There’s big buzz at BCcampus this fall

Welcome back! Over the summer, we took the time to plan, research and recharge and now we are ready to jump into the new term ahead of us with a lot of notable events and exciting things to share. From workshops to webinars, new tools and reports – keep your eyes on our channels to see the many great things we have in store for you.

Welcome back
Each of our core services has something new and unique up their sleeves for the fall, but here’s a quick taste to pique your interests:

BCcampus

We are growing! With the increase in collaborative projects, demand for accessible open resources, and successful teaching and learning events, BCcampus continues to bring in contract positions to ensure we have the right complement of staff. We will continue to work with our advisory bodies to determine how BCcampus can best serve the post-secondary sector in B.C.

Stay tuned for more exciting things from BCcampus, such as:

2015/16 BCcampus Annual Review
Announcement of the next Festival of Learning
BCcampus Web Properties Consolidation Project

Collaborative Projects

We are honoured to have two new members join BCcampus’ Collaborative Projects:

Kathreen Riel, Project Manager and Researcher for a three year early years pilot project developing and researching ways to engage professionals with learning opportunities in the early years sector in B.C.
Dianne Biin, Project Manager and Content Developer for the Indigenization Project that will develop open educational learning resources which will be available to post-secondary faculty and staff to increase their awareness and understanding of Aboriginal histories, cultures and perspectives as well as to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and being into their professional practice.

EdTech

EdTech Demos

September 26 at 9am (PDT) – H5P – an open source HTML 5 authoring tool for creating rich, interactive learning materials. H5P is a plugin that works with Moodle, Drupal and WordPress. Sign up today!
Brightspace from D2L – end of October (Date TBD).

Conferences

Clint Lalonde, Manager, Educational Technologies will be attending the 2016 Information Summit in Vancouver on September 22, 2016.
He will also be attending EDUCAUSE in Anaheim from October 25-28, 2016 to learn more about Next Generation Digital Learning Environments. He will be blogging his takeaways from this conference and sharing it with our communities.

We will be starting an EdTech sandbox project with 5 institutions for an open source tool called Guide on the Side.

Open Education

We’re super excited to announce a milestone of $2 million in student savings through the B.C. Open Textbook Project, with 23 of 25 public post-secondary institutions in B.C. using open textbooks.

To ensure our open textbooks meet accessibility guidelines, we’ve added a new co-op position and are happy to have Josie Gray join our team from UVic.

We’ve added a new set of instructional videos to accompany the Concepts of Biology 1st Canadian Edition. Please take a look and share them with your networks.

New open textbooks coming this fall:

Greek and Latin Roots for Science and Social Sciences (new)- UVic
Knowing Home: Aboriginal knowledge and science education research (new) – UVic
Principles of Microeconomics: OpenStax (adaptation) – UVic

The BC Open Educational Practices (BCOEP), a group of Instructional Designers who are interested in promoting open practices at their own institutions, will be having their first meeting this fall. At their first meeting, the BCOEP will be discussing how to work collaboratively to devise and share strategies to support the use of quality OER in innovative teaching practice across institutions.

Check out the new and exciting OER projects accepted through the Hewlett Grants. Thanks to the overwhelming OER grant proposal interest, we will be re-opening the call for proposals in July 2017. Stay tuned.

If you are an administrator at a post-secondary institution, please join us for:

The Open Education Strategy Forum for Administrators
When: October 6, 2016, from 10:00 am – 3:00 pm
Where: BCIT Atrium
Presenters: Amanda Coolidge and Rosario Passos, BCcampus, Cable Green, Creative Commons and Daniel DeMarte, Tidewater Community College
Pre-registration is required

Professional Learning

We will be bringing more opportunities to participate in Liberating Structures workshops, visual practice sessions and other in-demand offerings. You can expect to see other teaching and learning events return this Fall and next Spring.

Hold the date for Friday, October 28th for the ETUG 2016 Fall Workshop in Vancouver. A must-attend event for members of the EdTech community. The Call for Proposals will be coming out very soon so please keep your eyes on etug.ca for updates.

New offerings!

Join us for our latest Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) and Facilitator Development Online (FDO) sessions and stay tuned for our Designing Learning Online pilot coming this fall:

September 26, 2016 – October 28, 2016 – Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) – Fundamentals – Through participation in this 5-week online workshop, you will develop the skills needed to effectively facilitate learning in online environments.
November 7, 2016 – November 18, 2016 – Facilitator Development Online (FDO) – This course is about learning how to co-facilitate the FLO, which is itself a course about learning how to facilitate online learning more effectively.
NEW! Designing Learning Online pilot (more info to come).

As you can see, we have many activities going on this year and we encourage you to connect and join us for as many as you can.