Associate Professor Ole Lauridsen
Aarhus University

Associate Professor at Center for Teaching and Learning, Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. Coordinator of the English teaching programme for assistant professors and postdocs and for the teaching programme for PhD-students. Responsible for supervising teaching at the faculty and giving advice to many individual teachers on designing programmes and classes. Member of the Horizon Report Expert Board for the last 4 years.

Member of Horizon report 2016 Higher Education Expert Panel

In my keynote, I will take up the concept of blended learning, first, as the future way of designing teaching (in accordance with my work on the Horizon Report Expert Panel), second, as a way of teaching that in many respects can be directly aligned with the way the brain learns. For the last 8 years, the brain and learning has been the cornerstone of my research, and 2016 I published a practice oriented book on this topic ('Hjernen og læring', Akademisk Forlag). Based on the model I developed, the so called APL-model, I will show why blended learning corresponds to the way the adult brain learns, and I will give ideas and inspiration how to design teaching programmes in correspondence with our knowledge on the brain's learning processes. My point of departure is, as stated, the adult brain – the normal brain that is; thus, dysfunctions or traumata, will not be taken into consideration. Furthermore, my keynote is a generalist's keynote: It is learning in general and not learning within specific fields I will focus on.

My hope is that the participants will get ideas for their own practice and realize that considering the brain processes does not mean a total revolution – or a heavier workload – but that a certain way of thinking when planning and designing teaching can make a huge difference for the learning outcome.

Keynote Blended learning - Brainy Learning.pdf

Overview of the 26 categories of the APL-model.pdf

Mr Julian Stodd
Sea Salt Learning

Following research into psychology, neurophysiology and communication theory around learning, i moved into building and, ultimately selling, a global eLearning business.

Since 2010, i have split my time between research and writing about learning, through my books and blog, alongside consultancy and delivering projects out in the real world with my crew at SeaSalt Learning.

Much of my consultancy work is around core elements of the Social Age: the need for Social Leadership, the design of Scaffolded Social Learning, planning for Organisational Change and the impacts of Social Collaborative Technology.

Working with global organisations on both strategy and execution, I help them find their way through this new world. I help them develop an architecture for learning and change.

More recently, Julian has written about Black Swans and resilience, and the Future of Military Learning.

My writing is at www.julianstodd.wordpress.com

Re-designing learning spaces

Learning in the Social Age: the Socially Dynamic Organization

We are in the Social Age: a time of constant change, where many of the rules we thought were set in stone are evolving. The ways we work, the ways we learn, the types of power at play, the role of technology, all this has changed. There is a great deal of uncertainty and our strength will lie not simply in formal, codified types of learning and formal, hierarchical types of power, but rather in a new type of learning, and new types of strength.

The Socially Dynamic Organisation finds strength within it's communities: it is able to benefit not only from formal learning, but also the tacit, tribal knowledge of the learned wisdom of the community.

Formal learning can give us a foundation of knowledge and application, but a Socially Dynamic organisation draws upon more than this: it is agile in it's DNA.

In this keynote, we will:

• Explore the foundations of the Social Age
• Consider the impacts for military learning
• Understand the new types of power at play
• Consider how the Socially Dynamic Organisation benefits from both social and formal models of power
• Look at how we can practically build this capability into our own organisational learning.

You can read more about the Social Age here.

About Social Learning here.

And the Socially Dynamic Organisation.

Director Sae Schatz
ADL Initiative

Sae Schatz, Ph.D., serves as the Director of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a research and development program under the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Education and Training.
Before joining the ADL Initiative, Sae worked as the Chief Scientist for a small defense contractor as well as a professional development consultant, and prior to that, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida's Institute for Simulation and Training. In the last few years, Sae led the authorship and execution of the U.S. Marine Corps' Making Good Instructor Great project and accompanying instructor tool kit. She also acted as chief scientist for the award-winning Border Hunter research effort (sponsored by Joint Forces Command) and, later, for the Joint Staff's blended learning-training initiative.

Sae's interests include learning science and human–systems integration, with an emphasis on human cognition, instructional technologies, adaptive systems, human performance assessment, and modeling and simulation. Much of her technical work has sought to enhance individuals' higher-order cognitive skills (i.e., the mental, emotional, and relational skills associated with "cognitive readiness").

Re-designing learning spaces

What Comes Next?
Re-Conceptualizing Learning for the Future

Globalization, social media, ever-increasing computing power, and the proliferation of low-cost advanced technologies have created a level of worldwide complexity and rapid change never before seen. To remain competitive in this environment, today's workers, military members, and civil servants require an expanded set of competencies, higher levels of nuanced skills such as critical thinking and emotional intelligence, and more efficient and agile pathways to expertise. Achieving these outcomes depends, at least in part, on enhancing our learning ecosystem.

In the past, the forefront of learning technologies allowed us to learn "anytime, anywhere." Now, with the advent of new capabilities and motivated by our changing global context, tomorrow's learning will necessarily happen "everytime" and "everywhere." More precisely, learning in the future could be supported by a pervasive, learner-centric lifelong learning ecosystem, created via interconnected technologies, linked with operational and human capital management systems, driven by robust data analyses, and built upon the foundations learning science.

The technology needed to realize this futuristic vision is already in development. For example, the ADL Initiative, in collaboration with interagency and industry partners, is developing the Total Learning Architecture (TLA), a set of internet and software specifications designed to create "plug-and-play" learning across any TLA-enabled technology. However, developing the technology represents only the first step.

Emerging capabilities, such as the TLA, have the potential to unlock powerful new paradigms of learning, but they raise numerous questions. How will instructional design look in the future? Do today's pedagogical (andragogical) principles still apply to an artificial intelligence–driven learning ecosystem, or will new best practices emerge? What roles do learning facilitators, teachers, trainers, educators, and curriculum developers play within this reimagined system? And, perhaps most importantly, what can we do, individually and organizationally, to prepare for the future so that we can make smart, effective use of these new learning capabilities as they emerge?