(Em)Powering Up at TESS 2018

The theme of this year’s TESS conference is The Empowered Educator, which is based on a model first articulated by Associate Provost Dr. Simon Bates (UBC). For Bates, gone are the days of the tweed-suited lecturers who drone on at the head of the class. In his keynote at TESS, Bates will describe some of the ways that the educator role has expanded to include teaching for learning as collaborators, experimenters, curators of knowledge, technologists, and scholars.

Robin DeRosa, editor of Hybrid Pedagogy and professor at Plymouth State University, has championed open pedagogy as a means to empower students as well as educators. DeRosa’s keynote at TESS will highlight the opportunities and challenges of using open education in technology-rich learning environments.

Representatives from nearly every college and university in Ontario will be in attendance at TESS. Together, they will share and discover cutting edge tools and provocative ideas on topics such as:

• Virtual reality and simulations;
• Gamification and mobile learning;
• Open access texts and tools;
• Multimodal, data driven, and design thinking;
• Collaborative practices and community-building within and across institutions; and
• Research on the 2018 National Survey of Online and Distance Education.

And what better way to improve one’s abilities as educators than to consider the perspectives of their own learners? At TESS 2018, Ontario students will describe how they are innovating to improve their own education, and how educators who have empowered them have enriched their learning and their lives.

Anyone can be part of the TESS 2018 learning community this year through Virtually Connecting, where facilitators will connect participants via Google Hangouts. Sign up to learn more at this link: https://goo.gl/forms/yEwJqzjgB4Un12Na2.

View more on last year’s TESS conference at this link: https://goo.gl/h6xV7E.