Jossey-Bass Online Teaching and Learning (OTL) Conference :: Produced by LearningTimes

3 Practical Pre-Conference Workshops for Online Facilitators
brought to you by Fielding Graduate University (special registration required)

• Pre-Conference Welcome
  with Rena Palloff, Ph.D. and Keith Pratt, Ph.D.
• 11:45 am to 1:00 pm EDT (see time in other time zones)
  10 Ways to Take Responsibility for Your Own Professional Development
  with Rena Palloff, Ph.D. and Keith Pratt, Ph.D.
• 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm EDT (see time in other time zones)
  Seven Tips for Using 3D Worlds for Teaching and Learning
  with Jeremy W. Kemp
• 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm EDT (see time in other time zones)
  Tips for Using Wikis in Professional Development and Student Orientation
  with Glen Gatin, Ed.D
  This third session concludes with a de-briefing discussion with Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt (from 5:00-5:30 pm EDT) for Pre-Conference registrants.
  

Opening Remarks and Tour
with the OTL 2009 Conference Team
Meet the Jossey-Bass and LearningTimes conference team for an introduction to this year’s event, a tour of the online conference community, and to meet colleagues from around the globe participating in OTL 2009.

Engaging students is one of the most compelling concerns in higher education today, but creating a course that motivates and involves students while still respecting faculty time and effort is a tremendous challenge. This interactive session integrates theory, research, and practice to offer teachers a dynamic model for understanding student engagement as well as, strategies, and techniques for promoting it in the face-to-face and online classroom.

In this presentation, you will learn the difference between novices and experts, how to help students prioritize information retrieval processes, and tips to overcoming the limitation of working memory. Learn low investment, high ROI strategies for the classroom so that your content can be more easily understood and remembered by your students.

This session explores a set of practical techniques for producing high-quality, highly engaging podcasts. From establishing a brand and voice within your learning environment, developing a sustainable format, choosing the right tools, to creating an active community of listeners who can’t ignore your calls to action, this session offers concrete approaches for bringing each of the elements of a great podcast together.

According to Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, worldwide economic trends are flattening. In education, however, opportunities for learning are actually expanding or opening up through a myriad of emerging distance technologies. These opportunities can be seen in ten technology trends that spell the acronym: “WE-ALL-LEARN.” From online content in the form of e-books, podcasts, streamed videos, and satellite maps to participatory environments such as social networking, wikis, and alternate reality worlds, technology-based learning continues to open new learning pathways. At the same time, more instructors are sharing their course materials and teaching ideas globally, thereby expanding learning opportunities and resources. And the software used to deliver such online learning contents and experiences is increasingly available as open source. Naturally, many questions surround such systems, sites, and resources. For example, how can instructors and learners in developed and developing countries take advantage of these trends? For what purpose will people share? How can these trends converge to address individual learner’s needs worldwide? Curt Bonk will address these issues while enticing participants to think of implications for their organizations, countries, and regions of the world as well as for themselves as leaders and learners.

The leading authorities in the field have a new book, entitled Transformative Learning in Practice: Insights from Community, Workplace, and Higher Education, which provides strategies and methods for fostering Transformative Learning (TL) practice in a wide variety of higher and adult education settings. This session answers relevant questions such as: What are effective practices for promoting TL in the classroom? What is it about TL that is most helpful in informing practice? How does the teaching setting shape the practice of TL? What are the successes, strengths, and outcomes of fostering TL? What are the risks and challenges when practicing TL in the classroom?

In this interactive session, OTL Conference co-chairs and authors Palloff and Pratt offer practical guidance for faculty seeking to help their students work together in creative ways, move out of the box of traditional papers and projects, and deepen the learning experience through their work with one another. The facilitators draw on their extensive knowledge and experience to show ways in which collaboration brings students together to support the learning of each member of the group while promoting creativity and critical thinking.

Clark Aldrich will address strategies for delivering online content and instruction that is effective and engaging. He discusses the relationship between virtual world, games, and simulations — and how and when each should be used. Clark also focuses on coaching students in “learning to do” rather than just “learning to know” and ways to measure effectiveness in online instruction.

In this live interactive session Dr. Randy Garrison and Dr. Norm Vaughan will outline their framework for blended learning – the community of inquiry model – and relate the new developments that have come out recently that affect this model as well as the implications these new developments have on practice. This session will be filled with practical advice about how to use technology in education that is grounded in a sound theoretical framework.

Join your Jossey-Bass and LearningTimes hosts, conference co-chairs Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, and your colleagues from around the globe for for a special online conference wrap-up.

Discussion as a Way of Teaching

Best-selling author Stephen Brookfield chats about what it takes to foster good discussions. Stephen will ground the conversation in an adult learning context, and provide concrete examples and strategies for how you can take facilitating engaging discussions in the classroom to the next level and improve learning outcomes.

Diversity and Motivation

Based on their recently revised book, Diversity and Motivation: Culturally Responsive Teaching in College, the authors will discuss the teaching methods and effective practical strategies that foster motivation among culturally diverse groups of adult learners. The discussion will include illustrative practices and tools to develop four foundational conditions for intrinsically motivated learning: establishing inclusion, developing a positive attitude, enhancing meaning, and engenderingcompetence, as well as perspectives on the social justice implications of each condition. These insights and concrete suggestions are based on the authors’ experiences and research as college faculty.

Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction

This bonus podcast session highlights an innovative framework—the Phases of Engagement—that helps instructors become more involved as knowledge generators and cofacilitators of a course. The session will offer specific ideas for tested activities that can go a long way to improving online learning.