Liberating Boundaries: Modeling Global Communities Of Practice

Concurrent Session 2
Streamed Session OLC Session

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Brief Abstract

Addressing wide scale challenges to educational access and impact requires innovative approaches to collaboration across global and local contexts. This session offers a series of use cases demonstrating new approaches to align communities of practice around the world to shared change work within digital learning.

 

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Angela Gunder, Online Learning Consortium

Angela Gunder is the Chief Academic Officer and VP of Learning for the Online Learning Consortium. In this role, she is responsible for gathering, curating, and leveraging the intellectual capital created by and disseminated through OLC. Prior to her position at the OLC, Angela served as the Director of Instructional Design & Curriculum Development for the Office of Digital Learning, managing and mentoring the team that builds the fully-online programs for The University of Arizona. Her over fifteen-year career as a designer for higher education informs her instructional design practice, where she leverages her expertise in web design, usability, visual communication, programming, and standards-based online learning. She is an Associate Editor for the Teacher Education Board of MERLOT, and the recipient of the 2018 MERLOT Distinguished Service Award, the organization’s highest honor. She is also the recipient of two Online Learning Consortium Effective Practice Awards for the creation of a framework for personal learning networks, and for the creation of exploratory installations of education technology, respectively. In 2019, Dr. Gunder was named an OLC Fellow for her dedication to service, innovation, and scholarship in support of student success in online learning. Her research interests include open educational practices, digital literacies, narrative in online course design, and emerging technology for second language acquisition. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Fine Art from Fordham University, a M.Ed. in Education Technology from Arizona State University. Angela completed her Ph.D. in Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies at The University of Arizona, where in 2020 she was named an Erasmus Scholar by the College of Education for her commitment to the college, the university and to the community. Pronouns: she/her/hers

Co-presenter: Clark Shah-Nelson, University of Maryland - Baltimore

Clark Shah-Nelson serves as Assistant Dean of Instructional Design and Technology for the University of Maryland School of Social Work and is a doctoral student in Evidence-Based Management/Business Administration. Clark is an eLearning instructional design development professional with 25 years experience in educational technology innovations: teaching, designing leading award-winning online and distance learning teams for learning management platform implementation, training, end user support, professional development and engagement. He has presented at numerous online learning and ed tech conferences, was co-founder of the Blend-Online Educause constituent group, co-founding master chef of the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) Technology Test Kitchen, and has recently volunteered as Conference Co-Chair for OLC Innovate and Engagement Co-Chair for OLC Accelerate Clark has authored chapters on synchronous tools for teaching and learning support and co-authored a chapter on professional development installations. As a consultant, Clark has worked on several international projects in the realm of blended and online learning.

Co-presenter: Nate Angell, Hypothesis (Virtual Presenter)

Nate is an evangelist who connects people, ideas, and technologies to make things better, currently working with Hypothesis (https://web.hypothes.is), the nonprofit organization that stewards open, standards-based annotation technologies and practices. He has worked across a wide variety of public and private institutions, focusing on community development, digital communications, meaningful education, open technologies, and sustainable growth. Nate lives in Portland, Oregon USA with some other cats and humans. Learn more about Nate on his blog (http://xolotl.org) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/xolotl).

Extended Abstract

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Lilla Watson

Addressing wide scale challenges to access and impact of education requires innovative approaches to collaboration across global and local contexts. As educators seek to erase boundaries and remove silos from their work addressing similar challenges, global community collaborations offer a path forward in creating and sharing impactful practices more broadly. 

Stemming from a series of interviews and conversations at past OLC events, the presenters will share findings and emergent themes from a qualitative research study on the power and impact of global community collaborations. These perspectives are inclusive of collaborations addressing the equity and quality of digital learning environments, as well as using digital spaces and tools to keep communities of practice connected across the globe. Situated as a mosaic of approaches, this session offers a series of use cases offering new approaches to aligning communities of practice around shared change work within digital learning. Participants will leave with an actionable process and practice that they can employ in their own contexts to design, facilitate, participate in, and continuously improve their global collaboration efforts.

Participants from the collaboration started during the OLC Accelerate 2019 International Summit will present continuing work on modelling global communities of practice, starting with an initial report, which answers the following questions:

  • What types of challenges were surfaced through the collaboration model that was created and facilitated in the 2019 Summit?
  • What types of opportunities were surfaced through the collaboration model that was created and facilitated in the 2019 Summit?
  • What other collaborative models exist to support global change work?

At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be invited to join others in applying the ideas of a global community of practice to advance the thinking captured in the report.

As the world looks to address ubiquitous challenges to access to education in both global and local contexts, open education continues to serve as a powerful pedagogy and practice for creating sustainable and impactful change. This session will focus on creating and implementing a culture of collaboration and digital transformation in online, blended and flexible learning across the globe through critical open educational practices. The presenters will reveal the expanded qualitative findings from the 2019 OLC Accelerate Online International Summit on Openness, sharing what was learned, where we’ve gone since, and what new opportunities emerge ahead.

OLC’s International Summit, an online convening spanning time zones and continents bringing together thought leaders and practitioners around the concept of digital transformation. This session will focus on creating and implementing a culture of digital transformation in online, blended and flexible learning across the globe.