Week in review – Dec 6 and Dec 13

Sometimes one week blends into 2, and I can’t recall why I didn’t wrap up last week but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

I’ve been working on a post-conference OE Global summary, which is taking a bit longer than usual since I decided to stay off devices and hand write all of my notes during the conference. This worked really well for keeping me present and properly listening, but it’s not so great for pulling it all together in post conference blog post.

Conference proposals: I somehow managed to get proposals in for Festival of Learning, OTESSA, and OER20. This was an epic couple of weeks of proposal writing, but I like how it forces you to better articulate your thoughts and serves as a sort of deadline for getting work done before the event. It’s also wonderful to collaborate with colleagues from different institutions and locations on these. And n the flip side of submitting proposals, I am on a proposal review committee for the Festival of Learning and got to review a batch of 30.

I attended an E-campus Ontario session on doing sprints, which I found quite informative. There’s a really nice set of collaborative notes here that covers a lot of the larger and smaller details.

The Teaching and Learning team here at BCcampus continued to work on our collaborative strategic planning process which is starting to shape up quite nicely. One of the things that we discussed are technologies that allow for more inclusive experiences at events or meetings with collaboration between remote and on site participants. I’ve been really curious about the Meeting Owl, and also had the opportunity to sit in on a webinar this week that used Crowdcast, a tool that I honestly think levelled up the whole webinar experience as a participant. It’s been a while since I felt that way about a webinar, so I’m noting it. But for all 5 readers of my weekly round ups, if you know of technology that you think helps create more inclusive experiences, I’d appreciate knowing about it in the comments.

On the research end of things, the Institutional OEP Self-Assessment Tool group held 2 more research meetings to extract themes from the data from our five institutions.

If you haven’t seen it yet and need some chuckles, head over to Cira and read or grab some free (by attribution) Canadian themed stock photos. They are very tongue in cheek and play up some well known Canadian stereotypes.