CETL Blog

Zero Textbook Cost Courses at Camosun Story #1: Social Sciences

Last November I sent in a new set of Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) numbers for Camosun’s Strategic Plan metrics, Goal 2: “Deliver outstanding flexible learning opportunities to support students’ evolving educational needs.” Everyone is doing amazing work, and the number of reported ZTC courses at the college went from approximately 150 courses in 2023 to 436 in 2024.

The purpose of this next series of Open Education at Camosun stories is to showcase some of the courses and course sections at Camosun that are providing cost-free course resources for students. I will be talking to the various course instructors and their chairs over the next while to ensure that the information I provide here is accurate and supportive, so the stories will likely be spread out over the next several months. So, in anticipation of more, here is what I can tell you now about how many courses in our various Schools are Zero Textbook Cost.

Access: 92
Arts and Science: 161
Health and Human Services: 17
School of Business: 36
Centre for Sport Exercise Education: 49
Trades and Tech: 81

ZTC Story #1: Social Sciences

For this first story of Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) courses (by department or program) at Camosun College, I thought I would celebrate Social Sciences. This department runs classes in at least five different disciplines and offers several courses that are zero textbook cost, some of which are also using Open Textbooks.

NOTES: “All required readings provided through D2L” means that the course D2L site includes links to external resources on the Internet, links to library electronic resources, course notes, and Open Educational Resources (OER) linked to or pulled into the course site. I also want to thank the Social Sciences Chair, Katie Waterhouse, and all faculty in her department for taking the time to send me this information.

Now, here is a list of Social Science ZTC courses from Fall 2024:

ANTH104: Introduction to Anthropology – all required readings provided through D2L

ANTH204: The Anthropology of Food – all required readings provided through D2L

ANTH260: Human Evolution and Diversity – all required lab readings provided through D2L, also using an Open Textbook: Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology (https://explorations.americananthro.org/)

ANTH280: The Anthropology of Death – all required readings provided through D2L

GEOG100: Environment and Sustainability – all required readings provided through D2L

GEOG105: Geography of B.C. – all required readings provided through D2L

GEOG111: Natural Hazards – all required readings provided through D2L

GSWS110: Women, Knowledge, Sex, & Power– all required readings provided through D2L, also using an Open Textbook: Introduction to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies (http://openbooks.library.umass.edu/introwgss/)

GSWS204: Gender and Globalization – all required readings provided through D2L

SOC112: Racialization and Ethnicity – all required readings provided through D2L

SOC162 – all required readings provided through D2L

In addition, there are some courses in Anthropology that are Low Textbook Cost, including:

Anth 110: Gender Across Cultures – uses one book costing less than $30, also using an Open Textbook: Gendered lives: Global issues. (https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/genderedlives/)

Anth 290: Science of Identity – uses one book under $30, which is also available in the Camosun Library.

I want to end this post with a note that I understand not every course at the college can move to ZTC as there are many paid textbooks that support students meeting course outcomes. But if there are opportunities to save students money and still meet learning outcomes, I and others in CETL and the Library are available for discussions with faculty who may want to learn more about Open Textbooks in their discipline or about ZTC options for their subject areas.

I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with our next ZTC story.

Camosun Story #98: Chris, Kristina, and Sue: STEM Accessibility

Today we have a story of STEM Accessibility. What is STEM Accessibility, you may ask? Well, to give you an example, what happens if you’re teaching an online math class and want students to look at a formula, but they are unable to see it and have to rely on a screen reader to access the information? Sounds simple enough, and it would be if it were a sentence in English, but for mathematical formulas, it’s not that simple. So, I wanted to talk to Chris Avis, Kristina Andrew, and Sue Doner about a recent project they worked on to create more accessibility in STEM courses, to see what they found was possible and what work still needs to be done. But first I asked each of them to tell me a bit about themselves and how they came to this project. (Note that this work received an Accessibility Recognition Certificate in 2024)

Chris has been a faculty member in the School of Arts and Sciences for 15 years, primarily teaching physics courses. “First-year students often take our courses. But when physics is not their preferred discipline, they sometimes have a hard time with the course material, so I try to do whatever I can to make things easier for them. During COVID, I began looking at the resources we were creating for online learning and wondering how we could make those resources accessible, not just to those students who have identified accommodation needs, but for any student who may have to miss class due to life getting in the way.” Chris admitted to being both intrigued and intimidated by making physics resources accessible. “It’s a lot of work to get even one lecture designed for accessibility because physics is highly visual and mathematical, with a lot of text, jargon, equations, graphs, sketches, etc. So, finding ways to present content so that it is accessible without creating a massive workload issue is a challenge.” 

Kristina has been at the college for 20 plus years, working primarily as an instructional assistant with students which is where she first began learning about accessibility. “When I was in lab with students working on statistics, we had a couple of students who had difficulties seeing information on the computer screen. I was shocked by how much effort it was for the student to access the material – they had to zoom in on one single number to see it, then zoom out and zoom in again on the next number, and so on. Whereas, had the material been accessible, the student could have just listened to it.” More recently, Kristina has been a term instructor in the Psychology Department as well as an instructional designer in eLearning where one of her roles is supporting faculty to make their courses more accessible for students. “While doing this work, I have heard from faculty in engineering, math, physics, about the barriers to creating accessible course materials, and how they have found that students will self-select out of those programs when materials are not accessible.” 

Sue has been at the college for 11 years and involved in online education for over 20. “My interest in web accessibility was lit 20 years ago, when I attended a conference and discovered that the bespoke websites that I’d been proudly building were pretty much unintelligible for anybody who was blind. But I learned that you can make websites accessible to someone who is blind, which was an amazing gift.” Sue notes, however, that her background is in English and history, not math, so making equations, etc. accessible was still a challenge. “I went to a conference several years ago, where even folks who speak math and programming couldn’t agree on which markup language was best to use to represent equations allowing students to access them using assistive technologies. It is so much easier to make text and images accessible digitally than any equation in math. So, I needed to work with people who speak the language of equations to help me understand what an equation should sound like through a screen reader, as well as what markup languages would work best for different equations.” Her own challenges helped Sue understand the challenges faculty, who may not be comfortable with digital tools, might face trying to create accessible materials for STEM courses. “We can’t have the same expectations of STEM faculty creating accessible materials as we might of faculty teaching art, history, English, or business courses. This is a niche area that requires more competencies and more support to develop those competencies.” 

And this is where, Sue said, the three of them came together. “Kristina and Chris already worked well together, and my role was initiating the project, working with Kristina on the D2L templates, and working on the question if we’re trying to promote accessibility for other people teaching in these disciplines, how do we create a process that people could adopt and adapt without it being a crushing burden?” 

The project scene set, I asked Chris to talk about the problem he encountered and his connection to CETL. “Kris and I have talked a bit about some of these pieces, and I knew that Kris had also been working with Stephanie Ingraham in our department on an e-book for one of the radiography courses. We started by looking at the WORD templates Stephanie was building to see how they were working. But the challenge I was most concerned with was understanding how instructors use equations and the limits of text to speech technology in terms of capturing how they’re being used in the classroom.” 

An equation: y = mx+b which states that variable y is equal to the product of the slope of a line, m and variable x plus the y-intercept, b

“Take this simple equation y equals mx plus b. When we work with students in the classroom, we have to take them from reading those letters literally to understanding what that equation means. What this equation tells you is that there are two things you are measuring: there’s a variable that you plot on the y axis, and there’s a variable that you plot on the x axis. The letter “m” is a number called the slope, and the letter “b” is a number called the y-intercept. So, while text-to-speech software would read this equation as “y equals mx plus b,” really what we’re saying it that one variable is slope times another variable plus y intercept.” And, of course, most equations in Chris’ physics class are much more complicated than this. “They are not only challenging to typeset but doubly challenging to get text to speech software to read them properly.” 

An equation which states that the sum of force x-components is equal to the mass of an object multiplied to the x-component of acceleration

What you would get if a screen reader were to try to read this first line, is something like Sigma F subscript X equals M A X subscript. But what this equation tells us is that we’re going to add up all of these pieces of forces, and that is equal to mass times acceleration. So, when I discuss this equation in class, I don’t say Sigma F x equals M A X, I say sum of forces equals mass times acceleration. So, we knew that it would not only be challenging for the existing technology to read the equation coherently, we would still be missing what the equation is meant to communicate. To emulate the in-class experience, we would need to translate these equations verbally, not just have them read out by a screen reader as you would for English materials.” So, they decided they would need to provide multiple modes of access for students, meaning “typed notes for people who had no eyesight problems, and videos or audio notes where you could engage with the equations in a way that that would make sense of what you’re trying to communicate.” 

Kristina jumped in here to speak to some of the complexities she and Chris began to uncover. “We were also catching anomalies, for example the letter “m” can mean mass, or meters, or minutes so Sue and I reached out to ReadSpeaker and discovered that their development team had already identified scientific terms and jargon as a limitation in the tool and were compiling a database so it could begin to interpret these terms accurately, which the developers admitted would be a long project.” 

But, Chris, Kristina, and Sue wondered, what could they do for students now? “I started contacting faculty across the college, in engineering, physics, math, and chemistry, to find out what they were doing in classes that was working (which we could share with other faculty), but also that wasn’t working and where there might be gaps. Out of those conversations a few things happened. Larry Lee in chemistry found a publisher resource that he’s now piloting to help with the atomic structures. And the three of us discussed ways faculty could present information to students. For example, if they were recording a video, rather than saying here when referring to an equation, they should talk about the equation they are describing. However, this created more questions than answers and we still have a long way to go.” In addition to talking to people at Camosun, Kristina explored what other institutions were doing. And what she discovered was not a surprise: “this takes time, a lot of work, and training to learn the technology, and there are no resources we can point people to because they have not been created yet.” 

Chris then spoke to challenges beyond the classroom, namely college structures. “It is very hard for a single faculty member to create accessible resources, both in terms of time and skills, and we may need to explore a model where faculty are primarily delivering course materials, but instructional designers are primarily developing those materials. Sharing resources also becomes important, and with multiple sections of one course, the expectation should be that these resources are all shared within a department, including with new term faculty, rather than having five faculty members developing five separate sets of resources on top of an already backbreaking workload.” And the ultimate goal, Chris believes, is for post-secondary institutions across B.C. (and beyond) to share the resources they create, especially since science course curriculum is fairly standard across institutions. 

Kristina also added that they brought in the Centre for Accessible Learning to find out more about what assistive technology tools were being used to support students taking STEM courses. “There are some tools that can support math accessibility, or that can take images of handwritten documents and digitize them using Optical Character Recognition (ORC) (with the help of AI), but there are financial and digital literacy barriers for faculty and students who don’t know how to use these tools, meaning someone needs to provide support – both in terms of money and expertise.” But if faculty and departments work together, then it’s not on one person’s shoulders to make a course accessible. “And if those resources are shared with people in other departments, they can build off of that work where the content overlaps.” 

Chris, Sue, and Kristina all reiterated that creating accessible course resources is a workload issue for faculty, one that is not easily definable given that there are no guidelines at the college around how accessible course materials need to be. Chris reiterated, “if this is to become a college priority, we have to properly resource people to do the work; it can not be done off the side of people’s desks. We need to find a way to articulate how much time it takes to create or revise one module or lesson so that it is accessible for at least 80% of students, and also so that it is accessible for every student. We could be looking at ten plus hours of work just for one lecture and there has to be recognition of the resourcing required to do that, and a desire to invest in that.” 

Which of course led us to Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Kristina pointed out that “while there might be one student in a class of 40 with low vision, that doesn’t mean that adaptation of the materials would be just for that one student. This is bigger than one student, and students may not realize how much they benefit from accessible content until they are using it. How many students in a math class would appreciate an equation being read to them in a way that’s not symbolic? We won’t know until the instructor has the tools, the resources, and the support to be able to convert their content into a more accessible format.” 

Sue built off of this by saying, “we started with digital accessibility of STEM equations, an impossible goal. But the project and the approach nestled more into a Universal Design for Learning mission because Chris has created materials using multiple modes of representation, including videos to describe things, described images, breakdown in text format, using HTML templates, etc. and throughout, he has been both making his content inclusive and accessible, and discovering all the work a faculty member has to do to make this happen.” And Chris added that we need to engage in discussions with our unions and administration as to how we can support ALL faculty to do this work, even faculty who have Scheduled Development time, because they may need to use SD time for other work. “If our vision is to make accessibility a priority, how do we work together to be fair to all union members, and to encourage and fund this kind of work so that we’re making life better not just for students, but for all the faculty as well? If we released a faculty member for a term or a year so they could focus on making the most accessible course possible, then they reported out on how it worked for them, that would pay dividends over time. I hope there is an investment in this kind of research and development at the college because I think it will have profound implications for workload and sustainability for projects like these going forward.” And as Sue pointed out, “now that we have provincial accessibility legislation and expectations on post secondary institutions, wouldn’t we want to be proactive by having someone fully released to help us move towards those expectations as opposed to reacting in a panic later?” 

I wanted to bring the conversation back to something that had been mentioned earlier in our conversation: D2L templates for creating accessible content. Kristina started us off but saying “When I worked with Stephanie, I discovered that many of the documents she was providing to students were PDFs. So, we talked about the barriers PDFs present because they aren’t typically formatted in an accessible way. We explored WORD documents as well but discovered that the WORD extension that supports equation writing wasn’t doing what we thought that it should be doing: the equations looked better, but they were not being translated from text to speech accurately.” After exploring a variety of options, the team landed on HTML as providing the most accessible format, albeit the most labour-intensive for faculty to learn to use. But choosing a solution that would not work for faculty, was not a feasible solution, which was where the templates came in – creating as much digital accessibility as possible while recognizing that the STEM piece of it was still a work in progress. But also sharing the HTML templates across departments so faculty don’t have to reinvent them all the time. 

I wondered what was next in this project, and Kristina said using Generative AI! “A faculty member and I worked with handwritten material, because one of the things that’s unique with STEM is that information is usually presented step by step, with faculty writing out equations or solutions as they unfold. We took a picture of the material, fed it into Generative AI and asked it to spell out each of the steps of the equation. And it did a pretty adequate job, at least to the point to allow a faculty member to describe what is going on without having to spend 2 hours explaining each step.” 

Chris also had a great idea to make this work more manageable. “You could have a project for students, perhaps in lieu of doing a lab report, where they could take a piece of material from the course and experiment with tools they are already using, to make that material accessible, then have them critique the results for accuracy. You could then feed that material back into the class, in that circle of courage idea of generosity and mastery – students create a resource their classmates (present and future) will benefit from, develop their proficiency in using GenAI in a good way, and work together to assess the reliability of their work.” 

In terms of how to bring accessible course design to the attention of people at the college who might not know about it, Chris says, from his experience on curriculum committees, “when curriculum is brought forward for review, they have to have an Indigenization statement and an applied learning statement, but I think there needs to be an accessibility statement as well. I’m hesitant to add more to the curriculum development process itself, but these three priorities could run in parallel.” And in addition, Chris notes, wouldn’t it be an amazing opportunity for Camosun to lead collaboration with other post-secondary institutions given the budgetary crises we are all facing right now. 

As we came to the end of our time together, I asked Chris, Kristina, and Sue what final words they had for me. For Chris, this project has pointed at cracks in our foundation as an institution. “I think a big part of the problem is that, even pre COVID, faculty didn’t have the bandwidth to make significant changes to their course materials. The culture of the institution needs to be in the right place around sharing and realigning what we should be doing as faculty, instead of everyone trying to do everything all at once and having no time to do anything. So, I hope there’s an empowering way for us to take down some of those silos a little bit, recognize that we’re all on the same team, and realize that we need to do things differently. I don’t know how to have that discussion, but I do feel like a time of crisis sometimes highlights why we need to do it because we cannot keep doing what we’re doing without burning out.” 

Kristina wanted to thank all the faculty members who answered her call for help. “I reached out to people during SD and vacation, Pat Wrean, Susan Chen, Stephanie Ingraham, John Lee, Benji Birch – not one person turned me down which I think highlights the special faculty that we have at Camosun, who are committed to creating environments in which everybody feels welcome and doing anything they can to support the students at the college.” 

And for Sue, “there is no ‘we’ll just do this and take care of that’ when we talk about creating more flexible opportunities for students. Because if you want to create more opportunities for STEM programs, these are just some of the barriers and challenges that will just become bigger if we don’t begin to address them now.”  

Camosun Story #97: Aidan

Aidan is a faculty member in the Management & Human Resources (HR) Leadership (MHRL) department. She completed her PhD during COVID, and while she was working on her dissertation, realized that research was not where her interest lay – instead, she wanted to teach. So, three years ago, after she moved to Victoria, she started at Camosun, and now teaches mostly HR courses, including Organizational Behaviour, Recruitment and Selection, HR Foundations, and Occupational Health and Safety.

Aidan teaches in all modes: in-person, asynchronous, blended, hyflex, you name it! “If I’m teaching four courses in a term, typically two are fully in-person, one is blended, and the fourth will either be blended or entirely asynchronous – it depends on the courses I’m teaching that term. But for my upper-level courses, including recruitment and selection, I’ve been exploring a hyflex approach, so while I teach in the classroom, students can choose to attend either via Zoom or in-person.”

I wondered how the hyflex model was working for her recruitment and selection course. “It’s going really well even though it developed into hyflex accidentally. The first time I taught it was the year the course moved from fully synchronous during COVID back to in-person. Some students were hesitant, wondering what would happen if they were sick and missed several lectures. A colleague advised me to record the audio for the lectures so if students could not attend, they would not miss content. But then I realized that students were just hearing me and looking at lecture slides for 3 hours, which was not engaging. So, I spoke with Derek Murray in CETL about the idea of hyflex, and what does it means, and during my first Scheduled Development time I revamped that course to hyflex.” And a large part of that redevelopment involved redesigning activities so they could be done hyflex.

Aidan taught two sections of the new hyflex version of the course, one during the day, and one in the evening. “Student feedback was phenomenal. Those who really wanted to be in-person came in-person and those students who had family commitments or other challenges making it hard for them to come to class, loved that they could still participate online. Some students attended the whole term either in-person or online, but many went back and forth depending on their schedules.”

There is currently no “hyflex” designation in Camosun’s course registration system, so I wondered if students know ahead of time how Aidan teaches the class. “I send out an email to students before the first day of class to let them know what to expect, and that information is also in the course outline. And then, to make students who miss that email know, I also let tell them on the first day of class.”

Aidan told me that her chair has been very supportive as she (and some of her fellow faculty members) dove into hyflex teaching. And that encouragement meant Aidan felt supported to also redesign her occupational health and safety course for hyflex. “Students who had taken the recruitment and selection course loved the model and asked if I was offering anything else hyflex. But my chair, Dr. Steve Scott, is phenomenal, and says if you want to do something, try it, and if students love it, let’s look at how we can make it better. So, there’s definitely support in our department, and interest among some of my colleagues to do more.”

I knew that accessibility was important to Aidan, and I wondered how she made her courses more accessible for students. “In the recruitment selection course, I moved away from using a textbook, to using a mixture of academic articles, news articles, etc. which are all freely available for students. I’ve asked students if they would rather have a textbook, but most say, no, they’re happy not paying for a textbook, and that they find the information in the resources I supply gives them what they need for this course.” In addition, Aidan feels that the hyflex option also provides access and flexibility for those students who struggle to make it to an on-campus course for a variety of reasons. For example, “I had a student who had severe social anxiety and for her, taking class from home and still being able to interact with classmates and ask questions with the camera off meant she was able to get more out of the class than she would have otherwise. Plus, I record the hyflex lectures so all students can review them later.” In addition, Aidan offers students extensions for any assignment as long as they ask in advance. “Quite a few students have taken me up on that when they have a tough week or have many other assessments due at the same time.”

I asked Aidan if she could tell me a bit more about how she designed her hyflex course. “First, not all courses are suited for hyflex; it depends on the amount or kind of information students need to learn. But the recruitment and selection course relies on students sharing their experiences, and using those experiences as examples to build on, so there’s a lot of engagement happening. And because I wanted ensure students were present and participating, hyflex seemed like a good option to explore.” And to encourage engagement in a hyflex class, Aidan looked at Mentimeter and Kahoot. “The engagement needed to be online, meaning students could be in-person or at home, I wanted it to be anonymous, so students didn’t feel pressured, and I wanted to see the results of the engagement immediately. So using tools makes it easier to move to hyflex teaching because it doesn’t matter where students are – if they have a mobile device or a laptop, they can participate.”

Hyflex does not mean Aidan’s students no longer work in teams. At the same time students do groupwork in the classroom, she sets up breakout rooms for students online. “I’ll open breakout rooms, but I don’t force people into them. This way, students can form their own groups online just like they do in the classroom, with the people that they want to be with. Because some students like breakout rooms and some don’t, I only use them every third class or so.” I wondered how Aidan felt about some students not engaging in breakout rooms. “I had to let go of attendance, and understand that if students are not engaged, it’s either because I’m not engaging, or they just don’t want to engage. If I’m doing everything I can to make this class engaging and somebody still doesn’t want to engage, that’s not on me. They’re adults and I’m not here to penalize them or force them into breakout rooms. If this is how they choose to learn I’m here to support them. If they want help, I’m here. If they don’t want to come to class, they don’t have to come to class. If they want to learn on their own, that’s their choice.”

Turning to a new topic, I wondered how Aidan was handling some of the concerns around assessments and students using Generative AI. “For my take-home quizzes, which are open for 48 hours to provide some flexibility for students, I first run my questions through ChatGPT and Gemini to see what answers AI is going to give. I also base my questions either on things we talk about in class, which GenAI would not know, or I use what AI gave me as an answer and then develop the question to purposefully set that as the wrong answer. So, for example, I won’t specify in my question that we’re in B.C., but all the legislation we discuss in class is B.C.-based. However, GenAI will assume the question is about federal, or American, or some other legislation, giving the wrong answer. I also write my case studies in such a way that GenAI answers most of my questions about them incorrectly. I do tell students not to use GenAI because it’s not great for their learning, but I don’t tell them that if they use GenAI, they will get a zero. Instead, I let them know that if they use GenAI, they will probably get only one or two out of seven for that question because it’s not actually answering the question with the nuance needed.”

However, students can use GenAI for some assignment components. “In my recruitment and selection class, the major assignment is an interview. Students work in teams to come up with competencies and interview questions, then they conduct an interview with someone and record that interview. Students can use GenAI to come up with their interview questions, because in the real world, they would probably use GenAI like this, but GenAI will not help them conduct the actual interview. So that’s how I’ve navigated the use of GenAI, through creating authentic reflective assessments.”

I asked Aidan what she enjoyed most about teaching. “One of the things I love most is that I get to influence people who are going to make a difference in the real world. That was one thing I struggled with around research: you spend three years working on a project, the review process takes another two years, then if it’s published, few people read it, and it doesn’t usually make any change. But I’ve taught managers and CEOs who later tell me that what I taught them made a big difference in terms of how they manage their teams or how they deal with various situations. So, I felt like I could make more of a difference teaching than through doing research, and I find that very rewarding.”

As we came to the end of our time together, I asked Aidan what advice she might have for a new faculty member coming to teach at Camosun. “I would say, don’t be afraid of using resources. In my first year, while I knew about CETL I didn’t reach out because I didn’t want to be the person who was new and didn’t know anything. It wasn’t until I attended a workshop and met people from CETL that I realized they want to help. In addition, reach out to your chair and ask for help, and, if possible, sit in on other instructors’ classes to see what strategies they’re using to engage students. I’ve learned a lot from other teaching styles, and even if someone else’s style doesn’t work for you, you can still learn a lot from them.

Camosun Story #96: Max

“Max is a phenomenal instructor that made our first-year class so interesting and educational. She provided us with detailed in-class lectures partnered with informative slideshows that were easily accessible via D2L, and she frequently updated us with any changes well in advance. To make up for lost classes due to holidays, Max dedicated time to post recorded lectures with the same amount of depth. Her labs are very engaging, and she provides well-structured feedback on each assignment. For our final project, she broke it up into chunks which allowed for feedback and correction throughout the course. She actively acknowledged the challenges that come with our lives and continuously led with kindness.”

Max has been a faculty member in the Psychology department at Camosun since 2017. She told me her PhD was in environmental psychology, explaining that her research was around the question “if we spend more time in nature, does it positively impact our psychological well being and our physical well being?” Some of the courses she teaches include Experimental Psychology, Contemporary Issues, Interpersonal Skills, and Human Development: LifeSpan. And she sees “a whole range of students, coming from high school, returning to school after being in the workforce for a long time, and of course a good component of international students.”

I wondered what Max enjoys most about teaching and she told me that, because research is still her comfort zone, she loves showing her students why research is exciting. But she also said that she enjoys “the connection to students and the engagement in class. There’s nothing like seeing students who are quiet or struggling finally find the confidence to speak up in class because they know it’s a safe space for them.”

Max was one of the many instructors who was teaching here when we all moved online during the pandemic, and I wondered what that experience was like for her and if she had brought anything with her from that time. Maxine said while she gained more “online savviness from having to deliver all my courses online, with support from our department and CETL,” she had previously taught courses online. But she added “what I recognized during that time was just how isolated some of our international students are. It’s one thing to be a student who is surrounded by family during a time of isolation, but I really felt for the international students who didn’t have their family and friends around them, many of whom were living on their own. So now, I have more empathy for international students who may not have the same supports as domestic students.”

I asked Max if, like some other instructors, she has seen differences in students now as opposed to before the pandemic. “I hear this over and over, that students have changed, and I believe that they have, but subtly rather than drastically. Yes, I see students struggling a bit more with boundaries, deadlines, etc., and perhaps we pulled back on those during COVID to give everybody a bit more flexibility, but for my own classes, I provide the same guidelines around expectations now that I did pre-COVID to post COVID: there are deadlines, but if a student who is struggling or needs a bit of extra time reaches out to me, I’ll support them as best as I can.

I wondered if Max had any memories from her years of teaching to share. “The moments for me that are most meaningful are when that shy student who hasn’t said anything for two months finally finds their footing and begins to share and make observations. Because our brains work better when we’re relaxed and if our stress levels rise too much, it impairs our cognition, I try to make the classroom a safe space. And I’ve had students tell me that they feel safe to share their thoughts or ideas in class, and that even when students have differing ideas, everybody still feels that their position is heard and validated – those are the memories that mean the most for me for me.”

I wanted to know a bit more about this last point, especially in our current world where opposing discourse is often seen as ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’ “One of the courses I teach is interpersonal communication, and it is important to establish from day one of saying that the classroom has to be a safe space, while also making the students accountable in that space. They need to be able to share but be careful about what they are sharing because I can’t control if a student says something outside of class, even though I’ve asked them not to. So, part of it is acknowledging that I try to keep class as safe as I can, but they also need to keep themselves safe in that space. Then in that space, we talk about how we manage conflict and how we can have dialogue in spite of having differing opinions without falling into the name calling or nastiness that can happen when we become emotionally charged.”

Another question I had for Max was how she is working with students around Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) as it becomes more pervasive in our education systems.  “That’s something that I’m still working on, to integrate it more in my classes. I talk about GenAI as a tool because I would guess for a lot of these younger students, within three to five years, AI is going to be part of their workplace environment. So, I feel like part of my job is (which is the part that I haven’t integrated as well as I would like to) is to teach them how to use AI well and how to be transparent about it. If, as instructors at a post-secondary institution, we’re educating students how to search online effectively, decide if a journal article is good or bad, and create proper APA in-text citations or reference pages, then I feel we should do the same with GenAI and help them consider when it’s appropriate to use it, and how.”

One of the ways Max has mitigated the potential use of GenAI in her classes is to have students engage in applied work, which is one of her passions. “Many of my assignments are applied which makes it tricker for students to use GenAI, but not impossible.  For example, in the communication course, students need to write down and quote conversations they’ve had with friends and loved ones and give me context around the conversation using the communication tools we talked about in class.”

I wanted to know more about the applied assignments Max works with in her classes. “A part of it is making the course concepts more relevant to students, so for example, in the communication course, students complete a questionnaire about their listening skills, we learn about what good listening looks like, and then they redo the assessment again at the end of the semester. They then think about how their listening skills have changed from their perspective. So, they’re writing about their own behaviours and bringing content from the course into those reflections about what they’ve learned about themselves, which I think students enjoy.”

As we came to the end of our time together, I asked Max what advice she might have for a new faculty member starting out at Camosun. “Go to one of the new employee orientations and use the resources available to you. For example, the Arts and Science team is fabulous, and they’re more than willing to help you…you just have to reach out. Everybody here is willing to lend a hand if you just reach out.”

Camosun Story #95: Melissa M

When I asked Melissa to tell me a bit about how she came to teach at Camosun, she called herself ‘the accidental teacher,’ saying, “I worked for Tourism Victoria for 22 years, finishing my time there as the senior VP of Marketing and Communications. Then I went into consulting and wandered around the world for a while. But something haunted me in the back of my mind. Back in the late 1980s, I had taught part time at Camosun in what was then the new certificate in tourism management. And I loved it. So, when Marina Jaffey called me to say they were looking for someone to teach their media communications course, I jumped at the chance. I taught on a term basis for awhile, and then they couldn’t get rid of me.”

Right now, Melissa teaches Global Business Strategies, Services Marketing, Marketing Communications Portfolio, and her new love, Current Trends in Marketing (MARK 485). MARK 485 is a new course (taught for the first time in Winter 2024) designed to cover a topic that marketing is influenced by and/or that marketing can influence, for example climate change or Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the topic is meant to change every few years. When I asked my students in Fall 2023 what topic we should cover they almost unanimously said AI.” And it is the story of MARK 485 that Melissa shared with me.

But before we talked about this new course and how it worked, I asked Melissa what she enjoys most about teaching. “I confess when I taught in the 80s, I was the sage on the stage. I loved moving from one end of the stage to the other and delivering stories with great anecdotes. But while that was well received back then, when I returned to teaching, students didn’t seem to respond in the same way, so, I started to introduce activities into my teaching. Even if I have to deliver a lecture (to set the tone for example,) I try to make it interactive, and I get the most amazing adrenaline rush from seeing a group of students engaging and thinking out loud. And when I walk out of a class and say to myself, well, I learned something new today too, I love that!”

In the MARK 485 course, Melissa took student engagement even further turning almost everything over to the students. There were 25 students in the first offering, and Marketing and AI was the topic. “It was a risk for me because AI is changing constantly. I had done some Scheduled Development the summer before to prepare, but so much had changed by the time I taught the course that I knew this would truly be a collaboration between me and the students.” To support the students in co-creating the course as it moved along, Melissa walked the students through Bloom’s taxonomy. “I showed them how their four years in the program progressed, from first-year courses where they were asked to write multiple-choice exams that tested their recall and worked my way up to the most exciting part of taxonomy, explaining how they were now analyzing, creating, and using their critical thinking skills. Then I introduced them to the BOPPPS model for lesson planning. No one had heard of it, although no doubt they had seen a host of instructors model it for them in past courses.” The final piece was talking to students about how to read and analyze the journal articles Melissa had chosen to support possible class-led session topics. Pulling from an activity she had encountered in a class she took in an MEd class at Simon Fraser University, Melissa picked a 12-page article and handed it out to students. Students looked horrified, but she walked them through how to read a journal article, how to analyze it, and how to look for three quotes in the article that resonated the most with them. “I also had them write a guided reflection (for a 2% grade) on each article before class so they would come prepared for the student led class sessions. If they hadn’t read the articles, I didn’t grade them harshly because I knew that reading the articles themselves was just the first step, and hopefully they would learn a lot more from their peers during these student-led sessions.”

With the foundation for the student-led class sessions laid, student teams then picked their topics from Melissa’s suggested list. “The first group’s class session topic focused on AI, marketing, and stakeholder relationships. This team modeled the BOPPPS approach brilliantly and the session was very interactive. The team leading the class session appeared confident and engaged, setting a high bar for the rest of the class-led sessions.”

About halfway through the class, Melissa raised the topic of AI and the students’ future. “I asked how many of them would be graduating that term and planning to go directly into marketing jobs. Then I told them that there would be a good chance they would be hired in part because of how current their AI education is, including their newly gained knowledge about the impact of AI on marketing (and vice versa.) Helping students see how AI likely will fit into their careers and how they likely will take an early leadership role in making significant recommendations to their employers, perhaps even proposing how a company should go about rolling out an AI strategy integrated with their marketing plan, made this course all the more practical and significant to this first class of MARK 485 students.”

Melissa also had students write critical reflections three times during the term. “For the first one, they could pick any topic related to AI and marketing.  Many of the students wrote about being worried whether they were going to have a long-term career in marketing, or if AI would take it away from them, and I, in turn, was worried that I had sparked this anxiety. But by the second reflection, I started to see a different theme: that AI is just another tool in their marketing toolkit. The evolution from anxiety, through to ‘I think I’ve got it,’ to their final reflection where AI was not seen as a significant threat to their long-term marketing careers, was very gratifying.”

Melissa based the final class assignment on an article written by a marketing professor about an experiment he conducted on himself. “He’d given himself 30 minutes to engage with an AI tool to write a marketing plan, from the initial gathering of research, evaluating the external market and finding what separates you from your competitors, identifying your target markets, developing the marketing mix, all the way to determining conclusions and recommendations for action. So, I replicated this experiment and had students work on it in teams. Each student had 30 minutes to explore one or more AI tools. Their team then had to pick a company, and hand the controls over to one or more the AI tools to “write” a marketing plan for the company. After seeing the results of the experiment, student teams wrote a paper describing the experience, including analyzing how effective the AI tools they used were in producing an effective marketing plan. Finally, I asked them to make three to five recommendations for a senior marketing director in an organization about how someone in this role should move forward with AI.” Melissa gave them class time to work on the assignment and watched them work. “I loved seeing the playfulness of their experimentation, their curiosity, and their critical analysis.” On presentation day, students reported that while certain AI tools collect and report secondary research with an impressive depth and level of accuracy, the AI tools used currently fall down when it comes to creativity. “One team had AI write a marketing plan for Crocs, but when they tried to direct AI to create a print ad, the results were comical. The Crocs pictured in one of their ads had toes sticking out through the holes, another had extra toes on the side. We laughed, but they presented a mature analysis concluding that the number one thing they need to learn as marketers is how to communicate with AI tools effectively so these tools can help deliver desired results.” Overall students proposed practical, well reasoned recommendations for themselves moving forward as soon-to-be marketing professionals and for the advice and guidance they can provide for their employers.

I wondered what was next for this course. “The curriculum for MARK 485 was designed by Joan Yates (retired faculty member) who observed that even though the course would be student led, instructor preparation is enormous, meaning that a topic should be taught at least twice.” So, this winter, AI will once again be the focus of the course, although Melissa wonders how much it will have changed by then. She also worries a bit that the next offering might not be as successful as this first one was. “Numerous students have told me it was their favorite class, and I also looked forward to coming to class every time. But sometimes those magical experiences don’t repeat. Since students are becoming more knowledgeable about AI now and the course doesn’t run again until Winter 2025, I wonder: will I have the same success with this approach?”

Regardless of what may happen by Winter 2025, Melissa is sure AI will still be an important and relevant topic. “I say to my students, when I was a young marketer, it was so much easier for me. There were a few daily newspapers that were seen by consumers as “the authority,” the 6:00 pm news, only three American TV networks, CBC, and CTV. So, when you set out to write a promotional plan, that was all what you had to draw on. But today you can’t keep up with the number of for-marketing communications options that have been popping up over the past 10-plus years, so I empathize with them finding their way through this more complex marketing landscape, now compounded with the addition of AI for marketing. But at the same time, I tell them how excited I am watching them at the start of this AI era in marketing, because I was there for the first consumer websites, the first live e-commerce sites, the first social media platforms – and we had to decide which ones to focus on for our work. And now they will be the ones deciding which AI tools to recommend for and use in their own workplaces.”

Camosun Story #94: Blair and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

Blair has been a faculty member in the Criminal Justice Program at Camosun College for about 15 years. “I teach criminal justice and the law and legal policy for first-year students as well as case management. I also teach a course called Mental Health Addictions and Trauma (211) for second-year students, which has evolved over time to adapt to the reality of the people our students will be working with when they become practitioners.” Before coming to Camosun, Blair received a degree in criminology with an extended minor in psychology followed by his Master’s in Adult Education. “At that time, I was doing a lot of teaching in both federal and provincial prison systems, so my masters focused on education of people in prison.” Then one day Blair received a phone call from the chair of our Criminal Justice program asking if he would be interested in teaching an introduction to the criminal justice system course. While he had not considered teaching at a post-secondary institution before, Blair found he loved the experience and was happy to come on board full-time a year later after another instructor left for public office.

I asked Blair what he loves most about teaching, and he said, “I like seeing students grow, preparing them for the realities of the work they’re going into, and teaching them how to always keep the whole picture in mind to succeed as a criminal justice practitioner. Some situations they will face can be very draining, for example re-offending clients or client suicide attempts; you need to be able to step back, look at the big picture, and keep in mind those clients who leave and don’t re-enter the system instead of only focusing on the clients who return.” Blair was reminded of a poem about walking a path differently over time as you learn and grow, Autobiography in Five Chapters by Portia Nelson, and he told me that this is the goal of anybody working in the criminal justice system. “Working with people who have experienced traumatic lives and expecting an untraumatic-life version of success is unrealistic. Students have to learn what success looks like through the eyes of their client, not through their own eyes.”

This led nicely into my next question for Blair, which was how he integrated trauma-informed pedagogy into his teaching. “I work with trauma-informed pedagogy in my 211 course which started out as a ‘criminal justice perspectives on criminal behavior’ course. This is my favorite course to teach – we sit in circle and talk about whatever is coming up that day. For example, we talk about anger and where it comes from as well as the interplay between fear and anger and how to understand how people think and behave, so you can react and help them in the best way possible.”

Blair explained that a main tenet of the course is that if you expect somebody to modify their behavior in a criminal justice setting by, for example, abstaining from drugs and alcohol, then you also need to know what it feels like to change your own behavior. “I ask them to choose something they want to change about themselves, for example an entrenched habit like smoking, and track it over the course of the semester. It’s a difficult assignment and whether they get an A+ or a C has nothing to do with the change they’re making, but with their reflection on and insight into the hard parts of that change. Students create a goal statement and a number of objectives to help them achieve that goal. Then they decide on an externally imposed punishment if they lapse, which is not how we would do things in the real world but is what happens in a criminal justice system, and outline how that punishment would be enforced. This is all designed to give them some insight into how hard it might be for somebody to change something that may have been a part of their life for a long period of time.” Finally, Blair asks students questions like: What did or didn’t work for you? Did you have to change your plan? Did you have to change the outcomes?

One of the things students learn is how complicated it is to change your own behaviour without adjusting other things in your life. “I’ve had some students try to curb their drinking behavior, for example, and realize that they also needed to consider how friend groups fit into that behaviour – those are the insights that help them understand how best to help people within a criminal justice system, and those insights can be emotionally draining for some students.”

Because students have conversations about anger, fears, different types of behaviours (criminal and otherwise) and how we react Blair noticed that students were finding it tough to discuss some of the subject matter that was coming up. “I was losing some students because they found the course too emotionally draining.” So, while this course started as a criminal behavior course, a few years ago Blair changed it to a mental health addictions and trauma course to better match with what was happening in the classroom discussions. “Because I was losing students, I explored ways to teach the class differently, for example considering how much trauma is too much to introduce, and what would be useful in preparing students before they go into a system that has a lot of trauma in it.” So, Blair and a colleague at UVic who works with grad students around trauma started talking about trauma-informed practice. “Then, during COVID, I began to ask students to develop a trauma plan early in the course, before getting to the heavy topics. Now, we first have a person from Camosun Counseling come and talk about trauma, how it can affect people, how to identify when things aren’t going well for you, and to provide resources and advice for how to deal with things. Then I ask students to come up with a plan based on what they just heard, a plan for how they will deal with things that trigger them. The plan is private and not shared with me, but every third week we will revisit their plans so they can identify how they are feeling and if they need any supports. If I see anyone struggling during that process, we sit in circle to talk about what they are struggling with. I also tell students on day one that if anything becomes too much for them during class, they can get up and leave, no questions asked, to get some emotive distance so they can look at the subject in an analytical way.”

Since implementing the trauma plan, Blair says that students no longer drop for reasons related to the emotional impact of the course. “This course is like a capstone, because it’s usually at the end of the second year of the program. So, while students know a lot about the justice system, the course is designed to help them learn how people react in different situations by examining their own reactions to challenges.”

I asked Blair what advice he might have for faculty working with students and trauma. “We should not handle it ourselves. I’m not a counselor, and I actually think it’s a disservice not to refer students to professionals. What I can do is make students aware of supports they have access to, which I do on a regular basis, usually at the start of term then around mid terms when things are getting really heavy. I reiterate that they have access to resources, and that if things are getting to be too much, which is just the nature of post-secondary education, I ask them to please take the time to utilize those resources even if they need to take class time to get to an appointment.”

Camosun Story #93: Liz and how GenAI can support student learning

I’ve interviewed Liz before, first way back when I was first talking to faculty in 2021 about their teaching experiences during COVID, and then about her Open Education work as part of our Open Sustainability project. This last March, Liz also received an Open Education Recognition award for her work in Open Education at the college. But this story is different. I was in the Lansdowne office one day several months ago when Liz came running in to talk to my colleague Sue about a Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) assignment she had just finished running with her students. And she was SO excited I just had to see if she would tell me this story too…and she did!

Liz has been a faculty member in the Dental Hygiene program at Camosun for 35 years. In addition to supporting her students, Liz has a passion for keeping up with and teaching students about the use of current technologies and exploring different ways of evaluating learning. “Traditional ways of evaluation just don’t inspire students in their educational journey, so I try to be innovative and to find ways to ignite excitement in students.”

Preliminaries complete, we dove into a discussion of how Liz worked with GenAI in her course during the Winter 2024 term. “I didn’t know a lot about GenAI when I started this journey, but I knew that we are already behind what our students know, and that GenAI is a game changer in the information world.” Of course, there’s a lot of concern in our educational institutions about what the growth of GenAI means for us, resulting in resistance and fear amongst administrators, staff, and faculty. Not that this is anything new, as Liz noted, saying, “I remember back in high school when there was concern about the impact of calculators. I find it interesting how the initial reaction of education is to try to keep new technology out, but can we stop students from using it? I don’t think that’s possible. So, I took a different approach when it came to GenAI.” And related to all of this, Liz believes that one of the most critical things we can do for students is to teach them the difference between information, disinformation, and misinformation. “In a world where so much information comes from unreliable sources, we need to teach students to critically examine what they’re reading and assess it for validity and reliability.”

Liz began by learning about GenAI – what it is and how it works, and also met with Patsy, one of the librarians at Camosun, who helped her understand the benefits and limitations a bit more. Then Liz met with Sue and Kristina, two instructional designers in CETL to discuss what she was thinking. “What we see in dental hygiene is patients coming into clinic after going to ‘Doctor Google’ to ‘research’ their symptoms [research in quotes because, as Liz notes, there is a difference between academic research and ‘looking stuff up’ on the Internet.] Equipped with findings from Google, patients can believe they know their problems and come seeking validation so it’s important for students to learn how to ask patients investigative questions, in a nonjudgemental way, to assess where the information came from to determine reliability and validity.”

To support students to build this skill, Liz decided to add a new assessment to her nutrition course, choosing this course because the outcomes are broad enough to allow for flexibility. Liz chose to create an activity and assessment around the topic of the role nutrition plays in how the microbiome of the gut may contribute to inflammation and how this may impact the inflammation in the mouth and vice versa. “After choosing the topic, we [Liz, Kristina, and Sue] discussed how students could use GenAI to explore it. Students, in groups, chose a topic that related inflammation, nutrition, and periodontal disease, then created a prompt which they entered into ChatGPT. Groups then would examine the information provided for them and had to look for traditional peer-reviewed evidence to determine the reliability of the ChatGPT information.”

Before setting students loose, Patsy came to her class to give students an introduction to GenAI, walk them through how to use ChatGPT (the tool Liz recommended students use), and explain how to check for source reliability. Then they began. “I wasn’t sure how it was going to play out. Students learned something about nutrition, of course, but they also learned about GenAI and how it works,” supporting some soft skills development surrounding the use of AI.

Liz had students use traditional academic research tools to verify the sources presented by ChatGPT. She had broken them into larger groups than she normally would because “larger groups invited more conversation and discussion among the students and presented less risk because only one of them needed to sign up for ChatGPT. We then had a class where students presented their findings. They put up their prompts on the board and we talked about what they’d discovered. Then we put up the information they found and discussed the sources of the information. And that was where the discussion took off, because in each case, many of the sources provided by AI were made up: sometimes the article title was correct, but the author was incorrect, and several of the journals cited were nonexistent which was eye opening for them.” And that direct experience taught them more than Liz ever could.”

The class then moved on to a discussion around how they verified the information ChatGPT provided. “Again, the discussion was very rich. Students noticed that the information provided by GenAI was often general, although they were surprised with how much of the information was accurate overall. The other thing they noted was that ChatGPT provided a lot of qualifiers before answering prompts, for example saying, ‘you know, I’m not a doctor…,’ which they also found interesting.” In the end, students learned that GenAI might be useful to provide basic information as a starting point, but the specific information that may be needed in evidence-based care for patients.

Liz was excited by the engaging conversation the assignment produced. “Students were pumped. It was one of those magical classes where students are all talking, saying ‘Yeah, we found that – did you find that too? and ‘What do you think about that?’ They learned so much more than they could have learned by reading a single research paper which wouldn’t have created that excitement and engagement. When I asked them what they thought of this assignment, they said it was their favorite assignment for the whole year. It was another example of how, when you get out of the way of students and allow them to learn, with you as the guide on the side, it blows your mind.”

Liz’s assignment is also exciting for a few other reasons. First, from an employment standpoint. “One of the things employers will be looking for is knowledge of GenAI and how to use it, but with a healthy skepticism.” And second, a realization that this is the direction we should be heading around student assessments. “Sometimes in education, we’re afraid to let go of control. But we need to look at where our students are today and ask: Who are they? What do they want and need to learn? What kinds of tools are they familiar with? And we have to catch up to them.”

Liz emphasized the collaboration that went into this assessment creation. “I would never have been able to do this without support, to remind me about the concerns about student data or been able to maneuver the intricacies of the technology on my own. When I first sat down with Kristina and Sue the first time and I said, ‘we should be teaching students more about GenAI because they’re already using it but may not be aware of the benefits and limitations,’ they walked me through a thought process that helped me get to where I wanted to be. Then Kristina provided me with a sample, and I modified it from there. But without that collaboration, along with the support and encouragement to take the risk, this assessment would not have happened.”

As we wrapped up our conversation, Liz had some final words. “I think that the whole college community can benefit and learn from an experience like this. We have such a rich teaching and learning environment here, and there are so many instructors doing amazing things, but they are still not well known across the college. I think it’s a shame there aren’t more opportunities for cross-college learning and sharing.” We in CETL agree and will continue to support instructors in sharing their experiences so we can all learn from each other.

Camosun Story #92: Andrea

“Andrea is a compassionate instructor who offers students the individualized support needed to meet high standards with confidence. Her unique teaching approach is built on developing relationships, creating safe spaces, seeking rich learning opportunities, and providing thoughtful feedback. Andrea challenged us to be critical thinkers, expand our self-reflection, and provide exceptional patient care. Her innovative approach stands out in developing excellence in the next generation of nurses.”

Another recipient of a 2024 Camosun Teacher Recognition Award, Andrea has been a faculty member in the Baccalaureate of Science, Nursing (BSN) program at the college for 17 years. A registered nurse (RN) since 2001, Andrea has worked in almost all clinical settings, but early on in her schooling, began to feel like teaching was her path. “By second year I wanted to do what my teachers were doing, but I needed more clinical experience to give me more confidence.” Then her husband began to teach at Camosun. “I saw what he was doing, and I thought, I really want to teach too. And now, I love being in the classroom, in the lab, working with the students because they inspire me to think and learn and grow.”

Andrea told me she has taught everything in the BSN program, including theory and relational practice courses, but she always teaches the clinical courses, and has been in almost every clinical setting, but her heart “is in oncology and palliative care. I’ve also just completed my master’s in counselling which supports the work we do in oncology. I love helping my students support families as they work through grief.” I asked Andrea if her degree in counselling has helped her support students in their own studies, knowing how stressful the BSN program is. “Yes, absolutely. Our students are stretched thin and being a nurse is a busy, demanding job. As well, because many students have anxiety or other mental health challenges, if I can support them in a more holistic way to empower them in their learning, they can identify their own strengths to become the best nurses they can be.”

I asked Andrea what she enjoys most about being in the classroom. “I’m passionate about nurses giving great care to patients and families, and I feel that as an educator, I can help shape that. I understand that a nurse can be very skilled but may not be able to relate to patients who may be experiencing some of the hardest days of their lives. So, I just love being able to support the students in becoming that compassionate nurse for their patients.”

The BSN program was especially challenged when COVID hit, mainly because of the hands-on nature of the program, and I wondered how Andrea adapted at the time and what she might have taken away from that experience.  “I learned a lot and got more comfortable with technology and learning in different ways. My experience with the Provincial Instructor Diploma Program (PIDP) gave me a good foundation for using technology for teaching, but moving online forced me to use it more, for example by recording videos or integrating D2L discussion forums. I do think the pandemic made me a better teacher, but it also made me realize I don’t want to teach online because I missed the engagement with and immediate feedback from my students.” As to what Andrea has kept since that time, not a lot since she has only been teaching clinical recently. Immediately after COVID, however, she taught the theory course as a flipped course. “I never would have had the guts to do that before. In that version of the course, students reviewed videos in advance and came to class ready to work on more practical content. And I think the learning improved in those theory classes because they had access to the videos ahead of time.”

I take groups of eight students into the hospital setting, and what I have learned is that some students aren’t ready emotionally to be on units like oncology or palliative care. Some students have limited to no life experience dealing with death or grief or they have recently had a loved one pass, sometimes even from cancer. So, what I’ve started doing is having them reflect on whether they are ready for specific units. I explain that oncology is an amazing unit – it’s so rewarding, but people are going to die on our shift and families are going to be in a lot of grief. I ask them, how they are going to care for themselves and have them self assess if they think they’re ready. Because they have to look after themselves so they can get through their year of school.”

I wondered if Andrea had any specific memories from her years of teaching to share. “I was very inspired by something that happened recently. A student didn’t know if she wanted to go into the oncology/palliative unit, or into the respiratory unit for clinic. I needed more students to go on the oncology side, and I thought she would work well there. She had had a rocky term and was ready to quit, so, we talked about how things could play out for her, and she ended up just doing amazing on palliative. The patients loved her, and they never wanted her to leave. She had the right personality and wanted to learn and grow. In the end she told me palliative was the area she wanted to pursue, and I told her the patients and families would be lucky to have someone like her at their bedside.” Andrea told me how inspiring it was to see how one week this student was ready to drop out, and the next she was blossoming on the palliative unit. “The stories that resonate the most for me are when students become confident and begin to trust themselves, and then surprise themselves when they look back at the start of the term and realize how far they have come.”

Andrea had a lot of advice for new faculty coming to teach at Camosun. “Trust yourself but lean on experienced faculty – I learned so much from senior teachers when I started. Be humble with your students. It’s okay to not know something – that’s where we grow the most. And I really feel that completing some kind of courses on teaching is invaluable. For me, the PIDP made me a better teacher; it made me much more confident and breathed new life into this job for me. Have fun, be creative, and don’t be afraid to try new things. Students love it when you mix it up. Create diverse assignments so students have some choice to demonstrate their knowledge in different ways. And finally, make sure to take some self care for yourself so you can support your students.”

Camosun Story #91: Tara

“I took Anthropology 104 with Tara as an introductory course my first semester, while I was unsure about what to study. It was an online course and Tara made the class so enjoyable! Usually, online courses are hard to get into, but Tara delivered the course material in such an interesting and tangible way. The assignments were intriguing and challenged you to think beyond yourself and develop the anthropology lens. Her style of teaching made me enjoy the class even more!”

Tara, a recipient of a Teacher Recognition Award last spring, started teaching as a term instructor at Camosun in 2000 just after competing her master’s in anthropology from Simon Fraser University (SFU). For a year she commuted between Victoria and Vancouver, where she was living, then someone retired, and Tara became a full-time continuing faculty member. “I actually took my first course at Camosun in the 90s, in a pilot project for something they called ‘coordinated studies.’ After two years of taking courses at Camosun and the University of Victoria (UVic), I went to Trent University in Ontario to finish my undergrad because I learned at Camosun how valuable a small class was. After taking a year off and to work, I started my master’s at SFU specializing in medical anthropology.” Tara’s master’s thesis examined the way health care providers within a hospital system understand the concept of culture, if they feel agency over changes happening within their institutions and communities (often linked with culture), and how that informs their patient care. “I wanted to study how those in power within systems and institutions play a role in shaping our experiences; In contemporary language I would say I was studying institutional racism.” Tara assumed she would continue in a career revolving around research and international development when she finished her master’s, but life had other plans. “I’ve been teaching ever since, and love being in the classroom with my students.”

Tara teaches Anthropology 104, the introductory course, as do her colleagues, but she also teaches a gender across cultures course, as well as cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and a course on the anthropology of development. “The anthropology of development course studies international development as an industry. We take a critical analysis of international development and ask questions like: what does development mean? How does it play out in countries of the Global South? And we study the criticisms from anthropology about placing such a broad framework onto local contexts without studying those contexts from within which can often end up marginalizing those who need support the most.”

I asked Tara what she loves about teaching. “I enjoy getting students to see the world differently, to check assumptions, to understand how culture informs so much of how we view the world and how what we often assume to be universal is culturally situated and created. And how once we understand those things, we better understand why people act or think the way they do. I’m lucky to be teaching a discipline where students essentially read stories about real people and real lives – there is theory, but the stories are woven in throughout. Whether we’re talking about issues of people being unhoused, undocumented migrants, people in farm work, nurses, it doesn’t matter; we want to understand their perspectives.” Tara provides a safe space for students to challenge assumptions about the world as they explore these different perspectives. “Students are hungry to explore contemporary issues. Many have a basic understanding of gender, racism, settler colonialism, globalization, etc. so my job is to give them grounded examples in that safe space.” But Tara’s favourite thing about teaching a Camosun is the small class sizes. “We really get to know our students and can support them in their learning journey. If I have a student with academic experience, I can push them. If I have a student who is engaged, but doesn’t have the same solid academic background, I can support them to try things they find challenging. I can meet where they’re at, but also have high expectations of them.”

Tara also loves having international students in her classes. “They can speak from experience, and they understand that culture means more than food and flags and traditional dance. And they bring in great examples to share with the class. Our classes include people of different ages, different academic backgrounds, and different cultural backgrounds, which in an anthropology class, is gold.”

My next question for Tara was around what impact the past few years, from the sudden move to online teaching to the slow return back to “normal,” has had on her teaching. “I had already been using D2L and teaching an asynchronous online before the pandemic hit, so the learning curve was not as steep for me as for others. And while I prefer to teach face-to-face, I see the value in online courses. When I taught gender studies online last winter, I had five students who don’t live in Victoria, and because they were working part time or parents, the online format worked well for them. I also had a couple of students who were only taking that one class, but now they’re going to come to Camosun because it was a great experience for them.”

In terms of what she has carried over from that time, that is a more complicated question. Due to challenges around attendance post-pandemic (for a variety of reasons), Tara is not using D2L as much to encourage students to come to class. “I don’t want students thinking that the in-person course can be completed online. Providing course materials in D2L to support in-person courses has allowed us to move away from students having to buy textbooks. I can embed videos that I don’t have to take time to show in class, I can provide them with quizzes so they can check their understanding of content, and I love all of that. But how do we also encourage students to come to class? So instead, we are bringing some of those activities back into in the classroom.”

I wondered if Tara could share some memories of her classes from her many years of teaching. “A few years ago, I unintentionally used an offensive word in class- I didn’t even realize I had done it. After class, this lovely student came up and commented that he hadn’t heard that word in a long time – he was from England and familiar with the word’s pejorative meaning. I turned bright red and said ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t even realize I had used that word.’ He replied that he had been surprised. So, I opened the next class by saying, ‘I need to apologize for what I said. A student very respectfully pointed this out to me, and I am really horrified at my behavior. And I just want you to know, I am sorry, and I will work on this.’ It was good learning moment because we all have to be mindful of the language we use and the effect it can have even when it might not be intentionally used to be hurtful. That was really impactful and the way that student dealt with it was a model for other students.” Tara told me that while it’s lovely getting cards or e-mails from students commenting on how wonderful the class was, for her “what’s impactful is when I when I make mistakes, and how that then changes how I am in the classroom moving forward.”

Finally, I asked Tara what kind of advice she might have for faculty just starting out at Camosun. “Have fun. We have course outlines and learning outcomes to guide us and provide consistency for students, but we also have a lot of freedom to teach courses the way we want to. So, teach to your strengths, teach to your passions, and the students will love it. But most of all, be authentic and true to yourself. Just as students are diverse, our instructional styles are also diverse – I’m sure there are students who are frustrated by my teaching style and some who love it. We need to teach to our strengths, and be interested, invested, and passionate, and open to changing and learning when we get those student evaluations. But, at the same time, be self-aware when you review evaluations. Students are often very perceptive and if they say you really cared about them but were kind of disorganized, there is a pretty good chance you were disorganized. And if you’re aware of that, you’re going to be a good teacher. So, learn from your students, take what they say seriously, and let them help you become a better teacher, because just as we want them to succeed, they want us to succeed too.”

Open Education Story: Puja

Puja has, until recently when she moved into the Acting Associate Dean role in the School of Access, taught Math in both the Community Learning Partnership and the Academic Career Foundations programs. She is passionate about providing her students with access to free resources, especially since her programs are tuition free, and has adapted a combination of existing Open Textbooks for her courses. I was got to know Puja through the Open Ed Sustainability project where she worked to create an extensive math test bank in the MyOpenMath platform. Puja is also very generous with her time and her open resources, sharing them with colleagues across the college.

Puja, currently Acting Associate Dean of Access at Camosun College, has been here since 2008, starting as an instructional assistant in the math and upgrading help centres, then becoming an instructor in both the Community Learning Partnerships (CLP) and Academic Career Foundations (ACF) departments teaching upgrading mathematics and computer studies, as well as conducting math placement assessments for both CLP and ACF. But I know Puja best as a passionate champion of Open Education, working to provide her students, most of whom are in tuition-free programs, with free course materials. I interviewed her back in 2021 as part of a series of stories on the Open Sustainability project at Camosun, and last March she received a Camosun Open Education Recognition award, but I wanted to revisit her open work today.

Puja explained: “For a long time, I guided students to free online resources to support their learning because I didn’t want my students to pay to learn the basic things we were teaching. And in the fundamental Math upgrading courses, we used open textbooks. At the time, the texts we used had a few errors, but we were able to collaborate to improve them, and each term the materials got better. But while students in the fundamental courses didn’t have to pay for textbooks, once they moved up into higher levels, they were paying between $150 and $250 for a text. “It was ridiculous. Yes, some students could access Adult Upgrading Grant (AUG) funding and there were copies available for loan in our help centers, but not every student could take advantage of these options. I negotiated a lower price with the publisher of our textbook, but it was still not enough. We needed to find a way every student could access course resources for free. So, I talked with Sybil Harrison, then director of Learning Services, and she suggested looking at some open textbooks. At that time the idea was magical.” Puja spent a lot of time searching for the right open textbook. Some of the ones she found were American, lacking the Canadian context. Then in 2018, BCcampus awarded Camosun grant funding for open education, and Puja received some of that funding.

“I was doing a bit of this work off the side of my desk, but it’s hard when you’re working full-time. The grant meant I could finally focus on re-starting my hunt for an open textbook. The first one I found I quickly realized would not work for my students, but then I found another through our articulation group. This one had been authored by a colleague at another BC institution who knew the learning outcomes for our courses.” Puja filled in some gaps, made some corrections, and voila! She had an open textbook for her courses.

But since Puja taught online, she also wanted a platform where she could send my students to complete homework. That was when she discovered MyOpenMath, open platform where faculty can create and share math problems and students can complete them. “I was so pleased to find MyOpenMath. I had to learn a whole new coding language to use it, but it was worth it, and I’ve coded over 500 questions based on the open textbook I found. I can now also generate images – so if I give MyOpenMath the parameters, it randomly generates graphs and figures for the problems.”

One of the drivers behind Puja wanting to provide zero cost course resources for students in CLP is that CLP is a tuition-free program. “Students would ask, ‘Why should I pay for a textbook when the program is tuition free? It sounds like false advertising.’ In addition, I have worked in community with groups like the Bridges for Women’s Society and the Saanich Adult Education Centre (now W̱SÁNEĆ College) with students who don’t have access to additional funds for education – and for any student who wants to learn, textbook cost should never be a barrier to education.” The BCcampus grant helped Puja move towards her ultimate goal of having all the courses providing zero cost resources. “If I can make it work for one course, then we can do the others.”

I asked Puja what students say when they hear they don’t have to pay for textbooks. “Newer students don’t realize how amazing it is to not have to buy course materials – it’s normal for them. But my past students who struggled with those costs say that it’s a step in the right direction.” And when those students move on to other programs, they have some things to say about having to buy textbooks, which hopefully will encourage more instructors to move their courses to zero textbook cost.

I asked Puja how we can do better at Camosun to support faculty trying to engage in Open Education and move to zero cost course resources. “It has to come from the faculty members. There are many passionate faculty at the college doing quite a bit of work, and many others know about open textbooks and zero cost resources. They also know who to contact for support. So, the main thing is that faculty should be encouraged to take the risk. Use your Scheduled Development time if you’re a CCFA member – that’s perfect time to explore open textbooks. And often while you’re exploring, you’ll find something that you can use to supplement your courses.” In addition, Puja recommends the college find a way to provide course release for faculty members wanting to do this work because “everyone is so busy with their teaching responsibilities, and some faculty members may need additional support with the technical side of working with open resources.”

Finally, Puja says we need to listen to students. “When we hear directly from students about how they saved $200 on a textbook, and what they were able to do with that money, those are helpful conversations.” And she recommends we share those stories on our websites. “When faculty and others see real impact, they automatically want to do better for students.” And speaking of sharing, Puja says we also need faculty who are willing to share the work they have done. “If instructors see examples of high-quality open resources, and know that there is support available, they will come on board.”

One outcome of moving to open resources is the opportunity have students contribute to course resources in new and exciting ways. Puja said, “I’ve gathered about eight or ten questions developed by my students based on the topics they’re learning in class. I can put those questions in my textbook and give credit to the students who wrote them, so they see themselves in the textbooks. The parameters are that the questions need to be solvable, and that the students know the right answers.”

I wondered if, in her capacity as acting dean, Puja could share some ideas around how we can encourage college leadership to get more involved in open education initiative and support. “What we need to do is provide opportunities for collaboration, to encourage faculty and anyone who wants to learn about Open Education and give space for the work. If we can’t fund faculty ourselves, we should provide information about organizations that fund Open Ed work, so faculty can apply for grants or funds for developing OERs. We can also continue to recognize people engaging in Open Education work to encourage others to join in.” One other idea Puja had was for us to create space and workshops where faculty wanting to create and adapt open resources can come to work together. Of course, time is an eternal challenge for many faculty members, and while “continuing [CCFA] faculty have scheduled development time, we need to find ways to support term faculty to do this work as well.”

Puja also noted one other challenge that has come up in many conversations: the question of how students know if a course is zero textbook cost (ZTC). Currently there is no place to find this information at a glance, although Camosun is working on a course syllabus repository which would help, if ZTC information is included, and if the current version of the course uses the same materials. “We should provide clear information that a course is zero textbook cost. Then we could more easily track how many students register in that course because it is ZTC.”

But Puja also points out that simply having access to free course resources is not enough. “Students need access to a stable Internet connection, as well as a safe and quiet place to do their course work. And since they will incur printing costs if they prefer to have a hard copy of the resources, if we just provide the online textbook, we need to know if students have access to a free printer. There are so many layers to it.” But all we can do is keep moving forward in whatever way we can to reduce costs for students wherever possible.