Author: Amber

Before starting at Royal Roads University (RRU), I had never heard the term “virtual symposium.” After viewing more than ten pre-recorded presentations, I am grateful for the gradual introduction to the academic world as it relates to learning and digital environments. Below is a summary of my learnings.

Intentional Messiness of Online Communities

In Cormier’s Intentional messiness of online communities (2017), I discovered the concept of open learning and reevaluated my understanding of what “open” means. I found it illuminating to see how the meaning of the term could be changed by modifying the preposition that followed it: “Open to” means giving more people access, such as making it possible for more people to obtain post-secondary degrees; “Open for” means giving people with a certain skillset the opportunity to modify technology tools, as in the case of open source software; and “Open by” means making it possible for people to use work created by others, as in the case of Creative Commons licensing (Cormier, 2017).

Future Naval Training Systems Strategy

LCol Regan Legassie (2017) delivered an entertaining presentation on the Future Naval Training Systems Strategy. Many of his comments rang true to my own experiences. Specifically, I appreciated his comments that people who end up pursuing careers in organizational training and development often end up there by accident or necessity. My career path has led me to instructional design after years in corporate communications and organizational change management, so I related to his story. I also regularly experience the struggles he described about working with subject matter experts who know their content well but lack the ability to translate that knowledge into effective learning materials.

Leading Instructional Designers

The presentation Leading Instructional Designers by Gary Rosborough (2017) was perhaps the most relatable for me. How he works with faculty members and students, treating them like internal clients, mirrors how I manage my own consulting projects. It was reassuring to hear that the challenges he encounters in receiving approval on a statement of work, planning resources based on shifting timelines, and outsourcing the development of content are not unique to me. It was also encouraging to hear that many of the strategies he uses to deal with organizational obstacles are the same ones I am using. Those strategies are a blog post unto themselves, so I will not go into detail on them here.

Centre for Teaching and Educational Technologies

Vivian Forssman (2017) from RRU’s Centre for Teaching and Educational Technologies department offered a transparent and frank discussion of the limitations of technology in large organizations. Her description of the planning and approval timelines, and how long the planning process takes, echoed my own experience working with large organizations. I also appreciated her comments that many of the initial changes to RRU’s technology infrastructure needed to happen “behind the scenes” before students and faculty could experience the benefits. Having worked on large-scale technology enterprise implementations, I have seen first-hand the amount of project management, resource coordination, and inter-departmental alignment and cooperation that needs to occur before something as simple as creating individual student blogs can happen (Forssman, 2017).

Other Observations

I also watched a few presentations that did not resonate with me as deeply as I would have expected. I found it difficult to stay focused on Threading together the themes of the week with Dr. Veletsianos’ and Dr. Childs (2017), while I found Dr. Oostveen’s (2017) discussion of community models in online learning difficult to follow, since I listened to his presentation as a podcast rather than following along with the presentation slides. As much as I would have liked to immerse myself in Catherine Cronin’s Open culture, open education, open questions (2017), I found the audio level of the .mp4 recording too low and had difficulty hearing her comments. Dr. Childs’ (2017) presentation on the MALAT exit pathways left me with more questions than answers about the digital consulting pathway, and I found the student research paper presentations to be quite surface-level considering the purpose of the presentation was to share their knowledge as they prepared to exit the master’s program; I suspect both issues were largely due to time constraints. Despite different presentation styles, technical issues, and time limitations, viewing these presentations exposed me to a breadth and depth of research that I would not have otherwise encountered, and for that I am appreciative.

Overall, the virtual symposium showed me how academic theory and real-world application can come together. I am looking forward to this challenge in my own research.