In this episode, John and Jason talk to Karen Watté, the Senior Director of Course Development and Training at Oregon State University’s Ecampus about their free tools for AI guidance in higher education and how to humanize online education. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: Oregon State University - eCampus AI Tools: https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/faculty/artificial-intelligence-tools/ )Michelle Miller’s Newsletter: Teaching from the Same Side https://michellemillerphd.substack.com/p/r3-117-september-15-2023-reflectionOSU eCampus Readiness Playbook https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/faculty/artificial-intelligence-tools/readiness-playbook/ Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! [00:00:01] Jason Johnston: I picture everyone in Oregon in Log cabins and so on. Is that correct? [00:00:04] Karen Watté: no, not at all. [00:00:06] Jason Johnston: What? [00:00:07] Karen Watté: I always say tell our candidates who are coming, I say, we have the best of both worlds. You're an hour from some beautiful ski areas, you're an hour from the coast. And boy, if you wanna see the desert, you just head on a little bit further. And we've got the high desert. So, we've got something of every, for everyone here. I've lived other places too and I come back, and I say, oh, this is, this has got it all. [00:00:31] Jason Johnston: I grew up in Canada, and sometimes we would talk to people about the igloos that we lived in and having to check our dog sleds at the border and those kinds of things. Sometimes they believed us, sometimes they didn't. [00:00:44] Karen Watté: Yeah. [00:00:45] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:48] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the online learning podcast. [00:00:53] John Nash: we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation that we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great and some of it is, but there's still a lot that really isn't. So, Jason, how are we going to get to the next stage? [00:01:08] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:01:13] John Nash: I love that idea. What do you want to talk about today? [00:01:16] Jason Johnston: I am really excited to be talking today with Karen Watté. She's the Senior Director of Course Development and Training at the Ecampus Oregon State University. Welcome, Karen. How are you? [00:01:28] Karen Watté: I'm good. Thank you. [00:01:29] Jason Johnston: We, connected at OLC, Online Learning Consortium conference as part of their leadership day that they do ahead of time, and it was very fortuitous, I think, because we had just come through this summer where everybody was scrambling around AI, trying to figure out what to do, and while we were, trying to come up with some ideas and so on all of a sudden Oregon State had a full-fledged website built out with resources and stuff like that. And we're like, this is amazing. Over here at University of Tennessee and it was really well done. So, we got chatting about that at OLC and then we got chatting about being on the podcast. So, thanks for joining us. Cause I'm really excited about talking with you today. [00:02:10] Karen Watté: Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here. [00:02:12] Jason Johnston: Tell us a little bit about what you do at Oregon State and your role there. [00:02:17] Karen Watté: Yeah, as you mentioned, I'm the Senior Director of Course Development and Training with eCampus, and at Oregon State, eCampus is a centralized distance education unit, so we're serving all of the colleges within OSU. We have about 13,000 fully online students that we serve, and that's about one third of all the students enrolled at Oregon State are fully distanced. [00:02:42] John Nash: Wow, a third of them. Do you know what history is of deciding to do a centralized distance learning unit? I know some campuses do that, some campuses don't, and I'm curious a little bit about that. [00:02:54] Karen Watté: We've been in online for quite a long time, 20 plus years, and we are, the Oregon State is the land grant institution in Oregon, and maybe 25 plus years ago, we were doing the television based learning, and sending it out to everyone in the state, and that unit, of course, was extremely small, and as online learning developed, it changed and morphed into what it is today. And it, so it's always been that central support unit and the way that the funding was established at OSU to support that unit encouraged it to remain a centralized space. [00:03:33] John Nash: I see...
