Lessons Learned: OLC's Ideate On Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion

Concurrent Session 1
Streamed Session Equity and Inclusion OLC Session

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Brief Abstract

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is central to the work we all do within online, blended, and digital learning. DEI is core to community building. In this panel-style session, we will discuss what we learned from OLC Ideate: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Digital Learning Environments, a discussion based convening that brought together over 1000 educators to craft a charter for more equitable digital learning environments. 

  

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.

Extended Abstract

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is central to the work we all do within online, blended, and digital learning. DEI is core to community building. It is core to conversations around sustainable and accessible programming. It should necessarily be core to any conversation around impact or student success and even extends into the space of technological innovations and our relationships with industry partners. That said, though DEI is a foundational thread to the breadth of work we all do, it nevertheless remains an area of focus that many feel under-prepared to talk about or lead programming around. Beyond individual skills and knowledge base, there is also the question of what it means to engage as a community around the systematic changes necessary to truly move towards diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field and the learning contexts we work in. 

In this panel-style session, we will discuss what we learned from OLC Ideate: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Digital Learning Environments, a discussion based convening that brought together over 1000 educators to craft a charter for more equitable digital learning environments. During this 5-day event, educators came together in dialogue around their challenges and our collective opportunities. Learn what we discovered from engaging community in a DEI-centered collaborative charter. Hear about ways to continue to get involved with the amazing and generative community we began to form during the event. And leave with a better understanding of how you might meaningfully engage others around diversity, equity, and inclusion.