We attended the 1st Annual SUNY COTE Summit. This event brought together eLearning and ed tech staff of various levels from across the SUNY system, as well as guest speakers on topics of interest from outside of SUNY and NY state.
COTE Community Fun
It was more specifically for Open SUNY COTE fellows in the experienced, expert, exemplar, and innovator/researcher roles, though it seemed to be open to many.
Following are some of the key ideas, resources, and thoughts that I took away from this event and I wanted to share them with the SUNY Delhi staff:
Tools of Engagement Project (TOEP): this is a collaborative project for creating on-demand PD about technology integration in education: http://suny.edu/toep
TOEP offers a right-time right-place (or what you need when you need it) training for faculty. Faculty are busy, this site allows them to find resources on how to do just the things they want to try in a course. It has a community of engagement attached to it, which faculty can join.
Badges: SUNY COTE is creating a new badges system for their PD programs, which will allow for badges across curriculum. A speaker at the conference also talked about Open Badges. Badges have uses outside of the typical degree programs in that they can value recognition of the soft-skills that the overall courses and degrees in a study program might not clearly define, such as Leadership Skills. They can cover cross-curriculum skills.
SUNY Delhi is starting to implement badges, and badges training, right now. If any faculty are interested in possibly creating a badges system for soft skills in their own degree program or courses, then come see us and we can brainstorm with you.
Talks by Dr. Kyle L. Peck , John Walber, Dave Cormier, Dr. Michelle Miller, and others focused on a lot of philosophical and strategic directions for online learning. Here are just a few of the ideas covered:
Reducing the high cost of education through the use of Open Educational Resources (OER).
The concept or idea that the future of education will move away from strict-set degree programs, and towards tailor-made mix-n-match degree programs, in which students choose which courses they want for their own personalized learning program - that they would pick the topics and areas of development that they need, for their life, their career goals.
A 'flex MOOC', in which one division might create short courses for specific soft skills (such as outlined above, say, for leadership) with validated badges to represent those skills. Then student can mix-n-match the training they need for their own learning goals.
Links of interest on the latter topic:
Credly: https://credly.com/
Open Badges: http://openbadges.org/
Recordings of the Talks:
Here is a link to the COTE Summit website in which all the media talks are posted:
Other Cool Topics Covered:
So many amazing topics and resources were discussed that I cannot cover them all here, but I have made a 'Storify' of my Twitter feed and re-Tweets from the SUNY COTE Summit hashtag, and I think this covers the most important ideas and resources of this conference: