Sloan Blended Learning Conference, Chicago, Illinois - April 2010

Once again, I had the opportunity to attend the Sloan Blended Learning Conference in Chicago. This time I facilitated a three hour workshop on Student Assessment in Blended Learning Environments: Using the Community of Inquiry Framework for Design and Implementation. My session was video taped in two parts (part one and part two) and participant feedback about the workshop has been posted to YouTube. I really love this conference for a couple of reasons. One, I get to work with an amazing group of educators and research with a wealth of online and blended teaching experience. Two, I get a chance to visit with Christy and her family in Brooklyn, New York. I made sure I took lots of pictures!!!

My conference notes are not so lengthy this year – as I had my workshop and I participated in a blended learning benchmarking session – which has resulted in a very interesting wiki resource. The conference highlights for me included Joel Hartman’s opening keynote address on the Promise and Practice of Blended Learning and Veronica Diaz’ closing keynote session on Hybrid Learning meets Web 2.0: (re)designing a Hybrid Course with Emerging Technologies for the Net Generation Learner

I really liked how Joel laid out ten key issues for blended learning success:
1. institutional strategy for blended learning (why),
2. systematic approach,
3. faculty development,
4. course design and development support,
5. online student support,
6. online academic services,
7. robust and reliable infrastructure,
8. effective organizational model,
9. pro-active policy development,
10. data collection and assessment

Veronica had an amazing set of slides and I really like how she classified Web 2.0 tools (communicate, collaborative, documentation, generative, interactive), presented Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, and an evaluation framework for blended learning courses.