For the Educause Learning Initiative’s annual meeting, I’ve been preparing a workshop about various legal issues to keep in mind when designing assignments for a course. Specifically we’ll look at copyright, Creative Commons, and FERPA.

Most people look at me funny when I mention FERPA. Working at different institutions of higher education, it is always mandated that I know something about FERPA. Usually it’s just that student educational records are private, that they shouldn’t be shared, and that directory information can be shared unless a student opts out. Normally FERPA is seen as the concern of administrative offices that hold what have been traditionally seen as student records (grades, registration dates, etc).

A couple of weeks ago, I was a presenter at the CAEL 2009 International Conference. CAEL (The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning) is by definition broadly interested in assessing and serving adult learners in a variety of programs; nevertheless, I was struck by how few workshops offered anything geared toward online learning.

This isn’t a small matter. Each keynote speaker I heard addressed the importance of serving the underserved, of finding ways to identify, assess, and recruit adult populations who would benefit from increased access to adult and/or continuing education. There’s tremendous opportunity for institutional growth, they declared, and there’s a moral obligation and societal responsibility to do so. However, most presenters were thinking of these efforts as they pertain to on-ground, classroom-based models. Online learning–if mentioned at all–seemed to be regarded as an add-on option of dubious value to traditional academic delivery.

Last month, I attended a presentation by Penny Ralston-Berg at the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, titled: “What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective.” Her study, coauthored with Leda Nath (Raslton-Berg & Nath, 2009), asked students to describe their level of agreement with the current Quality Matters standards for online courses and the level to which elements within each standard contributed to their overall success. I was interested in getting this look at online courses from the student perspective to perhaps glean some useful implications for my own design. What I walked away with was a disturbing reinforcement of the competing global motives for my role as an instructional designer and online educator.

Today is the 14th Annual DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference focuses on ways that personalism plays out in various teaching practices at DePaul. Eric Iberri, Melissa Koenig, and Jeanne Kim (as “iddresources”) will be liveblogging Dr. Punya Mishra’s keynote, “Blurring the Boundaries, The Personal and the Professional in a Webbed World” and a few other sessions if time and technologies permit.

I recently returned from the NFAIS (National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services) Annual Conference interestingly entitled, Barbarians at the Gate? The focus of this conference was on the impact that “digital natives”—defined as those born after 1980—and emerging technologies have on the future of information services.  As one might imagine, based on the conference title, there is a perception that digital natives are very different than those of us outside this generation.  The word “barbarian”also implies that somehow their skills are not as refined as those of us born before 1980.  But is this really the case?

The annual SLATE conference was held on Thursday and Friday of last week (October 9 and 10). SLATE is the Blackboard users group for the Chicagoland area. This conference has been growing every year; this year I found participants from as far away as Kansas, Nebraska, and the St. Louis area. While a few vendors attend—primarily those providing Building Blocks for Blackboard—the conference provides a balance between technology and pedagogy (how to employ the technology to achieve learning objectives).

Here are three things I took away from this year’s SLATE conference:

Ironic that those of us in the trenches of online learning—instructional designers, flash developers, leading-edge online instructors and administrators—enjoy a face-to-face gathering periodically. Just this past week, some eighteen of us from DePaul found ourselves at the 24th annual Distance Learning Conference sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

For me, the three keynote addresses tied the conference together: Curtis Bonk (known as Curt once you’ve shared a drink with him) charged the group with his ever-present enthusiasm for all things online. Those of us from DePaul were delighted to find that Curt—who is the pure definition of a “connector” personality type—now includes in his presentation a reference to and photo of our own James Moore’s blog about the Pulse electronic writing tool. And here is James’ blog about that event.