Takeaways from Camosun’s First Blended Learning Conversation Café

On November 4th, 2021, a group of 20 Camosun faculty and staff got together for a conversation about blended learning – what works well, what can be challenging, and what are some solutions and considerations. I wanted to share with you some of the key takeaways from these conversations.

First, however, here is Camosun’s Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL)’s current working definition of Blended Learning:

A form of hybrid learning which blends in-person and online instruction and where all students generally follow the same mix of online and in-person activities. In some cases, particularly when traditionally in-person courses are moved to a blended model, online activities may replace some in-person activities. This practice is variously referred to as blended, hybrid, or mixed mode, and has important consequences for scheduling and registration procedures.

The first question we posed for open discussion was: What are the best bits (tools and strategies) from your online teaching experience during the pivot that you want to or are carrying forward this year when teaching in-person or in a blended environment?

Leveraging existing and supported tools (for example, in Camosun’s case, D2L tools). These tools provide both transparency around how learners are being assessed, as well as organization and consistency for both learners and instructors.

Providing learners with multiple content modes (text, images, audio, video). Content like this can be reviewed as many times as learners need to. Videos or audio could contain interviews or discussions between subject matter experts, allowing learners to listen to two seasoned readers modelling critical analysis, discussion, exploration of material.

Providing learners with the opportunity to work on content before coming to an in-person class discussion, problem-solving activity based on the content, or question and answer session, in a flipped classroom model.

Designing activities so that they can be done at home in case students can’t come to class (which is definitely an issue these days when students and instructors cannot come to class if they are sick.)

Bringing in guest speakers, either live into the classroom via videoconferencing, or via videos embedded in a course site.

Having learners create content to share and discuss with their colleagues, for example creating a short video outlining an assignment, checking their understanding of the assignment and explaining their work, why they know what they know and what they’ve learned, or having student teams use discussion boards to share their work with other teams.

In smaller groups, we then discussed the following questions: How could a blended delivery model support your students? What do we need to consider? What might be the challenges of a blended learning model? Potential solutions?

Benefits

Blended learning can make education more accessible, encouraging Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and recognizing the diversity of learners and instructors including the diversity of preferred modes of learning/teaching. It can accommodate students who prefer to learn on their own but also students who don’t have the best access to technology and provide flexibility for instructors and students with busy lives.

Blended learning can add options for students who are perhaps reluctant to speak in an in-person class, who need more time to consider questions before volunteering answers, thus broadening course participation, creating more opportunities for interaction, and supporting more collaborative learning.

Blended learning aligns with student expectations and the skills and experience needed in the current (often blended/ always technology assisted) work environment.

Challenges

As an institution we need to create/use consistent definitions for terminology – online, synchronous, blended, asynchronous – as well as acknowledging the different perspectives of students, faculty, institutional services, and administration around these terms.

Because it can be labour intensive to develop a good online or blended course, we need to provide faculty with funding and/or release as well as dedicated support. There can be a steep learning curve for faculty and students both for teaching/learning online and for using the technology. And additionally, access to technology and support can be limited for some students meaning that some aspects of the online component of a blended course may not be available to them.

We need to consider decision-making processes when deciding to run a course in a blended format. Faculty need the ability to structure the classes to what is best for student learning while recognizing the complexities of scheduling logistics between online and on-campus can be tough.

We need to reflect on changing technologies and institutional attachment to specific platforms and software, while ensuring those platforms don’t define our pedagogy but rather support what we need for teaching and learning.

We need to manage learner expectations by ensuring they understand that online courses or course components are not necessarily self-paced, and that the flexibility afforded by blended learning options may require learners to learn additional time management skills.

What’s next?

The participants in our conversation café are looking forward to continuing the conversations next term, and in the meantime, we in CETL will be sharing the key takeaways with our CETL team and leadership at the college, along with some recommendations for future discussion.

Want to know more about how we in CETL are supporting Blended Learning at Camosun? Contact Emily Schudel (schudele@camosun.ca)

Final Grades in D2L

Well, it’s hard to believe, but here we are at the end of another term.  I know you are all probably exhausted from the past couple of years of uncertainty, but here’s hoping everyone gets a well-deserved break over the holidays.

In the meantime, if you are wondering how to release your final grades to students in D2L, and to export final grades from D2L into myCamosun, here are some links to tutorials that might help!  Remember, if you have questions or run into any trouble, contact eLearning Support – now through our new Team Dynamix Portal.

Camosun Open Sustainability Project: Project Story #5

Fifth in our ongoing series on Camosun’s Open Sustainability Project, as I finally catch up with the amazing faculty project stories I have collected so far (three more interviews to go!), is Pooja Gupta. Pooja teaches upgrading math, and for this project she has been working on adapting an existing open textbook, splitting it into three textbooks and creating ancillary materials to support instructors using them – specifically creating PowerPoints and open math problems for student self-study using an open system called MyOpenMath.

Pooja tells me that her Open journey “started with searching for a suitable open textbook that I could use with my upgrading math students, but there were none. In addition, I was using Pearson MyMathLab for teaching my online math sections, but we had concerns about student privacy where student data was being stored.  More traditional textbooks are expensive, and the editions change frequently which always made me anxious because I worried about how students who bought that $200 textbook would afford a brand-new edition. So, there were multiple reasons leading me to look for something more sustainable and less expensive for students.”

Reducing costs for students was the biggest incentive for Pooja to work with Open Educational Resources (OER) mainly because the courses she works with are tuition-free, and it seemed unreasonable to ask students to purchase expensive textbooks when they are expecting free courses.  She does note, however, that even with open textbooks “if a student prints them, that can still be expensive because these are huge books. I work in a department where we see a huge economic divide, from international students from wealthy families to students for whom buying a textbook means losing a week’s worth of meals.  Sometimes choosing a textbook for a course can be a bit emotional because there is such a huge divide, and one solution does not work for everyone. Even when using digital texts, I am constantly concerned about students. Will they be able to access it? How are we going to support them?  But sometimes you just have to do the best you can at a given time.”

Pooja has faced many challenges along the way in this project, but the biggest was the inability to find a reliable open online tool she could use to create a math test bank.  “There aren’t many options that are adaptive, and the only platform I had available initially in which to build questions was D2L which is not open. So that was my biggest challenge: finding an open platform that would work across the country, and in different countries, which would randomly generate questions.  There were paid subscription services everywhere, but nothing open source.”  Finally, she settled on the MyOpenMath platform.

As you can probably guess, Pooja is not one to give up and one of the biggest lessons she learned in moving into OER is persistence.  “This process of finding and getting MyMathLab to work with D2L has been going on for at least 5 years.  But if you keep asking questions and talking to people, then things happen. So, I kept prodding and poking and kept at it – being persistent really paid off.”

As for advice Pooja has for other faculty wanting to explore the world of Open Education, she says first, “make sure to vet the content of any open textbook you want to adapt because it might work for one group of students, but not another.”  But don’t limit yourself to one book.  “Find multiple open textbooks. Don’t be afraid to put them together and make it your own, add your own personality into it. In addition, be mindful of the copyright and creative commons licences.  If you don’t know how to attribute licenced content, connect with a librarian. And finally, don’t rush the process of finding the right open textbooks, because it is not going to happen overnight, and give yourself time to work with the materials before you pilot them with your students. Also, knowing that there is a lack of editors in the OER world, I have committed to improve my resources on an ongoing basis.”

Like other faculty involved with our Open Sustainability Project, Pooja plans to keep working with OER.  But she first wants to complete her current project working with her test bank in MyOpenMath before exploring more open options, like H5P, to support her in bringing math to life for her students.

Centre for Teaching & Learning November Bulletin

The first two months here have been a whirlwind adventure!  My [department team] have been very supportive… That said, and I’ll be honest, the first couple of weeks felt like I was being dropped in at the deep end… I had never taught before, and it had been… well, about 20 years since I spoke in front of a group larger than a few people.  WHoooo!  … And now guiding and teaching many impressionable minds… Good thing I’m passionate about and thoroughly know the subject matter that I’m teaching… I haven’t been this excited about going to work in a long, long time.” Quote from a new faculty member

Invitation to join the Teaching and Learning Council

The Camosun College T&L Council is a collaborative, peer-based, interdisciplinary group of faculty from across the college with a passion for advancing quality teaching and learning at Camosun, including advocacy, supports and strategies. We are seeking faculty with enrolled students willing to act as champions, and actively engage in the Council’s projects. Learn more here…

Deadline for expressions of interest: November 12

Camosun Showcase 2022: Professional, Scholarly and Creative Activity

Call for submissions to share your knowledge and expertise! Are you interested in sharing your stories of innovation, research, and creativity with the college community and beyond? Are you interested in highlighting the relevant and important work that you have done individually or collaboratively with colleagues, students, or community?  Are you interested in writing about how you realized the ‘opportunity in the crisis’ in the last year and a half in terms of your students’ learning or your instruction? Learn more here…

Deadline for expressions of interest: December 13

Past Showcase Issues

Camosun’s Open Education Project

Congratulation to all who have participated in helping to build capacity for open education at Camosun. We received a BCcampus Open Sustainability grant that helped support a group of faculty to develop/redevelop their courses using open education resources. It has been a collaborative project involving support from across the college.  Through this funding and matching funds from the college, this project has brought together 11 faculty members, as well as librarians, copyright experts, instructional designers (with expertise in Universal Design for Learning, OERs, educational technology, etc.), curriculum developers, indigenization specialists, and others in an extensive (and exceptional!) collaboration. Together, we are working towards creating a framework for best practices in bringing OER sustainably into every-day use at the college.

Take a few minutes and listen to faculty speak about their projects

  1. Sandra Carr: Open textbook for Joinery/Woodworking
  2. Michelle Clement: Revising an open textbook for Marketing
  3. Brian Coey: Open textbook for Sheet Metal/Welding
  4. Pooja Gupta: Open math homework and ancillary resources to support existing open textbooks
  5. Peggy Hunter: Revising/enhancing existing WordPress Biology lab site (interactive images, self-tests)
  6. Stephanie Ingraham: Open textbook for Physics
  7. Liz Morch: Five nutrition modules on WordPress
  8. Alex Purdy, Jana Suraci, Sarah Erdelyi: Open textbook on Allied Health patient management

More Camosun faculty stories

We now have a collection of 41 inspirational stories from faculty across the college. Enjoy reading them!

·       Story #40: Laura

·       Story #41: Michelle

For more information about either the Open Education or the Faculty Stories projects, contact Emily Schudel at schudele@camosun.ca.

Free learning opportunities and resources

NEW! Rubrics guide

NEW! Dismantling racism & oppression Anti-racism & social justice guide

Magna Publications free resources (Faculty Focus newsletter, Teaching Professor email updates)

Anti-racist writing pedagogy workshop November 10, 12:30-1:30pm. Join Zoom here

BC Campus free learning opportunities: