Last week, I attended the EDUCUASE Learning Initiative (ELI) conference for the first time in Anaheim, CA. Most of the conferences I’ve attended in the past have been for rhetoric and composition, so I was eager to get to dig into conversations about learning design across the curriculum.
The learning designers, senior technology officers, and instructional staff who attended all seemed engaged in trying to understand how to make our university’s learning spaces – both online and offline – inclusive and accessible. While there were moments when I would have appreciated some more critical engagement with issues around data privacy and diversity, I felt, on the total, a genuinely earnest investment in understanding students’ learning experiences.
Specifically, conversations seemed focused on how to design engaging learning spaces aligned with course and institutional learning outcomes, while reaching an ever-growing student body. Much of the conversations also considered why people like instructional designers and academic technology officers matter in their roles on college campuses.
Conferences can often come away feeling like a blur to me. After days of conversations, active listening, and coordinated social outings, I get so drained and often don’t give myself enough space to actually figure out what to do with everything I learned!
This time around, I’m attempting a bit of synthesis that I hope supports both those who attended the conference and those who didn’t make it. By sharing out some of the resources I gathered and found useful, I hope others can build upon them for the purposes of their own projects, initiatives, and partnerships.
While it was tough to narrow down everything I found useful, here are my top five take-aways and resources from ELI 2019:
1.Offering more flexible options for faculty development beyond workshops is a common concern – and lots of institutions are finding great ways to respond to it.
Offering professional development in any industry, academia and otherwise, can be tricky. For starters, continued learning is rarely anyone’s top priority. I’ll admit that, even for myself, I prioritize commitments that respond immediately to the concerns of my job at hand; I’m not always thinking about what I need to do to continue my education or my development moving forward.
Faculty members’ responsibilities are often spread out pretty thinly as is: they have to research, teach, serve on departmental committees, and, in all likelihood, more institutionally-specific tasks beyond all of that. To make the time to attend a workshop, listen in on a webinar, or participate in an online learning community may seem overwhelming.
For those of us tasked with offering continued learning and support for faculty, we may feel at a loss for how to respond to particular learning needs without making investment in those needs too time-intensive.
I met with several fantastic learning designers from different institutions who had a lot of great ideas for supporting professional development that faculty could access on their own time and at their own pace. For example:
- The Mosaic Initiative at Indiana University developed a beautiful website, one page of which includes example photos of possible classroom configurations in active learning spaces. Along with these photos are brief descriptions of what active learning strategies these configurations might support. The pairing of description and image offers faculty an opportunity to see how their peers have thought flexibly about how learning spaces can be configured while also being able to use the photos of the learning spaces to create similar models in their own classes. Thanks to Tracey Birdwell of Indiana University for sharing this site with me!
- Rochester Institute of Technology’s Teaching and Learning Services Center has a website, which combines articles on teaching and learning with hands-on implementation guides, descriptions, and lesson plans. Specifically, their Teaching Elements page includes a mixture of tools and activities that instructors may want to learn more about, and these pages frame understandings of particular learning experiences within particular lesson plans. Thanks to Dena Novak of Rutgers for this great lead! (On a side note: it looks like Rutgers also has a great collection of learning videos on their Teaching and Learning with Technology website!)
- Northwestern University has an open Canvas Learning Center, which allows Northwestern faculty members to navigate through some guides and resources on using Canvas at their own pace, either as a self-guided course (in the Modules section) or as a collection of sorted resources (through a list of links on the home page). Not to mention that Northwesten’s Digital Learning resource has a tremendous amount of articles and stories that illuminate the variety of ways that faculty and staff are exploring digital learning solutions on-campus. Thanks to Shakir Hussain of Northwestern Qatar for these great leads!
- Several teaching and learning centers have developed podcasts that faculty have reported listening to during their commutes to learn more. Derek Bruff of Vanderbilt has organized a great list of teaching and learning podcasts that could be great models for asynchronous faculty development. (A note here: I did not meet up with Derek at ELI, but I had a lot of discussions about podcasts and remembered that Derek had posted this list, which I thought might be helpful to others! Thanks, Derek!).
2. Giving students space to build their own portfolios and digital identities requires significant scaffolding, support, and pedagogical structure.
I met with several instructors thinking about implementing digital portfolio initiatives on their campuses. While ePortfolios have been a capstone project for decades, renewed attention to ePortfolios seems to emerge out of an increased interest to help students curate their digital presence (more on this in lesson #4). As a result, college campuses are grappling with how to help their students develop their online presence in ways that give the students significant agency beyond LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
If you have an interest in helping students build digital presence, I learned about a few great resources from colleagues I met at ELI:
- At Michigan State University, their Digital Presence and Public Scholarship Initiative has created robust documentation and support for Reclaim Hosting, via MSU Domains. Lots of college campuses have adopted Reclaim Hosting, but what impressed me about MSU’s use of Reclaim was that it wasn’t just giving students access to a CMS platform and calling it a day. Rather, their MSU Domains site has tons of great information about how students can get started with using their own domain and why building students’ own domain might be meaningful. Reclaim Hosting has much of its own documentation, but I appreciated that MSU’s documentation was customized for its own student audience in ways that made the work feel manageable and personalized. Thanks to Daniel Trego for the heads-up on these resources!
- For designers interested in helping students build digital presence within a class community, CUNY’s Commons in a Box might be an interesting development solution.
3. Experiential learning in all forms – from incorporating theatrical performance to strapping on a set of VR goggles – is big.
It’s 2019, and in a moment when The New York Times publishes regular columns about how to spend less time on your phone, digital learning specialists are swinging back to considering the role of in-person interactions and face-to-face engagement in higher education. While online and hybrid learning continue to be popular, it seemed to me that people at ELI this year were more interested in considering how the on-campus learning experience can be supplemented by technology via experiential interventions.
I don’t have any particular resources to point to for this particular topic (AR/VR is still a burgeoning area of interest on my campus), but I thought it important to put a pin in the idea that experiences seem to be gaining greater cache in conversations about learning trends. The critical question to me, to this end is: how do we engage students in a spectrum of virtual and embodied learning experiences, and in what ways do we break down the conception that “virtual” experiences aren’t as “real” as face-to-face experiences? How do we weigh both the limitations and affordances of the spectrum of face-to-face and online learning experiences?
4. We’re still grappling with what it means for students to be “digitally literate” or “digitally fluent.”
At ELI, more than any other conference I’ve attended, there seemed to be quite a lot of grappling with how we prepare students for learning in digital environments. This grappling started with settling on some key terms: I’ve always referred to the ability for students (of all ages, mind you) to be both functionally capable and critical aware of digital environments as digitally literate, but a lot of thinkers at ELI are more inclined to call this combination of competencies digital fluencies. I engaged in a helpful Twitter dialogue with Donnie Sendelbach about this, and she suggested that “digital fluencies” suggests greater engagement with Bloom’s taxonomies for learning (specifically around creating and producing evidence of learning). As a rhetorician by training, I’m used to referring to any engagement with both producing and consuming text of any kind as “literacy,” and I’m still not sure which terms are best.
The point is that everyone in education seems concerned with how to prepare students for what it might mean to continue learning, producing, and creating information in a digital age. In fact, I presented a poster on how instructional designers could be more active participants in developing digital literacy curriculum and one of the keynote talks from Penn State’s Jennifer Sparrow and The Ohio State’s Liv Gjestvang spoke to the need for students to develop digital and data literacy in order to be prepared for future careers.
I could (and, ahem, probably will) write a completely different blog post about all of the debate around “the future of work,” but I learned of a few great resources and papers to help us think more about the connections between students’ digital literacy/fluency development and transfer to other working contexts:
- The Ohio State University’s Digital Flagship offers students access to a variety of digital learning tools, paired with coding curriculum to help students be prepared for learning in a variety of digital contexts in the future.
- The University of Michigan has a fantastic resource on inclusive learning, which, while not explicitly about digital literacy itself, covers topics about empathy that often get touched on in conversations about how digital literacy might involve greater engagement with understanding interactions with the diverse people we may encounter online.
- Librarians at Eastern Kentucky University wrote a fantastic article on helping students develop information literacy, a component of many digital literacy frameworks.
5. Remain optimistic and hopeful as a technologist, but don’t lose your critical lens.
There are a lot of opportunities to be scared about and worried for the future. Many technologies get used for nefarious purposes, and even technologies designed for good can be used for exploitative purposes in their own ways.
But I like to believe that we can think of access to technologies as opportunities to expand what’s possible in our classrooms and beyond. That seemed to me to be the message at ELI too: that if we join together and continue to acknowledge where we can do better with and without technologies, we can help our communities continually develop awareness of our tools and learning environments.
Were you at ELI 2019? What did I miss that you learned and found valuable? I would love to hear your thoughts too!