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Distance Teaching and Learning Summit for Online Leadership & Administration Plus Roundtable, Presented by UPCEA, July 25-27, 2023, Madison, Wisconsin.
Our presentation, “You Belong Here: Building an Equitable and Inclusive Online Learning Community,” delivered to over 50 attendees, addressed the rapid growth of global learning and threats to affirmative action. Noffs and Xiong argued that acknowledging the value and importance of diversity and building a sense of belonging has become more important than ever. Their session explored inclusive course design strategies used at Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies and how they use course analytics and data to measure their success. The conference is a popular grassroots educational community conference. Attendees come from all over the world to meet and discuss new challenges and how to improve their educational practice.
Some other sessions of note included an Opening Reception AI APP demo with Ray Schroeder, UPCEA Senior Fellow. Wednesday’s General Session also addressed the current hot topic of AI in education. Promising or Pernicious: AI in Higher Education featured Bettyjo Bouchey from National Louis University, Tom Cavanagh from the University of Central Florida, and Asim Ali from Auburn University discussing the up- and downsides of the maturation of AI around the globe.
Other sessions of note included “Using AI to Complement Teacher Presence and Student Literacy,” presented by Ruthanne Thompson and Tania Heap from the University of North Texas, and “The Online Teaching Course: A Faculty-Centered Community of Inquiry for the Design, Development, and Delivery of High-Quality Online Courses,” presented by Catie Weaver from Western Kentucky University.
-David S. Noffs & Angela Xiong
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At this year’s InstructureCon 2023 in Denver, CO., keynote sessions with Ariana Huffington and Deepak Chopra were truly inspiring. The information they provided about the value of rest, limiting the personal use of technology and developing other healthy habits was invaluable.
One of the most interesting and relevant sessions for me was “Canvas Third-Party Integrations: Evaluating Faculty Needs, Use of Protected Data, and Accessibility” by Christopher Casey, Coordinator of Digital Education, University of Michigan-Dearborn. Casey presented a detailed process and set of criteria for evaluating and integrating third-party LTI’s into Canvas. Ways to document and communicate this information to faculty and other stakeholders was also shared. As Distance Learning is making strides to formalize and expedite the evaluation of technology and media tools, I gained a lot of useful information from this session.
In the session “Leveraging Robust Analytics to Deliver Impactful Outcomes for the Modern Learner” with Jennifer Sparrow of AWS and Andy Fisher and Ben Hellar (both of Penn State) discussed how Penn State leverages analytics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Canvas to enhance learner outcomes by identifying actionable, just-in-time student and faculty insights. Learning analytics has interested me for many years and I’ve helped SPS to use Canvas data to identify at-risk students and conduct grade audits more efficiently.
The conference’s “Hack Night” was a great opportunity to meet with Instructure software engineers and Canvas admins from various schools. I joined a discussion group interested in the uses of the Canvas API. I also proposed my idea of cross-course content libraries (for common content like program policies) to the Instructure engineers. They agreed it was a good idea but made no promises as far as its implementation in the near future!
The “Educational Moments of the Future Exhibit” presented live demos and hands-on experiences with some of the latest innovations currently in development by Instructure.
-Dan Murphy
Attending an in-person conference for the first time in 5 years was an exciting opportunity. At InstructureCon 2023, I enjoyed meeting people in similar roles at other institutions and discovering how the unique needs of their organization may have lead them to explore features of Canvas.
In addition to getting diverse perspectives from the audience of our participation, I enjoyed attending other presentations that advocated for different techniques to achieving similar results; efficient and consistent content distribution and maintenance at scale. Some other schools described homemade tools they created to make it easier to do things like update standard language or replace a broken link on a widely used syllabus template. Other presentations, often from vendors, showed how their product could be used to offload those tasks.
Presenting at and attending this conference was a refreshing reminder that everyone is invested in trying out new and innovative ideas to make the course development and maintenance process easier on faculty and staff, in turn allowing us to better support the student learning experience. Having only participated in virtual events for so much of the past few years, it was also a refreshing reminder that bringing people together in a shared space can make the hard work of collaborating and learning together a rejuvenating experience as well.
-Aaron Bannasch and Jackie Wickham Smith