Category: General
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Entering the Open Education Textbook Debate: Information Wants to be Free
The recent BC Government announcement on funding the creation of open access textbooks for the 40 most popular courses in post-secondary education has caused a great deal of excitement, both on the side of those advocating that commercial access to resources is an unnecessary and cost-prohibitive barrier to education, and those who believe that the…
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Randomizing Questions in Your Desire2Learn Quiz
The quiz tool in Desire2Learn is pretty cool. I like that you can have the quiz graded and the grades exported to gradebook automatically. In addition to being able to see different types of reports on your students’ results, you can also set limits on time and number of attempts. My favorite aspect of this…
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British Columbia Desire2Learn Regional User Forum
On Friday, Liesel and I shared Vancouver Island University’s journey this year working with Desire2Learn at the British Columbia Desire2Learn Regional User Forum held at BCIT in Vancouver. The conference brought together about 60 participants from institutions in BC and as far as Alberta to hear what was on the horizon with Desire2Learn and share their experiences. In our presentation we reflected on our experience…
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Desire2Learn Version 10.1 Software Review
There’s a lot to like about Desire2Learn version 10.1 Here we have it. Six months in to learning Desire2learn version 10.0 and version 10.1 is released. With some pretty significant changes I might add. But I’m ready. Bring it on. Reading their press release and watching their Webcasts I quickly see there are lots of…
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Open Access and Scientific Publishing
Recently in honour of Open Access Week, PhD Comics posted a video (liked to and embedded below) explaining what open access means and why the scientific community should take notice. It very clearly lays out why open access is important to science, government, universities, and students. Enjoy, and see the post below this one for…
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How can I project the screen of my iPad in the classroom?
For the record: I am not advocating buying an iPad or any other product. These suggestions are based on support forums and have not been tested explicitly by myself or CIEL. There are a number of options for projecting the screen of your iPad, depending on the other hardware you have at your disposal…
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‘Why Open Education Matters’ video competition winner
Below find the winning entry for the ‘Why Open Education Matters’ video competition launched earlier this year by Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Foundation. The winning video was produced by the Blinktower creative agency based in Cape Town, South Africa. Great to see the winning video come out of South Africa! You can…
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Daphne Koller shares what Coursera is learning from online education
Coursera is a new education technology for-profit company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. The website provides freely accessible online courses in the fields of Computer Science, Healthcare, Humanities and Social Science, Mathematics and and commerce. Each course typically includes short video lectures and assignments to be submitted,…
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Fusion 2012 Reflections: Khan Academy Keynote
Last week a small delegation of staff form the Innovation and Excellence in Learning Centre attended the Desire2Learn (D2L) User Group Conference, called Fusion 2012, in San Diego, California. The conference is a great opportunity to network with other D2L administrators, users and instructors to discuss best practices for supporting, training and using the learning management system. Overall…
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The Evolution of the Web Visualization from Google
Check out the beautiful evolution of the web interactive visualization created by the Google Chrome team. You can view the evolution of browsers and web technologies as well as the growth of the internet in terms of users and traffic. The amount of change and development in the web space in the last two years is remarkable!…
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Welcome to the Educational Technology Blog at VIU!
Hi everyone! I’ve started this blog to share the progress of various technologies we will be rolling out for academics and students at Vancouver Island University. Lots of exciting things are happening in the Innovation and Excellence in Learning Centre which we look forward to sharing with you. In the next few months we will be…
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Welcome to the Vancouver Island University blogging network
Welcome to WordPress@VIU. Wordpress is being offered and supported by the Innovation and Excellence in Learning Centre at Vancouver Island University. WordPress blogs can be used by faculty to design and develop standalone websites, contribute to teaching and learning blogs or create websites where students can access course content. To create a WordPress site, click here. Note: You…