Discovery Time!

Streamed Session

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Session Materials

Brief Abstract

Join us for a fun and interactive session centering on OLC Accelerate’s Discovery Sessions! Starting with a little bit of orientation, some guided roadmapping, and most certainly lots of key reflection and collaborative learning, this session will get us thinking about the possibilities for asynchronous online engagement.

Presenters

Katie Fife Schuster is the Director of Global Events for OLC. In this role, Katie provides direction and leadership for the logistics and planning of OLC symposiums, the IELOL program, and IELOL Global program. Prior to her current role, Katie held the position of Director, Conferences & Events for OLC, where she worked in conjunction with the Senior Director, Conferences & Events, and the Conference Service Manager towards the achievement of OLC’s annual conferences. With over 20 years of service to OLC, she has also been the Director of Online Learning and the Director of Publications, stepping in wherever her broad range of leadership, organizational, and technology skills are best utilized for the advancement of OLC's commitment to quality in online learning.
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.
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
Patsy Moskal is the Director of the Digital Learning Impact Evaluation in the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida (UCF) where she evaluates the impact of technology-enhanced learning and serves as the liaison for faculty scholarship of teaching and learning. In 2011 Dr. Moskal was named an OLC Fellow in recognition of her groundbreaking work in the assessment of the impact and efficacy of online and blended learning. She has written and co-authored numerous works on blended and online learning and is a frequent presenter on these topics. Patsy's co-authored book--Conducting Research in Online and Blended Learning: New Pedagogical Frontiers--with Dziuban, Picciano, and Graham, was published in August 2015. She currently serves on the OLC Board of Directors.

Extended Abstract

A staple of OLC’s Accelerate's Conference is the asynchronously presented sessions. Whether these took the form historically of a poster or more recently, a pre-prepared digital presentation, these sessions afford presenters and participants alike a unique opportunity for sustained engagement because they were designed with the asynchronous in mind. But taking the time to orient to these types of sessions in a conference setting, as well as meaningfully engage with them is not always easy, particularly given all of the other opportunities presented to us. As such, this interactive session was designed to address those two considerations specifically. We’ll start off making sure you know how to access the sessions, as well as a brief orientation to the presentation platform (PlayPosit). We’ll then spend time collaboratively engaging with the sessions themselves, with dedicated space and time to share lessons learned, things we noticed or thought were cool, and strategies we picked up along the way. Our work will be guided by an intentionally designed Discovery Session Roadmap, which will help us identify which sessions to start with and those we want to intentionally plan to get to in the future. Best of all, along the way, we’ll have a chance to talk about the many amazing and exciting possibilities for asynchronous engagement in online, digital, and blended learning environments, as well as walk away with new ideas for how to design with the asynchronous in mind. Even better, we’ll be experiencing this session in a synchronous, online format (while referencing and engaging in asynchronous content), affording us the opportunity to further reflect on these types of learning experiences.