Boldly Awakening The Ordinary: Aligning Design Principles And Practices For Social Impact

Pre-Conference Workshop Session 2
Streamed Session

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Brief Abstract

This hands-on, collaborative workshop, geared towards designers of all levels, will invite you to connect with a burgeoning community of practice to celebrate and hone your design perspectives, align your values with design action, and develop the foundations for more sustainable and inclusive teaching and learning environments in your context. 

 

Virtual pre-conference master classes (Friday, September 17) can be added to your conference registration at a price of $125 for one or $220 for a two workshop combo deal.

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Presenters

Lead Presenter: Ben Scragg, Online Learning Consortium Inc.

Co-presenter: Angela Gunder, Online Learning Consortium

Angela Gunder is the Chief Academic Officer and VP of Learning for the Online Learning Consortium. In this role, she is responsible for gathering, curating, and leveraging the intellectual capital created by and disseminated through OLC. Prior to her position at the OLC, Angela served as the Director of Instructional Design & Curriculum Development for the Office of Digital Learning, managing and mentoring the team that builds the fully-online programs for The University of Arizona. Her over fifteen-year career as a designer for higher education informs her instructional design practice, where she leverages her expertise in web design, usability, visual communication, programming, and standards-based online learning. She is an Associate Editor for the Teacher Education Board of MERLOT, and the recipient of the 2018 MERLOT Distinguished Service Award, the organization’s highest honor. She is also the recipient of two Online Learning Consortium Effective Practice Awards for the creation of a framework for personal learning networks, and for the creation of exploratory installations of education technology, respectively. In 2019, Dr. Gunder was named an OLC Fellow for her dedication to service, innovation, and scholarship in support of student success in online learning. Her research interests include open educational practices, digital literacies, narrative in online course design, and emerging technology for second language acquisition. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Fine Art from Fordham University, a M.Ed. in Education Technology from Arizona State University. Angela completed her Ph.D. in Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies at The University of Arizona, where in 2020 she was named an Erasmus Scholar by the College of Education for her commitment to the college, the university and to the community. Pronouns: she/her/hers

Co-presenter: Madeline Shellgren, Online Learning Consortium

Pronouns: she, her, hers Twitter: @MaddieShellgren As the Director of Online Engagement, Madeline (Maddie) Shellgren serves as the lead innovator, designer, and project manager of the OLC's portfolio of online engagement opportunities. Known for her love of storytelling, play, and all things gameful, Maddie thrives on facilitating and designing meaningful ways for people to connect, learn, and grow together. Within the OLC, she has served on steering and operations committees for several of the organization’s conferences (including as Technology Test Kitchen and Innovation Studio lead, as well as Engagement Co-Chair) and has had the distinct honor of being the mastermind behind the OLC Escape Rooms. She looks forward to continuing supporting OLC community building efforts, is committed to sustainable, equitable, and anti-oppressive ecologies within education, and is genuinely excited to leverage her interdisciplinary scholarly and professional backgrounds as she helps lead the OLC towards truly innovative and transformative models for what’s possible for online and digital engagement. Maddie joins the OLC from Michigan State University (MSU), where she has served as the lead on numerous student success initiatives related to instructional design and technology, accessibility, and equity and inclusion. Over the past eleven years, Maddie has dedicated her professional life to teaching and learning related initiatives and has strategically sought out opportunities that give her a multi-dimensional perspective on teaching and learning, including working as a Standardized Patient training medical students, serving as Program Director for Teaching Assistant development, taking lead on a number of cross-institutional educator onboarding and professional development projects, and teaching across online and face-to-face contexts. She most recently worked as an Assistant Rowing Coach for the MSU Varsity Women’s Rowing Program. There she was given the opportunity to help redesign a community from the bottom up, story the team's new journey together in fun and multimodal ways, lead in the co-construction of community expectations and norms, help ensure alignment across a variety of stakeholders and initiatives, and develop and operationalize strategic structures for long-term sustainability (such as entirely new social media, marketing, communications, and content management strategies). She had the privilege of seeing the impact of her human-centered and equity-oriented approach each and every day as the team reimagined what it meant to be a Spartan on the MSU Rowing Team. With her move to the OLC, she will continue on as a volunteer coach, still supporting these efforts and the team, and is excited to get back on the water.

Co-presenter: Adam Croom, University of Oklahoma

Adam Croom is a faculty member in the Strategic Communication area of the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Croom also serves the university in a separate capacity as the Director of the Office of Digital Learning. Croom completed his Masters at Pepperdine University where he studied education and learning technologies. His research focused on networked approaches to online learning in public relations design courses.

Co-presenter: Jonathan Lashley, Idaho State Board of Education

Extended Abstract

Now in its sixth iteration, this workshop-style MasterClass at OLC Accelerate will invite you to collaborate with a burgeoning community of practice to celebrate and hone your design perspectives, align your values with action, and develop the foundations for more sustainable and inclusive teaching and learning environments in your context. 

This workshop is intended for instructional designers and design-oriented faculty at all familiarity and experience levels with formal design disciplines, including graphic and visual design, learning experience design, interaction design, or service design. There is no required or prerequisite skillset needed, however. 

Through the workshop, you will explore human-centered, foundational design principles, as well as develop fluency with a suite of co-design methods and activity protocols, including open-source (free!) tools. You will share in the collective genius in the room to reimagine and redesign learning materials, processes, experiences and even systems. 

Through this MasterClass, participants will:

  • Climb foundational rungs on the ladder toward designing or redesigning their values, and aligning them with action.
  • Begin to develop fluency with designing personas around why/how to do this work, based on discrete challenges of the moment in the field of online and blended learning.
  • Expand their sense of design agency in creating learning spaces that enable students to thrive
  • Participate in a community of practice and access open source resources and materials to enable further professional learning for design impact in their contexts.

Japanese designer and theorist Kenya Hara (2007) has offered that design “is the energetic acknowledgement of our own living through the making of things and through communication,” where our making can be understood as our attempt to “boldly awaken our everyday existences, which seem ordinary” (p. 411). From an educator’s lens, we see Hara’s words as a challenge to enliven our intentional acts of design. And in the spirit of Hara’s challenge, we look forward to collaborating with you during this MasterClass experience, as we co-design together to create more equitable learning environments!