Meital, the Israeli Inter University Centre for e-Learning, serves as a bridge between the local e-Learning community and its international counterparts. As such, we participate in multiple international projects and maintain vital channels of communication and collaboration with individuals, institutions and networks in Europe, the US and elsewhere.
In 2020 we have established an international track at the meital conference. Following the success of that initiative, we will include a similar track in this year’s conference. This track will include sessions on Agile Pedagogy, Inclusive and Equitable Education, Intercultural Collaborative Learning, and Hybrid Learning Spaces.
This track will be livestreamed openly for anyone wishing to follow the sessions. However, active participation is limited to registered conference attendees.
Free to attend, but registration required.
Blend but Don’t Break: Introducing the TEC-VARIETY and R2D2 Models for Online Motivation and Engagement
Curtis J. Bonk, Indiana University
In the age of the pandemic, everyone is talking about the need to motivate and engage their online and blended students. In dealing with COVID-19, online instructors throughout the world are seeking to integrate technology in more effective and creative ways, while remaining cognizant of the disparity in student Internet access, basic digital learning competencies, and time, space, and hardware availability. In spite of these challenges, some have found ways to push the edge of the online teaching and learning envelope in new and innovative ways, whereas others have striven to find low risk, low cost, low time activities; in effect, they blend but don’t break. In response, Professor Curt Bonk will detail two of his designs for how to engage and empower learners and move them from bland online content and unimaginative activities to offering flexibility, choice, and creativity.
Dr. Curt Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University where he teaches psychology and technology courses. From 2012 to 2018, Bonk has been annually named by Education Next and listed in Education Week among the top contributors to the public debate about education from more than 20,000 university-based academics. In 2020, Curt was awarded the IU President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Technology.
Agile Pedagogy has a lot in common with the Agile Manifesto and the Scrums Meetings first introduced in Software Development. Thus, Agility is a paramount factor in course development, classroom and assessments. The lectures in this session will expand our understanding, adaptation and implementation of this novel concept.
Konstantinos Petridis
LOVE.DIST@NCE, an Erasmus+ 3-year project led by the Polytechnic Of Porto, aims to promote inclusive education in Israel and Georgia by widening access to higher education for students from vulnerable and marginalized populations, e.g., religious groups, rural populations, ethnic minorities and students with special needs.
Doing Cooperative Learning in Online Learning Contexts
Francisca Maria Ivone and George Jacobs
Virtual Show & Tell: An International Collaborative Project to Enhance Intercultural Communication in Courses from Different Disciplines
Stephanie Ginensky and Jann Purdy
Intercultural online collaboration projects
Ildikó Lázár and Miri Shonfeld
Imagine students enrolled in a formal academic program, who complement their learning needs through MOOCs, working in groups with their class colleagues and their new fellow students in the open course, working alone in a remote laboratory, and participating in hackathons or competitions, participating a a professional development course that strengthens their competences… All these technology-mediated modalities of learning, formal, informal and non-formal; individual and collaborative; face-to-face and online, have been growing intensively during the last decade, and have become part of everyday life for young students or lifelong learners. Their common element refers to the hybridity of different dimensions of learning.
How are Universities are coping with the New Normal during and after the Pandemic: Sharing of Practices, Research and Reflections from Singapore and Asia
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about challenges for universities to continue the education they are providing even as students have to stay out of campus for most of the lessons. The lockdowns in schools and universities have necessitated emergency responses in the quick adoption of online and blended learning. Practices have quickly emerged such as the movement of examinations and yearly admission exercises to online, and live hybrid learning in which instructors become TV show hosts, teaching students in-person in the classroom as well as students watching the lecture live online. Indeed, more opportunities arise to bring about educational change or paradigm shifts that were once out of reach. Some universities have used the pandemic as an opportunity to re-define the intent and curricula of their undergraduate education.
In this talk, I will discuss some of the policies and strategies that universities have adopted to continue undisrupted learning, speaking from a Singapore perspective and also sharing examples from elsewhere in Asia. From these varied practices and supplemented by reported research studies, we will tease out new salient understandings from a learning sciences perspective.
Chee-Kit Looi is Professor of Education at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He was the founding Head of the Learning Sciences Lab, the first research centre devoted to the study of the sciences of learning in the Asia-Pacific region. He is currently the Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Development in Learning at NTU.