Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Farhad Dastur, a psychologyinstructor at KPU. We had a fruitful and energizing conversation where wediscussed his love for nature, his extensive traveling (I have a feeling I haven’theard half of the destinations he has explored), his passion for teaching, hisnew position in T&L Commons as an…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
This past year, maintaining communication with students, and sustaining student engagement, proved challenging. Conferencing tools, previously reserved for the odd administrative meeting or symposium presentation, suddenly became a vital tool for many of KPU’s faculty and instructional staff. When the shift to remote teaching first occurred, KPU educators had two conferencing tools at their disposal, BigBlueButton, which was designated as the teaching and learning conferencing tool to be used with students, and the IT department supported Microsoft Teams software for department meetings. With…
“Take care” — it was probably one of the most used phrases of 2020. As we worked through a pandemic, environmental catastrophe, social and political unrest, and economic uncertainty many of us started to think more deeply about the role of care in our classrooms and institutions. Pedagogical care is not a new concept, of…
There was a time when I, like many of you, had not considered the personal information that was being collected when using technology tools. My role in the teaching and learning Commons at KPU forced me to reconsider my laissez-faire attitude about such practices. It had not crossed my mind that student data and faculty…
Today’s blog has kindly been provided by Teaching & Learning Commons educational consultant Dr. Gordon Cobb. It can be viewed here: https://dev.wordpress.kpu.ca/drcobb/creating-interactive-media-with-h5p/