Month: February 2014
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Goal Setting and Planning (Part 1): Overcoming Obstacles
By Sharon Kelly, Teaching Faculty Member and Degree Advisor, Faculty of Management/Educational Counsellor, Student Affairs, VIU VIU is an open access institution. And each year, new students join programs with big dreams and high hopes. They have spent time exploring their options, thinking and preparing, applying, getting transcripts in or assessments complete and once admitted…
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Shut in, shut out and shut up: Maternal Caregivers of Pediatric Brain Tumor Survivors
By Susan Lymbery, Teaching Faculty Member, Faculty of Academic and Career Preparation and Faculty of Arts and Humanities, VIU Imagine your gifted six-year-old has just been diagnosed with an inoperable, malignant brain tumor and is expected to survive only weeks. When this happened in my family, I gave up everything to spend every moment with…
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The Power of the Negative Example
by Doris Carey, Faculty Member, Faculty of Academic and Career Preparation, VIU When introducing a new concept, instructors tend to provide a concise definition of the term and follow up with a few examples of the concept. For example, if I’m introducing a lesson on polynomials, I make a list of algebraic expressions with three,…
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Group Exams – A Testimonial
by Sandra Johnstone, Teaching Faculty, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU Finally jumping on the bandwagon I’ve been intrigued by the idea of group exams for a while, but hadn’t got around to testing out the idea in any of my classes. I think that students can learn a lot through discussions with their peers,…
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Educational Developers: Change Agent, Maven or Broker?
by Liesel Knaack, Director, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning, VIU Many times people ask me, “What do you do”? I often say, “I help faculty be successful in the classroom with their teaching and to assist with student learning.” After I describe my job a bit more, I soon realize I do much…
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Are Teachers Simply Muddling Along?
by Andrea Noble, Online Course Support Assistant, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL) “…teaching is frequently a gloriously messy pursuit in which shock, contradiction and risk are endemic.” (p. 1) In Stephen Brookfield’s book, The Skillful Teacher, he exposes the truth about teaching. After all, it’s not a predictable profession. Students, class sizes,…
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Creating a Good How-To Video
by Melissa Robertson, Learning Technologies Support Specialist, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning, VIU The past few weeks at work I have been working on making videos and it hasn’t been an easy road. I have learned many things about basic video production, as well as some things about myself. Through the past few…
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Redefining your Program: Keeping up with the ‘real world’ from a National Perspective?
by Olaf Ernst, Visiting Scholar, NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences (Visiting Department of Recreation and Tourism Management, VIU) Often our students in class and individual meetings refer to university on the one hand and ‘the real world’ on the other hand. A bit peculiar, it sounds like VIU is an entity in itself, completely…
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Teachable Moments
By Wendy Simms, Biology Department, Faculty of Science and Technology, Vancouver Island University I have a four year old son enrolled at a daycare that has a “Kinderprep” program 4 days a week. However, once the school year ends in June they take a break from Kinderprep and go back to play based activities. Last…
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Think Outside the Dodecahedron Part 1
by Anna Atkinson, Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Vancouver Island University I love the word dodecahedron, and boxes are a bit boring even when you’re thinking outside them. Besides, the term “think outside the box” suggests that to this point, only one model has been tried: the box. Teaching is about always…
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Teaching Circles: Using Skilled and Experienced Alumni
by Greg Klimes, Teaching Faculty, RMOT, Faculty of Science and Technology, Vancouver Island University One of the nicest rewards I’ve experienced here at VIU occurs each year when I invite several alumni from the RMOT program to assist in the mentoring and teaching of my current students. Here’s how it works and what it looks…
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My Life as a Rebel
By Deirdre Godwin, Program Assistant, Professional Development and Training, Faculties of Health and Human Services & Trades and Applied Technology, VIU In an earlier incarnation, or so it now seems, I was a student at an institution called Malaspina College. Many of my classes were held in decommissioned army huts, most of which on the…