The Online Learning Consortium 20th Annual International Conference #ALN14 is being held at the Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando at the heart of Walt Disney World. Founded back in 1992 from funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation [formerly known as the Sloan Consortium], this year Sloan has undergone some rebranding as @OLC moves into new markets worldwide. This name change signifies where Sloan has been and where it is headed-online.
Leadership & Administration and Faculty & Student Engagement are the primary tracks this year with the all-encompassing Undefined track serving to contain the balance of the hundreds of sessions offered this year. One event coordinator told me there were 2200 attendees with more offerings than any previous year.
I arrived interested in hearing more about:
- Mobile learning
- Competency-based learning
- How others have been tackling the issues of orientating faculty into online learning?
- What others are doing to incorporate online community for their faculty?
Day 1 Wednesday, October 29, 2014 did not disappoint.
I started #ALN14 by listening to Jason Rhode of Northern Illinois University speak about Designing Competency-Based Self-Paced Online Workshops for Introducing Faculty to Online Teaching Technologies.
Granted Northern Illinois University [NIU] has a much larger ‘scale’ than Bay Path in their approach to orientating their faculty to online learning-however, they do many things we already do:
- survey faculty for prior knowledge,
- allow faculty to work in a sand-box [or Master] course,
- create an individualized plan. We do this, albeit a little less formally than NIU,
- and offer a self-paced learning environment.
A few takeaways I would like to see us implement in our online faculty orientation are:
- Offer a slightly more formalized ‘learning contract’ for our online faculty. This might be a little more time consuming [however, I’m sure we could find some technology to track] and I believe it would legitimate the process. We could augment our orientation with a couple of ‘free’ perks as well, such as offering:
- a little more ‘pre-start’ guidance and objectives for the incoming faculty
- badges for completion
- an approach to the potential of an online certification. This might dove-tail into feeding faculty into the MHE program.
- a gateway leading faculty to our ‘newly developed’ online community.
I attended a session entitled, Building Online Academic Communities with the Commons in a Box, by Matthew K. Gold from City Tech and Grad Center of CUNY. I have been working with WordPress since 2009 and believe it is a great solution for containing an online community [as well as ePortfolios].
Commons in a box is great solution that would give us everything we need to create our own BPU academic online community- and it’s free. We like free.
This would give faculty, student groups, departments etc. virtual space to create:
- profile pages
- groups
- committees
- blogs
- academic journals and other research
- links to social media feeds
- a showcase of examples
With the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing Program at the top of my mind, I can easily envision an MFA Cohort page for faculty and students alike, to congregate and share all sorts of information.
Of course, there would be challenges:
- maintenance- who is responsible? How often?
- interaction fatigue –would this be used by the community? Or, is it overload?
- tracking and surveillance-for the community
Yet, the possibilities are:
- Communities ARE our Resources- they create our stories
- They become our human microphone
This session ended with an interesting quote, by Jim Groom,
‘It ain’t a community without love, feedback, and being there.’
The afternoon keynote speaker Dr. John Medina was one of my favorites of the day. Speaking to an audience of at least 800 people, once he started talking, John barely stopped to breathe. John’s premise revolves around the 12 brain rules. In his talk he spoke about a couple.
Survival: The brain is a survival organ. It is designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in nearly constant motion (to keep you alive long enough to pass your genes on). We were not the strongest on the planet but we developed the strongest brains, the key to our survival.
Isn’t it interesting how learning often revolves around sitting still, in a classroom? How might we incorporate some of these brain survival rules into online learning? John went on to explain the impact of exercise.
Exercise: Exercise boosts brain power. The human brain evolved under conditions of almost constant motion. From this, one might predict that the optimal environment for processing information would include motion. Indeed, the best business meeting would have everyone walking at about 1.8 miles per hour. At work, we are in our own way, by incorporating our standing desks!
To get a little sense of John’s energy have a look at this quick video. I think John’s book[s] are a must for my library.
This was just Day One!
How did Leanna and Mary’s presentation on Collaborative Creation go?
Stay tuned for more details.
