The ACRL-OR Board is delighted to award Kim Read of Concordia University our first professional development scholarship! This new scholarship, announced last month, is designed to allow ACRL-OR members the chance to apply for awards of up to $250 to attend conferences, workshops, courses, seminars, or other learning opportunities.

Read, who is a distance education and reference librarian at Concordia, will use her award to register for The International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network in Santa Barbara, California in June 2016. She has submitted a proposal to present ideas from her research on eLearning in prisons. There are also multiple tracks of this conference that speak to her professional interests. A track on engaging learning experiences and another on self-regulated learning will specifically help her develop best practices of immersive pedagogy, which she use to design, develop, and deliver successful immersive learning experiences for college students at Concordia. The strategic goals of Concordia University include “a commitment to create and nurture a campus-wide culture of innovation,” which includes thinking imaginatively and leveraging technology to enhance academics  (including learning methods, modalities and delivery systems). Read’s main liaison area is the Master of Education program, and she states, “with thousands of students in the degree program I serve, developing immersive learning practices for a program of this size serves the university as a whole.”

Are you looking for support to attend a professional development event of your own? Applications for the ACRL-OR Professional Development Scholarship are reviewed three times a year. The next deadline is July 31, 2016.  

~ Kate Rubick, ACRL-OR Member at Large (2015-2017)
Instruction Services Librarian, Lewis & Clark College
rubick@lclark.edu