Upcoming CIDER Sessions

Please note that the date for this CIDER session has been changed to Wednesday, February 10th.

Students at a French immersion high school in Ottawa and a school in Brazil exchange recipes, using a combination of French, English and Portuguese. The Brazilians discover they like poutine! Children in a rural Sierra Leonean village devastated during the civil war and a school in Mississauga collaborate to produce an online art gallery of pictures about what peace means to them. What do these examples and hundreds of thousands like them mean to the participants? What are the benefits and challenges of collaborating across countries and cultures in the design, implementation, and assessment of learning activities? Such activities by their collaborative nature support global education, whether it emphasizes peace, social justice, citizenship, ecology, or any topic or issue of shared interest. Bill Egnatoff will present a conceptual framework for bi-national collaboration of this sort. He will illustrate the framework from relevant literature, through his experience in teaching a course called Global Education Through International Collaboration, and through his peace education design research with colleagues in Canada and Sierra Leone. That work includes experimentation with, and evaluation of, a variety of tools and systems to support collaboration among twinned school communities, pre-service and in-service teachers, teacher educators, and researchers.

The link to this session will be posted closer to the session start time: February 10, 11:00am Mountain Time (Edmonton, Canada)

In this session, Stephen Rowe shares his experiences developing an entirely online offering of an Australian undergraduate course catering to 200 students enrolled across 3 campuses. The model that was developed serves as the centre-piece and "end-point" of his PhD. Practical integration of synchronous and asynchronous elements of the online model will be described. By recording synchronous sessions, staff time normally spent on repeat sessions was freed-up and used for additional support of student learning across each week. Asynchronous elements of the model allowed students flexibility with their assessment tasks and enabled them to progress through content at their own pace. As well as describing the online model, some of the key lessons learned, student activity, results and feedback will be presented for discussion.

While much is written about the integration of e-learning into organizations, few have written about how that e-learning might be applied with regard to the development of organizational wisdom. This research study, part of a 3 year long PhD study, intends to further this conversation by probing more deeply into the implementation of e-learning in such a way that wisdom may be cultivated. Although the word "wisdom" may sound unrelated and irrelevant to an organizational context, its cultivation within organizations - especially those involved in educational partnerships - matters greatly. The study aims to focus on the following central objective: to build theory in explaining how e-learning becomes embedded (or not) within the process of the development of organizational wisdom.

This presentation summarizes a series of three studies to explore the field of distance education research. The aim of the first study was to develop a validated classification of research areas to organize the body of knowledge in distance education. The Delphi method was used to develop a consensus among a group of distance education experts and a set of 15 research areas was derived from a literature review and the expert's responses. In order to identify gaps and priority areas, 695 articles published in five prominent distance education journals between 2000 and 2008 were reviewed in the second study. Based on the same sample, an analysis of gender, methods and collaboration patterns among researchers in distance education was carried out in the third study.