The 25th Annual eLCC Conference April 16-18, 2014 - Breckenridge, CO
I attended and presented at the eLCC conference this year and celebrated the 25th anniversary of eLCC. The conference was well attended and it is always a quality production with excellent presenters and speakers.
One of the first sessions I attended was personally exciting for me because it was on two topics of interest for me, badging and gardening!
Michael Macklin and Claire Pettner from Colorado State University Online Plus did a presentation titled “Certified Gardner Program: a non-credit curricular badge pilot”
http://www.online.colostate.edu/certificates/digital-badges/certified-gardener/
They call it “unbundled education.” People can sign up for the whole program or they can take courses ala-cart. The badges are sorted into different levels that you can build on. Trek levels and Quest badges. They actually said that the Certified Gardner Program via badging is much more robust of an experience then if they were to come to the campus and take the face to face courses. The program is also as you can imagine much more community focused because it is non-credit continuing education. What a great way to pilot the badging system. It seems so appropriate. The badges are certified, include metadata and are good for up to 3 years. They are using the Mozilla open badge system but they are also working on building a big data infrastructure for the badging system as CSU. They have a long term goal that one day the badges would be worth credit and can be transferable.
Wednesday Keynote Alan Levine http://cogdogblog.com/
“Enquire Within Upon Everything: True Stories of the Wondrous Web” You can take a look at the slides here. http://www.slideshare.net/cogdog/enquire-within Alan’s presentation was an entertaining look at where we were with technology 25yrs ago and what he calls “amazing stories of openness.” You can view some video stories here: http://stories.cogdogblog.com/
His presentation was quite interesting as he dug up the proposal of Tim Berners-Lee and his vision of openness and the exchange of information on “the World Wide Web.” It was just the start to HTML webpages as a method to share information. It did seem like it really fell into place as it was conceptualized. Increasing Student Engagement in Online Discussions with SNAPP presented by Holly Chandler from Front Range College
The Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP). This was interesting. There’s a free browser plugin that can be accessed that will take the data (in real-time) in your discussion forum and create a sociogram of interactions.
A network diagram of your students’ discussions online can: - identify disconnected (at risk) students;
- identify key information brokers within your class;
- identify potentially high and low performing students so you can plan interventions before you even mark their work;
- indicate the extent to which a learning community is developing in your class;
- provide you with a “before and after” snapshot of what kinds of interactions happened before and after you intervened/changed your learning activity design (useful to see what effect your changes have had on student interactions and for demonstrating reflective teaching practice e.g. through a teaching portfolio)
- allow your students to benchmark their performance without the need for marking.
Also visit http://www.snappvis.org/ for more info. I can also forward you the handout to help interpret the sociograms that Holly provided. Just let me know. She has a variety of articles that support this as well.
“Effective Preparation for instructor success in online education”
Jacqueline Cahill of Colorado State University Global Campus
I have to say I was impressed at the rigor and robustness of how they prepare instructors to teach in their online ed programs at the CSU Global Campus. New faculty coming in must take some courses and pass just to get in the door. If for some reason they don’t pass in the beginning they can’t teach. For current instructors they must keep up with ongoing training as needed or identified. They also have a mentoring program (that seemed a little big brother to me, but they feel they need to stay on top of policing what is going on in all their courses in order to meet the standards of excellence they require.) All faculty use a checklist to make sure they perform certain tasks expected and on time! They have yearly peer reviews as well.
Ms. Cahill explained that they have a high rate of faculty satisfaction and retention. They have a faculty resource center that provides a variety of robust teaching strategy training opportunities.
Thursday Keynote
John Sener, Sener Knowledge, LLC. John has written a book called “The Seven Futures of American Education: Improving Learning & Teaching in a Screen-Captured World” http://www.thesevenfutures.com/vision John’s keynote was entertaining and interesting but it is tough to stay awake after a big lunch and long morning. Here are some key take-aways and notes from his presentation.
First he defined “Melioristic” – The world can become better or can be made better by human effort. Then he defined a fun word “Cybersymbiosis” – being dependent on technology. Here’s how we can be more melioistic for the future of education in 3 easy steps:
- focus on making things better; Go beyond status quo, move beyond equal quality, move beyond effectivenes
- deal with changes by aligning education with the foundational shifts that are reshaping it.; refine knowledge; redistribute access, renegotiate authority
- deal with the powers that be by incorporating the influential futures that will be shaping education in the years to come; free market rules, free learning rules, standards rules;
