Debs Highlights from ALTc
There were so many brilliant sessions to choose from and inevitably there were some that I wanted attend but couldn’t go to but from those that I did go to, here are some of my key highlights along with some of my attempts at the ‘doodly sketchee’ things…
Sheila MacNeill and Jim Emery explained all about their project as part of the JISC effective Learning Analytics Programme and their quest to find insights into the patterns of use of technology for learning and teaching in relation to student engagement. They gave a fab outline of their endeavours and struggle with the complicated interweave of culture, processes, people and technology and the importance of having both sufficient time, resources and institutional investment in the project in order to make progress. The session was well attended and even had us joining the dots to find a paper unicorn !
One of the other sessions that I was so glad that I went to was David Hopkins session on Certified Membership of ALT.
CMALT is a portfolio-based professional accreditation scheme developed by ALT to enable people whose work involves learning technology to: ◊ have their experience and capabilities certified by peers ◊ demonstrate that they are taking a committed and serious approach to their professional development – Taken From CMALT Prospectus 2014
I have been thinking about starting compiling CMALT evidence for a while but I wasn’t quite sure where to start really so I found David’s session so helpful. David explained all about the CMALT guidelines and highlighted some useful pointers about looking at the CMALT Portfolio Open Register ( you need to be logged on to the ALT site to view) where some very kind people have shared their portfolios so you can have a look and see the sort of standard that you need to achieve … He also mentioned the key things to keep in mind were to ‘Describe’, ‘Evidence’ and ‘Reflect’ and that it would be a good idea to start thinking about possible forms of evidence sooner rather than later… I’m hoping to start compiling my evidence shortly but am still wondering what to use for my portfolio.
David gives some really good additional advice and a summary of his talk here on his blog ‘Dontwasteyourtime.co.uk‘ . My little doodly thing also tries to capture some of the excellent hints and tips that he gave us !
I’m Secretary of the Open Education Special Interest Group so it was an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to hold one of our face to face sessions at ALT this year. One of our lovely Chairs Teresa Mackinnon provided us all with cookies and cakes to keep us going. It was great to welcome some new members too this year and show case our new Community Space, Forum and Webinar series. Our next forthcoming webinar is on Open Principles in Education – Building Bridges, Empowering Communities – presented by Suchith Anand University of Nottingham
If you would like to find out more about what we do at #openedsig please check out the links above !
Some other Doodly Stuff that I did at the conference ….
I ran out of paper when I was frantically scribbling down all the points from Jane’s talk – I’m sure I missed loads but you can check out her full talk here.
Debs Open Learning Journey 
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