2007 Retreat Session Descriptions

The Basics of Branding

What is a brand? Why is a brand important? How do you define your brand? How do you build a brand? The answers to such questions can position your organization for success and future growth. Don't miss an engaging opportunity to explore these branding principles in the context of continuing education.

Sarah Harwood: Vice President, Integrated Communications, Quarry Integrated Communications Inc. Sarah brings more than 15 years of marketing experience to the Quarry team, working with organizations in the private and public sector. As a senior brand strategist, Sarah has been active in insight gathering and instrumental in the translation of that insight into strategy and multi-faceted campaigns for clients across a variety of sectors and industries including Sprint, Sun Life, Ten Thousand Villages, and Conestoga College.

MTCU Initiatives: The Eastern & Southern Ontario Distance Education and Training Network and the Ontario Qualifications Framework

The Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities has committed to spending $7.4M to develop 15 Access Centres across Southern Ontario over the next 3 years. These Centres will provide opportunities for residents to access post-secondary education through the use of technology (high speed Internet access, video-conferencing) that they may not otherwise have been able to pursue.  The first five Centres have been opened in Bruce County, Prescott, Hastings County, Chatham , and Orléans.

Luc Comeau, the Executive Director, Eastern & Southern Access Centres and Barbara MacPherson from the MInistry of Training, Colleges and Universities will be on hand to tell you more about this initiative and respond to your questions.

Going Online (and Making Malcolm Knowles Proud!)

We are all familiar with the central tenets of adult education theory. Adult learners wish to be in control of their learning. They are looking for direct relevance to their lives and their work. They want to participate and share experiences. They like learning that is task-focused.

Why, then, do we tend to ignore all this when we create online learning environments for adults? Why is so much of online learning still not much more than online books? Part of the answer is that we are still very much in the early days of online learning. Technologies change faster than human beings. We are still trying to find our way in this relatively new teaching and learning environment.

The irony of this situation is that emerging online technologies and practices provide us with so many innovative and effective ways of making learning more self-directive, relevant, participative, task-focused and communal. Things like Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networking tools), online games and simulations, pod-casting and mobile learning, personal learning environments and portfolios, and online communities of practice, facilitate the creation of rich and engaging learning environments.

This presentation will provide examples of various creative strategies and tools that educators and trainers can use to more fully engage adult learners online.

Rick Nigol is Co-founder and Director of Education at eLearn Campus, a full-service company that helps organizations get better results from their eLearning. Rick is the former Manager of Distance Education in the Office of Open Learning at the University of Guelph and a Past-Past- Past-Past-Past President of OCULL.

Digital Copyright – Panel Discussion

The afternoon's copyright panel discussed a range of copyright issues relevant to distance and continuing education and generated considerable discussion about the headaches we all suffer when dealing with copyright matters.
comics and photos from newspapers, magazines and books?

Natalie Giesbrecht, Distance Education Production Manager at the University of Guelph, went through the fair dealing exception, making special note of the difference between fair dealing in Canada and fair use in the US. She discussed the problems with relying on fair dealing in an online environment, noting that although fair dealing is content neutral, the scope and nature of online distribution makes it difficult to ever rely on the fair dealing exception.

Mariam Ahmed, Copyright Administrator at Ryerson University's G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, spoke about copyright ownership issues, focusing on when it is necessary to obtain consent to use copyright materials and how to go about doing it. She expressed concern about the difficulty of ensuring that faculty are complying with copyright law and suggested ways to minimize the need to obtain consent, such as using links instead of reproducing material.

Chabriol Colebatch, Copyright Officer for the C4, a consortium of universities in southwestern Ontario, including McMaster, Guelph, Waterloo, Western Ontario, Laurier and Windsor, reviewed the main limitations of the Canadian Copyright Act as it relates to distance and continuing education, highlighting its failure to keep up with changes in technology and in particular, the internet. She discussed recent attempts at copyright reform and encouraged everyone to review the upcoming amendments to the Copyright Act, due to be announced before the end of the year. The amendments are expected to include provisions relating to distance education and educational use of the internet.