Wednesday, January 31, 2018, 15h30-17h00
This session is for the leaders and members of the Special Interest Groups (SIG). As example for collaboration, the SIGs will present their activities and projects in this session to the wider community. Participants will rotate after each round (3 x 25 minutes).
Hosts: Hervé Platteaux, UNIFR; Felix Seyfarth, UNISG; chair: Katrin Wolf, PHLU
The SIG Video was created in November 2016. It assembles today about 20 members across Switzerland from all types of higher education institutions. During the SIG session, we want to present what has been achieved so far, a video guide (v1.0) for educators looking for orientation when faced with two main questions:
The guide is written in English and will be distributed under a CC license. Also, we want to present the next possible steps for the SIG Video:
Come to our session to discuss about all this and to participate as a new member of the SIG!
More information: SIG Video
Host: Ricarda T.D. Reimer, FHNW; Katrin Wolf PHLU
Open Educational Resources (OER) are an important topic in international discourse. In Switzerland there are some initiatives, e.g. the SIG OER which would like to boost the discussion about and the practice with OER. We observe that publishers and different companies are very interested in this topic. On the contrary educational institutions and politics hardly bother with this topic. Why is in Switzerland the discussion about free and openly licensed educational materials neglected by these two domains? We would like to discuss this question on a meta-level with the aim of knowing your specific requirements for supporting OER at your university. Following questions will build the framework for our discussion: What are the challenges and what kind of specific obstacles are present? What kind of knowledge and support do you need? What could be possible incentive systems in order to establish an open teaching and learning culture at your institution? What significance does the topic have on education policy level?
The outcomes of these discussions will provide a good basis to prepare an OER conference which will be held in Lucerne in 2019. The programme of this conference will be focused on the Swiss community but without neglecting the international discourse.
More information: SIG Open Educational Resources (OER)
Hosts: Ahidoba de Franchi Mandscheff, UNIGE; Lukas Sigrist, ETHZ; chair: Katrin Wolf, PHLU
Your work is linked to distance teaching and learning and you think that its quality should be considered as an important issue?
What do you do to ensure quality in your courses? What is done at your university at institutional level? What would you need to ensure quality of online provision is under control? How can we show it?
If you want to share or search for practice and expertise on this topic, come and join the SIG Quality Distance Learning!
As distance learning is quickly expanding through the world, all higher education institutions are concerned with ensuring the quality of their provisions in this format. In Switzerland, with the upcoming accreditation of higher education institutions under the new Higher Education Act (HEdA), it will be necessary to develop specific procedures to integrate online provisions in the internal quality assurance system of Swiss Higher Education Institutions, to prove that quality of distance learning is well established. Many reflections and concretisations have already been done in Switzerland, Europe and further, and sharing practices and experiences is seen as a way to boost and facilitate the work of each higher education institution in this field. The SIG Quality Distance Learning proposes in-depth discussions and developments at expert and practitioner's level. Distance learning is seen as a broad term including generally use of technology in teaching and learning.
The objectives of this SIG are to:
More information: SIG Quality Distance Learning
Hosts: Anne-Dominique Salamin, HES-SO; Patrick Jermann, EPFL; Stefano Tardini, USI; chair: Hanspeter Erni, PHLU
The aims of the SIG SwissMOOC are to support Swiss HEIs that want to implement MOOCs to achieve their goals more easily by sharing information, expertise and services.
In this session, the activities of the SIG will be presented, with a specific focus on the results that emerged from the latest SIG meeting about MOOC metrics: How do you measure your MOOCs for quality, costs, success, efficiency, etc.? What metrics do you use?
Hosts: Lisa Messenzehl, ZHAW; Omar Benkacem, UNIGE; chair: Andreas Reinhardt, ETHZ
The eduhub SIG e-Assessment, SIG-EA, aims to facilitate the implementation of e-assessment services at Swiss HEIs and help foster assessment innovation in the educational landscape by bringing together the corresponding educational and technological professionals in a community of practice. The SIG-EA focuses its activities on three core domains: (1) direct exchange at two annual workshops and at the annual SWITCH eduhub days, (2) the exercise of SWITCH's principal membership mandate in the SEB Consortium, and (3) bilateral consulting, collaboration and exchange between institutions and SIG-EA members. Since its reconstitution in 2013, the SIG-EA has organised nine workshops with 15 to 20 participants on average. The workshops start with brief reports from all participating institutions, followed by presentations and hands-on activities, usually with a special focus on EA at the hosting institution. Furthermore, SEB Consortium mandate activities are coordinated and discussed at the workshops. Moreover, bilateral exchange and support between SIG-EA members – in the form of e.g. technological cooperation, exam visits, or direct consultations – is frequent. Today, formative e-assessment is standard practice at most Swiss HEIs, and most development activities focus on summative e-assessment – i.e. online examinations – and assessment innovation. Recently, many SIG-EA members have been able to successfully proceed from initial pilot examinations to routinely conducting online examinations, while at the other end of the spectrum several HEIs are in the process of scaling-up their online examination services to thousands of examinations per semester.
More information: SIG e-Assessment
Host: Patrick Roth, UNIGE; Céline Restrepo Zea, UNIL; chair: Andreas Reinhardt, ETHZ
The SIG e-Portfolio was born during the 2010 eduhub days held at the shores of the Leman Lake. Since then, two national surveys have been conducted to get a panorama of the Higher Education institutions in terms of e-portfolio practices, and for collecting the community's needs. Based on these results, several actions have been taken such as the creation of guidelines, the organisation of events, etc. The actions undertaken and the challenges we expect to face in the future will be discussed during this SIG e-Portfolio session.
More information: SIG e-Portfolio
Host: Willi Bernhard, FFHS; chair: Nathalie Roth, SWITCH
The SIG Digital Collaboration is a relaunch of the SIG e-Collaboration which lasted from 2010 to 2016.
Since it was established in 2010, the group has carried out the following activities: collection, categorisation and visualisation of e-learning and e-collaboration scenarios, design of social media models for learning, development of a MOOC business model, meeting with e-collaboration experts at CERN and various communication activities (at INTE'13 and the SWITCH eduhub days).
The re-opened SIG is focusing on new needs and current/future trends for a "smart" collaboration. While e-collaboration relies more or less on electronic tools, digital collaboration should incorporate smart technologies that make the user's work easier, more intuitive or deeply immersive.
The SIG Digital Collaboration brings together actors who want to design and experience collaborative activities in the age of digital transformation through the use of existing or new digital technologies. The members of the group can test new tools, methods and technologies in collaboration scenarios in order to experience their effectiveness and identify problems and opportunities in current or future projects.
Host: Christian Glahn, HTW Chur; chair: Nathalie Roth, SWITCH
The mobile revolution has made mobile phones the lead technology for personal communication, information access and -management. While mobile phones are more widespread than personal computers, laptops and notebooks, the mobile revolution goes beyond portability of computing devices. Already we find ourselves in device ecologies with ubiquitous availability of information and communication services that are no longer limited to special devices. While the technology has spread quickly and disrupted many parts of society, mobile learning is still in its infancy. Mobile learning has to overcome many conceptual, practical and organisational challenges, before we can fully benefit from the widespread technology for supporting learning in different settings.
The SIG Mobile Learning connects actors who innovate education and learning through the use of mobile and ubiquitous technologies in formal and informal settings. Through this, the SIG Mobile Learning increases the visibility for novel educational concepts for mobile learning and for the relevance for organisational practice. Furthermore, the SIG activities will support the impact and the uptake of mobile learning projects on the Swiss education and training sector.