Summit 2011 update

DEHub team members have been progressing with the staging of 2011 Summit “Education 2011-2021: Global challenges and perspectives of blended and distance learning” 15 to 18 February 2011. The Keynote speakers have accepted, all world renown writers on blended and distance learning such as:
• Mohamed Ally
• Gráinne Conole
• Michael Crock
• Bruce King
• Colin Latchem
• Diana Laurillard
• Yoni Ryan
• David Wiley
The Dockside venue has been booked providing a magnificent location at Darling Harbour, Sydney.
An exciting series of Keynote presentations, Keynote Pocket Panels and Plenary sessions have been planned throughout the three day of the Summit. We are expecting many refereed paper presentations and dedicated and supportive group of authors researchers and practitioners have joined the DEHub team to blind review all submitted papers.
We are looking forward to meeting a huge number of researchers and practitioners at the summit and hope to see you there in February at Sydney.

May discussion question

In the Spring edition of the DE Quarterly David Jones of CQUniversity has written an article: Managing individual, student, reflective journals – The story of BIM. In this he poses the following question.
 

What impact does the provision of tools that increase the importance of student participation, reflection, interaction and ownership of learning have on student outcomes and staff teaching practices? 

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment. 

Southern Skies Distance Education Academic Exchange

The DE Hub and the UNE community will host four scholars from South America on 3rd and 4th May as part of the ‘Southern Skies Distance Education Academic Exchange’ project, funded by the Council on Australia and Latin America Relations (COALAR).

The Southern Skies project provides for academic exchange between four distance education universities in Australia and four distance education universities/organisations in South America to share information, establish links between the two regions, develop a series of case studies and examples of best practice in distance education and build capacity in the participating institutions.

The four visiting scholars are:
• Professor Fredric Litto – President of the Brazilian Association for Distance Education, Executive Committee IDCE and Formerly University of São Paulo, Brazil);
• Dr Stavros P. Xanthopoylos – Executive Director of the Online and Distance Education Centre at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil;
• Marta Mena – ICDE Latin America Network and University of Morón, Argentina; and
• Associate Professor Sara Perez – National University of Quilmes, Argentina.
The DE Hub would like to invite you to attend a series of seminars given by the visiting scholars on 4th May, from 9:00 to 11:00 am, at the Oorala Lecture Theatre.

Each scholar will give a 20 minute presentation on topics related to Distance Education in their country and in their institutions, including policies and practices. In addition, they will talk about the role that DE plays in meeting the needs of students, as well as the major factors and concerns affecting DE in higher education. There will also be time for questions/discussion and morning tea will be provided.
Please RSVP to dehub@une.edu.au by 30th April for catering purposes.
Originally posted to the UNE Official email list by the Professor Graham Webb, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, on behalf of the DE Hub team.

The April discussion topic

Vanguard, laggard or relic? The possible futures of higher education after the Epistemic Revolution, by Dion Dennis and  Jabbar Al-Obaidi in First  Monday, Vol 15. No 3, March 2010.

This article argues that current educational products will have to pay greater attention to “aesthetic, function and emotional elements” of course materials if institutions are to attract future students and highlights current weakness in current institutional capabilities.
“…disciplinary Ph.D.s, bound for college classrooms, aren’t taught basic visual literacies and intermediate design skills as a necessary complement to their content mastery. Yet they have an audience of students and institutional clients who grow up enmeshed within expertly designed consumer products and signs, and, as a result, take functional, elegant and design–dissolving behavioral, iconic, and informational environments as a kind of birthright.”

This months discussion topic: Models of growth

The topic for discussion this month is David. Cavallo’s paper on organisational growth,  Models of growth – Towards fundamental change in learning environments. While this paper could easily fit within the Theories and Models and Curriculum Design questions of our research profile it also is critically relevant to the way in which professional development should/could and most often is not practiced or even thought of within the higher education sector. We invite you to examine the Cavallo article and provide you thoughts, suggestions, criticisms and recommendations . Many thanks to David Jones for his recommendation of this paper.

The ongoing debate about distance education

The one constant concerning Distance Education and its definition is that it is a competitive and contested discourse.
To ascribe a definition is to ignore this. All previous models, theories and definitions are products of the context of their time. As technology changed thus providing changes in methods, so too have the theories, models and definitions. We see changing realities within formal, informal and lifelong learning/education; changes in student isolation, time, space and place, changes in autonomy, community and responsibility for learning; changes in non-contiguous, synchronous and asynchronous interaction brought about by technology.
Does this dictate that Distance Education is redundant or needs to be discontinued as a descriptive term? Given the predominance of its use globally in the titles of Distance Education associations and major organisation such as ICDE, UNESCO and COL who use it in their title or feature it highly in their documentation, the weight of usage identifies it as a relevant term, even with its contested description.

DEHub: Will the Hub roll?

Last week Asha Kunwar visited UNE campus to launch the DEHub officially. Many visitors from the DEHub partners visited to ensure that the collaborative efforts were launched. Yet, how can a hub, do its job it it is not connected through the spokes to the rim. For the wheel to turn, all must be working in harmony with each other. The image below identifies the key elements of the wheel that supports the innovations to become commonplace in our distance learning environments.

The key to making the wheel roll along are the collaborative networks that researchers make across the various partnering institutions. Numerous meeting and discussions were held during these three days. The week following the visit to UNE, Professor Kunwar and Professor Tynan, Director of DEHub, have engaged in conversations with leaders and staff of each of the other universities (Charles Sturt, Central Queensland, and Southern Queensland). Has the momentum begun?  Will there be a strong network of spokes in this wheel? Even more crucial, how are you involved in forming a solid and responsive outer rim?

Does Distance Education = Ubiquitous Learning?

Using the term ubiquitous with learning, suggests that learning is everywhere. So it has been since the dawn of time.  Yet, when combining the two terms, are we suggesting that the same information is to be learned in the same way, at the same time, everywhere within our personal, social, and professional environments? A major challenge, as we apply ubiquitous computing to learning, is to critically reflect on the possibilities and variations for applying these omnipresent tools. We have opportunities ‘to design a new vocabulary and a new narrative for our complex and troubled times.’[i] In doing so we must consider carefully what we research and how we use that research in education. We must reconceptualise how we design formal learning environments to cultivate humanity, diversity, creativity, and imagination and explore opportunities to manage creatively the tensions of informal and formal learning.

The University of Illinois’ Ubiquitous Learning Institute [ii] promotes ubiquitous learning as ‘ideas without barriers, inspiration without limits, innovation without boundaries’. How are we to achieve such a visionary goal? Interdisciplinary research, scholarship and policy formation are essential to the development of a clear path to this vision. I suggest that there is a significant  role for the act of researching in coming to understand how we learn and how we teach in this new landscape of technology-embedded personal, social and professional environments. George Siemens,  a theorist on the implications of technology and societal trends, has articulated the essential connectivity of  ‘knowing knowledge’ in the process of linking learning and teaching to form learning ecologies [iii]. Essential to this process is evidence-based practice. That is, incorporating an enquiring and reflective framework into the learning process that involves the whole organization (and society) and all persons within it. What role does distance education play in this process? Do we now looks towards Distance Educators to support our ubiquitous learning journeys?

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[i] Starkey and Tempast (2009) p578.

[ii] http://education.illinois.edu/uli/

[iii] Siemens, 2006

DE Quarterly – Spring 2009

The latest edition of the DE Quarterly (No. 2, Spring 2009) is available on the DE Hub website here:

http://www.dehub.edu.au/documents/DEQuarterly_No2.pdf

The DE Quarterly is designed to showcase innovative distance education teaching practices with a view to encouraging the sharing of information on best practices and the adoption of these practices into units and courses.

To contribute to the next edition of the DE Quarterly contact the DEHub staff (dehub@une.edu.au).

The DE Hub Community

• Have you created an interesting feature in Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle or elsewhere – an innovative quiz, an online document analysis, a cooperative learning environment that students engage with, or something else that you feel enhances the distance education experience for students?
• Do you feel that your distance education teaching practices are unique and that you bring something extra to the learning experience?
• Would you like to learn more about the innovative teaching practices of others academics around Australia, and how they are increasing student satisfaction, learning outcomes, and enrolment numbers?
• Would you like to work with other academics around Australia in promoting your ideas (whatever your field of study) and increasing your publication record?
• Would you like to explore the possibility of undertaking research on distance education practices?

If you are interested in becoming part of the growing DEHub network, visit our website http://www.dehub.edu.au to subscribe to the DEHub mailing list. This mailing list will provide you with invitations, information and opportunities surrounding DE (Distance Education) innovation and research.

DE Hub has been established by the Australian Government’s Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) to provide a central research institute for the development, facilitation and dissemination of information on best practices in distance education for the Australian higher education sector.

This includes fostering a cooperative and collaborative research network amongst academics engaged in research on distance education. We have four institutional partners, the University of New England (UNE), Charles Sturt University (CSU), the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and Central Queensland University (CQU). We are also actively involved in international research collaborations and networking.

To provide a summary of our activities and opportunities we have an online newsletter, the DE Quarterly. Our second edition is available at http://www.dehub.edu.au/documents/DEQuarterly_No2.pdf