OLC Ideate—Virtual Salon Series

Why Did We Create OLC Ideate?

OLC Ideate came as a response to the global pandemic that led many institutions down a path of emergency preparedness in the wake of temporary campus shutdowns. As we received requests from institutions for support with professional development and guidance on planning for continuity of instruction, we recognized the opportunity to engage our diverse and robust community of educators in conversations and collaboration around best practices for ensuring quality in online teaching and learning.

OLC Ideate makes its goal to both surface and model effective online engagement to educators, designers, practitioners and leaders of all levels and arenas. Moving past the notion of a passive, “sit-and-get” online experience, each salon focuses on inspiring participants to leverage the power of online and digital learning with the goal of extending impact and access to education. The OLC wants to support educators in creating a landscape where institutions are able to serve their learners without obstacles or disruption, particularly in this time of increased conversations of emergency preparedness and instructional continuity. Our hope is that in bringing people together for these salons, the effective practices and methods shared will serve as a model of what is possible in terms of collaborative and constructivist engagement in the online learning environment, staying with educators well beyond times of crisis.

Additionally, each OLC Ideate is meant to serve as a gathering point for community between our larger events. The connections made in each salon will become a springboard to the larger conversations and collaborations held in other events and opportunities to follow, where we invite you to join us, fueling the fire of the ideas sparked in the salon discussions of OLC Ideates.

How does it work?

In planning the format of the salons, we led with a driving design question – how might we make our online experiences together truly valuable and interactive?
Borrowing from emerging session styles (including our own popular OLC Collaborate events), we envisioned a series of open salons that would require hosts to consider how they might balance the following elements in a brief forty-five (45) minutes:

• A brief explanation or provocation that ends with a challenge or driving question
• A series of activities to engage participants in reflection and collaboration
• A synthesis of the collaborative work of the group with a closure or call to action
• The production of some sort of new idea, resource or artifact to be shared out after the salon

Part lightning talk, part collaborative session, and part design sprint, each salon is structured to be highly interactive and participatory. Salon leaders guide participants through discussions on topics related to a series of themes that the OLC, our collaborating partners, and our community broadly identify as central to our work and responsive to community needs.