Tag Archives: conference

Anywhere, Anytime, Anyplace: A Brutal Underestimation

Anywhere, anytime, anyplace

This quote was shared by Siân Bayne and Jeremy Knox in their keynote (The Manifesto for Teaching Online) at this year’s annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning. The quote particularly caught my attention:

Thrust into the world of online and distance education, it immediately became clear that the slogan of anywhere, anytime, anyplace is a brutal underestimation of the complexities and entanglement of different inequalities and structural arrangements. Overnight, gone is the relative safe haven of campus life, social life and peer groups. Students and staff were thrust into a lack of dedicated space to work undisturbed and the need to care for family members and especially children who must be home-schooled during the lockdown. Students reported more family responsibilities like running errands, household chores, taking care of elderly family members. Such role conflict emerged in stories of students being admonished for being lazy and just reading (rather than physically active); for having even more pressure to choose between prioritising their time/finances for personal gain (their studies) or their families financial or care-giving needs. For some, returning home meant returning to places of violence while residential accommodation on campus was a refuge for those coming from abusive/dysfunctional homes—physical emotional and verbal abuse/gender-based violence.

This comes from ‘A Wake-Up Call: Equity, Inequality and Covid-19 Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning‘ – worth reading in full.

Czerniewicz, L., Agherdien, N., Badenhorst, J. et al. A Wake-Up Call: Equity, Inequality and Covid-19 Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning. Postdigit Sci Educ 2, 946–967 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00187-4

DT&L Conference Registration Opens April 14

2021 DT&L Social Media Stil

The Distance Teaching & Learning Conference (@UWMadison #UWdtl)  is 100% online, and runs 2nd – 5th August, 2021.

Registration is just $329.00 for 75+ sessions from internationally-renowned Online and DistanceEd experts.

More information can be found at https://dtlconference.wisc.edu

2021 DT&L Conference Call for Proposals

The 2021 Call for Proposals is Open

The 2021 Call for Proposals is Open

The 2021 Distance Teaching & Learning Conference Call for Proposals are open today (and closes 4:00 p.m. Friday 8th January). The conference this year will again be 100% virtual.

There are seven formats to present (which are described here):

  1. Pre-Conference Workshops
  2. Research Session
  3. Exploratory Session
  4. Roundtable Session
  5. Panel Session
  6. DT&L Talks
  7. ePosters

Hoping to get my proposal in soon

35th annual Distance Teaching & Learning Conference

35th Annual DT&L Conference

I am going to be presenting this year at the 35th annual Distance Teaching & Learning Conference (August 6-8, 2019) in Madison, WI. There are some amazing presentation and workshops scheduled. Hope to see you there.

The organizers have created some sneak peeks to share:

Keynote & Invited Speakers

Robin DeRosa

Workshops

Notes from The Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning

I was at The Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning last week. The conference seems to get better each year, and I needed the weekend to think a little deeper about what I saw and heard. This here, is both a prompt and a reminder (so that I don’t forget what I saw, and work on the projects that I want to).

As usual, several of the participants used Twitter for back-channel conversations. This became a useful tool to aggregate comments and resources  via the #UWdtl hashtag. Hopefully more participants get onboard next year.

Speed Sessions

I managed to catch a couple of Speed Sessions Tuesday afternoon, only the last four, but these were helpful. The “speed” part of the speed sessions was hurt a little when presenters had difficulty getting their laptops to work with the HDMI connection to the projector in the room, but luckily those with recalcitrant laptops were able to borrow working MacBooks. Of the four sessions that I saw, Moses Wolfenstein‘s “Finding a Place for Gamification in Learning” was the most entertaining,  but Laura Bunte of Stratagem had some very useful formulae and templates to share for projecting the cost of developing online content.

Information Sessions

The Conversation Prism

The Conversation Prism

I was lucky enough to see a series of information sessions that met my interests and needs:

  • Using Game Design Theory To Develop A Faculty Self-Assessment
    • Susan Manning shared four game design elements (story, mechanics, technology, and aesthetics) that could be used by instructors to help inform their instructional design.
  • Social Media in Education: So Many Choices!
    • Ronald Hannaford posited that Social Media in Education has many of the same amorphous aspects of online learning fifteen years ago. I particularly liked the Conversation Prism image he used. He suggests a strategic plan for campus-wide integration.
  • Are Games And Simulations A Good “Fit” For Your Curriculum
    • Penny Ralston-Berg demonstrated some great examples and games. The one I will be looking at in more detail is Quizlet.
  • “Voice And Screencasting Feedback”
    • John Orlando started his session with my favorite video of the conference (Hexaflexagons). More interestingly, he shared research on the amount of time some faculty spend on student feedback – more on textual feedback, and less on audio feedback. However, the audio feedback contains more “words,” so is both more efficient and more detailed. I am pondering running some research along these lines at work.
  • “MOOC Development And Delivery From The Support Staff’s Perspective”
    • Hui-Lien (Sharon) Hsiao and Norma Scagnoli shared their processes, challenges, and merits of facilitating courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am very, very curious to see how these business courses pan out.

 

Distance & Learning Conference: Call for Proposals Now Open

Call for Proposals

The Call for Proposals is now open for the Distance Teaching & Learning Conference that takes place Madison, Wisconsin from August 11-13, 2015.

The deadline to submit your Call for Proposal is: Monday, January 26, 2015 at 4pm CST

The Distance Teaching & Learning Conference welcomes hundreds of distance education and online learning professionals every year to share effective practices, research, strategies, and new tools/techniques.

  • Share your data on established practices
  • Present a hot new topic in distance learning
  • Have your results published in the proceedings publication
  • Network with experts from around the world

Some suggested topics include: New course design models, mobile & social learning, learning analytics,

competency-based learning, gamification & badges, open educational resources

More information can be found at:

https://dtlconference.wisc.edu/call-for-proposals/

28th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning

Conference ID

A week ago I spent three extremely rewarding days at the Distance Teaching and Learning conference in Madison (full disclosure, I am on the planning committee). It has taken a few days to put my notes and thoughts in order, and here they are.

Wednesday

Madison, 2012

Madison, 2012

Early morning saw me boarding the Megabus to Madison. The cost of the trip was shockingly low – just five dollars. I spend more travelling to and from work on the El each day.

I arrived in Madison in time to meet with Dawn Drake and finalize our presentation for one of the Communities of Practice sessions that afternoon (on Management and Administration). I enjoyed discussing the topic with the folks there.

Promotion

I was slightly shocked to discover an inadvertent promotion on page 33 of the conference brochure (I am not Dean of the College of Commerce).

Thursday

Madison Conference 2012

The trending topics of the conference from my perspective were mobile learning and MOOCs. Previous conferences had been abuzz with discussion on Second Life, Google Wave, and Social Media. The focus on mobile and MOOCs seemed to me to be more pragmatic. Mobile communication was ever present during the conference – the effective use of Twitter heightened my enjoyment of the sessions (and muted any dissatisfaction with particular presenters). 

The keynote from James Zull was not the strongest part of the conference. Zull is a far better researcher than large-venue presenter. His premise did make me think, and his presentation style gave me plenty of time to tweet and retweet with others in the room. This was particularly refreshing, with a vigorous discussion and commentary taking place along the back channels.

Norma Scagnoli’s and Seung won Hong’s presentation on “iPads is graduate professional education” was enjoyable. Norma admitted that the use of iPads at the University of Illinois in the Management program was flawed, with students and faculty not knowing initially whether they owned the iPads or had to return them. I hope they are able to repeat the experiment and train students and faculty on effective use, rather than discover what happens organically. I wanted to know whether students were able to use etextbooks on the iPad effectively in a classroom situation (I have observed that students are able to make notes and refer to material more rapidly in printed textbooks).

Ray Schroeder’s “eduMOOC: Open online learning without limits” presentation was packed, and worked as an iceberg presentation – there was much more material below the surface. I will have to return to his site and explore more:

https://sites.google.com/site/edumooc/ 



Ray Schoeders talk about MOOCs was probably the most productive session for me.

Scott Schopieray’s “One Week, One Course (OWOC): A rapid prototyping concept for courses” contained a little smoke and mirrors – the courses were not completed in a week, but the idea is intriguing. The design of the rapid prototyping model was clever, and effectively implemented. I am tempted to see if this is an idea that can be implemented at work.

The “iPad apps for utility and learning” was not a presentation that I should have attended. Unfortunately I was in the front row as the presentation started, and when I realized my mistake it was too late to leave….

I did not see much at the vendor presentations that was new and exciting, but I am taken with the idea of Camtasia Relay. This may be an effective way way to scale classroom recording and adhoc lecture capture. This is something I will look later.

Thursday evening ended with a delicious meal with some of my colleagues from DePaul at Harvest, a little restaurant with a great view of the capitol.

Friday

The Capitol in Madison, and a statue of Hans Cristian Heg

The Capitol in Madison, and a statue of Hans Cristian Heg

Friday morning began with a fun follow-up discussion of Administration and management. I then attended Dean Blackstock’s and James Mudie’s presentation on “Streaming high quality mobile video: A conversation and some code!” Dean and James developed a great solution to automatically serve up the right type of video to mobile users. Not a solution that I need at the moment, but fun and interesting.

I next attended Johanna Dvorak’s and Laura Pedrick’s presentation on “Developing a comprehensive campus-wide online student services initiative.” What they presented was a work in progress, but the policies applied to assemble the stakeholders and determine what needed to be done are ones I will gladly borrow.

The last concurrent session of the day was “Using mobile technology in faculty development and training.” This was a Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt session, with George Engel providing most of the information I was interested in. Their handout is on the web, and can be found here:

http://mobilefieldworkshop.wikispaces.com/file/view/Faculty+Training+Using+Mobile+Technology.pdf

What I didn’t see answered was how mobile devices constrain focus. Anecdotally, I have noticed that those that I correspond with on mobile devices frequently cannot process multiple concepts in the same email. This topic is deserving of a conference presentation (and research).

The conference ended with a keynote from Judy Brown. Already I am looking forward to next year.

Fusion 2010

Fusion2010

Monday through Wednesday was happily spent at the Desire2Learn (D2L) Fusion Conference. Work will be migrating from Blackboard to this (to my mind) superior Learning Management System. The change cannot happen too quickly for me.

Like all conferences, Fusion2010 was a mix of fascinating presentations and less-than-stellar presentations. Like most conference attendees I was in a constant state of partial attention – checking and tapping away on my mobile telephone. And here (according to one of the presenters) I age myself, because I use the term “mobile telephone.” To the younger generation all ‘phones are mobile. No distinction is necessary.

The ‘phone was essential – a device to record notes from the good presentations, and portal to escape through during the deathly dull presentations (though keeping one ear open for the occasional pearl of wisdom). Here are my assembled notes from the conference.

 

 

Monday

The D2L conference distinguishes itself from more prosaic conferences by being more playful and mentally stimulating. For example, each table at breakfast and lunch had 3-D architectural puzzles (Empire State Building, Taj Mahal, etc.) for participants to complete. Little touches like this made a noticeable difference.

The topic of the opening keynote by Stuart Brown (Play) resonated with me, but the meandering delivery and lack of engagement with the audience turned me off. Somewhere beneath the keynote was something valuable to share, but the keynote wasn’t working for me. Perhaps I should just read the book.

The organizers had asked for me to relate some of my D2L experiences on camera. I have no idea whether this will see the light of day….

 

 

Tuesday

The University of Wisconsin Colleges Online provided a well-prepared session on multiple-choice quizzes (“Advanced Use of the Feedback Feature in Multiple-Choice Quizzes”). The level of the session was lower than I had expected, but the presenters did well in creating useful handouts and an example account for participants to experiment with. I share their feedback suggestions here:

 

  1. Write multiple-choice questions that have four (or more) viable alternatives for the answers.
  2. Try to avoid the use of “all of the above” or “none of the above.” These alternatives prevent you from using the option to scramble the answers on the quizzes/exams.
  3. If you want to use all the alternatives, you can spell them out that in a way that includes the appropriate language.
  4. For the correct alternative you do not need to provide any feedback at all. You can use the “Question Feedback” instead, which will be visible to all students, regardless of whether their response was correct or incorrect.
  5. For the incorrect alternatives you should focus on explaining why the answer is inappropriate.
  6. Do not include page numbers, page references, or chapter references in the general question feedback. This level of detailed information is tough to “repair” later.
  7. You might want to tie questions into learning outcomes. This is your choice, but it will make a revision harder later.

Julie Evans, Chief Executive at Project Tomorrow, was our lunchtime keynote speaker. I found her findings to be both interesting and helpful – paralleling some of my observations at work.

Beth Rubin presented the research that four of us at DePaul had collaborated on with “Effect of Using Desire2Learn on Student and Faculty Outcomes” – we both enjoyed the chance to interact with attendees at this session and at the poster session earlier in the day.

One of the most helpful sessions of the day was “Tips and Tricks for Administrators,” which provided me with a deeper understanding of D2L.

Wednesday

D2L had provided all attendees and presenters with access to the D2L LMS, with the intention to share, collaborate and discuss. Whilst this is a great idea, the concept did not really seem to work – a few days later there seemed to be little interaction on the site, and less handouts/documentation from presenters than I had hoped for.

 

Lunch was particularly entertaining. The keynote speaker (Joel Cohen, writer and co-executive producer on The Simpsons) had the audience in his hand with “The Business Tao of Homer: Lessons in Creativity and Innovation From The Simpsons.”

 

Anyroad, I enjoyed my first Fusion conference and look forward to more.