Category: Camosun College

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!

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