The 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games offer great learning opportunities for post-secondary instructors and students during the build-up, the actual event and studying the post-Games impacts.

BCcampus, through its Online Program Development Fund (OPDF), is supporting E-Legacies, an online hub that is filled with information on ideas for study topics, current events, and resources that will be used to spark classroom discussions, projects, and research – all pertaining to the 2010 Winter Olympics.

“The Olympics is one of the biggest projects in this provinces’ history, yet we were aware that no one had thought about how to ensure all post-secondary students and instructors were able to get the maximum benefit from these learning opportunities,” said Terry Hood, of LinkBC, a network of 20 colleges and universities that offer hospitality and tourism education.

One of the key features of the site is 2010 Today Discussion Starters – a series of two-page modular learning resources available on a wide variety of topics surrounding the Olympics. The Discussion Starters are written in a journalistic style and are now available for instructors to introduce to their students across the province. They present information at an introductory level (within seven themes and 46 sub-themes) and spark inquiry, debate and critical thinking on an issue.

“We’ve been most pleased with the response from BC instructors who have discovered this site! It’s been great to see the innovative ways these online learning resources are being used,” said Hood.

This project has sparked the idea of the “Games learning legacies torch” being passed from one host country to the next. A network of UK universities is now studying the learning opportunities presented by the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. They have been watching the development of the E-Legacies Resources Hub with interest, and intend to adapt the e-Legacies website platform with their own resources for post-secondary studies in the UK around the 2012 Olympics.

In addition, discussions are now underway with academic colleagues in Russia to develop a comparable e-Legacies site for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

“This project gives BC’s post-secondary communities a unique opportunity to leverage support with other entities, like the UK colleges and universities, to deliver benefits to our students that wouldn’t be possible otherwise,” said Maynard Kirkpatrick, of Thompson Rivers University, E-Legacies project coordinator.