ATHABASCA — How has Athabasca University (AU) shaped and been shaped by technology?
That is the topic being presented Thursday evening at 7 p.m. by professor emeritus Dr. Robert Holmberg and independent researcher Dr. Nancy Parker in a virtual presentation put on by Science Outreach – Athabasca.
“I was at Athabasca University from 2001 to 2018,” Parker said in a Mar. 17 interview. “When I first came there, we were just starting to expand online learning so, we were experimenting with different types of affordances. We were trying to upgrade systems and we were doing a lot of different things.”
AU no longer sends out packages from their print room with big printing presses churning out all the material needed per course but being long distance, the other challenge is having the students get to know each other, an important part of any post-secondary experience.
“Part of the challenge is that courses start every month, and students can be at any point in the course,” she said. “How do you get the group together to interact with each other? So, student-to-student interaction is one of the puzzles that we needed to solve.”
The complexity of just that one part of the technology can be hard to grasp, she said. Then there is the advantage AU had during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Some of the advantages that Athabasca University has is that it did have a design orientation, it did have an expectation to say, what is it we expect students to learn and then say, how do we best enable that and doing it in a very systematic way," said Parker.
Between the two of them, Holmberg and Parker will cover technology at AU from the 1970s onward.
The link for the presentation is at scienceoutreach.ab.ca/events/upcoming/.
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