ASCILITE NEWS

Expressions of Interest invited in ASCILITE’s 2022 Community Mentoring Program

Applications (Expressions of Interest) in the 2022 Community Mentoring Program are now being accepted and are due by 1 February 2022. Both potential mentors and mentees are required to submit an EOI to express interest in the program, and will be matched with a mentor or mentee in early February.

The ASCILITE Community Mentoring Program (CMP) has been operating since 2003 and over 200 members having taken part to date. The program is recognised by members for its value in coaching, facilitating and networking for both mentors and mentees. It aims to provide mentoring opportunities across a number of fields including educational technology, academic development, learning development, faculty education, early career research, graphic design and programming.

You will find full details of the program on the ASCILITE website here along with the application forms.

An ASCILITE Live! webinar information session on the CMP will be conducted early in the new year.

ASCILITE Launches its new Wavelength Podcast Initiative and the first episode

We are pleased to announce the launch of the ASCILITE Wavelength Podcast as a means to continue to promote the work of the Society and to highlight contemporary issues in tertiary education and technology-enhanced learning.

You can listen or download our first episode, featuring Dr Joanne Orlando and Professor Michael Sankey from the Wavelength Podcast page on the ASCILITE Website.

The podcast has been conceived as community contributed. Therefore, members of ASCILITE are invited to assemble and submit segments for inclusion in future episodes. Submission guidelines and requirements are available on the ASCILITE Wavelength Podcast page .

We hope you enjoy the first edition of the ASCILITE Wavelength Podcast.

We would additionally like to thank the following individuals who have made the launch possible: Zack Arkley-Smith, Michael Blumenstein, Victoria Clout, Gayani Gunasekera, Gerhard Hambush, Sally Kift, Michael Milford, Kane Murdoch, Joanne Orlando, Juliana Cavalieri Goncalves Peloche, Michael Sankey, and Amanda White. The ASCILITE Wavelength Podcast is an executive portfolio led by David Bruce Porter, Sandra Barker and Michael Cowling.

2021 Conference Retrospective

The 2021 Conference Organising Committee would like to extend a big thank you to all those who attended the ASCILITE 2021 conference either physically or virtually.

This year’s keynote was presented by Professor Sarah Pearson. Papers were submitted from a range of countries comprising Australia, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom and the USA. 50 papers have been included in the conference proceedings and all have DOIs and URL links so are ready for citation!

This year’s conference was sponsored by Edalex, Pedestal3D, Blackboard, Echo360, FeedbackFruits, IntelliBoard, Cyberlearning, AccountingPod, Open Universities and D2L.

This year, we had 317 delegates from Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, Scotland and Germany and this included 67 new ASCILITE members. The keynote presentation attracted 172 virtual listeners. Virtual attendance for the four streams on day one ranged from 80 – 111 and on day two it ranged from 82 – 88 while Pecha Kucha attendence totaled 139. On day three, attendance across the four streams ranged from 26 – 60.

Thank you to the sponsors, reviewers, presenters, chairs, facilitators and all those who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make ASCILITE 2021 a great success. Back to the Future, ASCILITE’s first hybrid conference, with last year being ASCILITE’s first online conference. Both conferences have been organised by UNE.

Thanks also goes to the amazing team from the University of New England. They did a great job at pulling both the online and physical conference together, despite some hiccups along the way – COVID-19 and then on 14 October when UNE was hit by a tornado, rendering the building where the conference was going to be held unavailable (and still won’t be for at another 12 months).

2021 ASCILITE Awards

Each year, the ASCILITE awards are given to deserving recipients and this year was no exception with a range of stellar winners, all of whom are cited below.

2021 Community Fellow Award

This award is given in recognition of outstanding contributions to the exemplary use of, and/or research into, technologies for teaching and learning in tertiary education in a professional community.

Professor Michael Sankey (Charles Darwin University) was the recipient of this award in 2021. Michael has been a mentor in the ASCILITE Community Mentoring Program (CMP) for six (6) years and has often supported mentees well after the completion of the program. He is a regular contributor to the ASCILITE TELall Blog (and in fact, came up with the name!). He has authored presentations at ASCILITE Conferences for over a decade and has been a long time AJET Reviewer. In addition, he actively supports two ASCILITE SIGs – TELedvisors and Transforming Assessment and is one of our first ASCILITE podcast presenters. Michael is also keen supporter of TELAS.

2021 Emerging Scholar Award

This year’s Emerging Scholar Award went to Keith Heggart from the University of Technology Sydney. Keith is a Learning Designer and teacher who has conducted a dynamic research program into course design, examining the affordances provided by technology to increase student experience, accessibility and job-readiness of graduates.

2021 Innovation Award

The ASCILITE Innovation Award celebrates work undertaken by an individual or team of people in support of the exemplary and research informed use of technologies for teaching and learning in tertiary education. Innovation is defined as a new idea, device or process. It is something original that “breaks into” teaching and learning in the tertiary sector. This year’s Innovation Awards went to two recipients:

Laura Tubino (Deakin University) for Lifelong learning through mathematics.
Samantha Clarke (University of Sydney) for Modular Professional Learning Framework.

D2L / ASCILITE Grants

For the second year running, D2L and ASCILITE jointly support funding of up to $10,000 per year to support research projects of merit in the field of technology enhanced learning. This year’s grants were presented by Chris Campbell (ASCILITE President) and Tony Maguire (D2L) at the conference. Two project teams were awarded grants:

Jabed Chowdhury (La Trobe University), Bhavani Sridharan and Kamanashis Biswas (Australian Catholic University) for A Gamification Approach in Cyber Security Teaching to Enhance Student Learning.
Sharon Altena (QUT), Rebecca Ng (ANU) and Meredith Hinze (University of Melbourne) for Investigating the professional identity of university learning designers across Australasia.

2021 AJET Distinguished Reviewer Award

This year’s AJET Distinguished Reviewer Award went to two recipients in recognition of their outstanding work as AJET reviewers:

Chiu-Lin Lai (National Taipei University of Education)
Ruofei Zhang (The Education University of Hong Kong).

Both recipients are highly regarded by AJET Associate Editors and are lightning fast in returning their completed reviews. On behalf of the AJET editorial team and the ASCILITE community we thank Chui-Lin and Ruofei for their generous contribution of time and expertise.

Life Membership

This is ASCILITE’s most prestigious award that recognises the significant service and/or sustained contribution of an ASCILITE member to the Society. It is the highest recognition of achievement made by ASCILITE and is awarded only when an appropriate candidate meets the criteria. Thus, it may not be presented every year.

This year ASCILITE recognised Professor Michael Henderson (Monash University) for his sustained support of ASCILITE and its aims.

Michael has been a member of ASCILITE for over 10 years and a leader in the development of ASCILITE’s journal (Australasian Journal of Education Technology) for many years. He first joined AJET as an Associate Editor (2012) and then became a Lead Editor (2014 – 2020) where he worked prodigiously to improve the journal by reducing the journal’s paper acceptance time from almost a year to about one month; joined the DOI movement; uploaded all backdated issues; joined a publication preservation network system to ensure continued service in case of journal closure; shifted to Creative Commons licensing; upgraded the journal software; added structured abstracts, keywords and significance and strengthened the research ethics stance and improved the overall review process. Michael continues to support AJET’s new editorial team. Congratulations Michael!

2021 ASCILITE Conference Best Full Paper

Elizabeth Beckmann and Lynn Gribble for CMALT 2011 and 2021: Personal Narratives for Professional Recognition.

2021 ASCILITE Conference Best Concise Paper

Birgit Loch, Belinda Thompson, Christopher Bridge, Dell Horey, Brianna Julien and Julia Agolli for Building a culture of innovation in learning and teaching technologies through an innovators group.

On behalf of the ASCILITE community, congratulations to all our award winners this year!

2023 ASCILITE Conference to be held in Christchurch, New Zealand

ASCILITE 2022 was announced at the 2021 conference and is to be held at the University of Sydney from 4 – 7 December 2022.

We’re also excited to announce that ASCILITE 2023 will be held in Canterbury, New Zealand. The conference team at the University of Canterbury is already working with Christchurch Tourism to plan an amazing conference on 3 – 6 December 2023 at Te Pae.

Mark your calendars! We’ll see you there.

Peer Assisted Learning Design Pilot Initiative Update

The Peer Assisted Learning Design Pilot Initiative (PALD) is on track to begin in 2022. The PALD coordination group—Jack Sage, Michael Sankey, and David Porter (ASCILITE Executive) would like to thank everyone who has expressed interest in the program and let you know that we will be in touch soon.

As the next step in the initiative, comms have been prepared, including a new PALD page on the ASCILITE website. An invitation letter promoting the initiative will soon be sent to not-for-profit organisations in order to commence curating and advertising potential PALD projects.

The Peer Assisted Learning Design (PALD) Initiative is an ASCILITE pilot program aimed at connecting educational technologists and designers with not-for-profits to support their educational technology or instructional design needs. The initiative was conceived by Jack Sage and Michael Sankey as part of their 2021 Community Mentoring Program relationship. For more information on PALD, visit the PALD Initiative page or email the PALD team.

Invitation to submit EoIs for Business Education SIG webinars

In the Business Education (BE) SIG session at the ASCILITE conference, SIG members identified on a Padlet key themes they were interested in discussing further in 2022. Amanda and Audrea (SIG leaders) have kindly offered to kickstart our webinar series in February on ‘Pedagogy of Care and Learning Analytics’.

We are inviting Expressions of Interest (EoIs) from BE-SIG members to contribute to further webinars from March 2022 onwards. Please submit your EoI by 31 January via the following MS Forms. As you can see from our previous webinar recordings, not all co-presenters have to be ASCILITE or BE-SIG members.

OTHER NEWS

Contributions Invited for the EDEN 2022 Annual Conference, Tallinn University Estonia

EDEN Digital Learning Europe is delighted to announce that the Annual Conference will be hosted by Tallinn University in Estonia on 20 – 22 June 2022 in hybrid mode. The conference team hope to see the majority of the participants face-to-face in Tallinn, but virtual participation will also be an option.

The digital ecosystem of education has experienced both challenges as well as innovation boosts within the last two years in Europe. This situation is a potential for EDEN as the hub of professionals dealing with digital transformation of educational organisations.

EDEN has a long history of supporting educators in online and distance education, providing a forum for discussion, learning, and refinement of best practices in this area. This pandemic has been no exception. In 2022, the conference is intended as a continuation of the efforts of EDEN to support educators by providing a space to explore the issues and insights that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contributions are invited

Contributions are invited which address the author’s own research, project achievements, case studies, theoretic and conceptual work, the conference theme and tracks and the creative use of educational technology. Submissions, taking into account the conference theme and related to at least one of the conference topics, are welcome in the following formats: full paper, poster, workshop, demonstration, synergy session, training session. Email the organisers for further information.