December can be a busy time of year in post-secondary education. Final papers and exams need to be marked, and holiday preparation notches up the stress levels. Amid the chaos, we’ve taken some time to look back in time to what was happening on bccampus.ca a year ago.

We reported the 2013 Managing Online Education Survey by WCET (with help from BCcampus) revealed 85% of responding institutions have implemented some form of standards or best practices in online courses. Institutions are applying lessons learned from other online providers to improve the student experience.

We told you how Dr. David Vogt of the University of British Columbia created a LOOC (Local Open Online Course) to help its community members increase and promote their digital literacy skills. Enrolling in the digital literacy LOOC will help students get better grades and give them a real-life skill to put on their resumes. For example, instead of just being a law grad, they could be a law grad who is also an expert in social media marketing.

We touched base with UBC’s Oliver Gruter-Andrew about a “cloud” email service just for the B.C. post-secondary system. Through BCNET, UBC and other institutions are working through a number of challenges around security, privacy, set-up, configuration, and licensing of hosted email services. They hoped to be in a position to host email for interested B.C. institutions sometime in 2014.