CIDER Sessions

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CIDER has many speakers on tap from across Canada. Each session is sixty minutes long and runs from 11:00am Mountain time (1:00pm Eastern). Sessions are free and open to all. List all Upcoming CIDER Sessions. Check back often, as this list of upcoming events will be expanded. Slides and the audiographic recording of all Past CIDER Sessions are available for downloading in the archive.

Interested in presenting in our 2012-13 season? We invite DE scholars and practitioners with research of interest to our members to send a description to Dr. Terry Anderson.

Our next CIDER session

Measuring Social Presence in a Community of Inquiry

Facilitator: Patrick Lowenthal

Institution: Athabasca University

Date and time: Jun 05, 2013 11:00 AM Mountain Time (Canada)

Patrick Lowenthal, Marti Cleveland-Innes, Karen Swan and Jennifer Richardson will review and debate social presence in a community of inquiry, with a focus on its measurement process.

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List all upcoming CIDER Sessions

Our most recent CIDER session

Challenges in the Graduate Student Experience: Struggling to Complete Valuable Research in an Online Environment

Facilitator: Matthew Asser • Profile

Institution: 4Growth Inc.

Date and time: May 08, 2013 11:00 AM

Research pertaining to graduate students in distance education and their thesis research process is woefully constrained. Consequently, potentially important research and research areas remain unexplored. This presentation will explore specifically the issues graduate students experience conducting the research phase of the thesis, including the challenges students may encounter to recruit participants.

Streams of research identified in the presentation will be: online graduate work broadly, to create context around how graduate study emerged, the value of graduate work, and central issues; the particular case of thesis research students who work in an online environment; graduate student researchers in higher education, on campus or distance education and their access to research participants; and access to research participants in an online environment, whether it is different from campus based access and if so how.

The paucity of research into the issues graduate students face when actually doing research is cause for concern. Research universities that have a focus in distance education must be aware of these challenges if they are to unfetter the constraints faced by their graduate students.