Category: Camosun College

Some Resources to Help Students Learning Online

Looking for resources for your students with tips for learning online? Wondering where to send students to find support at Camosun College? We have some resources for you!

First, check out a collection of links for students on our Tutorials site.

Here you will find links to the Student Learning Success Guides put together by Camosun’s Learning Skills which includes tips for remote learning, stress management, and time management. Also, a link to Online Learning at Camosun College, which contains information about what kind of technologies students should have, and how to access it.

In addition, if you are wondering how students can access Office 365, the link for this is on this page as well as the link to Student Technical Support. You will also find direct links to Student Affairs and the Centre for Accessible Learning at Camosun.

If there are other links you would like us to include on this page, email Emily Schudel.

Looking for resources specific to learning online?  Check out Kwantlen College’s open textbook Learning to Learn Online,  or eCampus Ontario’s identically named Learning to Learn Online which was co-written by students, for students!

And finally, more for you as online instructors, also from eCampus Ontario, a chapter from their open textbook Remote Teaching: A Practical Guide with Tools, Tips, and Techniques called Helping Students Become Effective Online Learners with some strategies you can try yourself.

Camosun Library offering Virtual Workshops and Tours

Need library help?  Well, look no further.  Our fabulous librarians are offering  free virtual workshops and tours of the Camosun library for Camosun students, faculty, and staff.

  • Monday, Sept. 14 (3:00-3:30pm) and Thursday, Sept. 17 (11:00-11:30am) are Virtual library tours for students
  • Monday, Sept. 21 (2:00-2:45pm) and Wednesday, Sept. 23 (11:00-11:45am) are The Power of Permalinks workshops for instructors.

Register now for the tours and workshops – seating is limited.

 

Kaltura Post-Upgrade Training Sessions

As you may or may not know, we (Camosun College, but really anyone who has their Kaltura hosted at UBC) are having a Kaltura upgrade this weekend (Kaltura will be unavailable from Saturday, August 22 at 4:00 am until Sunday, August 23 at midnight). Things should be up and running, and new improved on Monday (August 24th).

BCNet is offering some training on the upgrades for our faculty and staff who use Kaltura, so please register using the Registration links below.  The sessions will also be recorded in case you are unable to attend.  Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone else you think would be interested in attending.

A couple things to note:

  • Sessions will be executed in a Moodle environment given the popularity of this LMS amongst members.
  • Sessions will be hosted using Zoom webinar. As such we have a 500 attendee limit to each session.
  • Sessions will be recorded for anyone who cannot attend and for use as an additional training tool after the fact.

Kaltura Capture and Media Management

  • When: August 27, 2020 from 10:00 – 11:00am PT
  • Where: Online via Zoom
  • Description: This session will focus on the Kaltura Capture feature including everything from install, to access, to usage. Also included, will be a review of best practices on effective media management.
  • Registration

Kaltura Analytics and Student Engagement

  • When: September 1, 2020 from 10:00 – 11:00am PT
  • Where: Online via Zoom
  • Description: This session will provide an overview of the new KAVA analytics tool and how to interpret the analytics you receive. With a focus on student engagement, this session will also cover the use of video quizzing and captioning.
  • Registration

Let us know if you have any questions about Kaltura in general, or about the upgrade by emailing elearning@camosun.ca.

 

Camosun Faculty: Please share this message with your students! (time-sensitive)

Dear Camosun College Students,

** Do accessibility-related challenges impact your student life at college? **

Accessibility challenges for students at college can be the result of a mismatch between what you need to succeed as a student and how components of college experiences & environments have been designed.

For example, you may have experienced accessibility-related challenges associated with a physical or learning disability, or associated with speaking English as a second language, or associated with financial limitations, or associated with the use of technology at the college.

The 2019/2020 “Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Project: Phase 2” is a faculty/student-partners project at Camosun College. Our project team is interested in hearing your stories about accessibility-related challenges in college life, learning what would help to minimize those challenges, and creating learning tools out of your stories that will help our college community better understand how we can all help design experiences and environments that are more accessible for everyone.

** What does our college community need to know about accessibility-related challenges? What do you want us to know? **

We invite you to share your stories with us between February 24 to March 16, 2020 in small groups (Sharing Circles) or anonymously (Online Form).

Questions about this project may be directed to: Sue Doner, UDL Project team leader, in the Centre for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (doners@camosun.ca).

Information about this project and a schedule of opportunities for you to participate may also be found on the project website “Practical Applications of Universal Design for Learning”

Open Education Grants Expressions of Interest for Camosun Instructors

Recently, Camosun College was awarded a BCcampus Open Education Sustainability Grant from BCcampus. This grant has been allocated to provide teaching release and professional support to Camosun instructors interested in redesigning their courses over the next year through creating, adapting, and/or adopting Open Educational Resources (OER) or engaging in other forms of open educational practices with the aim of enhancing the learning experience for students.

This would be an ideal project for May/June 2020 Scheduled Development. Accepted applicants will begin their projects with an intensive workshop (3 full days face to face with days between for reflection and homework) from May 19 to May 25, 2020. Project participants will learn from each other and will be supported by the Camosun open project team based in CETL and the Library.

To be considered for this project, interested faculty must submit a 250 word proposal by January 20, 2020.

Definitions of Terms from BCcampus

Application Guidelines

  • Applicants must be CCFA or BCGEU faculty members (term or continuing) at Camosun College.
  • Created/adopted/adapted OER must become a required resource for a course or courses, replacing a commercial textbook or resource.
  • The creation/adoption/adaptation of the OER must reduce the cost to students (preferably to no-cost) and increase their use of a learning resource.

Proposal requirements

Submit your project proposal online by Jan. 20, 2020.

Proposal descriptions should be a maximum of 250 words, and include the following:

  • What kind of project you would like to pursue – rationale, objectives
  • How the project outcomes will reduce costs to students and enhance their learning experience
  • If your project intends to create new OER, provide a rationale for why you are creating new resources rather than modifying or adapting existing resources
  • Indicate when you plan on using your OER in your course(s). (Your OER should be ready to be integrated into your course(s) sometime between May 2020 and September 2021.)
  • Letters of support from your Chair and Dean

Examples of possible projects

  • Your project could be an Open Textbook, a multimedia resource, course modules, quiz questions/testbank, web resources, video, etc.
  • Your project could support you moving away from traditional textbooks to adapting/adopting an existing open textbook, or moving to no textbook using a variety of open resources, etc.
  • Your project could involve integrating open activities into your course activities, or creating non-disposable assignment options for students.

Evaluation Criteria

  • Potential impact on student experience in the form of high-quality materials, maximum access, open and innovative pedagogy, and cost savings to students.
  • Extent to which project includes curation and customization of OER that will be freely and openly shared throughout and beyond Camosun College.
  • Distribution of “grants” across a range of disciplines.

If you have questions, please contact Emily Schudel, schudele@camosun.ca.

Walls Optional at Camosun College- May 2nd

I wanted to let you know what is happening at Walls Optional this year (on Thursday, May 2nd to be exact).  For those of you who don’t know, Walls Optional is Camosun’s annual one-day conference celebrating the amazing work of the people at our college.  Every year we have a different theme, and with the launch of the new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy, this year’s Walls is all about Inclusion through Universal Design for Learning.

“Our goal is to explore how we can develop and support teaching & learning environments that are inclusive to an increasingly diverse student population:

“The homogenous class made up of students of similar abilities, backgrounds, ethnicities, interests, learning styles, languages and expectations is long gone – if it ever existed.” [from “You Need to Know About Universal Design for Learning”, 2014]

Inclusivity is at the heart of the proactive strategies found in the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines. The more we practice and discuss UDL strategies in our teaching & learning environments, the more flexible our course materials, activities and assessment methods will become, and the fewer barriers members of our diverse student population will encounter.

Walls Optional 2019 will open with a facilitated dialogue consisting of faculty and students who will speak to the theme of “inclusion through UDL”, and their experiences with this approach in their own classrooms. We will then break into peer-led workshops, of either 45 minutes or 5 minutes (“lightning rounds”) in length, and end with a closing plenary session.”

To find out more once our presentation schedule has been posted, and to register for this immersion experience into UDL, go to our website (http://camosun.ca/about/teaching-learning/events/walls-optional.html) – We look forward to seeing you there!

Faculty Copyright Guide from the Camosun Library

If you have never explored the faculty guides on the Camosun Library site, I encourage you to do so. You will find a treasure trove of information on open resources, library research classes, Lynda.com, etc. there. To find the Faculty Guides:

  • Go to http://camosun.ca/
  • Click Library at the top, right
  • Click Research Guides (next to the Home link under the main page image)
  • Click Faculty (at the top, right)

In this post, I am going to briefly introduce you to the Copyright Guide for Camosun College (http://camosun.ca.libguides.com/copyright), and focus more specifically on the section of the guide that references copyright and D2L.

Once you go to the Copyright Guide, you will see a number of tabs to choose from. To find out more about what copyright is and how it might affect you and your courses, click the Copyright Basics tab. I think one of the more important sections of this page is point 6 in the middle column, which gives you some ideas for informing your students about copyright. We have to remember that students don’t always know about copyright law, and need to realize that they can’t just pull things off the Internet to include in their papers or presentations without proper attribution. Of course, if you follow this same advice, you will be a good model for your students to emulate!

The Copyright Guide provides additional information on Fair Dealing, Open Resources, and how to handle Licensed Resources (the electronic resources provided by the library). Make sure to go through these sections to ensure you and your students know how you can use them, and how to cite them! The Coursepacks tab deals with how to put together hard-copy resources for your students (to sell in the Bookstore), and the Multimedia tab is more about showing video or playing audio in the classroom. As alternatives to paper coursepacks, and spending class time viewing videos, we often recommend using D2L as a place to provide such resources to your students – in D2L, they are always available for students to review (and prevents the possibility of students losing paper!) Which will bring us to the D2L tab.

The copyright questions faculty ask us in eLearning are most often, not surprisingly, related to what can be put up into D2L. An instructional designer can give you some advice around this (for example, we recommend never uploading a video to D2L – aside from copyright concerns, D2L is NOT a streaming media platform and the videos will not play well at all). But for more specific information about how you can use various resources in D2L, the D2L tab is the place to visit (http://camosun.ca.libguides.com/c.php?g=92245&p=597617). The information in the table is fairly straightforward (to find out more about Creative Commons (CC) licencing, go to https://creativecommons.org/), and as noted, if you have questions about specific types of hard-copy resources, you will need to talk to the Copyright Advisor (listed on the Home tab) to find out what options you have for including these in a D2L course site.

If you have questions or concerns or are just not sure where to begin (you don’t know what you don’t know), an instructional designer in eLearning can give you some advice regarding copyright issues and D2L, or point you in the right direction. As well, the main Camosun copyright contacts are listed on both the Home tab, and the Forms/Contact tab in the Copyright Guide – they will be happy to help you out.

Friday, June 12: Friday Fun Fact – Where is Camosun College, and how old is it anyway?

So, this has nothing directly to do with educational technologies or online learning, but Camosun College is the reason Distributed Education (and I, your intrepid blogger) is here, so I thought I would look into a bit of its history for this holiday Friday’s post.  And yes, it may seem a funny thing to post on a blog belonging to a unit at Camosun College, but I think most of the audience following this blog, mostly through Twitter, does NOT work here, so I think it’s fair.

Camosun College first opened in 1971, so it’s a fairly young institution.  To quote the camosun.ca website, “Located in picturesque Victoria, British Columbia, Camosun is situated on the traditional territories of the Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. The college adopted the name “Camosun,” a Lkwungen word meaning “where different waters meet and are transformed
” (http://camosun.ca/about)

We have two campuses – one close to the University of Victoria in an area of the city called Oak Bay, the Lansdowne campus, and the second up in Saanich called Interurban – and close to 20,000 students studying in over 160 programs.

We do a lot of cool things at Camosun College (in addition to online and blended learning).  I don’t pretend to know what they all are, so I won’t start listing them here at the risk of missing something. The one plug I will make, which I think is particularly cool, involves our Centre for Indigenous Education & Community Connections, Eyēʔ Sqȃ’lewen which you can read more about at the IECC website (http://camosun.ca/learn/school/indigenous-education-community-connections/index.html).  One of the initiatives driven by the College and the IECC is the indigenization of Camosun College curriculum (http://web.camosun.ca/cetl/curriculum-design/learning-about-indigenization).  There is even a free course offered to all staff and faculty at the college, TELTIN TTE WILNEW (Understanding Indigenous People), which does bring me back to Distributed Education, because this is a blended course which we support through our online learning management system, as well as instructional design guidance and recommendations.

So, that’s my short post for this holiday Friday, and now you (perhaps) know a bit more about Camosun College from which all these blog posts originate!

Find out more at: