Category: Emerging technologies
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Building AI Literacy
Applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are part of our daily lives. From smart home devices to virtual assistants like Google and Siri, AI applications are ubiquitous. As AI-generated content becomes more common in many professions, students will need to be skilled in using it. How can we help students develop critical thinking skills, especially when…
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Practical Prompting for Teaching and Learning
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), specifically in large language models (LLMs), are adding a new way learners may access information. Unlike traditional search engines that link to websites, LLMs directly answer user questions using a vast amount of information (Stadler et al., 2024). An LLM uses machine learning to process large datasets, enabling it to…
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Recharging Assessment with Generative Artificial Intelligence
The 2022 surge in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), marked by the launch of ChatGPT, continues to bring critical considerations to how educators assess learning. This blog proposes alternative assessment methods and offers ways that educators can make the most of GenAI.
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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…