Workshop 1: Formulating and leading your institutional digital learning strategy
A hands-on virtual workshop for administrators
Facilitated by Dr. Fernando Senior and Dr. Debra Mashek
While digital and online learning has flourished over the past decades and has altered the landscape of higher education worldwide, the global COVID-19 pandemic force institutions, ready or not, to quickly pivot into this new learning, administrative, and business paradigm. Like an iceberg, what is visible from the surface is the obvious need to install a technological infrastructure that extends the physical campus into a virtual space. New practices in marketing, enrollment, learner support, and teaching follow this. But what hides below the surface are essential elements that need to be present for a unique, sustainable, and prosperous journey into the new digital world.
The Workshop invites higher education administrators to formulate a preliminary institutional digital learning strategy, which is often not given the priority it warrants in light of its importance. Such a strategy represents a cornerstone that will shape the digital identity of the institution. Additionally, it is also imperative to consider the strategies that will foster collaboration within the institution.
The Workshop is a virtual hands-on experience internationally offered as part of a physical and virtual event to allow high-level administrators to experience what it is like to be an online learner and to interact with all participants, regardless of their modality of participation in the event.
The experience includes asynchronous and synchronous activities, templates, guidelines, and individual and group activities. Participants will complete a series of exercises leading to
1) identifying essential elements in their institutional digital learning strategy, and
2) identifying strategies to champion the institutional collaboration required to mobilize their institutions.
The Workshop is structured in the following phases:
1. Access to a pre-conference asynchronous activity where participants can review a
welcoming message from the facilitators, download resources and templates, and access a
forum to meet and greet other participants and the facilitators.
2. A three-hour synchronous work session divided into:
I. The Why: A discussion about the new digital education paradigm and why institutions need to understand its implications.
II. The What: A discussion about guidelines and best practices and individual and group activities to guide the institutional digital learning strategy formulation.
III. The How: A discussion about guidelines and best practices to cultivate collaboration among diverse stakeholders as campuses vision, plan, and implement their digital learning strategy.
3. Participants will have an opportunity to share their most significant concluding insights
during a group reflection (or collective harvest).
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Dear Forum Participants