It’s going to be busy.
We had our third and final Brightspace training session on Monday. The trainer does a great job. They were good sessions for me to get a general understanding and now I’m looking at my practice course to see where I would add more specific information for sharing with instructors.
I tried attending some of the OE Global conference this week. Between time zones and other commitments I didn’t engage as much as I would have liked. I did see a couple of live sessions and found a recording from U of Edinburgh (info below). This conference is almost too much – there is a lot of information in pre-recordings and recorded access to the webinars as well as some asynchronous activities.
University of Edinburgh – short online courses. ‘micro’ masters that ladder to masters degrees. Certificates (Digital Marketing) that ladder into post graduate degrees
Courses can be enrolled in for free on EdX
Presentation: Short Online Courses Making a Global Impact
A general theme that I picked up by listening to a few presenters – particularly around the areas of adoption of Open resources and related policies – is that stakeholder input and buy in are really important. I hope I can make some time to go back and listen to some of the recordings. The conference goes on until Monday and I’m sure there will be recordings available for a while.
I am trying to work my PD plan and my CTLI to do list into tangible deliverables. I know that most of my time in the next while will be Brightspace related. I copied my section of the CTLI ‘important things’ document and pasted into a Google doc where I had started a rough PD plan. I added a column so I could make notes on where I’m at. Part of that is a plan for open and access. When thinking of a plan for open/access at NIC I imagine a holistic model. “Rethinking the Teaching Itself” is part of the Widening our Doorways plan so it makes sense that access is baked into what we do rather than sprinkled on top. This goes back to the message I was picking up from the OE Global sessions.
We had a College Conversation with the president and it was Truth and Reconciliation ‘day’ Thursday – single quotes because we all know it’s not just a day of the year that we’re supposed to work on this. I feel like we may be on a path to something more than lip service with some of the activities. Not to say it’s only been lip service so far but the path to doing something useful/meaningful is fraught with tripping hazards. Suffice to say, I’ve studied a lot of this history and am still learning and these conversations make me feel heavy.
I have a big to do list for next week. I forgot about writing a summary of the training so that should be first up. I am supposed to start the certificate course on Monday but so far haven’t heard anything from them. Jen and I will get together and start planning our upcoming sessions for the pilot group of instructors moving to Brightspace. I’m going to work Monday morning for a while just to get organized. I need to carve amounts of times to focus on one thing at a time so my attention isn’t split and I can start tackling my list.