First up, next conference is in Wellington (Te Papa) woo hoo!

Today (apart from the keynote, see below) I think the discussions and reflections between sessions were the most valuable, and I really can’t do justice to the myriad of amazing ideas and inspiration here.

Overall, engagement is a dynamic state influenced by interaction. For our distance learners, the question is how to create networks in geographical dislocations (that was an expression I picked up, it may or may not translate for us in NZ).

I’ve got some ideas for StudyUp (a mix of ideas for both on-campus and distance students).

• We need to engage more with lecturers.

• Get them to promote StudyUp directly
• Can run contact course StudyUp sessions.
• Promote the fact that we can run tailored StudyUp sessions for on-campus students, these don’t have to be during lecture times (if that is going to encroach on an already busy lecture schedule, can be any time and advertised to the students).
• Develop short YouTube videos (promotion of the series, and designed to reinforce key ideas from the sessions) – these videos could be used to promote StudyUp before and after lectures
• In terms of catering for our distance students and establishing an academic-based learning community, we could offer 1-to-1 Connect sessions for distance students.

We could also consider having a blog for distance students. The blog idea would work best if it focused on what students need to know when they need to know it – unfortunately our systems are not nearly as good as many of the universities here, so we wouldn’t be doing in this in a  particularly sophisticated way, but I’m sure we could manage it. Could look at the questions coming up in academic Q and A, for example.  And of course there is generic advice at certain times of the year (exams, for example).  Other universities also use blogs (etc) to remind students of important information, like the date for when they can withdraw without penalty.

As an addition to the blog, we could encourage vlogging. This is video blogging. We could encourage students to record short snippets of where they’re at, any advice they’ve got, any problems they’re experiencing, and post them on the blog (along with any appropriate commentary that directs students to information they need to know to help them through).