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A crash course in ed tech and online learning for higher ed leaders
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate is how challenging it can be for an institution to grapple with online learning and ed tech. Leadership is so important and yet the top layer of an institution is generally not selected for their in depth knowledge of something many of us have dedicated our careers to. Even Directors of Teaching and Learning centres may specialize in other things, and have only an operational level understanding of ed tech and how it supports teaching and learning. The online learning in Canadian universities and colleges 2018 preliminary data is pointing – with a few exceptions – to the growth of online and…
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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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A few moments from ICDE 2017 #worldconf17
I skipped Open Ed this year to attend the ICDE World Conference in Toronto. The last time I attended ICDE was eight years ago in Maastricht. I brought my daughter, who was 5. She got sick in the bathroom 15 minutes before my presentation, then sat on the floor and did crafts while I presented. (Somebody took a photo of her which still lives in the conference archives. Check out that mom-purse full of kid stuff). Of the things that I remember, the conference was held in a very nice venue but there was no food at all for the four days. I remember being impressed by how it was…
