Month: June 2013
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2013 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) Annual Conference Summary
Three staff from the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL) attended the STLHE (Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) 33rd annual teaching and learning conference in Sydney, Nova Scotia from June 20-22, 2013. Kathleen Bortolin – Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Specialist, Cayla Neil – Teaching and Learning Support Assistant and Liesel…
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Signature Pedagogies: Three Program Level Projects to Improve Learning
At Vancouver Island University, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning is working on three projects related to signature pedagogies, professional learning and knowledge networks. VIU is engaged in a teaching and learning institutional-wide project for enhancing teaching of our faculty and engaging them in current best practices around signature pedagogies and discipline-specific teaching…
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Course (Re)Design Institute: Redesigning with Blended Approach
During May 2013, nine Vancouver Island University teaching faculty took part in our first offering of a Course (Re)Design Institute. VIU had never offered such an institute and we went on the hunt for best practices and a model to offer it in a way to include more learning prior to F2F sessions and extend…
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Faculty Development Spring Institute: First Time a Success
Vancouver Island University (VIU) hosted the first annual Faculty Development Spring Institute (FDSI) this May 21-24, 2013. We had 29 participants from the island, mainland BC, Yukon and Ontario! We were aiming for 30 and we are quite pleased with the interest and the amazing group of people who came out. A collaborative effort between…
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D2L 10.2 Upgrade
The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning is very excited about the June 27, 2013 D2L upgrade to the latest version 10.2! Version 10.2 offers a more streamlined navigation for two of the system’s most used tools – Content and Discussions – as well as other improvements. Please be assured this is not a…
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Pros and Cons of Technology Embedded within Teaching and Learning Centres – and Not in IT
At a recent Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Conference (STLHE), I was part of a round table discussion about the pros and cons of including educational technology departments (serving learning management systems, blogging, video streaming, mobile devices, online course instructional design) within higher education teaching and learning centres. In Canadian colleges and…
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Deploying Kaltura at VIU – ETUG 2013 Presentation
I presented at the ETUG conference this year about our experience deploying Kaltura on campus over the past year. There was lots of interest from the community about Kaltura with the shared service being hosted by UBC coming early next year. I appreciated some really tough questions from the community about: ownership of content after…
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ETUG Spring Workshop 2013
This years’ spring Educational Technology User Group (ETUG) conference was held at Simon Fraser University with the theme “Tell it on the mountain: Teaching, Engaging, Learning and Leading ”. I came to the ETUG conference for the first time last year and was really happy to see the collegiality and knowledge sharing which happens within…
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Photo editing online – free!
Last month I facilitated a 1.5 hour workshop on photo editing. Although I use Adobe Photoshop CS6 for my own photo editing, I knew that not all VIU faculty/staff would have Adobe Photoshop available to them. So, after a bit of research and experimentation online, I recommend the following, totally free to use, online photo…
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Adopting Open Textbooks Workshop
On May 27th I attended a workshop organized by BC Campus titled Adopting Open Textbooks held at Camosun College in Victoria. BC Campus has been running a series of these workshops starting off at Thompson Rivers University, University of Northern British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Kwantlen Polytechnic and now Camosun College. The event was predominately attended by…
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Gamification – Article and Infographic
I came across a couple of interesting (and short) articles on gamification in education today. Although the language makes it seem like gamification is something only the K-12 sector is working on it is becoming a trend in post-secondary as well as job training. In fact, there are over five different seminars on gamification of…
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Guide on the Side: Flipping the Classroom
A teacher’s value is not in the information stored in their head, but rather their ability to pull together the best learning resources to produce a desired outcome. The modern teacher is (or should be) more an aggregator of resources than a producer of information, at least in the classroom. Why are thousands of teachers…