ICDE World Conference on Online Learning 2017

Description

The World Conference on Online Learning, the 27th biennial conference of the International Council for Distance Education, was held at Sheraton Centre, Toronto, Canada 16-19 October. I attended this event together with one of my colleagues to present a paper, Online, Flipped, Blended Approach to Apprenticeship Education: A case study of UCEM's Surveying Technician Diploma, that we co-authored.

The theme for the conference was Teaching in a Digital Age: Re-thinking Teaching & Learning and under this umbrella theme our work was presented under Track 5 - Redesigned Institutional Business Models.

Evidence

As evidence I would like to present the sway presentation I created that included some project interview clips to give a better idea of our project to the audience before the talk. Also I am sharing the presentation slides. The presentation was delivered by my colleague and co-author of the work, Nick Moore, then Dean Learning and Teaching at UCEM.

I would also like to present blog posts I have written reflecting on my ICDE2017 experience.

Reflection

I have written three blog posts reflecting on my experience of the ICDE2017 World Conference, which I have listed below:

ICDE conference attracted almost all the big names in academia who are active in distance and e-learning sphere. I met Prof. Tony Bates who's work (ACTIONS model) I had referred to in my PhD work. I also got the chance to listen to the MOOC pioneer Stephen Downes. However, as a conference ICDE is such a big conference. There were 1000s of participants and you hardly got time to get to know people at an individual level. The number of parallel sessions were crazy and identifying sessions to go was very difficult as you could not change presentation rooms (small auditoriums) to go to a different presentation during a session as you could normally do in a smaller conference. Now having attended EDEN conference, I think I much prefer EDEN conference, which is not a small conference but much smaller compared to ICDE Conference. I like to get to know people and their work in a more personal level.

The work we presented was very much about the changes in the UK in its apprenticeship provision. But we presented our work to a mainly Canadian audience. There had been changes in Canadian apprenticeship education and other presentations of the session were addressing those issues. Questions were posed to all presenters at the end of the session and from the questions posed to us I felt that the audience did not seem to realise that this was not a Canadian study. So I felt that had we presented our work in an event in England it would have had much better response. A learning point from this conference was to consider the context whenever sending an abstract to a conference.