Thank you so much for allowing Sarah and I to attend OLC this month. It was both professionally rewarding and informational. Though many times I go to conferences hoping to come back with new gadgets or tools to implement, the value in this conference was definitely the collaboration with others. During my first break out session, I met Dr. Omar Lopez. He is from the University of Texas and is in the midst of building a competency based program at Texas State University. He was very interested in my student experience at Western Governors University, and is anxious to hear more as I continue on. We have been in contact since my return and I intend to keep the lines of communication open. There is likely much to be learned from him. Our dinner Wednesday night with the folks at EdMap was wonderful. We are anxious to meet with Andrew next week for a virtual demo. I talked with Jeremy as well as Maureen about piloting EdMap with a couple of our Gen Ed courses to be developed. We met Dr. Ron Hannaford and Dr. James Tedford from Biola University. God was so good to seat us across …show more content…
After attending a workshop on data analytics I am eager to explore how data that is already tracked in Canvas may help guide us in the next template update. The OER workshops were helpful as well; our initiabtive to lean in on OERs is definitely timely. There are many resources out there. I’ve compiled a list of resources that I’d like you to review. If you think there is value in it, I’d like to clean it up, dress it up, and provide it with our other course building documents I attended a fantastic workshop on accessibility presented by the University of South Florida. It was well organized, went straight to the heart of accessibility issues in online courses, and provided many tools and examples they use to maintain compliance. Designing courses for accessibility is going to happen at ONUGlobal. It’s not a choice, it needs to happen, and it