Category: Emerging technologies

  • Enhancements to VIULearn: My Home, Course Home and Nav Bar (April 30)

    On April 30, VIULearn will undergo a  change in terms of look and feel as we upgrade to a new version called Daylight. We are also going to slide in a few enhancements to the My Home, Course Home and the Navigation Bar to take advantage of this update. Here is what is happening. My Home…

  • VIUTube moves to a New Location at UBC

    VIUTube moves to a New Location at UBC

    VIUTube, VIU’s streaming video platform for uploading and watching videos in a secure and private location is being upgraded (and moved to a new location). VIU is now part of a centralized shared service for post-secondary institutions in BC for streaming video. By being part of this new service means we save on our annual…

  • 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.…

  • Best Practices for Facilitating Online Learning: VIU Community of Practice Recap

    Best Practices for Facilitating Online Learning: VIU Community of Practice Recap

    We hosted our first fully online VIU community of practice discussing best practices for facilitating online learning last Friday over lunch. While the initial group was small the session went very well. We had established some structure to and prompts to guide the discussion however we ended up having a vocal group of faculty who…

  • What’s New in VIULearn? (Summer 2016)

    This summer, there have been changes to the names of some of the tools you use in VIULearn. For instance, “Dropbox” for submitting assignments has been creating some confusion with the internet storage service “Dropbox”. Additionally, there have been a variety of improvements to navigation for you and your learners. These changes rolled out on…

  • Teaching Excellence Video Series: Gail Krivel-Zacks on concept mapping and designing meaningful case studies

    Teaching Excellence Video Series: Gail Krivel-Zacks on concept mapping and designing meaningful case studies

    Gail Krivel-Zacks from Education talks about using concept mapping to help students organize information with complex relationships and to help students demonstrate learning over time. Gail discusses a process by which she had students create relevant case studies for other students to create a deeper and more meaningful learning experience.

  • Teaching Excellence Video Series: Jessie Key on creating video lab tutorials

    Teaching Excellence Video Series: Jessie Key on creating video lab tutorials

    Jessie Key from Chemistry discusses his use of video tutorials for lectures and labs.

  • BCcampus Open Textbook Project Presentation at VIU

    BCcampus Open Textbook Project Presentation at VIU

    On January 15th Clint Lalonde from BC Campus visited VIU to talk about the BCcampus Open Textbook Project.  Clint Lalonde manages the Open Education department at BCcampus and is an extremely experienced educational technologist in all aspects of teaching and learning. Clint was joined by Jessie Key, one of three BC Campus Faculty Fellows; post-secondary educators…

  • The growth of WordPress at VIU

    The growth of WordPress at VIU

    We launched WordPress.viu.ca as a blogging/website service for faculty at Vancouver Island University in early 2012. The site is set up as a WordPress multisite network, so we maintain one version of the software/code and faculty can login and create blogs which exist within the VIU WordPress network of sites. WordPress sites have been created…

  • Creating a Good How-To Video

    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…

  • How to Turn Your iPad into a Document Camera: Teaching Chemistry in a Room not Designed for Teaching Chemistry

    How to Turn Your iPad into a Document Camera: Teaching Chemistry in a Room not Designed for Teaching Chemistry

    by Jessie Key, Teaching Faculty Member, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU This semester I am teaching a fairly large section (for VIU) of 72 students in CHEM 232 (Organic Chemistry II). VIU, like many other colleges and small universities, has only a handful of lecture theatres which can actually accommodate this…

  • Simulation Snippets Part III

    Simulation Snippets Part III

    By Barbara Metcalf, Teaching Faculty Member, Bachelor of Nursing Program, Faculty of Health and Human Sciences, VIU For all blog posts on this topic see Simulation Snippets Part 1; Part 2; Part 4 and Part 5 This has been a red-letter week in the simulation suites. This week, I debuted the two most comprehensive simulations I have…