Work

The Learning Technologies and Design Team in the TI just produced this outstanding resource (with design by our Comms team), with strategies for engaging remote and face-to-face students. Top tier work by the entire team, and some really great collaboration as well, with instructional designers and learning technologists and graphic designers coming together to create highly compelling and useful resources. Best team ever.

Kara Loy and Rachel Huh just published this module on Critical Reflection (with design by Jessica Snow and Alix Redmond from our comms team)

Natasha Kenny and Gavan Watson just published a couple of great posts on active learning classroom spaces:

Gavan Watson: Guiding the planning, design and use of active learning classrooms (part 1)

Natasha Kenny: Five approaches to guide the planning, design, and use of active learning classroom spaces (part 2)

The 5 approaches:

1. Collaboration
2. Community
3. Flexibility
4. Transparency
5. Access

Both posts are chock full of linky goodness. And, I’m glad they’re both blogging. Long live the blog!

I was part of an online panel session “You get what you assess: Competency-based education in the digital era.” at EDUCAUSE 2021 this morning (or afternoon, depending on where people were). I talked about how we use competencies and learning outcomes at an institutional level, and some of the opportunities and challenges we’ve seen. It wasn’t a scripted presentation bit, but they turned on the Zoom auto-transcribe feature so I grabbed the transcript for my portion. There was a bunch of Q&A that had some great bits as well, but I couldn’t grab that part of the transcript before the meeting went poof. Also, holy smokes is the spoken word different from what I would have written in text. Yikes. Anyway… Here’s my part, for posterity.

So this is kind of big news. I’m starting a new role at the Taylor Institute, as Associate Director, Learning Technologies & Design.

D’Arcy Norman will be taking on a new role as Associate Director, Learning Technologies and Design, providing strategic and administrative leadership for and helping to advance learning technologies and design within and beyond the TI.

I’ll be leading the Learning Technologies and Design Team, with both Learning Technologies Group (where I was manager prior to this) and Learning and Instructional Design Group, as well as our team of grad student Learning Technologies Coaches.

We have an open position in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, as part of my team. I think it’s a pretty great place to work, with an amazing group of people, doing important work that has the potential to transform the university and improve the teaching and learning experience for the entire campus community.

This is a Learning Technologies Specialist position, with a strong focus on “program innovation” - working with instructors on the development and implementation of new academic programs, providing consultation and expertise on the design and integration of learning technologies to support the pedagogical goals of each program. It’s a full-time, regular position (not a term position), and is a great opportunity to work with the entire team at the TI.

I was interviewed recently (via email) by Katie Deighton, from the Wall Street Journal’s Experience Report. She was writing an article on online exam proctoring, and wanted to follow up with me about the categories of proctoring software and to get a university learning technologies perspective.

The article was published yesterday. I’m officially a critic. She wasn’t able to use the entire response, so I’m putting the rest of it here:

Katie:

What are the biggest challenges that online proctoring companies face when it comes to both reputation and customer acquisition? How big of a problem is the user experience, when compared to issues surrounding privacy, security, etc.?

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Martin Weller’s book 25 Years of Ed Tech is a great people’s history of educational technology, covering the major innovations over the last 25 years. He published it through the Athabasca University Press under a Creative Commons License. As a result it’s been adopted by the edtech community, who have produced an audiobook version, as well as a “between the chapters” discussion series.

Chapter 7 is on Learning Objects, read by Brian Lamb. I was part of the Between the Chapters discussion for the chapter, with Brian Lamb, John Robertson and myself¹, hosted by Laura Pasquini.

Awhile back, Ian Linkletter shared links to videos that Proctorio published to their corporate YouTube account. Proctorio apparently wasn’t aware of how the internet works, nor about what YouTube is for, nor how to manage confidential resources (which may be an interesting tell regarding internet security awareness and infosec practices in the company?). It’s a platform for sharing videos. If you have confidential videos, don’t publish them to YouTube.

Anyway. Proctorio could have said “oops. holy crap. we didn’t realize those were public. sorry! hey - would you mind deleting those tweets?” and delete the videos from their YouTube account. They didn’t do that. Or, maybe they did - after they had a public freakout and sued Ian for sharing links to the videos that they had published on the internet for people to see.

We’ve been using Zoom at scale since March, and have learned how to use it well for everything from 1:1 meetings up to classes of 500+ students. Since we launched in March 2020, to prepare for the COVID Rapid Pivot to Remote Teaching™, we’ve hosted 304,776 meetings in our campus Zoom environment. We’ve held 379 webinars. We’ve created over 4 TB of recordings.

In that time, we’ve realized there are a few features that would make life simpler for instructors, especially in these large-enrolment classes.

The UCalgary Department of Computer Science has been publishing a great podcast series called What the Tech? It’s intended as a way to share some of the work being done by faculty members and grad students, and covers a pretty wide range of topics. I was asked to be on the show to talk about learning technologies, innovation, and some of the things I’m going to be working on for my PhD research.

The University of Calgary has been developing a strategy, ii’ taa’poh’to’p, to help guide the university toward reconciliation. This is incredibly important and we are all working to understand and to learn. One of the first steps involves acknowledging that indigenous peoples have been living on this land long before european settlers arrived. We make the territorial acknowledgement in ceremonies and large gatherings - but now that we are all participating from our own homes it has become more important for us all to acknowledge the First Nations, and the treaty that we are all part of.