Events – Page 13 – Digital Learning Dispatches

On the 27th of January the #Openteach project team in the NIDL led by Dr Orna Farrell hosted a seminar about teaching online. This seminar was funded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

Online 1

The aim of the seminar was to explore effective online teaching practice and how to support the professional development of online educators. The seminar featured two very interesting guest speakers: Professor Elena Barbera from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and Dr Helen Coker from Queen Margaret University Edinburgh.

Time in online education

Online 3 Professor Barbera spoke about her research on the role time plays in online education. She outlined her ideas about the online time paradox: that students enrol in online courses because they don’t have enough time to go to a campus based course, but the remaining time that the student has to study is low quality, and they may end of up dropping out due to to the lack of time they had to begin with.

Barbera described how this consideration of time is woven throughout their approach to online education at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Online 4

Being an online lecturer

Online 5 Dr Helen Coker’s talk focused on her journal article “Purpose, Pedagogy and Philosophy: “Being” an Online Lecturer”published in IRRODL. Coker’s study took an ethnographic approach to exploring the lived experiences of online educators. She identified three approaches to online teaching practice: knowledge, affect, and dialogue, as illustrated below.

Online 7

These three approaches were found to be mutually constituting, one could be brought into focus but the rest were still there.

Social presence: Scenario 1 of #Openteach

Online 8 The final part of the workshop was an interactive session on social presence facilitated by the #Openteach project team. The aim of this session was to pilot the first scenario from the #Openteach short online course.

Participants were presented with a scenario related to the topic of social presence in online teaching and worked through a scaffolded activity designed to prompt discussion about approaches to establishing and maintaining presence online.

Join #Openteach

Online 2 If you are interested in taking part in the #Openteach short online course about teaching online which will run from the 23rd of March to the 3rd of April 2019 and will take approximately 10 hours to complete. The course is open to anyone with an interest in online teaching. You can register your interest https://openteach.ie/join-openteach/ or email orna.farrell@dcu.ie for more information.

Final thoughts

Overall the seminar was well received by participants, and was a good opportunity to open up dialogue and discussion about teaching online in Irish higher education. All of the resources from the seminar are available from the #Openteach website:

https://openteach.ie/

It’s time to pack your bags as Dublin is ready and eagerly awaiting your arrival. You might need a warm coat as we expect some spine chilling weather this week to conicide with Halloween, the celebration of Samhain and the world famous Bram Stoker Festival. If you’re one of the advance parties arriving in the next few days for the meeting of OERu partners or for one of the other NIDL pre-conference activities then you can expect a week of deadly adventures. It might be a little cooler outside by this time next week based on the long range weather forecast for Dublin but we can still guarantee you a warm Irish welcome and plenty of good Craic. The ICDE World Conferenceoffers an action packed programme over 5-days and the local NIDL team at Dublin City University (DCU) keenly awaits your arrival in the land of saints and scholars.

What’s New?

Over the last week we have been adding the polishing touches to the conference programme, with a team of volunteers from DCU working tirelessly to ensure that everything is ready for your arrival. We are also delighted to report that a great team of DCU Student Ambassadors will be supporting us throughout the conference. Last week the full Conference Book went off to the printer containing the final programme along with lots of useful information to set the stage for an impactful week. Also we released our conference app so that you can start engaging with other participants and some of the tools and resources we have available for you. We strongly encourage participants to download the conference app before you depart for Dublin in order to get ready for the event and to greatly enhance your professional learning and networking experience. To download the app:

Search for ‘The Event App by EventsAir’. Download to your device and enter the event code wcol2019.

Please enter the username and password you set when you registered for the ICDE World Conference. Note that login is case-sensitive so please make sure your device isn’t capitalising the first word. If you have any problems logging in to the app then please contact Celia or Judy from our great team at Happening Conferences and Events.

On other conference news we finalised the allocation of breakout session chairs and we are particularly grateful to the dozens of people who kindly volunteered to contribute to the ICDE World Conference in this important way. Without the volunteers we have drawn on over almost two-years the ICDE World Conference would not be possible. All paper sessions will have a dedicated chair to ensure that everything runs smoothly and presenters keep to time. We also received last week most of the digital poster submissions and successfully uploaded them to the conference app where you can already view and later in the conference vote on them. The scheduled to meet the poster author(s) to discuss their work appears in the conference book.

Preparations for Sunday’s pre-conference event on November 3^rd at DCU’s St Patrick’s campus are well in hand where we expect to welcome over 200 delegates to a busy full-day programme. A campus map with further directions to E Block where you will find the Registration Desk will be sent to delegates in the next few days. As your registration pack for the full conference will be available on Sunday morning when you arrive we encourage you to come early as tea and coffee will be available. Towards the end of Sunday’s pre-conference the #Openteach project team will be launching one of their key outputs, “Teaching Online is Different: Critical Perspectives from the Literature”. This report critically analyses the international literature about online teaching and professional development and a printed version of the work will be freely available to delegates attending the pre-conference. It argues that teaching online is different, evidenced by some of the unique roles, competencies and professional development approaches required to equip online educators to teach effectively. The #Openteach project is based in the Open Education Unit in the National Institute for Digital Learning (NIDL) at DCU and the report is externally funded by the Irish National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, a valued Bronze sponsor.

Read more about next week’s ICDE World Conference in our final newsletter, including another informative speaker spotlight, an update for presenters and taste of Ireland section, before around 800 delegates from nearly 80 countries converge on Dublin next week.