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VPL Biennale 2024
The #VPLBiennale concluded last week in Kilkenny, Ireland, after two jam packed days of lightening talks, panels and concurrent sessions. The organizers came from different countries and organizations and this was a noticeable strength that resulted in an attendee list from 31 countries, a diverse set of topics that broadly covered inclusion, policy, recognition, validation, micro-credentials, badging, to name a few. It was a delight to run into people I’ve met at OER, CAEL, and EPIC and more than a handful of Canadian counterparts. At the last Biennale I was newcomer to validation of prior learning (VPL) and left Iceland with a better understanding of importance of validation systems, how they operate…
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Alternative credential stacking
This is Part 2 that follows Alternative credentials – micro-credentials, stackable credentials, and digital badges The key to understanding alternative credentials isn’t so much the technology or the badging, it’s actually the pathways to or from HEI or to or from industry/professions. In other words, do they lead to something and is this something recognized? This is where stacking comes in. Stackable credentials are composed of a sequence of credentials that stack or accumulate towards an additional credential. According to Ganzglass (2014) they serve “to build up an individual’s qualifications and help them to move along a career pathway or up a career ladder to different and potentially higher-paying jobs.”…
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Reflecting on a decade
This week I’m wrapping up almost a decade at JIBC (9 years and 7 months to be exact). This is almost 3x longer than any other stay with an employer and it feels important to pause and reflect on this formative time. I started at JIBC as an Educational Technology Specialist. It was a brand new position, with no rules and few expectations other than “we need you to harness the online learning activity that is happening here”. It came with a 40k budget and an office of one, but this office of one had a door, a huge window, and a view of the pond. I had spent the…
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The Future of Ed Tech in Higher Ed when Open Source is a Radical Solution
Yesterday, I had the wonderful opportunity to be a keynote speaker at the Open Apereo 2019 conference. This is the first time a keynote I’ve done has been recorded so I’m posting the recording as well as the text script (even thought I diverged from it on occasion). I have nothing but huge gratitude to all the wonderful organizers and people I met at the conference in LA and I sincerely hope that our complementary worlds of open education and Apereo will overlap more in our future activities. It is a great pleasure to be here today, not only because I am a huge admirer of Apereo but also because…
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BC Open Research
Last week, BCcampus published a blog post on a summary I did of the landscape of research in BC on open. I’m reposting it here so that I don’t lose it, forget about it, or any of the things that happen when websites change. I’ve realized in the course of curation OER in Other Languages that more copies is sometimes better when it comes to these kinds of efforts. In October of 2018, I began a secondment to BCcampus as Researcher, Open Education Practices. After being in an Administrator position for the last nine years, I’m grateful that this research role has afforded me the opportunity to do some catch…
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Don’t let your online strategy become a conversation about which LMS to use
I’m that age where I can say I’ve been working in ed tech for 15 + years. Like many of us, my life in ed tech in higher education began more or less with the LMS. Through the years I’ve witnessed the good, the bad, and the ugly with seemingly endless tentacles that the LMS brings to our discussions about teaching and learning and especially online learning in our institutions. Here’s the short of it. LMS’s do some things really well and are not going to go away. We still use an LMS at our institution, and while I would really like the vendor to invest some of our hard…
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Decentralized structures and the innovation agenda
In a few of my posts on innovation, I’ve talked about the role that teaching and learning centres have in supporting an institutional innovation agenda, and where they can run into trouble. In my last post, I argued that without proper prioritization, innovation can become an add-on watered down initiative that the centre is tasked with. I also wrote in one of my earlier posts about finding the innovators in the institution, who are likely scattered across programs and the importance of recognizing and building on what they are doing. I’m essentially advocating for a bottom up and top down approach to innovation with a goal of healthy and meaningful…
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Prioritizing Innovation in the Organizational Structure
It’s been a while since I wrote a series about the topic of innovation in higher education. Here they are from 2015: About those innovation jobs…7 Rules About Innovation First steps in Creating a culture of innovation in higher education – Figuring out what innovation will mean Removing barriers to innovation – the teaching and learning centre and third spaces Some ideas for creating a culture of innovation Considerations for ed tech and innovation In preparation for being invited a second time (thanks Mark!) to facilitate a discussion on Institutional Organization and Support in the Planning and Managing Technologies in Higher Education course, I’ve found myself thinking about organizational structures and achieving higher ed innovation…
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Innovation in Higher Education…and other blasts from the past
I had the pleasure to be a keynote at CNIE 2017 in Banff last week, 14 years after first attending the very first iteration of this conference in the exact same location. This year’s theme was Exploring our past, present and future, which could not have been a more perfect theme to talk about a topic I’ve become quite interested in over the past year. Last year I began looking into the past of concepts like open pedagogy/pédagogie ouverte and delving into this past has really helped me gain some perspective on how we are currently talking about open. Preparing for the CNIE keynote gave me a great opportunity to delve more deeply into the past…
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Some ideas for creating a culture of innovation
In my last post I mentioned the importance of the idea of third spaces in creating a culture of innovation and in removing barriers to innovation. I focused solely on the T & L centre as an obvious starting point for a third space or facilitative boundary object, partly because I really wasn’t in the mood to get into how IT departments, steering committees, etc can be so inhibitive, even if they try to be on board with innovation. I find that often these inhibitive structures don’t really know how to be facilitative of innovation, and like T & L centres need some transformation. As the new Director/VP of innovation you can’t always dismantle…
