ASCILITE NEWS

2016 ASCILITE Conference

Only seven weeks to go and ASCILITE 2016 will be upon us.

The UniSA conference committee are eagerly awaiting your arrival. The program has taken shape and we have some very exciting presentations. Ryan Baker (Associate Professor of Cognitive Studies at Teachers College Columbia University) will be Keynote on Monday morning. His research on engagement and robust learning with online and blended learning environments will set the scene for the conference “Show Me the Learning”.

Tuesday brings Professor David Boud (Deakin University) to the keynote table with his plethora of research into assessment and digital learning while after lunch our invited speaker, Peter Goodyear from University of Sydney, supports the conference theme with his work in the area of design for learning. The conference concludes on Wednesday with Professor Belinda Tynan (DVC Education, RMIT).

In addition to these distinguished speakers we have 34 full papers, 51 concise papers, 6 Symposiums, 22 Posters and 4 special presentations (including working with the AJET editors). The final program is now available from the Proceedings link of the website and the final papers will be hyperlinked closer to the conference.

Socially we have a busy program for you to be able to network with old and new friends at ASCILITE. This starts on Sunday night with the Welcome function at the base of UniSA’s Jeffrey Smart Building on City West Campus (only 5 minutes walk from accommodation and conference venues).

Monday night will have a Dine Around opportunity where you can book a place at one of our local restaurants offering special deals for ASCILITE delegates. Tuesday, of course, is our Gala Dinner which will be held upstairs in the Convention Centre overlooking the iconic Adelaide Oval. The theme this year is “The Pink Ball”. Details on what this means can be found on the Social Program page of the website. Finally, if you plan on staying in Adelaide on Wednesday night we will have some post conference drinks not far from the venue from 5.00pm with gourmet pizzas if you are hungry.

You can view the full program here.

We can’t wait to see you so don’t forget to register now because the Early Bird closes on 14 October and that's only a few days away!

Call for Nominations to the Executive Committee

ASCILITE members have until 7 October to submit their nominations for the ASCILITE Executive Committee. Current ASCILITE financial members who value the services and professional community engagement offered through our not-for-profit Society, and who believe they have the time, commitment and dedication to work in a voluntary capacity to contribute toward a variety of ASCILITE activities, are invited to nominate for election to the Executive Committee.

The ASCILITE membership was emailed details of the elections along with a notification of the Annual General Meeting (to be conducted at the annual conference) on 26 September.

For further details and nomination forms, please visit the ASCILITE website.

ASCILITE Live! Webinar: Perspectives of the European Instructional Designer

Date & Time: 26 October 2016, at 5pm AEDT. You will find your local time zone here.

Abstract: EDEN is proud to be the European strategic partner of ASCILITE and contribute to the ASCILITE LIVE! webinar series. This webinar focuses on the problems and solutions of a learning designer in the context of open learning. Denes Zarka will explore what "open" stands for in the context of learning resources and present various models for the use and re-use of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Denes will tell the participants why he designs open content and also why others design open content. You will learn about sustainable models for OERs and you can think together with fellow webinar participants and Denes about questions like "is a free course a MOOC already?" or if a free presentation can be considered an OER.

Registration: EDEN will issue open badges to the webinar participants – in order to receive the participant badge (and the link to the recording of the webinar) you are kindly requested to share your e-mail address via the short online registration form.

Technical note: This webinar is hosted by EDEN's Adobe Connect online conferencing tool. To be able to join, you do not need to install any software, simply enter the webinar room as guest. Please, login a few minutes in advance to be able to test your speakers and microphone.

Presenter: Dénes Zarka (1965) – instructional designer, Director of the Centre for Learning Innovation and Adult Learning (OIFK), Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Graduated as electrical engineer (M.Sc) in 1989 at the Budapest University of Technology. Worked as Project Manager at the Budapest Training Technology Centre in 1992-1997, joined as Senior Advisor of OIFK in 1997. Experience with e-learning, ODL and ICT research, managing projects, on-line course development, staff training, corporate relations and market research. Denes is also a Researcher at EDEN.

ASCILITE and EDEN: This webinar is the first collaborative activity to arise from the Memorandum of Understanding between EDEN (European Distance & e-Learning Network) and ASCILITE that was signed in June 2016. The aim of the MOU is to engage in mutually beneficial international activities and initiatives, promote each others undertakings and support each other in facilitating the enhancement of evidence-based research and practice in the use of educational technologies.

EDEN has more than 200 institutional members and over 1200 members in its Network of Academics and Professionals (NAP) across the EU.

ASCILITE conference session – Speed Editing with an AJET Editor

The Lead Editors of ASCILITE's esteemed journal AJET will be conducting a Speed Editing session at the ASCILITE conference that commences in Adelaide on 28 November.

These short, sharp, speed editing sessions will allow prospective authors to discuss with an Editor of AJET an idea for a paper that could be submitted to the journal. Your session can be booked in advance of the conference via the below link. At the session, authors need to bring along a maximum one page summary of their proposal.

Details of what needs to be included in the one page summary, as well as the booking sheet can be found at this link. Other queries can be directed to e.heinrich@massey.ac.nz.

Final call: 2016 Awards for Excellence in Learning Analytics

It's not too late to make a submission for the 2016 Awards for Excellence in Learning Analytics.. The submission deadline has been extended to Friday 7 October and the easy submission process is described below. When you are ready, just complete this form to make your submission. You will find additional award guidelines here.

Submissions need to meet the following requirements.

The total duration of the presentation will be 5 minutes max and the presentation will comprise between 10 (minimum) and 15 (maximum) slides (there is no “per slide” timing requirement, the presentation simply must not be longer than 5 minutes in total duration)
The presentation must address: i) a situation analysis/context, ii) an overview of the LA project/practice in question and the reasons for the approach employed, and iii) the impact of the project/practice on learning and teaching
Submissions will consist of a link to the presentation (please do not submit a copy of the file itself). The link must be publicly accessible (ie cannot require a password to access the presentation)
The presentation will incorporate a recording of an audio narration to a series of slides (the slides may contain text and images).
The presentation must be of sufficient quality to allow a viewer to clearly hear and read its content using standard desktop computing equipment

ASCILITE2016 Conference Early Bird Closing

The closing date for Early Bird registration rate for the ASCILITE 2016 conference has been extended by one week to 14 October so do take advantage of the great rates available and register this week.

A very early draft conference program has been posted on the conference website. The full program will available later in a few weeks.

Important Reminders

AJET Call for Special Issues: This is a reminder that AJET (Australasian Journal for Educational Technology) has announced a call for papers for two Special Issues in 2017. Details on each of the issues is available on the AJET website here.

ASCILITE Innovation, Fellow & Life Member Awards: Nominations are open for the ASCILITE Innovation Award, Fellow Award and Life Member award until 17 October. Further details are available here.

OTHER NEWS

OLT Project: Completing the Loop: Returning Meaningful Learning Analytic Data to Teachers

Colleagues,

The OLT funded project "Completing the Loop: Returning Meaningful Learning Analytic Data to Teachers" has recently been completed. The aim of this project was to make learning analytics data easier to access and comprehend for staff so that they can better understand how students are utilizing online resources.

Members of the ASCILITE community may be interested in a couple of the project outputs:

The Completing the Loop Handbook which provides an overview of the project and its outcomes; and
The Loop Tool which is an open-source online application compatible with Blackboard and Moodle that allows teachers to access data from learning management systems in an easy and meaningful way.

You can find more about both of these outputs from the Completing the Loop website.

Feel free to share these resources with anyone you think would be interested and we are happy to receive feedback about them.

Professor Gregor Kennedy

Pro Vice-Chancellor (Educational Innovation)
University of Melbourne
Project lead – Completing the Loop