The Catch: Season Finale Edition

Photo by Andrey Larin on Unsplash

What’s happening in technology-enabled learning this week?

This week’s very special episode of The Catch is the season finale edition! It will be hibernating for the summer, resting up and collecting thoughts and ideas for a relaunch in the Fall. As such, this one is a little longer than usual because we want to let you know about all the stuff we have going on over the next while!    

 The Cutting/Trailing Edge

Radio is a wonderful example of a trailing-edge technology still being used in new and cutting-edge ways. The following is an incomplete history of events of the last 123 years:

• 1895: Radio was invented
• A long time after that: eCampusOntario was formed
• A little while after that: eCampusOntario started a radio show known as “Gettin’ Air”
• Last week: Terry Greene interviewed David Porter for the season finale of the Gettin’ Air radio show on VoicEdCanada.

Listen to the outcome of that historical timeline here.

Trickle Up

The Catch is a regularly released blog post that connects you to the great goings on in open and technology-enabled teaching and learning for educators in Ontario post-secondary institutions.

So, what do you get when you take that idea and apply it to learners instead? You get a regularly released blog post that connects you to the great goings on in open and technology-enabled learning from the perspective of learners in Ontario post-secondary institutions.

Sounds good!? Just like with The Catch, we will share bite-sized bits of information related to learning strategies, learning technologies and opportunities to connect with learners in your community. As always, we will keep things short and sweet: you can always link to more, should you be interested. We’re thinking about calling it The Pitch. Stay tuned!

Behind the Content

If a MOOC is a “Massive Open Online Course”, then what is a mini-MOOC? Well, it’s still massive in that it welcomes massive amounts of people with open arms, but it’s mini in time. The good news is, there’s a 2 week mini MOOC on now! Jenni Hayman has corralled an impeccable gang of open educators to create and curate the content, resources and activities of the Making Sense of Open Education MOOC! Open Educators from across Canada each grabbed a piece to work with and then Jenni put it all together as a place for those new to Open Education to kick start and supercharge their excitement for Open! Check out the latest tweets to #MakingSense18 or jump right on into the MOOC. It’s not too late!

Open Treasure

You were probably not able to attend OEGlobal 2018 (OEConsortium’s Global Conference) this past April. There was an entire Atlantic Ocean in the way for crying out loud! Here’s a great substitute: the current issue of the open access journal Open Praxis is chock full of extremely open-y goodness – a selection of papers from the conference. We can’t even pick a favourite, because all of it!

Has the Open Treasure section of The Catch piqued your curiosity about adopting or adapting an open educational resource? Are you interested in researching the impact of open education or open practice in your classroom? There is an eCampusOntario funding opportunity coming up which could support you in that work. Stay tuned to the eCampusOntario newsletter and website for the release of two new Requests For Proposals (RFPs) on their way in mid-June. Following shortly after the release of these RFPs will be a series of webinars designed to help you prepare your proposal. Stay tuned to ecampsusontario.ca for details!

Adoption Announcements

Would you like to see yourself in the Adoption Announcements section come September? We sure would! Here’s how this can happen:

• Go to openlibrary.ecampusontario.ca
• See if any of the very OPEN textbooks there could be used in any of the courses you may be teaching in the fall. You don’t need to guess which ones are free and open and there for you to take. The answer is: all of them.
• Download that open text book in whichever format you’d like. There are lots of options.
• Download it again in a format you don’t even need or know what it’s for. (MOBI, anyone? What’s that?) just because you can. It’s free. Then delete that.
• Adopt that text.
• Put it in your course outline.
• Save your students a wad of cash.
• Be their hero.
• Let us know!

 Now and Next

Ontario Extend is an educator empowerment program designed to explore the skills, knowledge, and attributes required to extend and transform our teaching and learning practices and to enrich our professional development. It’s also an Open Educational Resource steeped in Open Educational Practices. The eCampusOntario team has spent the past few months building a community of Extenders to get involved and start sharing their technology-enabled pedagogical practices. We’ve visited Fleming College and Lambton College to kick off two cohorts for participants to use as on-ramps to join the greater community/lifestyle that is Extending. What’s next? We have the one and only Alan Levine, aka Cogdog, running the Extend show for the summer! He’s got some ideas and is of course open to your ideas for what we can get up to, Extend-wise, this summer. See this post at cogdogblog.com for some of those thoughts and, for the love of all that is good in this world, take advantage of his expertise all summer long! He’s standing by and ready for anything!

Also, stay tuned for the results of an action research project studying Ontario Extend itself, currently underway by David Porter and Valerie Lopes!

 Read It and Tweet

The Daily Extend is a short and simple daily challenge posted at extend-daily.ecampusontario.ca and tweeted out from the @ontarioextend account. It’s a fun way to share ideas and practices. It’s not just for those involved in the Ontario Extend community. It’s also for anyone not (yet) involved! Try this Daily Extend from last week, for example. Together we curated a list of summer reading that we plan to do, whether it be education related or not. We generated some great ideas for books or articles to check out this summer. Have a look at the list for ideas and tweet one or two yourself if you feel like it!

The Catch is a regular blog post on ecampusontario.ca curated, created, and collaborated on by the eCampusOntario Program Managers: Terry Greene, Peg French, Joanne Kehoe, and Jenni Hayman. Other contributors include… you? Let us know if you have something that you think would fit nicely in here by emailing thecatch@ecampusontario.ca with the subject heading “Catch This!” or whichever subject heading you want to use, really. See you in September!