A session from ALT 2021 caught my attention: “Promoting Connectedness – the importance of peer mentors in an intra-curricular online learning space” since I am working on instructor presence this week. The speakers of this session were Peter Bryant, Juliette Overland, Danielle Eden and Natasha Arthars. Bryant acknowledged the indigenous people in Australia. Bryant teaches in the business school and has a large proportion of international students who from abroad. Eden talked about an intercurricular pilot study they ran online with about 1800 students participating! They developed four module led by experts including a futurist. They ran the program online using MS Teams. Participants completed research connections (webinars), reflections and feedback, “Business Not As Usual” forum, and Badging and Rewarding activities. Eden mentioned the inclusivity of the design to promote belonging: students as partners, asynchronous/synchronous combinations, and teamwork. The peer mentor teams ran drop in sessions that were options for students. The pitch presentations were three minutes long. The peer mentor rubric was very cool: it was structured as a verbal feedback rubric. The facilitators helped groups share feedback. The lessons learned included training and adapting to new technologies, students as partners in learning to promote connectedess, and helping support mentors kept the system going.
A second session was focused on community of inquiry frameworks and entitled “Pedagogy meets Technology: developing a Community of Inquiry for digital teaching and learning” with Cecilia Goria and Matt East. Goria spoke about the stages of teaching with technology starting in March of 2020 with Emergency Remote Teaching (spring semester of 2020), Adapted Remote Teaching was the first semester of 2021 with Consolidated Remote teaching in the fall of 2021. Goria referred to the current semester as Skilled Remote Teaching. The names of the stages are intriguing and Goria cited several recent publications she has authored. The first pedagogical priority/necessity is addressing the challenges of mixed-mode teaching that provides flexibility and takes into account diverse learning contexts. Goria mentioned the second pedagogical priority is interaction with content for deep-learning that includes close-reading, critical thinking, identifying bias, contextualizing… The third pedagogical priority mentioned by Goria is engaging students. The community of inquiry framework combines social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence and poses that learning occurs at the intersection of all three. Goria described the Talis Elevate annotation platform for collaborative and personal notes. The platform allows annotation of texts, images, and videos. Students can also keep personal notes. Instructors can’t see them but can get analytics on the number of comments and time spent watching/annotating. During their pilot, they had 106 modules and 1500 students registered! Gloria tied together the pedagogical solution (community of inquiry framework) with the digital solution (Talis Elevate software). The careful design and consideration of how to incorporate these elements caught my attention.
