Speakers

International Conference on Open and Innovative Education Speakers

Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Title: 'Teachnologies' for Lifelong and Life-wide Learning

Professor Judy Kay
Professor of Computer Science
Faculty of Engineering
University of Sydney
Professor Judy Kay is Professor of Computer Science in the Faculty of Engineering, University of Sydney. She heads the Human Centred Technology Research Cluster, a large multi-disciplinary research group that conducts fundamental research, design, engineering and evaluation of new technologies. She is a Payne-Scott Distinguished Professor at the University of Sydney, in recognition of her contributions to both multi-disciplinary, high-impact and deployed research and to education. A core focus of her research has been to create infrastructures and interfaces for personalisation, especially to support people in lifelong, life-wide learning. This ranges from formal education settings to supporting people in using their long-term ubicomp data to support self-monitoring, reflection and planning. Central to this has been in the design of user modelling systems and interfaces. She has integrated these into new forms of interaction including virtual reality, surface computing, wearables and ambient displays. Her research has been commercialised and deployed and she has extensive publications in leading venues for research in user modelling, AIED, human computer interaction and ubicomp. She has held leadership roles in top conferences in these areas and is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED) and Editor of Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technology (IMWUT).
This talk presents a vision for 'teachnology', technology that is carefully designed to transform learning in formal educational settings and beyond. This is based on three foundations. The first is the interface technology that is becoming increasingly available, ranging from mobiles, wearables, interactive surfaces to virtual, augmented and mixed reality. The second is based on principled design and use of learning data, drawing on decades of research Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) on learner modelling. This highlights how teachers and learners can become active partners with AI system, by building understanding about ontologies, AI learner modelling and Open Learner Models (OLMs). The third is interfaces to support self-regulated learning because the interfaces help learners engage in meta-cognitive processes of reflection, self-monitoring, planning.
The talk begins by reviewing the broad scope and vision described above. It then presents a series sets of case studies from my work. One set was designed to support learning of 21st Century skills such as collaboration and critical thinking. They had the dual goals of supporting collaboration to improve learning and learning to collaborate. These 'teachnologies' used online collaboration and interactive tables and walls. The second set of studies deals with individual learning based on personal data from activity trackers, virtual reality and mobiles. The talk concludes with key lessons learnt and directions.

Title: Education for a Digital World: Leading Change in Teaching and Learning

Professor Martha Cleveland-Innes
Professor of Education Innovation
Athabasca University
Professor Martha Cleveland-Innes is Professor of Education Innovation at Athabasca University. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the bilingual Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology and the author of The Guide to Blended Learning. Professor Cleveland-Innes is instructor, co-designer, and researcher for the open online courses Blended Learning Practice. and Leading Change for Teaching and Learning in a Digital World. The 2nd edition of Introduction to Distance Education: Teaching and Learning in a New Era, which she co-edited, was released by Taylor & Francis in 2021. This same publisher will release The Design of Digital Learning Environments: Online and Blended Applications of the Community of Inquiry, co-edited by Professor Cleveland-Innes, in late 2022. She has held major research grants supporting research on the digital technology-enabled student experience. In 2019, Professor Cleveland-Innes received an Honorary Doctorate from Mid-Sweden University and the Leadership Award from the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education. Her research interest areas include 1) online and blended learning, 2) communities of inquiry, 3) higher education reform and lifelong learning, and 4) leadership in digital education. Professor Cleveland-Innes is currently Visiting Professor of Pedagogy at Mid-Sweden University. For more information, see https://www.athabascau.ca/humanities-and-social-sciences/our-people/martha-cleveland-innes.html.
Changes in societal context cause significant new requirements for both the process and the outcomes of education. The new requirements include new teaching and learning purposes and practices. These purposes and practices are guided both by earlier forms of distance education and the transition from traditional place-based, in-person learning.  As digital information and communication affordances allow us to engage without being in-person, we must act in ways to bridge the separation or distance. Through all generations of distance and online education, teachers played a role of learning facilitator, and the material was content and with teaching techniques embedded within it. In other words, this move to digital learning acknowledges greater access to information and knowledge. Teachers no longer must be the purveyor of this content.  These enduring characteristics of distance education can guide us to digital learning that is pedagogically distinct from more traditional, lecture-based teaching delivery in universities. The way forward is to adjust our pedagogical approaches to education. This means integration and training of both the technology and the new roles of teacher and learner.  
This conference activity with review and discuss digital society, transformational leadership, new pedagogies, and education institutional change.

Title: Setting the Stage for Effective Online Learning with Social Analytics and Dynamic Support for Collaborative Learning

Professor Carolyn Rosé
Professor
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Language Technologies Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Professor Carolyn Rosé is a Professor of Language Technologies and Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Interim Director of the Language Technologies Institute. Her research program focuses on computational modeling of discourse to enable scientific understanding the social and pragmatic nature of conversational interaction of all forms, and using this understanding to build intelligent computational systems for improving collaborative interactions. She is best known for her work on dynamic support of collaborative learning using intelligent conversational agents in online, face-to-face, and hybrid settings, triggered through real time analysis of conversational interactions. Her research group's highly interdisciplinary work, published in 280 peer reviewed publications, is represented in the top venues of 5 fields: namely, Language Technologies, Learning Sciences, Cognitive Science, Educational Technology, and Human-Computer Interaction, with awards in 4 of these fields. She is a Past President and Inaugural Fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, Senior member of IEEE, Founding Chair of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. She also serves as a 2020-2021 AAAS Leshner Leadership Institute Fellow for Public Engagement with Science, with a focus on public engagement with Artificial Intelligence.
This talk explores the costs and benefits of social interaction in online communities, what we have learned about what works, what can be done with technology, and what questions we still need to answer. In particular, this talk highlights social analytics as an area of Artificial Intelligence that plays a role in supporting education that has featured in movements towards large scale learning opportunities, such as promised in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as in more traditional Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning environments. It will review the history of the rise and fall of the MOOCs in connection with developments in AI in Education that contribute to the broader landscape of online learning at scale as well as illustrating the important role of social support in the success of such endeavors. It further discusses how social analytic technologies have played a role in providing, monitoring, and intensifying such experiences. As an illustration, it will cover a recent full scale deployment study of computer-supported collaborative learning as a key part of an onboarding activity in a fully online university setting. In this study, the powerful experience of a single synchronous activity with another student on the platform significantly increased the probability of a student enrolling in and completing at least one course within 60 days of the activity.

Title: Innovating Pedagogy

Professor Rebecca Ferguson
Professor of Learning Futures
Institute of Educational Technology
The Open University, UK
Professor Rebecca Ferguson is Professor of Learning Futures in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at The Open University in the UK, and a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is a leading member of the international learning analytics community, was an executive member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) for four years, and is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal of Learning Analytics. Her work has been influential in shaping the field, supporting implementation across Europe, and promoting a focus on social learning analytics and on ethics. She has led events in this area on five continents, including several associated with her work as principal investigator on the European Learning Analytics Community Exchange (LACE) and on LAEP, a project that helped European policymakers to set out an agenda for high-quality and stimulating ways of learning and teaching through the use of learning analytics.
Professor Ferguson spent two years as Academic Lead on the microcredentials programme at The Open University, due to her extensive experience in related areas. This experience includes a leading role in the creation of FutureLearn and work as Pedagogic Advisor for the company in its first years, Evaluation Lead on the OU's first 13 MOOCs, OU PI on the European-Commission-funded European MOOC Consortium: Labour Market (EMC-LM) project, and current Academic Lead of the international FutureLearn Academic Network.
Professor Ferguson has worked on the Innovating Pedagogy reports since the series was founded in 2012, including two years as lead author. This series of high-profile annual reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment in order to guide educators and policy makers around the world.
Innovation in education is often associated with developments in technology. However, unless new gadgets are used to open up new possibilities for learners and educators, interest fades fast when the novelty wears off and tools become mundane rather than exciting. Innovations in pedagogy can produce more substantial changes in education, building on the possibilities afforded by new devices. A wide range of tools is now available that can support networked, collaborative and conversational approaches to learning. Learners are no longer restricted to a limited local audience. They can use digital tools and the Internet to engage in authentic tasks that connect their learning with experiences outside the classroom. Interactions with technology generate sets of data that can be used to help learners understand and develop their aptitudes and skills. The sensors built into smartphones enable them to measure, interrogate, analyse and record their environment. In her keynote, Professor Ferguson will discuss the annual 'Innovating Pedagogy' reports that The Open University in the UK has produced with expert partners over the last decade, and will introduce some of the exciting new approaches that have been covered by the report in recent years.

Forum Speakers

Title: Pedagogical Innovations: Challenges and Strategies

Three internationally renowned experts will share their views on the challenges and proposals for overcoming the challenges.
Professor Shane Dawson
Executive Dean, UniSA Education Futures and Professor of Learning Analytics
University of South Australia
Speech Topic: Realising the Impact of Learning Analytics
Professor Shane Dawson is the Executive Dean of UniSA Education Futures and Professor of Learning Analytics at the University of South Australia. He has published widely on topics from creative capacity to social network analysis and the application of learner ICT interaction data to inform and benchmark teaching and learning quality. His current research interests relate to complex systems and academic leadership to aid adoption and application of advanced technologies and analytics in education.
With the support of many talented colleagues, Professor Dawson has been involved in the development of numerous open source software including the Online Video Annotations for Learning (OVAL), OnTask (a personalised learner feedback tool), and SNAPP, a social network visualization tool designed for teaching staff to better understand, identify and evaluate student learning, engagement, academic performance and creative capacity.
Professor Dawson is a founding executive member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research, past program and conference chair of the International Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference and an inaugural co-editor of the Journal for Learning Analytics. Professor Dawson has been supporting the development of Learning Analytics over the past decade and more.
  • The field of Learning Analytics has rapidly grown over the past decade in terms of publications, grants and commercial ventures.
  • There remain few large-scale implementations of Learning Analytics.
  • Institutional constraints have limited the scope of research problems investigated.
  • Learning Analytics integrates both technical and social systems in an organisation.
  • To move from small problems to scaled impact requires a shift in focus from technical to social solutions.
Professor Kinshuk
Dean, College of Information,
University of North Texas
Speech Topic: Analytics Based Pedagogical Innovations for Enhanced Student Learning
Professor Kinshuk is the Dean of the College of Information at the University of North Texas, USA. Prior to that, he held the NSERC/CNRL/Xerox/McGraw Hill Research Chair for Adaptivity and Personalization in Informatics, funded by the Federal government of Canada, Provincial government of Alberta, and by national and international industries. He was also Full Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems and Associate Dean of Faculty of Science and Technology, at Athabasca University, Canada. With more than 550 research publications in refereed journals, international refereed conferences and book chapters, his work has been dedicated to advancing research on the innovative paradigms, architectures and implementations of online and distance learning systems for individualized and adaptive learning in increasingly global environments. Professor Kinshuk is Founding Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Learning Technologies, Founding Editor of the Educational Technology & Society Journal (SSCI indexed, within top 3 in Google Scholar metrics ranking for Educational Technology), and Founding Editor of Springer's Smart Learning Environments journal (Scopus and ESCI indexed).
  • Understanding the current trends in learning
  • Understanding the role of analytics in student's learning context
  • Analytics based pedagogical innovations as learning interventions
Professor Norman Vaughan
Professor, Department of Education
Mount Royal University
Speech Topic: Strategies for Three Challenges on Pedagogical Innovations
Professor Norman Vaughan, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Education at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He has co-authored the books Teaching in Blended Learning Environments: Creating and Sustaining Communities of Inquiry (2013) and Blended Learning in Higher Education (2008) and he has published a series of articles on blended learning and faculty development. Professor Vaughan is the Co-founder of the Blended Online Design Network (BOLD), a member of the Community of Inquiry Research Group, the Associate Editor of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning and he is on the Editorial Boards of numerous national and international journals. More information about Professor Vaughan can be found on his personal web site at: https://sites.google.com/a/mtroyal.ca/normvaughan/.
  • The importance of faculty in higher education experiencing an online/blended course from a student perspective
  • The importance of working with corporate, government, and non-government organizational partners to provide students with collaborative workplace and volunteer learning experiences
  • Recognition and promotion of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) within educational systems and institutions

Workshop Speaker

Title: Online Collaborative Learning: Using Perusall and Miro for collaboration

Dr Eva Tsang
Director of ALTO
Hong Kong Metropolitan University
Dr Eva Tsang is Director of Office for Advancement of Learning and Teaching (ALTO) at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. She has worked extensively on online, blended and mobile learning environments for learners and innovative use of educational technology in learning and teaching. She has also conducted a series of professional development seminars and workshops on course development, instructional design, OER, use of new technologies, eLearning, blended learning and mobile learning for internal academic staff and higher education planners and practitioners from external institutions.
Fostering student interaction and collaboration is no easy feat. This workshop will introduce Perusall, a collaborative reading platform; and Miro, a widely-used online collaborative whiteboard. The first part of the workshop will introduce the features of Perusall that can help make readings and assignments more engaging by annotating, commenting, upvoting and downvoting comments. The second part will introduce the basic functions of Miro, and showcase some examples of its use. As the workshop will be accompanied by hands-on activities in Miro, participants are recommended to join this workshop using a desktop/ laptop computer.