I attended the World Conference for Online Learning 2017 in Toronto this past October. This conference is organized by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) and runs biennially in an international location. Since the conference landed in Canada this year it was not one to be missed. This event brings together a cross-section of people supporting and researching online, open, and distance education as well as those interested in education technologies and emergent models of innovative education.

I traveled as part of the ICDE’s Global Doctoral Forum, which enabled me to convene with graduate students from all over the world, share our research, and forge connections. We spent two days in the doctoral track sharing our research projects and hearing from mentors about open research, scholarly publishing, and getting to know more about ICDE and their work around the globe. The Global Open Education Graduate Network (GO-GN) team also facilitated one of the forum days and engaged us with thinking about how to conduct research in the open. It is always amazing to have an opportunity to interact with fellow doctoral students from around the world. In addition to a variety of research contexts, this group also had diverse research interests, so it was really interesting to hear about all the different lenses these emerging scholars are using to approach education technology research.

The ICDE Global Doctoral Forum at World Conference for Online Learning 2017

At the conference I also had a chance to present the results of the research I conducted with George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons as part of my Digital Learning and Social Media Research mentorship. The presentation went well and we had some interesting questions emerge around our findings. The full paper is due to be published in IRRODL early 2018. The slides from the session are available below:

Many experts, gurus, and top researchers were at this conference, so it was an amazing professional development opportunity. I was delighted to catch up with and make new friends with education technology researchers from around the world. ICDE 2019 will be in Dublin, Ireland so I am already saving my pennies to attend the next big event.

World Conference for Online Learning 2017

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