Engagement Block Party
Brief Abstract
The Engagement Block Party is structured around participants' needs and aspirations with digital learning explorations, technology innovation and creative expressions. Let our engagement team members guide you through a series of engagement opportunities that can ignite your ideas, recharge your batteries or give you a cool new set of strategies for your faculty development, student engagement or networking processes. Choose your own adventure based on what interests you most, slow down a while, and let our expert volunteers guide your journey through cool improvements and innovations for your work.
Refreshments will be served
Presenters
Dr. Bryan Aylward is the Senior Director of Academic Operations for the University of Arizona Global Campus. Bryan’s division encompasses the Faculty Scheduling department for the university across 50+ start dates annually, the Contracts & Payroll Compliance department, as well as the Data and Academic Systems department for the university. Bryan has almost 14 years of experience in higher education operations across numerous departments including student services, registrar, curriculum operations, as well as academic operations. In addition to this experience, Bryan has been an associate faculty member for the Forbes School of Business and Technology since 2012 with focused instruction on leadership and management courses. Bryan is an advocate of high-quality education, with experience in the online, traditional classroom, as well as hybrid classroom formats (Online and Classroom), and is well versed in the challenges that exist for both students and faculty.
Bryan received his Doctorate in Psychology with a focus on Business & Organizational Leadership from the University of the Rockies in 2017.
I am a bilingual learning experience designer, manager, and facilitator. I help organizations create sustainable, scalable, inclusive, and user-centered practices to leverage knowledge and learning. I have over a decade of experience designing, improving, and managing online programs, processes, and services. I specialize in training and development, instructional design, content creation, inclusive practices, and change-management processes. Advocate for accessibility, equity, and inclusion in online learning practices.
Pronouns: she, her, hers
Twitter: @MaddieShellgren
As the Director of Online Engagement, Madeline (Maddie) Shellgren serves as the lead innovator, designer, and project manager of the OLC's portfolio of online engagement opportunities. Known for her love of storytelling, play, and all things gameful, Maddie thrives on facilitating and designing meaningful ways for people to connect, learn, and grow together. Within the OLC, she has served on steering and operations committees for several of the organization’s conferences (including as Technology Test Kitchen and Innovation Studio lead, as well as Engagement Co-Chair) and has had the distinct honor of being the mastermind behind the OLC Escape Rooms. She looks forward to continuing supporting OLC community building efforts, is committed to sustainable, equitable, and anti-oppressive ecologies within education, and is genuinely excited to leverage her interdisciplinary scholarly and professional backgrounds as she helps lead the OLC towards truly innovative and transformative models for what’s possible for online and digital engagement. Maddie joins the OLC from Michigan State University (MSU), where she has served as the lead on numerous student success initiatives related to instructional design and technology, accessibility, and equity and inclusion. Over the past eleven years, Maddie has dedicated her professional life to teaching and learning related initiatives and has strategically sought out opportunities that give her a multi-dimensional perspective on teaching and learning, including working as a Standardized Patient training medical students, serving as Program Director for Teaching Assistant development, taking lead on a number of cross-institutional educator onboarding and professional development projects, and teaching across online and face-to-face contexts. She most recently worked as an Assistant Rowing Coach for the MSU Varsity Women’s Rowing Program. There she was given the opportunity to help redesign a community from the bottom up, story the team's new journey together in fun and multimodal ways, lead in the co-construction of community expectations and norms, help ensure alignment across a variety of stakeholders and initiatives, and develop and operationalize strategic structures for long-term sustainability (such as entirely new social media, marketing, communications, and content management strategies). She had the privilege of seeing the impact of her human-centered and equity-oriented approach each and every day as the team reimagined what it meant to be a Spartan on the MSU Rowing Team. With her move to the OLC, she will continue on as a volunteer coach, still supporting these efforts and the team, and is excited to get back on the water.
Extended Abstract