Presentations, Talks & Stuff

This session offered participants an opportunity to reflect on the digital learning spaces that they work in and how these spaces constrain and afford student and instructor behaviour. The session will introduce participants to the concept of Hostile Architecture and explore how this idea can be applied to digital spaces and tools. We will examine hostile and unpleasant digital designs, including Learning Management Systems, surveillance technologies and other digital tools, and reflect on how the design of these spaces and tools can impact the design of courses and the learning experience. We will conclude the workshop by collaboratively brainstorming ways of recognizing and subverting designs of control or recognizing when designs of control are desirable or beneficial.

This interactive session was a reflection on the complexity of diversity and representation in the design of educational materials using the example of the development of the Health Education Media Library, a project funded by the 2021 eCampus Virtual Learning Strategy. This project was a response to the challenges of finding high-quality, diverse and inclusive media while creating health education content. The proposed solution was a community-sourced library of images, video and audio that would be made widely available for health educators. As the project evolved, however, this simplistic approach revealed the complexity of diversity work in higher education, starting with the not simple task of defining diversity, how that definition can codify identity, and the implications of that definition including some groups and excluding others. This session provided an opportunity to reflect on some of the questions and considerations that were raised through the initial phase of the Health Education Media Library project, linking them to broader diversity discourse in higher education, curricular design, and media cataloguing. The session reflected on the importance of how we approach this work and who is included, concluding with a reimagining of the participatory design of the project.

This presentation provided e an opportunity to reflect on the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had in higher education by examining the positive outcomes of the rapid deployment to online programming on the development and delivery of the MD program at Western University. Although, like most university programs, the pandemic caused unprecedented disruption for our learners, faculty and staff, this disruption had some surprising benefits.

The MD program was in the midst of a curriculum renewal in March 2020 when all university courses were transitioned to online delivery. Some aspects of the renewed curriculum presented more challenges than anticipated and were not fully implemented when the program launched, in part due to a lack of community cohesion. However, the pandemic offered an opportunity to make deliberate changes to the delivery of content that allowed us to revitalize and reinforce the ongoing curriculum reform. This transition also laid the foundation for a stronger community of practice as the work of designing, developing and delivering content in a restricted time span required ongoing and purposeful collaboration between community members .

Throughout the session, there were opportunities for discussion on the lasting impacts of COVID-19 on curriculum in higher education.