Washington DC – National Harbour Conference Centre, 20th-23rd July
Final day!
The conference has been interesting but in particular our colleagues from across the globe have been wonderful. We’re still getting people coming up to us saying “your session was great” and “so cool what you guys are doing”. This is fantastic feedback to receive. When meeting various reps and peers many of them have said as soon as they hear the accent “Where are you from?” and as soon as we tell them they respond with “Oh wow – I’ve heard of you guys!” So we really are making a name for ourselves! Well done the EHU Learning Technology team!
Keeping Peace in the House: Best Practices for Ensuring Faculty & Institutional Adoption of Technology – Harriette L. Spiegel, Instructional Specialist, University of Tennessee at Martin
The first session of the day was around how to get everyone on board with technology changes, developments or additions. There was quite a bit of audience participation to discover how other institutions handle technology adoption. The methods are all very similar. There seemed to be quite some emphasis on using video technologies (Collaborate, Skype, Zoom, WebEx) to provide support. I suppose this is mainly as US Institutions can be quite large or very spread out. We’re very lucky in Edge Hill to be able to pop and see someone personally relatively easily! Even so, we could investigate more screen sharing to provide support in a timely and efficient way – especially if needed urgently!
Customising the User Experience, One Tab at a Time – Robert Torres, Blackboard Administrator, Berkeley College
A great session where Robert showed some of the fantastic work he’d been doing on the Berkeley Blackboard Community pages. He has heavily modified the entry page with lots of great ideas on where to place social media icons and also (because they are self hosted) app server checks for help desks to use for troubleshooting. He talked through the rationale of the tabs and contents and also some of the code that had been used to combine lists into menus. Take a look below (apologies about the ‘phone’ picture quality!)
Increasing Student Engagement with Digital Badges – Melissa Stange, Lord Fairfax Community College; Richard Shelton & Dr Donna Shelton, Northeastern State University; Megan Cole – Badge Labs
An informative session about using badges in education. They’re still building their evidence but early signs shows it works – mainly playing on competition between peers to encourage everyone to get involved! They are also working with external agencies to recognise the badges and awards to be used as evidence in CVs or in particular for specialist skills that certain companies require. There are a number of organisations out there who are taking badges seriously and supporting creation and use, so hopefully this will be something fun for us to consider in the near future!
Product Innovations for International Clients in 2015 and Beyond – an overview
This session was much of the same that we’ve already heard. Blackboard are trying hard to include all customers in their decisions – not just the US – and we have seen this effort in the development of some new features (although none that are particularly useful at the moment but hopefully could hold some potential in the future). UK versions of Mobile for example come a little later than for the US but this has been explained that it is to ensure that localisation is done properly. Good job we are a patient lot!
Overall, the conference was a fantastic experience. We are doing lots of great work and will continue to do so so that the student experience is the best we can possibly offer when it comes to technology in education.
If you wish for any further information about what we saw, then please get in touch!
Carol Chatten
Learning Technology Development Officer
John Langford
Learning Technology Development Systems Officer