-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Educause Learning Initiative Online Spring Focus Session on Faculty Engagement and Development: Effective & Innovative Practice
Last week I attended the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) Online Spring Focus Session on Faculty Engagement and Development: Effective & Innovative Practice. The session ran over three days from 9am-1pm online in Adobe Connect, an asynchronous collaborative meeting room very similar to Blackboard Collaborate used on our campus. I am estimating that roughly 50-75 participants…
-
Teaching Excellence Project Reflections: Guest post from Ruth Rodgers
Since September 2013, it has been my privilege to participate with the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL) team in the initial stages of a project investigating the characteristics of excellence in teaching practice valued by VIU faculty and students. The goals of this project were multi-layered: the team hoped to engage the…
-
Facilitating Inquiry-based Learning: Reflections of a Rookie
by Sandra Johnstone, Teaching Faculty, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU My inspiration This semester is the first time that I have designed and facilitated a course that centres on a semester-long collaborative research project. The course was a third-year earth science course in Geochemistry, with ten students enrolled. The project was based on 162…
-
Learning and Nanaimo Bars
by Greg Klimes, Teaching Faculty, RMOT, Faculty of Science and Technology, Vancouver Island University In my program I delve into the basic principles of law enforcement, as it relates to the protection of our natural resources. In any successful program to be successful, there are always two 2 parts involved. Education and consequences. Education would…
-
VIU looked at with Dutch glasses
by Olaf Ernst, Visiting Scholar, NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences (Visiting Department of Recreation and Tourism Management, VIU) As you probably remember I am not a regular VIU faculty member, but a long-resident visiting scholar from a country on the other side of the globe. Now, after having been here for almost three months…
-
What Successful Teachers Do
by Doris Carey, Faculty Member, Faculty of Academic and Career Preparation, VIU I recently read an article with an intriguing title: The Differences Between Successful And Unsuccessful People (Jacqueline Smith, Business Insider, March 19, 2014). I immediately thought of what I might include in a list of the differences between successful and unsuccessful students, thinking…
-
W is for Wrinkly Brain
By Carrie Johns, Secretary Registrar and Convocation, Registration Centre, VIU My son is two years old, four months, and 26 days old, and he is a genius. No, really. He read his first story book to me and my husband this weekend. Okay – it was Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon and he took some…
-
I am a bad teacher . . . (?)
by Anna Atkinson, Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Vancouver Island University At this time of year—actually, at this time of term, no matter which term it is—the question of whether I’m actually a terrible teacher looms large. I’m tired, my students are tired, the workload has intensified, and for some perverse reason…
-
WHAT?? Four Crazy Student Incidents From My Teaching Days —
by Melissa Robertson, Learning Technologies Support Specialist, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning, VIU I was taking a walk down memory, thinking about my teaching days, when I realized there were many situations I was prepared for and a few I was entirely not prepared for. Here are the four craziest incidents I had…