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OERs: A Curator’s Perspective

By Eileen Horn
September 4, 2016

It’s a busy time around here! With the fall semester starting and new competency-based program development in full swing, everyone is working hard to deliver the best learning experiences possible. Back-to-school season is exciting but challenging for learners, instructors, and those of us in supporting roles. Part of that hard work is curating learning resources—open educational resources (OERs). Today’s post will explore how some of our faculty are approaching OERs.OER logo

In the midst of all this preparation, I’ve recently heard conversations about how important thoughtfully curated learning resources are to a student’s success, and it occurred to me it might be interesting to look back at the transcript of a conversation I had with Kim Kostka about using OERs. Kim and her colleagues Tom Neal and Tony Millevolte assembled and annotated an array of OERs for one of our Flexible Option competency sets.

Here are some of the highlights from my conversation with Kim.

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Is Virtual Reality the Next Trend in Education?

By AngelaMeidl
July 5, 2016

While Virtual Reality (VR) has been around for some time, it is only recently that major companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, and HTC have been developing headsets for home use. While many new VR owners are using these headsets for games, there also exists potential for VR in other environments. Oculus and Facebook, the owners of Oculus and the Oculus Rift VR headset, recently held their inaugural Launch Pad event at Facebook HQ

Facebook HQ, Menlo Park, CA
Facebook HQ, Menlo Park, CA

In Palo Alto, CA to discuss how to further the possibilities of VR in areas outside of games. Participants were asked to fill out an application detailing what they thought was missing in the VR space, and how they feel they could best contribute to the field. I was one of those 100 participants invited out to Facebook for a day of workshops and support from the Oculus team to try to develop a tool in VR, in my case a visualization tool for our Data Science program.

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Conference Connections

By Eileen Horn
February 29, 2016

I once heard that fall is “conference season.” At the time it didn’t mean anything to me, but for some reason it

Making professional connections - Eileen at OLC 2015
I found this picture in the OLC Conference gallery. I remember this breakfast conversation! We were talking about differing support models for faculty who are developing or teaching online courses.

stuck in my head. This past year I got a taste of what this means. By happenstance I had the opportunity to attend two conferences back to back in October: the OLC International Conference and UPCEA Central Region Conference.

OLC is huge. There’s no doubt about it. This is both good and bad. It’s good that there are a lot of high-quality sessions to choose from, and it’s good that there are a lot of people to connect with. On the other hand, it’s so large that one’s ability to absorb knowledge is compromised by the din of all the activity, especially when poster sessions are held in the exhibit hall, as they were at OLC. The focus of the conference is online learning. The UPCEA regional conference was small and intimate with a broader focus of strategies for continuing and higher education institutions. It was special because it was local and celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first UPCEA conference, which was also held in Madison, WI.

So, why am I writing about these conferences today?  From these two very different events, I was reminded of a couple important things.

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ID Team Earns Award

By Eileen Horn
January 2, 2016

2015 Brightspace Excellence Award
2015 Brightspace Excellence Award

In July of 2015, D2L honored six Excellence Award winners from around the world, including our instructional design team. The award honors the delivery of innovative, collaborative, or impactful learning experiences via the Brightspace platform. D2L recognized the UW–Extension team’s support for UW Flexible Option. View the article for more details.