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A global perspective on Indigenous teaching and learning: What can we learn from New Zealand
As part of our commitment to supporting professional development in incorporating Indigenous knowledge and perspectives into teaching and learning at VIU, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning, together with the Office of Aboriginal Education and Engagement, recently hosted Ron Bull, senior Indigenous scholar from Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand. Ron spent the day…
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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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Learning to Learn: Student Study Strategies for Success!
The start of the school year is always an exciting time for learning. It is also an excellent time to share learning strategies with students (and faculty) to assist them in being better learners. The past month I’ve visited many classrooms and done a number of program orientation sessions on metacognition and effective learning strategies.…
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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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What is the BSN Partnership for Student Learning Initiative?
The BSN Partnership consists of Bachelor of Science in Nursing faculty members and students who have formed a collaborative team (representing all four years of the program) focused on finding new ways to engage students in thinking critically about nursing issues. The Partnership is designed for faculty and students to work together to collaboratively design…
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What’s New in VIULearn this Month? (March-April 2016)
Every month, VIULearn is updated by our software provider D2L. Most of the time you won’t even notice the changes, because they are behind-the-scenes improvements. An example of a behind-the-scenes improvement was an improvement to the Import / Export / Copy Components tool that allowed bigger courses to be copied faster. Sometimes, there are improvements…
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Exciting Ways to Use the New “Not” Release Conditions
You may have seen my previous blog post where I talked briefly about the new “not” release conditions. If you were wondering what these conditions could be used for, I’m here to give you a few ideas to get you started. What Do You Mean by “Not” Release Conditions? Ever since VIU first adopted VIULearn…
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What’s New in VIULearn this Month? (February-March 2016)
Every month, VIULearn is updated by our software provider D2L. Most of the time you won’t even notice the changes, because they are behind-the-scenes improvements. An example of a behind-the-scenes improvement was an improvement to the Import / Export / Copy Components tool that allowed bigger courses to be copied faster. Sometimes, there are improvements…
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Using Classroom Response Systems to Gather Student Feedback
Recently we were approached by a department looking to gather feedback from students for a program review. As the feedback that they were looking to gather was in the form of multiple-choice responses, we decided to use student response systems in the classroom to gather the survey responses. The TurningPoint Clicker system is a basic…
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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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Self-Paced Fully-Online VIULearn Orientations for Learners
VIULearn is a learning management system. Some teaching faculty members use it to upload files for you (like your course syllabus or their PowerPoints), create Discussions or Quizzes, and have you upload assignments or view grades. Some teaching faculty members even run fully-online courses in VIULearn. This means that some of your course activities or…