Category: Creative Commons

  • Learning to Learn Online: An Open Educational Resource (OER) for Students and Instructors

    Learning to Learn Online: An Open Educational Resource (OER) for Students and Instructors

    For months now, members of the CIEL have been shouldering questions about how to help students be effective online learners. Now, thanks to some student authors and the power of Pressbooks, the world of higher education is privy to a timely resource that provides tips for students (and instructors!) as they continue to transition to…

  • Introducing VIU’s Open Education Working Group

    Introducing VIU’s Open Education Working Group

    Photo by James Sutton on Unsplash The VIU Open Education Working Group (VIU-OEWG) brings together key stakeholders from across the institution to provide advice and support for VIU’s open education initiatives, which include the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open educational resources while embracing innovative open pedagogies. Email maxwell.stevenson@viu.ca if you wish to join this meeting. Meetings happen…

  • Engaging students with Open Education at VIULearns 2016

    Engaging students with Open Education at VIULearns 2016

    Last week during the VIULearns event on the Nanaimo campus I had a chance to engage students directly with the idea of open education. I positioned our booth to draw students in around all aspects of open education; including open access, open data, open educational resources, open licenses, open educational practices, and open source software.…

  • OpenEd 2015 Conference

    OpenEd 2015 Conference

    I have just returned from OpenEd 2015 in Vancouver, a conference focused on exploring developments in open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices. I attended this conference when it was last hosted in Vancouver in 2012 and was delighted to see it return to the area. The conference attracts many top researchers in this field…

  • Going Text-less

    By Sandra Johnstone, Teaching Faculty Member, Earth Sciences, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU A round of applause This semester – Spring 2014 – I experienced a first in my teaching career. While we were reviewing the course outline for my first year earth science class the students broke out into applause. Now, I flatter…

  • Some thoughts on Textbooks, Open Textbooks and Reviewing for BCCampus

    by Jessie Key, Teaching Faculty Member, Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU Textbooks are one of the primary resources of instruction for most courses at the university level. They can act as a framework or backbone to the topics addressed in the course by providing explanations, examples, and practice problems to students. An ideal…

  • Adopting Open Textbooks Workshop

    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…

  • Finding openly licensed audio and music

    Finding openly licensed audio and music

      I was searching for a piece of audio today for a short video that I am putting together. While I can think of a number of popular pieces of music which would suit my need, I would be breaching copyright by simply using it directly in my video. Especially since I want to eventually…