Events

About the Lab

Learning Outcomes

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The British Columbia Open Education Community (BCOEC) welcomes members from the post-secondary sector in British Columbia and the Yukon. This community convenes monthly in virtual gatherings, fostering an environment for sharing insights, providing support, and engaging in discussions about the challenges, best practices, and current issues within open education. 

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Recordings and transcripts available from past meetings: B.C. Open Education Community (Playlist)

About the Session

This session explores innovative approaches to challenging colonial narratives through digital embodied story practices and research-creation methodologies. 

Discover how traditional sm̓iʔmay̓ (Syilx) storytelling intersects with cutting-edge digital technologies to create powerful new forms of Indigenous expression and resistance. Belanger will share insights from her groundbreaking research, demonstrating how digital platforms can be harnessed to preserve Indigenous knowledge, promote cultural resurgence, and imagine Indigenous futures. This session offers a unique opportunity to explore the potential of digital storytelling in decolonizing narratives and creating space for Indigenous voices in the digital realm. Participants will gain valuable perspectives on bridging ancestral wisdom with modern technology, and will learn about the transformative power of Indigenous futurisms in challenging dominant cultural narratives. Whether you’re an academic, artist, storyteller, or simply interested in the intersection of Indigenous culture and digital innovation, this session promises to be both informative and inspiring. 

Speaker

Mariel Belanger is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in cultural studies at Queen’s University, whose research focuses on “Storytelling sm̓iʔmay̓ Futurisms from the Digital Frontier.” As an Indigenous scholar and artist, Belanger’s work challenges colonial narratives through innovative digital storytelling practices and research-creation methodologies. Her groundbreaking approach combines traditional sm̓iʔmay̓ (Syilx) storytelling with futuristic digital technologies, creating a unique space for Indigenous voices in the digital realm. Belanger’s research explores how digital embodied story practices can serve as powerful tools for decolonization and cultural revitalization. Through her work, Mariel Belanger is not only preserving and promoting Indigenous knowledge systems but also reimagining her place in our increasingly digital world. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges the gap between ancestral wisdom and cutting-edge technology, paving the way for new forms of Indigenous expression and resistance in the digital age. 

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This session will be recorded, archived, and made available publicly on BCcampus.ca. By participating in this session, you acknowledge you are aware your participation will be recorded and the recording will be openly available.

About the Series

The BCcampus Winter 2025 Research Speaker Series offers participants and presenters an opportunity to learn and share knowledge and advocacy on research methods, approaches, and pedagogies around accessibility, access, Indigenous engagement, and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in teaching and learning.   

These livestream webinars take place every month from January to March and will allow you to learn about new research directly from the researchers.  

Sessions

1. January 21, 2025 – Storytelling sm̓iʔmay̓ Futurisms from the Digital Frontier. Challenging Colonial Narratives through a Digital Embodied Story Practice and Research-Creation, Mariel Belanger, Queen’s University 
2. February 25, 2025 – Transparent, Detailed, Ethical: An Introduction to the Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework, Kari D. Weaver, University of Waterloo Libraries 
3. March 11, 2025 – Engaging in Great Practices for Research on Teaching and Learning, Brett McCollum, Thompson Rivers University

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this series, participants will be able to:  

1. Broaden your knowledge and research skills in the B.C. post-secondary context.  
2. Learn about Indigenization, EDI, decolonization, and accessibility in research.  
3. Be inspired to participate in research communities of practice or explore the themes in your work.  
4. Connect with academics and community members who share your interests.   

About the Session

In this hands-on sandbox session, you will create a hypothes.is account and trial public, group and review LMS embedded activities. We will discuss how hypothes.is helps engage students in exploratory reading, provides informal opportunities for sharing personal experience, and highlights misinformation. We will demonstration how AI can be used to enhance and generate social interaction prompts.

In this Sandbox workshop, we will explore how to:   

• enhance a sense of belonging for students in online and in-person courses  
• develop effective writing prompts using AI 
• annotate videos and images  
• show examples of co-create knowledge through annotated readings  
• use hypothes.is in multiple use-cases
• discuss rubrics for assessing student work 

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This session will be recorded, archived, and made available publicly on BCcampus.ca. By participating in this session, you acknowledge you are aware your participation may be recorded and the recording will be openly available.

About the Facilitators

Julia Grav (she/her) is an entrepreneur in the Victoria technology sector, managing a web development and design business for over 10 years. She actively consults with small businesses, not-for-profits, and NGOs to improve their branding, optimization, increase their web presence, and build customized website applications. 

She began teaching at Camosun College in 2014 in the Department of Computer Science and is now a new faculty instructor in the School of Business, Applied Business Technology. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Concordia University and spent three years teaching in Turkey. In 2017, Julia graduated from Simon Fraser University with a Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction. 

Julia’s teaching philosophy aligns with the principles of Universal Design for Learning, bringing learning science and inclusivity into the forefront of her classroom. She emphasizes choice and autonomy, along with multiple, reiterative low-stakes assignments, to enhance her students’ learning experience. By offering timely feedback highlighting effort, and including positive strategies for future success, Julia encourages her students to build and develop their mastery in technology. 

Emily Schudel (she/her) is an instructional designer in the eLearning unit of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Camosun College and has over 25 years’ experience. She has worked with faculty to enhance their courses with technology, taught blended courses combining face-to-face with online technologies, and delivered distance education using synchronous technologies (such as narrow-cast satellite, web-conferencing, audio-conferencing, and tele-conferencing) and asynchronous technologies (like D2L). Recently, Emily became Creative Commons certified and now collaborates with faculty on open education projects, using WordPress, Pressbooks, H5P and other open platforms.   

In her spare time, Emily enjoys hanging out with husband, Kevin, and their many kitties, as well as photography, blogging, walking, meditation, and creative writing. 

About the Series

Discover the BCcampus EdTech Sandbox Series, workshops empowering educators, learning designers, and graduate students in B.C.’s post-secondary institutions to explore, experiment with, and evaluate cutting-edge tools for enhancing teaching excellence and student success. Aligned with the B.C. Post-Secondary Digital Literacy Framework, this program emphasizes a support technology perspective, encouraging open-mindedness, curiosity, troubleshooting skills, and the selection of appropriate tools for work and study.

Focus Areas for 2024-2025:

• The AI Sandbox: A space dedicated to experimenting with, and reviewing, artificial intelligence (AI)-based learning technologies. 
• The No-Go EdTech Sandbox: A space aimed at examining learning technologies educators, students, and staff should avoid using in teaching and learning, and why.  

In these two-hour live streamed webinars, expert leaders will introduce and demonstrate cutting-edge, open, and free, or low-cost educational technology tools.  

By actively participating in these sandbox sessions, participants will experiment with tools, work with fellow educators to review features of the tools, gain insights into teaching activities, and discover ways to integrate these tools into courses.  

Recordings of the presentations and reviews of the tools will be available on our website following the event. 

EdTech Sandbox Series Sessions

1. September 18, 2024 — Beyond Surveillance: The Case Against AI Detection and AI Proctoring, Ian Linkletter, BCIT
2. October 16, 2024 — Learning Design with ChatGPT: Implications for AI Literacy, Hajime Kataoka, University of Victoria
3. November 6, 2024 — Design Smarter: Harnessing Canva’s AI for Enhanced Educational Outcomes, Prabhjot (Prab) Bhamra, University of Toronto
4. January 22, 2025 — Exploratory Learning: Effectively Integrating AI with Hypothesis, Julia Grav and Emily Schudel, Camosun College
5. February 26, 2025 — Exploring Animaker for Teaching and Learning, Maryam Safa Schneider

Session Description

Join us for a one-hour webinar to learn how you can grow your expertise in copyright law through Creative Commons.  

Creative Commons (CC) is an international non-profit organization that empowers people to grow and sustain the thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture needed to address the world’s most pressing challenges. Its CC Certificate program offers in-depth courses about CC licenses, open practices, and the ethos of the commons.

Content creators, writers, educators, librarians, staff, and graduate students in B.C. and Yukon post-secondaries are eligible for a 15% discount towards registration for CC Certificate training for training sessions offered June 2025. 

Save the date for this webinar to learn more, ask questions about this opportunity, and hear how colleagues who have completed this training are applying their knowledge. 

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This session will be recorded, archived, and made available publicly on BCcampus.ca. By participating in this session, you acknowledge you are aware your participation will be recorded and the recording will be openly available.

Panelists

Jennryn Wetzler (she/her) is the director of learning and training at Creative Commons and oversees its training programs, including the Creative Commons Certificate program, which has served over 68 countries. Jennryn manages CC’s open education platform: a community group of open education advocates around the world. She also manages CC’s open journalism efforts, and consulting work. Jennryn enjoys focusing on projects that increase equitable access to information, believing that journalism and education are pillars of any democracy, and essential human rights.

Donna Langille (she/they) lives and works as an uninvited settler on the unceded traditional territory of the Syilx Okanagan peoples. They are the open education librarian, as well as the subject liaison librarian for film studies, theatre, media studies, and the digital humanities at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO). They completed the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program in 2021.

Christina Hendricks (she/her) is a professor of teaching and academic director of the centre for teaching, learning, and technology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver campus. She has been an open education practitioner, advocate, and researcher for over ten years, and completed the CC Certificate program for educators in 2018. Christina has worked with others to design and facilitate a few open online courses and is the series editor for a set of open textbooks for Introduction to Philosophy courses.

Session Description

In this session, we will explore how to create and review PDFs for accessibility. The session will reinforce the importance of ensuring documents are accessible before converting them to PDFs and will cover the remediation process. We will also discuss tools that can review PDFs for accessibility and how PDFs can be a barrier to learners. 

Learning Outcomes: 

• Explain elements of Word or PowerPoint documents that can become accessibility barriers 
• Use Adobe to review PDFs for accessibility 

What to Bring: 

• A Word or PowerPoint document you wish to make into a PDF, or a PDF file you have already created 

Agenda: 

1. Outlining how to create and review PDFs for accessibility 
2. Use Word, PowerPoint, or Adobe Acrobat to review the accessibility of files 
3. Participant questions and next steps 

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About the Facilitator

Your facilitator for this session will be Ann Gagné. 

Ann (she/her) is a queer settler with invisible and dynamic disabilities, passionate about increasing awareness of accessible pedagogy and resources to include disabled learners. She has been working in higher education for almost 20 years.  With an interdisciplinary educational background, Ann has used her training and experience in her roles as an instructional designer, curriculum developer, and educational developer. 

Accessibility Bites Series

Accessibility Bites: Plain Language, September 26, 2024

Accessibility Bites: Supporting Students who are Blind or with Low Vision, October 31, 2024

Accessibility Bites: Supporting Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, November 28, 2024

Accessibility Bites: PDF Documents, January 30, 2025

Accessibility Bites: Video Accessibility, February 27, 2025

To access resources and watch past Accessibility Bites webinars, visit media.bccampus.ca.

About the Session

The trend of offering more programs online reflects a lasting shift in the education system. Enabled by technological advances and fueled by students’ demand for flexible learning options, globalized education is now more accessible. However, Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) environments present unique challenges for both learners and educators. Join us for a discussion on effective strategies for facilitating COIL.   

 While the session will primarily focus on teaching considerations, we will also explore strategies for curriculum development. The main goal is to share insights, lessons learned, and practical approaches to addressing the unmet needs of COIL students.   

Learning Outcomes  

• Analyze the value of COIL for both learners and facilitators  

• Identify and propose solutions to common challenges faced by remote, international student teams  

• Evaluate various approaches to facilitating effective collaborative learning  

• Discuss assignments and lecture topics that set teams up for success in cross-cultural collaboration  

• Evaluate the use of technology to support remote collaboration and address digital accessibility issues  

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This notice is to inform you that this session will be recorded, archived, and made available publicly on BCcampus.ca. By participating in this session, you acknowledge that your participation in this session may be recorded and the recording will be made available openly.

About the Facilitator

Your FLO Facilitator for this session is Alison Foo, MSc, PMP.   

Alison (she/her/they) teaches remote clinical research capstone courses at McMaster University Continuing Education and Seneca College. She is also a career, communication, and leadership coach. Her mission is to foster healthy environments by empowering empathetic leadership and creating inclusive, safe, and collaborative spaces. She has experience working with students (high school to graduate), newcomers, marginalized communities, and professionals from various industries. When she’s not working or volunteering, she naps with her rescue dog, watches Asian TV, and dreams of never grading assignments again. 

Event Description

This Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) MicroCourse will assist participants in managing technology’s impact on the spiritual, emotional, physical, or mental health of themselves and their students. Participants will learn tools for setting healthy boundaries with technology, using those boundaries intentionally, and teaching students to avoid using digital technologies in ways that cause harm. This two–day course offers participants the opportunity to reflect on their own digital well-being, the well-being of learners, and how this work can contribute to the broader journey of reconciliation. 

Learning Outcomes

Successful participants will gain an appreciation of digital well-being by: 

• Managing technology through actively implementing strategies for spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental health 

• Understanding digital literacy as using digital technology intentionally and setting healthy boundaries  

• Modeling and teaching digital well-being 

Participants can expect to dedicate approximately 60 minutes per day for five days to learning and activities.  

Course Logistics

Asynchronous  

When: February 3–February 7, 2025  

Platform: Moodle Synchronous  

While most of the learning will happen asynchronously, we will offer two optional synchronous sessions in Zoom: 

• Monday February 3, 2025: 3:00–4:00 p.m.  
• Friday February 7, 2025: 9:00–10:00 a.m.  

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This session will be recorded, archived, and made available publicly on BCcampus.ca. By participating in this session, you acknowledge you are aware your participation will be recorded and the recording will be openly available. 

About the Facilitators 

Your FLO Facilitators will be Connie Strayer and Robyn Grebliunas.  

Connie (she/her) is both Métis and German. With gratitude, she acknowledges the Qualicum and Snaw-Na- Was First Nations on whose ancestral lands she lives, works, and plays. Connie is an educational developer and Indigenous relationship specialist, as well as a regular collaborator with BCcampus. Through a student-centred and decolonized approach to this work, she strives to create systemic change within post-secondary spaces and increase mental health literacy and skills for educators, students, and community members. Connie has had the honour of working under the teachings of many Indigenous Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and colleagues in many of B.C.’s First Nations Communities; these relationships and teachings have influenced her approach to education.  

Robyn (she/her) is both Métis and Lithuanian. With appreciation, she acknowledges the Okanagan and Syilx First Nations on whose ancestral lands she lives, works, and plays. Robyn specializes in Indigenous adult education and communication. She is honoured to collaborate with BCcampus on Indigenous education. Robyn is grateful for the many years she has spent working in public and private Indigenous post-secondary education. She is passionate about creating online education learning experiences for adult learners. She has a master’s degree in professional communications, with research embedded in creating relationship efficacy in the digital realm, a helpful tool. Robyn carries an educational philosophy of traditional grassroots learning with a belief in two-way learning and strength-based learning. Robyn has had the honour of working under the teachings of many Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers and in many First Nations Communities in B.C. and Alberta; this opportunity has greatly influenced her approach to education. 

About the Session

Do you want to create a learning environment that considers the diverse lived experiences of your students? In this three-hour Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) Lab session, we will start by exploring current frameworks for course design (such as Universal Design for Learning and quality assurance) and determine what is “missing” with these frameworks from an equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) perspective. We will then explore at least two different approaches to incorporate principles of EDI into the course design and development process. We will conclude with space for critical reflection and co-creation of strategies for implementing these changes.

This session will be beneficial for anyone who is interested in moving away from the status quo in course design and becoming an agent of change!  

Please note: This session will not be recorded. Registrants should plan to attend the full three hours for an optimal learning experience.  

Learning Objectives 

 By the end of the session, participants will be able to:  

• Explain shortcomings of existing approaches or frameworks to course design from an EDI perspective  
• Discuss the challenges they may encounter in their current course design process from an individual, interpersonal, and institutional perspective, and how to overcome them  
• Reflect on how to apply a critical, collaborative and wholistic approach to their course design and development process 

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About the Facilitator

Randeep Nota (she/her) is a second-generation Punjabi settler. She is a consultant whose work comprises educational development and program and policy reviews. She is concurrently pursuing her PhD at the University of Toronto, focused on work, learning, and social change. Randeep has experience working in post-secondary institutions in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario in various teaching, staff, and management roles. She has researched and presented nationally and internationally on topics including anti-racism policies and practices in the post-secondary sector; incorporating equity, diversity, and inclusion practices in course design; the internationalization of higher education; the use of technology in post-secondary teaching and learning; and the (un)ethical use of surveillance in learning. Prior to her work as an educational consultant, Randeep provided pedagogical consultations for credit and non-credit, online and hybrid courses, and worked on program development, and quality assurance reporting for diploma and degree-granting programs.