Category: General
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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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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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Group Restricted Content
Are you interested in using the Groups tool in to create project discussion areas for students? Perhaps you have readings that only certain students should have access to, or what to release additional information for specific learners needing more support. The Groups tool in D2L will help you organize your course and personalize student learning.…
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Bill Gates on giving Instructors Real Feedback
In this TED Talk Microsoft founder Bill Gates proposes a method for getting teachers real feedback on their practice. A recent initiative from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the Measures Of Effective Teaching Project which aims to close the gap between institutional expectations for effective teaching and what is actually happening within classrooms. The initiative seeks to identify…
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D2L Email: Tracking Recipient Activity
Email: Tracking Recipient Activity To enable your D2L Email to track when recipients open your email messages, follow these steps: From inside your D2L Email, select Settings. Select the first checkbox for Track activity for messages sent to internal email addresses. Choose Save. Go to your Email Message List. Select your Sent Mail folder from…
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Desire2Learn Learning Sessions
This March our Centre began running Desire2Learn Learning Sessions, welcoming 31 instructors from various faculties to 25 different sessions throughout the month. The instructors averaged 2 sessions each! If you didn’t get a chance to attend any sessions, we are offering eleven different 50 minute sessions at many times and days in April, May…
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Learning, Innovation and Teaching Enhancement Grants Awarded
In January 2013 The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning along with the support of the Vice President Academic and Provost offered a limited number of grants to VIUFA and BCGEU instructors. The purpose of the grant was to allow instructors the opportunity to purchase a teaching or learning resource to support the teaching…