The Early Feedback Survey is now available in VIULearn. VIU faculty members are invited to use this tool to capture information—anonymously—on how students are responding to your course. The survey is already populated with a suite of questions tailored toward online learning. You can preview the questions in PDF form here. This type of mid-course…

This blogpost was originally published by Educause Review Transforming Higher Education by  Kathleen Bortolin on Tuesday, August 4, 2020. (Link to original article). The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown much of higher education into disarray, but amid this storm are opportunities to redesign teaching and learning in dynamic, student-centered, and empathy-rich ways, with a mind to the…

This Fall, to better support the busy lives of students and employees at VIU while maintaining safe social distance, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL) will be offering fully online orientations for VIULearn and other teaching and learning technologies that are supported by CIEL. Students and employees can self-register for these webinar…

To help support instructors, CIEL has decided to not perform the VIULearn Course Cleanup in 2020. The following semesters will be permanently removed from VIULearn in July 2021: Fall 2017, 2018; Year 2017, 2018; Continuous Intake 2017, 2018; Spring 2018, 2019; Intersession 2018, 2019; Summer (May and June) 2018, 2019

Read this post to learn more about updates to Zoom security for VIU including the move to Canadian data centers only, a new Report Users feature, and upcoming requirements for meeting passwords.

We’ve had a number of faculty ask us about how to help students be successful in online environments. The good news is that being a successful student in an online class is not that different than being a successful student in a face to face (F2F) class. The bad news is that the world has…

Last week we explored some of the technology options for improving your video and audio on videos and web calls. Today, we want to take a look at options for replicating the use of a document camera or whiteboard over Zoom.  Dr. Todd Barsby, Associate Dean of Science and Technology at VIU, has captured his…

We’ve had lots of conversations with faculty members about what their teaching in the Fall semester will look like, and course outlines have come up regularly. Students need access to the basic information about the courses in which they are enrolled. This is true in the best of times, and is even more important as…

As we continue to live in the world of Alternative Delivery, we are often asked “how much of my online course should be synchronous and how much should be asynchronous?”. There is no magic ratio that will work for every course and every instructor. The approach that we recommend is to think about what your…

Being seen and heard clearly online is extremely important in this time. Whether you are creating videos or just spending hours on video calls, many of us are finding our current equipment isn’t quite meeting our new needs. But how do you know what equipment you do need? To help answer this question, members of…