Category: Open educational resources
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Learning to Learn Online: An Open Educational Resource (OER) for Students and Instructors
For months now, members of the CIEL have been shouldering questions about how to help students be effective online learners. Now, thanks to some student authors and the power of Pressbooks, the world of higher education is privy to a timely resource that provides tips for students (and instructors!) as they continue to transition to…
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Open Education Resources and New Textbooks: Update from BCcampus
The latest from The BCcampus Open Education team, Lauri Aesoph, BSc, Manager, Open Education New textbooks Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science – Book 2 This new work (Book 2) joins Book 1, published in 2016. Knowing Home attempts to capture the creative vision of Indigenous scientific knowledge and technology that is derived from an…
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VIU Students Saved $483,000 in Textbook Costs Since 2015
Open Textbooks Remove Some Barriers for Students to Learn Over half of B.C. students do not buy the required textbooks for a course, and over a quarter of potential learners choose not to register for a class due to excessive textbook costs.* Since Fall 2015, 21 Vancouver Island University faculty members have been using open…
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Introducing VIU’s Open Education Working Group
Photo by James Sutton on Unsplash The VIU Open Education Working Group (VIU-OEWG) brings together key stakeholders from across the institution to provide advice and support for VIU’s open education initiatives, which include the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open educational resources while embracing innovative open pedagogies. Email maxwell.stevenson@viu.ca if you wish to join this meeting. Meetings happen…
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Student Digital Learning Experience: Requirements for Learner Success at Vancouver Island University
Digital technologies are an essential part of student learning. The student digital learning experience encompasses the required technology services, supports, infrastructure, access and learning tools for ensuring graduates of post-secondary institutions have the necessary digital skills, knowledge and abilities to thrive in the world. Students need a robust, reliable, flexible, and accessible digital learning experience for…
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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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OpenEd 2015 Conference
I have just returned from OpenEd 2015 in Vancouver, a conference focused on exploring developments in open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices. I attended this conference when it was last hosted in Vancouver in 2012 and was delighted to see it return to the area. The conference attracts many top researchers in this field…
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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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Going Text-less
By Sandra Johnstone, Teaching Faculty Member, Earth Sciences, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU A round of applause This semester – Spring 2014 – I experienced a first in my teaching career. While we were reviewing the course outline for my first year earth science class the students broke out into applause. Now, I flatter…
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Some thoughts on Textbooks, Open Textbooks and Reviewing for BCCampus
by Jessie Key, Teaching Faculty Member, Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU Textbooks are one of the primary resources of instruction for most courses at the university level. They can act as a framework or backbone to the topics addressed in the course by providing explanations, examples, and practice problems to students. An ideal…
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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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Guide on the Side: Flipping the Classroom
A teacher’s value is not in the information stored in their head, but rather their ability to pull together the best learning resources to produce a desired outcome. The modern teacher is (or should be) more an aggregator of resources than a producer of information, at least in the classroom. Why are thousands of teachers…