As we head into May 2023, Reclaim Hosting will celebrate the first anniversary of Reclaim EdTech. Over the last twelve months we ran five workshops and eight flex courses as part of this offering, with at least one event a month, contrasting with previous years where we ran at most two workshops or trainings a year. It has been a tour de force of building out entirely new events, fine-tuning existing ones, and exploring new and interactive ways to connect and learn online.
We have a lot to be proud of; the introduction of Discord as a homebase for informal conversations, events, and deeper discussions around the work we do has provided a space for connection across the broader Reclaim community, and it feels good and right! Curating these moments and spaces has been a top priority for Reclaim Hosting since its inception, and with the welcome updates to community.reclaimhosting.com, and we’re excited to be at this point some ten years later. It is a pleasure to be able to walk the walk of an edtech and build out compelling, communal learning environments to do this work.
We’re energized about what’s to come, and Reclaim EdTech is certainly not going anywhere. We’re kicking off year two as an opportunity to learn from at least one of the lessons from year one: all flex courses will be free and openly available to the community. From the beginning we struggled with keeping these courses behind a paywall, but at the same time we were starting a brand new division of Reclaim Hosting and were not entirely sure how we were going to pay for it. Capitalism! But throughout the year we realized these courses were being found well after the fact, and their value was much more inline with outreach and education about possibilities at Reclaim than a product in and of themselves.
This led us to shift our thinking around Reclaim Edtech more generally going into year two. As of June 2023 there will no longer be subscription costs associated with Discord or flex courses, but rather it will be part and parcel of our support offerings for institutional clients. We will continue to charge a one-time registration cost for multi-day workshops and trainings, but otherwise Reclaim EdTech will be yet another service we offer educational technologists who want exposure to new approaches, applications, and ideas in the sphere of learning technologies. What’s more, going forward we also want to ensure members of this community have the opportunity to participate and help run some of these offerings so it is not only Reclaim Hosting assuming the role of expert/practitioner.
We hope these changes will make our regular events that much more accessible, given we recognize that the value of Reclaim EdTech is in the process of building community and engaging existing and potential members more than a subscription-based service that might preclude portions of our community from fully engaging in what’s possible.
Thanks to everyone involved for participating in events and helping us think through the possibilities of Reclaim EdTech over this last year. For more information about what’s to come, make sure to check out the following: Event Calendar, Community Site, Discord Server