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There’s a Place for Us [Repost]
[This was originally posted at EdContexts at https://edcontexts.org/diversity/theres-a-place-for-us/. However, the blog is closing down. I’m thus reposting it here. It started as a rough draft and was posted on my blog on May 9, 2015. PDF-version-with-comments] I was born and obtained my undergraduate education in Singapore, “the little red dot” or “the Lion City.” In late 1999, I relocated to the USA and have had much adventure navigating cross-cultural zones of change. As a Singaporean Chinese, I am often perceived as someone from the Republic of China, which is not a problem or…
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Virtually Connecting at #OLCInnovate 2017
Coursera Partners’ Conference, March 28-31, 2017, Boulder, Colorado. Online Learning Consortium (OLC) Innovate, April 5-7, 2017, New Orleans. These two conferences were scheduled too close to each other for me to attend both. Fortunately, we have Virtually Connecting! On April 5, 3:15 PM Central Time, I met up with onsite folks, Lora Taub-Pervizpour and Patrice Prusko, virtually, at OLC Innovate via Google Hangout. They shared with us the “new” Solution Design Summit. The session was facilitated by onsite buddies Michael Berman and virtual buddy Wendy Taleo. The OLC onsite participants talked about a new event that…
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MOOC Hype and the Coursera Partners’ Conference 2017
I was fortunate to get to attend a conference for Coursera partners, of which my institution is one, a trailblazing one. Apparently, as my director said, what we are doing at our unit is new and unheard of to many participants. In fact, I shared at work that I was awed by the attention we were getting. With 24 (or 25?) of us attending, we were represented at a significant number of breakout sessions. There were several big moments for us; but for me, the two major ones were first,…
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Online Teaching Tune-Up
My unit is starting a series of faculty professional development brown bags on online teaching. Rolling out this Wednesday is a session by Dr. Gary Hecht. He will share strategies and examples he used for facilitating live (real-time) sessions based on his experience teaching in the iMBA program. I have created a digital invitation for this purpose. I will write more after the session, where I will be live tweeting. University of Illinois faculty and staff can enroll on the registration page so that we have an idea of how…
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Competency-Based Education 101: An Animated Tale
Related to the previous post, these videos were created as part of the CBE module using GoAnimate. Want to learn more about the “new” educational approach? Check out my videos. A new focus on Competency-Based Education (CBE) [1:17 min] A quick survey of CBE [2:25 min] Some questions about the CBE approach [1:25 min]
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Design Challenge: 30 Minutes of Learning
I have been working on a design assignment recently. Here’s the Design Brief: Learners would be academic department chairs, faculty and course developers and only have 30 minutes to commit to learning this module Topic: Competency-Based Learning in Higher Education I had about two weeks to complete this assignment. Some of you may know that I’ve been out of the country for a while and most of my belongings are still out of the country. I operate now in a minimalist mode with only 5% of my belongings. In order to create this module,…
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Learning Bytes: OopsEd, Books and Buzzwords
A Byte of 2016 OLC Accelerate The 2016 OLC Accelerate came to me today via Virtually Connecting. A major takeaway was the reference to what is called accidental learning by Roz Hussin and her students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln – learning from the “Oops” moments of our lives. The following video captured our interaction of ideas with onsite and virtual buddies: Born a Crime This is an enticing book title. It sounds grammatically or syntactically incorrect, but is not, because author Trevor Noah is simply telling us what it meant…
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My Super Power as an Instructional Designer
Someone asked me: What is your super power as an instructional designer (ID)? A terrific question! In these days of rapid technological development and free web tools, I’ll stick my neck out to say that any ID can learn to use multiple tools and acquire a range of credentials and certification in several areas, from project management to accessibility and several other skill areas. These then don’t make me extraordinary. What makes me extraordinary? My mind. Our uniquely powerful minds, and not forgetting our distinctive temperaments with their mental, physical and emotional…
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Practical Formative Assessment Tools
I had the privilege of using some formative assessment tools in my face-to-face classes the last semester. That is, instead of suggesting tools for faculty to integrate in their lessons. This is a good thing — to learn and implement, research and practice– the symbiosis we instructional designers need to acquire or develop as education professionals. Both facets are equally important in helping us become great designers and educators. I call these tools “practical” because they are not time-consuming to use, nor is there a steep learning curve. The following are tech tools I…
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Because You’re an Extremely Experienced Student: Thoughts On Completing MOOCs
[The following image is a collage of one of my course-inspired Makes. The collage has 8 images of ways I had denoted the concept of teapot. I used charcoal drawing, gel pens, oil pastels, ink, cutouts and other art movement styles to create the images. This reflection began some time in written form in July 2016.] I get it. The word “MOOC” conjures up notions of hype and hoopla generated some 3 to 4 years ago, when Coursera, Udacity and some brand-name institutions launched free short open-access courses and invited the world in. [If…
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Visible Thinking: Land Mines for Explosive Learning
Those who teach know that on some days we question if what we do is making any dent in our students’ armors (shields some put up, unintentionally, maybe). This week had one of those days, and several others that were not so. Those good learning-teaching days? They are not of the kind Tim Slater wrote about. The kind where students sit passively to just watch me, watch videos, take notes (or not) and listen (or not). No, a good teaching/learning facilitation day is when the students speak, a lot, with focus…
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Virtually Connecting Goes to HERDSA 2016
Note: I had fun writing this post with Wendy Taleo, who hosted the Virtually Connecting session. Plaits. (14 Dec 2012). “Fremantle Horizon.” Online image, Flickr. Retrieved 12 July 2016. A ping from Wendy Taleo drew me out of my teaching-grading cave to the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) conference this Wednesday, July 6, also a Hari Raya Puasa public holiday in Singapore. Though Fremantle, Perth (Western Australia) might be closer to me than say, an American conference, work commitments still hold me and many others…
