussion on recent website activities and seek your input on future web focus.
Driving this kind of investigation is our commitment to maintaining a growing and active membership.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
This presentation will discuss the integration of information literacy and research skills into the curriculum of Distance and Open Education History self-paced courses, offered online by Athabasca University. Learning takes place through interactive, automated modules delivered at distance and online. The modules teach students through the course the information literacy skills they have to demonstrate to complete their research essay assignments satisfactorily. The modules offer students flexibility and feedback and teach the information literacy skills that students require in most History or Humanities courses and which frequently cause frustration to improperly instructed students and their instructors: library skills, critical reading, research, academic essay writing, documentation and academic integrity (avoiding plagiarism). Students’ information literacy skills are assessed in three ways: automated quizzes, assignments and the final examination. The mastery of these literacy skills prepares students for academic success and intellectual satisfaction. The above teaching and learning strategy has been implemented in Moodle successfully, and currently the course is open and students are enrolled. An evaluation project to assess the literacy information skills modules is being conducted.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Educational technologists
The Math Coach program provides help with mathematics using online coaching. In the program, communication using text-based CMC with additional whiteboard capacity is used. Students range from sixth to ninth year of compulsory school, and upper secondary school (aged 12–19). Coaches are enrolled from students at teacher training colleges. Stenbom et al. (2012) introduced a framework for analyzing online coaching, the Relationship of Inquiry. That framework is a modification of the well-researched and verified theoretical framework the online Community of Inquiry (Garrison et al., 2000, 2001). Survey data and transcript analysis indicates that emotional presence is a natural part of a four-element framework for analysis of one-to-one online coaching. Abbreviations, special words and symbols, such as emoticons, are used regularly as an instrument to enhance the visibility between the coach and coachee. It serves as a replacement for face-to-face non-verbal communication. Also, sharing of emotions and moods between two individuals as people and about the coaching activity are common.
This presentation will review the proposed framework for online coaching consisting of cognitive, social, teaching and emotional presence. A special focus will be on the role emotion may play in such environments. Beyond discussion of theory, implications for practice and training of online coaches will be discussed in an interactive session with guided dialogue.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists
The AIM (Accelerative Integrated Method) is a gesture-supported language teaching methodology developed over the past ten years by B.C. educator Wendy Maxwell and now widely implemented throughout K-12 school boards throughout Canada and the U.S. Its outcomes-based approach coincides with the objectives of the Common European Framework of Reference for languages now being implemented in language teaching worldwide. The AIM is currently being piloted in a section of beginners’ French at TRU. This is the first use of the methodology at the post-secondary level in Canada.
In this workshop will begin with a brief demonstration of the teaching technique by giving a sample interactive lesson using a fictitious language so that attendees can experience the methodology first-hand as learners. We will view some of the AIM materials and discuss how the methodology was applied in a section of FREN 1000 at TRU in 2013. A brief review of existing research on the method will be provided, and successes and opportunities will be discussed. The session will conclude with an overview of a formal research project now underway through the TRU Teaching and Learning Scholars program to measure the efficacy of the AIM in the post-secondary classroom. Audience participation, questions, input and discussion are highly encouraged.
This presentation may be of interest to second-language teachers at both the K-12 and post-secondary levels. It may also interest instructional designers and researchers working on second language acquisition, adult learning and gesture-based learning.
Of Interest to: Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers
Many M.Ed. programs claim to incorporate signature pedagogies in their programs, which often include approaches such as inquiry-based, case-based and problem-based learning, communities of learners, and more.
Teacher education is unique among disciplines in that we are doing what we are teaching. Metateaching has been defined as thinking about teaching (Timpson 1999), but if metacognition is thinking about thinking, and a meta-language is a language about languages, then metateaching is in fact teaching about teaching. If we combine this with notions of signature pedagogies and the idea that we should be modeling what we are teaching, then what does this mean at the graduate level?
It means that graduate instructors should themselves be modeling what they are teaching. Wouldn’t signature pedagogy in education be one that actually implements the theories and models being studied in order to teach those same theories and models? Shouldn’t it be one that employs experimental designs and invites the students (most of whom are teachers) to examine the course design as it is being taught? Wouldn’t it make sense to have the students have input into the design and/or teaching?
This presentation will examine the common approach to teaching graduate-level education courses—the seminar—and suggest an alternate approach that uses the theories and models being taught and where the teaching methodology matches the kind of work the participants will do when they graduate.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers
To address the identified shortage of registered nurses and their high rate of turnover in First Nations communities, a clinical nursing education practice hub was established at the Conayt Friendship Centre in Merritt, BC, in 2011. The intention of this partnership was twofold: to strengthen friendship and cooperation between Aboriginal peoples and the faculty/students of TRU School of Nursing, and to provide culturally relevant education to BScN students who would then promote the health of Aboriginal people.
The intended audience for this presentation includes post-secondary educators and community-based researchers interested in Aboriginal contexts. This presentation might also be of value to K-12 teachers, particularly those associated with First Nations communities. The ‘Kәnkneyt’ presentation will focus on the:
Learning outcomes include an increased understanding by presentation participants regarding:
Of Interest to: Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Researchers
This presentation, of interest to individuals teaching online and at a distance as well as those working in instructional design, outlines the results of a multi-year, design-based doctoral research study. This study examines the use of a socially networked online learning environment as a virtual classroom offering openness through its capacity to create, annotate, rate and comment upon persistent artefacts. Additionally, the study examines how students engage a dynamic course archive containing artefacts from current and past learners. The archive is used to support learners in an online graduate level course by offering access to the day-to-day conversations of current and prior learners along with various artefacts created in these current and prior course sections. The study looks at the use, value and perceived barriers in the use of such an archive and it attempts to challenge our current understanding of what students benefit from in their learning processes.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists
The article reports progress concerning the design of a computer-assisted simulation training (CAST) platform for developing decision making skills in police students. The overarching aim is to outline a theoretical framework for the design of computer-assisted simulation training to facilitate police students’ development of search techniques in complex interactions within the built environment, learning to apply and perform the five “quick peek” techniques for information gathering and subsequent risk evaluation. The article draws on Luckin’s Ecology of Resources model of learner context informed with perspectives on reflective thinking from Dewey and Schön. The article discusses design issues within the Ecology of Resources model applied on CAST for complex police situations.
Of Interest to: Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists
My target audience is educators practicing in K-12 and perhaps university professors as well. The three concepts/ideas participants will walk away with include: skills necessary to teach online, tools necessary to teach online, pedagogy of online learning and discussion of asynchronous or synchronous delivery model.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators
The Post Graduate Medical Education (PGME) Office at the University of Toronto uses the POWER system to electronically track learner registration and assessment data. There are three main evaluations that are facilitated through POWER: the resident-in-training evaluations, rotation evaluations and at least one teacher evaluation. This data is used to assess learner performance, to improve the educational experience and to support teacher promotions.
Since the inception of the POWER system in 2004, there have not been any changes to the evaluation tools. In 2014, the PGME Office began developing a mobile evaluation application to modernize the evaluation tool and to increase evaluation rates and learner response time.
The POWER vendor Knowledge for You provided PGME with a prototype based on a mobile evaluation application developed for Undergraduate Medical Education at the University of Toronto. The prototype was circulated to a group of Program Directors, learners and administrative staff. Feedback was applied to the prototype and the application was released into the quality assurance environment for further testing by faculty, learners and administrators.
The application is scheduled to be delivered into the production environment for the 2014/2015 academic year. Beta testing feedback from learners indicates a positive reception for this application. An evaluation of the application will be conducted after it has been launched for a year to determine the impact on evaluation rates and learner response time.
Of Interest to: Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators
Procedure Log Acknowledgement : This project was completed with support from the Postgraduate Medical Education Vice Dean Dr. Salvatore Spadafora, POWER Steering Committee Chair Dr. Kevin Imrie, Director of Policy and Analysis Caroline Abrahams, Director of Operations Loreta Muharumha and with contributions from User Support Services Officer Khush Adaita and Medical Education Coordinator Natali Chin.
Mobile Evaluations Acknowledgement: This project was completed with support from the Postgraduate Medical Education Vice Dean Dr. Salvatore Spadafora, Associate Dean Dr. Glen Bandiera, Director of Policy and Analysis Caroline Abrahams, Director of Operations Loreta Muharumha and with contributions from User Support Services Officer Khush Adaita and Medical Education Coordinator Natali Chin.
Is it possible to safeguard academic rigour while bringing innovative technology into university classrooms? This study session discusses using Mozilla Popcorn Maker to produce video assignments which enrich applied learning.
Bringing innovative technology into academic teaching and learning presents challenges for both instructors and students. At the same time, the challenge directly feeds into community building and the added value of applied learning. This presentation discusses the impact, benefits and limitations of an assignment to compile a 3-5 minute video clip using Mozilla Popcorn Maker at the outset of a blended Masters program in an applied social science program (conflict analysis and management). The case study demonstrates how the sharing of the assignment challenge and products contributed to preparing students for the beginning of their academic program, and more importantly contributed to a strong sense of community and set the context for a safe learning environment. Presenters analysed strategies for an assessment matrix to safeguard academic rigour while recognizing diverse abilities for dealing with technology challenges and innovation. In conclusion, they offer best practices and lessons learned for replicating the assignment in similar learning environments.
Both presenters will be conducting the presentation remotely. Thereby, the interaction with the audience will have to adapt to the synchronous environment, engaging them in dialogue through the blended format.
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers
A learning ecology is “‘a set of contexts made up of configurations of activities, materials, resources and relations generated in physical or virtual spaces, which provide opportunities for learning”, as defined by Barron.
Currently, there is a myriad of digital resources that are used by teachers to informally develop themselves professionally. OER, MOOCs, Personal Learning Environments, Communities of Practice … are in the move towards each individual being responsible for taking his/her own decisions on learning, rather than simply accepting those formally proposed. Several authors have described the benefits of informal learning, based on connectivism, and placing great emphasis on the benefits which these learning networks can provide for professional development.
A key aspect of the updating of professional development is personalization: adapting policies to the specific needs of each individual, according to their learning style. It is clear that the use of ICT in education extends the potential learning space for professional development and updating of skills, thereby generating lots of learning opportunities.
The concept of learning ecology could be a useful tool to help each professional to create a complex structure of interlinked relations and components which form an own learning ecology: a personal strategy for professional development and relations.
The research aims to analyze and understand the ways in which learning ecologies are and will be contributing to the professional development of primary school teachers.
In this presentation, the design and the current stage of the research will be introduced, as well as its initial outcomes.
Of Interest to: K-12 education, Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers
