Virtual Speed Networking Lounge - Escape Room

Streamed Session

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Brief Abstract

 Join OLC Escape Room designers and learn what it takes to craft these fun challenge and puzzle-based experiences that unite participants around collaboration and strategy.

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Presenters

Lead 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: Kristin Ziska Strange, University of Arizona

Extended Abstract

Escape Rooms are collaborative experiences where participants work together to solve a series of puzzles, challenges, riddles, or mysteries using clues, hints, and intentional strategy. They often feature a specific theme and a particular set of objectives that require participants to work as a team if they hope to complete the challenge in time. 

Educational Escape Rooms have been an exciting, new feature of the past few OLC conferences. They have allowed conference participants a fun and unique space to not only engage with a variety of educational technologies, but do so in a themed, challenge-based environment with others. Challenges have included finding a hidden code within a database to unlock a presentation, navigating through a virtual or augmented reality to receive your next clue, using distance-learning technologies to communicate with your teammates, or completing a circuit to turn on a device, among others. That said, they were all fun, practical, and representative of the types of teaching and learning challenges that educators face in their day-to-day lives.

Think you’re good at solving your way out of a sticky situation? Love solving your way out of complex conundrums and having fun along the way? Well jump right onto this virtual collaborative session and put your mad skills to the test as we present the hardest challenge of all: how to design these fantastic and educational versions of supreme fun!