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New Course Homepages in VIULearn
The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning is currently reviewing Course Homepages in VIULearn. We have received feedback from various VIU stakeholders and are incorporating this feedback into a new course homepage design. We are hoping to update and refresh the course homepage look and feel for the Fall 2015 term. The course homepage…
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The Off-Campus Classroom: Community-engaged Pedagogy at VIU – Three Special Sessions!
The Centre for Innovation and Excellence and Learning would like to invite everyone to a new speaker series to explore innovations in community-engaged pedagogy at VIU. Intent on sharing some of the stories from faculty, staff and students already engaged in campus-community partnerships, VIU instructors, staff and students will present their stories of community-engaged teaching…
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Course Redesign Institute
Teaching Faculty Members: Do you have a course next term that could use a boost of new ideas or an enhancement to engage students more? Do you want to reconsider your assignments and ensure they are in alignment with intended learning outcomes? Might you have a course that is working okay for you and your students, but it could be…
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Mid-Year New Faculty Orientation
We invite all new VIU teaching faculty and newly appointed sessional instructors to join us on Friday, January 9 for VIU’s Mid-Year New Faculty Orientation. Breakfast and lunch are included. The purpose of the Orientation, sponsored by the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching, is to introduce you to teaching and learning resources for…
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Culture in the Classroom Session 3 Recap
Our third session of Culture in the Classroom focused on pedagogy and some practical tips and suggestions related to teaching and learning. We started the session by reviewing our homework— the resources listed in the previous blogpost. A number of interesting points were raised during this discussion including the following: It is important for higher…
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Culture in the Classroom: Session 2 Recap and Resources
Our second session of the learning series, Culture in the Classroom: Working with International Students, focused on intercultural competence models and cultural values frameworks. Mackenzie started us off with a mini-lecture outlining Darla Deardorff’s process model for intercultural competence, which looks like this (click on the image for a larger view): This model explains the…
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Culture in the classroom: Session 1 Recap and Resources
On September 18th, 15 participants from the VIU community attended the first session of Culture in the classroom: Working with international students, a collaborative learning series offered through the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning and International Education. After a brief introduction of our interdisciplinary group, Mackenzie Sillem facilitated a lively and fast-paced ice-breaker.…
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The growth of WordPress at VIU
We launched WordPress.viu.ca as a blogging/website service for faculty at Vancouver Island University in early 2012. The site is set up as a WordPress multisite network, so we maintain one version of the software/code and faculty can login and create blogs which exist within the VIU WordPress network of sites. WordPress sites have been created…
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Culture in the classroom: Working with international students
Are you interested in continuing to grow your knowledge and skills in working most effectively with international students? If so, we’re hoping to help. This semester, Kathleen Bortolin (Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning) and Mackenzie Sillem (International Education) are co-facilitating a four-part series entitled Culture in the classroom: Working with international students. Currently there…
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Innovative Learning Scapes 2014
by Kathleen Bortolin, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning, Vancouver Island University Reflections on the 2014 Higher Education Teaching and Learning (HETL) Conference, Anchorage, Alaska Flying into Anchorage, Alaska, hemmed in on either side by views of snow-capped mountains rising out of the ocean, I began wishing I had packed my hiking boots and…
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Global Accessibility Awareness Day – May 15th
May 15th was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As someone who spends a lot of time in online courses personally and professionally, I decided to take advantage of a free webinar entitled “Web Accessibility Tools in Action: Awesome Tools to Build The Web For All” offered by Desire2Learn. Sean Yo (@seanyo or seanyo.ca for more information on…
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Horses and Motorcycles
by Darlene Goodrick, Supervisor – Printing & Duplicating, Vancouver Island University How does this topic apply to learning and teaching at VIU? Maybe it doesn’t but being mother to twins involved much learning and teaching and helped make me the person I am today now working at VIU. One of the twins loves horses and…