ETUG | HigherEd

#FoL18 Festival of Learning 2018

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Earlier this week, I attended the 2018 Festival of Learning hosted by BCcampus.  I could only attend the first 2 days out of the 3, but I still learned a ton.  Just wanted to recap my thoughts before all these wonderful thoughts escape me…

Day 1

Morning Keynote – Jesse Stommel

Jesse’s keynote really set the tone for the entire festival, which is the theme of care, human connection in learning and empathy…

Cultivating Trust and Emotional Safety in Educational Environments

Never thought I would be doing Tai Chi at a conference LOL~  Jokes aside, this wonderfully engaging session continued with the theme of empathy, and goes back to the roots of education. As educators, it’s our responsibility to create an emotionally safe environment to ensure learning can occur.  It comes down to training people to be “NICE”.  It honestly makes me a little bit sad as a parent and as an educator… Have we forgotten how to be “nice”?  We have to remember that empathy is a skill that needs to be taught.

Then this quote from the session facilitators really resonated with me:

Resiliency is the end product of the process of a traumatic experience, and it takes time…

Using the all-too-familiar Liberating Structures strategy, we talked about a 15% solution so we don’t feel so overwhelmed and angry at the larger systemic problem.

Student as Partners in Developing Curriculum and Teaching and Learning Initiatives

I loved how students were able to share their experience on working with faculty and administrators as equals! 3 students came to share their experience as partners in a working group during a program review.

Student-Experience Design & Open Educational Practices: eCampusOntario’s SXD Lab

This was a demo from eCampusOntario’s SXD Lab, who are doing amazing work connecting students with members of the public to practice design thinking and coming up with tech-based solutions.  It reminds me so much of my community work with Mozilla & Hive Learning Networks.  I had to connect the facilitators with the wonderful people who were part of Toronto Hive.

OEP in Remote Australian Aboriginal Workforce Development: What translates?

I was interested in this session because I saw Johanna’s portfolio of all the wonderful work she’s done with the indigenous communities in Darwin, Australia, where the population is 30% indigenous (compared to 3% in the rest of Australia) with 20+ languages. The community of Darwin is very remote & rural, which is similar to some of the communities that we work with.

Frankly, after completing the EMR microlearning project, I truly wasn’t happy with my work, and wanted to find out how I can improve and provide authentic learning experiences when working with indigenous learners. However, I also found out that good work doesn’t come easy. Johanna has spent years building deep relationships with her community. Her supervisor even adopted her as her own daughter and she calls her “mother” while she continues to remain self-aware that she is “white-faced” when interacting with her audience.

I wish I had the luxury to build “years of relationship” but it just doesn’t happen. Coming from a mixture of cultural backgrounds personally, I totally understand it, but I can certainly try to remain hopeful and learn bits and pieces of the time (15% solution again, eh?).  Anyways, I needed to attend this session in order to remain hopeful and examine “best practices”.

Day 2

Keynote Panel with Students & Academic Leaders

Again, it was wonderful to hear the voices of students. The theme for the 2nd day again was set on the “refocus” back to students as learners instead of consumers. Students have needs, an urge for belonging and a voice that yearns to be heard by us. Jonny Morris was one of the best facilitators I have seen where he really listened to everyone and gave all people equal time to speak.

I keep on thinking how impactful human connections and authentic learning experiences can be created in an online environment, which is what we produce 99% of the time here. Perhaps it’s again going back to the 15% solution in order to avoid feeling overwhelmed – What can I do to create more opportunities for students to be heard? Perhaps instead of an online survey I can do more check-ins and conduct a focus groups?

Teaching an Online Instructional Design Course Using Design Thinking

Design Thinking was another underlying theme at this conference. I’ve applied Design Thinking in my community work with Mozilla, but never in an academic setting here at my day job.  Given this was also an “online” environment, I was very intrigued.

Amy, an instructor from RRU ran this session, and explained how she applied Design Thinking in her online course over 1 semester, and shared a few edtech tools such as Padlet.com and Mural.

Amazingly, like most conferences, the best type of conference experience you can have is the “un-conference” connections you make, and impromptu lunch sessions & conversations you make!  At this impromptu lunch, a few of us met up with Jackie from Lethbridge College, AB who shared with us their experience in applying the Design Thinking Process in their Program Review process!  (AWESOME & AMAZING!)

Learning to Bounce: Teaching Resilience in the Undergraduate Classroom

If we don’t talk about failures then we can’t address success. If we don’t normalize failure, then we cannot be resilient.

This seems to be an overarching theme that I got from the emotional safety session and this session on resiliency…  The facilitator shared her personal story of failure (I can tell she’s an extremely passionate & compassionate instructor) and discussed how it inspired her to look into the Resilience Project at Stanford. She showed many videos and stressed the importance of “talking about failures is a key ingredient in resiliency”.

How do we actually create space for resiliency?

She also shared strategies such as “Wise Interventions.”

Sharing the BC OER Paddling Together: A Guide for Indigenizing of Post-secondary Institution

In this session, Michelle and Dianne from BCcampus shared their journey on producing the OER project, Padding Together. This would be a tremendously useful and helpful resource for all of us once it is released later this year.

In the meantime, all of their current resources are available for review, including the Environmental Scan Summary via:  http://solr.bccampus.ca:8001/bcc/items/c0a932f4-8d79-4d3d-a5d4-3f8c128c0236/1/

Design in Mind-Using Design Thinking for More than you can Imagine

Again I was interested in how Design Thinking is applied in various contexts so I attended Lisa’s session where she shared her experience running Design Thinking workshops with her school district, for teachers, administrators, staff and students. It was interesting hearing about her work in the K-12 sector.

Rebuilding a Student Support site through Community Engagement: An Amazing Journey

Naz & I attended Emily’s session on how she personally interviewed 90 faculty members in the span over 4 months, as well as distributed online student surveys in order to gather user experience feedback on their D2L uses. She found out surprisingly a lot of the support info students & staff need has nothing to do with D2L. I only wish we had the luxury to really dive deep and connect with our faculty & students…

Liberating Structures User Meetup

I wanted to attend the Liberating Structures meetup because it’s such a part of our community but I have only had very peripheral contact with it. I definitely learned more about it and I am glad to hear there’s more work & interest around it.

The users group is willing to go to various institutions and run lunch&learns! In addition, an online webinar is in the works for us to experience Liberating Structures in an online environment, which may be tremendously useful for us. 🙂

POST #FOL18 TO DO LIST:

  • Gather an emergent tech (AR VR 360 video) group via ETUG
  • Stay connected with the BB Ally Pilot group that Clint is running
  • Stay connected with the Vancouver Liberating Structures Group and possibly invite them for a workshop? Ideally an online one.
  • Reach out to Lethbridge College re: their Design Thinking/Learning Experience Design process for program reviews
  • Check out this Accessibility resource