What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about peer reviews? Ponder for a moment and write down a few thoughts before you proceed. Did you think about peer reviews as a tool for students to assess the work of their peers, or a way to evaluate peer contributions towards…
Recently, I gave a virtual keynote at the 2021 OLC Accelerate Conference. The title of my talk was 20/21: A Pedagogical Journey. In it I reflected on the journey of higher education over the past 18 months, including the many lessons learned and some of the lessons that have gone begging. In this post I share two…
For many of us, the last 18 months have been a time of transition and turmoil as we have faced a global pandemic, a growing climate emergency, increased racial violence, and the impacts of historical and ongoing colonization (to name just a few of the issues that have arisen in 2020-21). As a university community…
The Teaching and Learning Commons offers a broad range of supports to our faculty and instructional staff, including workshops and learning opportunities, a suite of learning technologies, funding opportunities, and pedagogical consultations. Over the past 18 months we have experienced record-levels of engagement with our university community, as hundreds of instructors took advantage of our…
Many of us come to our work with complex and multifaceted values. For those of us engaged in work around open education, a common and shared value is the unwavering belief that education should be a public good. For many of us, this means that the learning taking place within our institutions should be as…
In this blog post, I want to share with you 5 tips from Karen Costa’s (2020) “99 Tips for creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos: A Guide for Online Teachers and Flipped Classes” that will help you create more effective and engaging videos in the post-COVID era. If there’s anything that 15 months of the…
Taanishi kiiyawow. As Rachel Chong greets me in Michif, the native tongue of her people, she smiles brightly. “I’m in no way an expert, but I’ve been trying to learn the traditional language of my ancestors recently. I’m still very new at this.” Crediting her newfound skill to St. Albert Further Education, where she recently…
While higher education is defined by debate and discussion, it would not be difficult to find a consensus that collaboration is an essential component of any learning. Tremendous support for this position came from the switch to emergency remote delivery, when it became clear that time-proven methodologies of class delivery were not transferable to the digital realm. What once seemed so easy…
According to this report, students are confiding in Faculty about mental health struggles, particularly in the last year around COVID, and questions continue to arise around how to help students who have. In my discussions with Faculty around both UDL and accommodation planning, mental health disabilities come up frequently. Absences, episodic symptoms that see students…
In this blog post, we would like to showcase a resource framework developed to assist KPU faculty in building their Moodle course sites using evidence-based instructional design principles. This comprehensive resource is housed in a WordPress site that includes three primary, tabbed sections. Why Use Templates in Moodle for Course Design Moodle is KPU’s adopted Learning Management System (LMS) and is used to deliver online, blended, and tech-enhanced face-to-face courses. As KPU pivoted to teaching online during the pandemic, Moodle was vital in supporting faculty to design lessons, activities, and assessments in synchronous and asynchronous formats. Although Moodle provided a lifeline for current users,…