What Did I Learn At SXSW EDU?

By: Kara Wasnewsky

2019 Conference Recap From SXSW

Over spring break I travelled to Austin, TX to attend the SXSW EDU conference. SXSW EDU is a conference & festival that “cultivates and empowers a community of engaged stakeholders to advance teaching and learning.” At the conference I met people from across the country (and in some cases the world) who are passionate about teaching and learning including others from higher education institutions, k-12 teachers and administrators, educational technology creators, and educational policy makers. Together we engaged in thoughtful discussions and hands on workshops around creating effective and inclusive learning experiences, preparing students for a digital future, and, of course, some healthy speculation on the future of learning. I wanted to share some of what I learned at the conference with the Regis community, so that you all can benefit from some of the ideas and knowledge from the conference.

Serving English Language Learners

I attended a couple of sessions on how to best serve English language learners (ELL) as this is a question that has come up with faculty and staff here at Regis. I was also fortunate enough to get 15 minutes to sit with an ELL mentor, Ana Llamo, who is an educational consultant with over 25 years of experience working with English language learners. Here are some of the suggestions Ana and the other presenters had:

1. Familiarize yourself with who is in your class. The first step to being able to create an inclusive environment is to know who is represented in your class.

2. Provide opportunities for students to rewatch or relisten. ELLs may not get everything the first time around, so providing another opportunity for them to experience something again is beneficial.

3. Build in opportunities for students to share notes with a buddy. ELLs have a challenging time keeping up with taking notes during class. Giving them an opportunity to check their notes against another student’s will help make sure they have what they need.

4. Provide visuals as much as possible. Visuals will help ELLs better understand the material.

The Center For Instructional Innovation will be publishing a full guide with these and more strategies to serve ELLs in the coming months.

Universal Design For Learning

I also attended a Universal Design For Learning workshop ran by CAST, the organization that founded the framework. The UDL framework is something that the Center For Instructional Innovation are big fans of and we introduce it in the Best Practices for Online and Hybrid Courses online course that we facilitate. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Universal Design for Learning is a framework that guides the development of flexible learning environments that can accommodate individual learner differences. The tips above on how to best serve english language learners are all practical strategies for implementing UDL.

It was wonderful to be able to hear from CAST and from practitioners that have effectively implemented this framework in their classrooms (and in one attendee’s case in her entire school district.) It got me thinking about if there are ways that The Center For Instructional Innovation could provide templates or other supports to make implementing UDL easier for faculty here at Regis.

The Center is working on planning a workshop where you will be able to hear from a couple UDL experts on how to effectively implement this framework in your courses.

The Future of Writing

Firstly, I want to let everyone know that almost every institution struggles with student’s writing skills. This has been a concern for faculty here at Regis, but know that it is not unique to us.

This was one of the first things the presenters at the “Future of Writing” session let us know. Then they stated “what we need to do is stop complaining that they can’t write and start to ask what are the actual problems with their writing and how can we solve them?” For example is the student struggling with correctness of writing? If that is the problem then maybe something like the website Grammerly can help. Are they having trouble with citations? Then maybe they need to be directed to the Purdue OWL site.

Taking this a step further into the future of writing, could AI diagnose what a student is struggling with and provide instruction, recommendations, or nudges to help them through it? This is what was proposed at this session and I thought it was a very interesting idea. What if as a student was writing a little note came up and said “this isn’t a very strong opening sentence. Here are some opening sentence suggestions…” This would likely improve the quality of the writing, but would we lose the need to actually know how to write well if the computer can point us to a better way to phrase or structure something? I am curious what you all think. Let me know in the comments.

That’s all I have for you from this year, but if anyone is interested in hearing more about any of these topics or about the conference in general do email me.

#ELL #SXSWEDU #UDL #Writing