Preparing Educators for Online Global Collaborative Learning

Are you curious with how we might ‘flatten’ the learning landscape to provide student choice, accessibility, and equivalence through multiple global learning opportunities? If so, you are in luck. While humans reemerge in a post-COVID world to begin to learn again with other humans face-to-face as well as online and blended, educators continue to struggle with facilitating effective cross-institutional learning where students learn with their peers, not just about things. Online global collaboration encourages students to learn with others from different cultures; unfortunately, such powerful forms of global education are not typically embedded into formal curricula in higher education. In Episode #216 of Silver Lining for Learning (SLL), we will learn about innovative forms of online collaboration from Dr. Julie Lindsay who is Senior Education Technology Advisor at University of Southern Queensland. As Dr. Lindsay will discuss in this episode, we can do better. In fact, as she describes in an October 2024 article in the Times Higher Education, well-designed online global collaborative learning (OGCL) has been found to transform learning and enhance skills such as effective communication, intercultural awareness, and global perspectives. With that article as a backdrop, she will also explain how we can better prepare educators to collaborate globally. During this podcast, we will discuss the possible impact of AI on learning and teaching in higher education and why alternative approaches to learning and assessment are now vital.

More about our guest below the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h53Y4ARlf1E

Dr. Julie Lindsay is a highly accomplished and influential figure in the field of education, with over 35 years of experience spanning K-12 schools and higher education. She is a passionate advocate for the integration of educational technologies and innovative pedagogies to drive digital transformation for teaching and learning. Notably, Julie worked in international schools for fifteen years as an educational technology and online learning leader across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She has designed and implemented numerous online global projects for K-12 classrooms utilizing a collaborative "working with" approach to global learning. This rich experience has informed her scholarship, leading to the publication of two influential books: "Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds" and "The Global Educator: Leveraging Technology for Collaborative Learning and Teaching." Julie continues to deliver presentations, workshops, and consultations on global collaboration in education internationally through her consultancy “Learning Confluence.”

Julie completed a PhD in 2019 entitled, “Online global collaborative educators and pedagogical change.” This research offered innovative insights into educator beliefs, competencies, and conceptual change as enablers to adopting a Global Collaborator Mindset with attributes of connection, openness, autonomy, and innovation. These findings have helped to shape her current research, which centers on exploring practices and approaches to embedding online global collaborative learning in higher education with a view to establishing an open community of practice and a robust framework to guide effective learning design and implementation.

Currently Julie holds the position of Senior Education Technology Advisor in the Learning and Teaching Futures Portfolio at the University of Southern Queensland. In this role, she is a thought leader and change agent seeking to reimagine traditional approaches to education and foster innovation. Artificial Intelligence is firmly on her agenda and in 2023 she established the AI for Learning and Teaching Collective, an internal, open community of practice with links to external partners that meets to share practice and develop better approaches for AI integration in higher education. In 2020, Julie was the recipient of the Research in Educational Leadership and Management Award from the Australian Council for Educational Leaders. In 2023 she was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Excellence Award for University Educational Leadership "For fostering student reflective learning, employability and professional identity through a university-wide, sustained initiative leading to changed academic practice through integration of online portfolios."

She is actively involved in several initiatives that promote the effective integration of technology in education, including leading the global Technology and Innovation Network (TIN) in partnership with the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE), further demonstrating her dedication to fostering innovation in education on a global scale. In June 2024 Julie was the recipient of an Erasmus+ Staff Mobility nomination and spent time in Germany with partner university, Justus Liebig University, Giessen. Julie can be reached via email at: julie.lindsay@unisq.edu.au and via LinkedIn at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/julieannelindsay

• Julie Lindsay’s ORCID #: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6220-8785
• Curriculum embedded global collaborative learning research website: https://create.usq.edu.au/global/
  Learning Confluence: https://learningconfluence.com/
• Video #1: Online Global Collaborative Learning (7:08): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz78Cb-JR44
• Video #2: Exploring curriculum-based global collaboration in higher education (3:42): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBhuBAxF31U

Recent Publication:

• Beyond borders: how to make online global collaborative learning work, by Julie Lindsey, Times Higher Education, October 16, 2024
• As higher education strives to ‘reset’ in the age of AI to become more flexible, interdisciplinary, open, focused on real-world learning and with authentic assessment, curriculum-embedded online global collaborative learning (OGCL) is a key path to future-ready graduates
  https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/beyond-borders-how-make-online-global-collaborative-learning-work