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Appreciative Inquiry, Advocacy, and a bit of Green Day: Reflections of EDC 2014
I recently attended the annual Educational Developers Caucus conference in Calgary, co-hosted by the University of Calgary and Bow Valley College. For me, being back at the UofC was a nostalgic experience, even though I had to admit much has changed on campus over the last 20 years. I still managed to find some oxidizing…
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Teaching and Learning at VIU
by Darlene Goodrick, Supervisor – Printing & Duplicating, Vancouver Island University Recently I was fortunate enough to take part in the “FISH” customer service training. What is “FISH” you ask? Really? You don’t know what a fish is? OK I am kidding, that isn’t what this is about. Well sort of but not really. It…
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Shanghai Immersion
by Bryan Webber, Teaching Faculty Member, Faculty of Management, VIU I like to think that I’ve been reasonably engaged with the international presence here at VIU. I regularly teach classes with a significant international composition (for example, one of my classes this semester has approximately 33% international students –and that’s relatively low for our courses…
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Titles: Impossible and Important
By Carrie Johns, Secretary Registrar and Convocation, Registration Centre, VIU VIU’s Registration Centre produces a brochure every semester that outlines various deadlines and guidelines pertinent to students attending classes. This brochure goes through several drafts and revisions by members of the Registration Centre before it is sent to Marketing, Advertising and Design to be produced…
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Goal Setting and Planning (Part 1): Overcoming Obstacles
By Sharon Kelly, Teaching Faculty Member and Degree Advisor, Faculty of Management/Educational Counsellor, Student Affairs, VIU VIU is an open access institution. And each year, new students join programs with big dreams and high hopes. They have spent time exploring their options, thinking and preparing, applying, getting transcripts in or assessments complete and once admitted…
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Shut in, shut out and shut up: Maternal Caregivers of Pediatric Brain Tumor Survivors
By Susan Lymbery, Teaching Faculty Member, Faculty of Academic and Career Preparation and Faculty of Arts and Humanities, VIU Imagine your gifted six-year-old has just been diagnosed with an inoperable, malignant brain tumor and is expected to survive only weeks. When this happened in my family, I gave up everything to spend every moment with…
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The Power of the Negative Example
by Doris Carey, Faculty Member, Faculty of Academic and Career Preparation, VIU When introducing a new concept, instructors tend to provide a concise definition of the term and follow up with a few examples of the concept. For example, if I’m introducing a lesson on polynomials, I make a list of algebraic expressions with three,…
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Group Exams – A Testimonial
by Sandra Johnstone, Teaching Faculty, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU Finally jumping on the bandwagon I’ve been intrigued by the idea of group exams for a while, but hadn’t got around to testing out the idea in any of my classes. I think that students can learn a lot through discussions with their peers,…
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Educational Developers: Change Agent, Maven or Broker?
by Liesel Knaack, Director, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning, VIU Many times people ask me, “What do you do”? I often say, “I help faculty be successful in the classroom with their teaching and to assist with student learning.” After I describe my job a bit more, I soon realize I do much…
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Are Teachers Simply Muddling Along?
by Andrea Noble, Online Course Support Assistant, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL) “…teaching is frequently a gloriously messy pursuit in which shock, contradiction and risk are endemic.” (p. 1) In Stephen Brookfield’s book, The Skillful Teacher, he exposes the truth about teaching. After all, it’s not a predictable profession. Students, class sizes,…
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Creating a Good How-To Video
by Melissa Robertson, Learning Technologies Support Specialist, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning, VIU The past few weeks at work I have been working on making videos and it hasn’t been an easy road. I have learned many things about basic video production, as well as some things about myself. Through the past few…
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Redefining your Program: Keeping up with the ‘real world’ from a National Perspective?
by Olaf Ernst, Visiting Scholar, NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences (Visiting Department of Recreation and Tourism Management, VIU) Often our students in class and individual meetings refer to university on the one hand and ‘the real world’ on the other hand. A bit peculiar, it sounds like VIU is an entity in itself, completely…