- July 17, 2024 from 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
- July 31, 2024 from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
- August 14, 2024 from 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
- August 21, 2024 from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Register now!
About the Session
Join us for this exciting Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) session in partnership with Vancouver Island University. 
Jessica Gemella and Anwen Burk are curriculum, teaching, and learning specialists with the Centre for Innovation in Education and Learning (CIEL) at Vancouver Island University (VIU). Responding to faculty requests on how best to use emerging technologies in their classroom, Jessica built a digital literacy toolkit. Anwen was subsequently invited to collaborate on expanding it.
The result? A toolkit designed to support higher education professionals to facilitate conversations on the ethical use of digital technologies for meaningful collaborations within digital communities. Specifically, this toolkit aims to support faculty in collaboratively creating class agreements addressing issues such as ethical digital technology use, netiquette, and digital citizenship, all in service of maintaining overall well-being.
This toolkit helps learning communities to:
- Consider the ethical and legal implications of collecting and disseminating digital information
- Assess the risks and benefits of having an online presence
- Establish healthy limits with technology to maintain well-being
- Engage in meaningful communication and collaboration with digital communities
- Explore how digital tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) can extend teaching and learning opportunities
The overarching goal is to make this digital literacy toolkit adaptable for widespread adoption. As such, it will be available to reuse and adapt.
Join us for this free one-hour virtual FLO session! You will participate in a co-creation activity and be asked to reflect on the process and the outcomes. Participants will be invited to start thinking about how they could use the toolkit at their institutions and how it could be adapted for their use.
Register now!
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 in this session will be recorded and the recording will be openly available.
About the Facilitators
Your FLO facilitators for this FLO Friday session will be Anwen Burk and Jessica Gemella.
Anwen Burk (she/her) is a curriculum, teaching and learning specialist at VIU’s Nanaimo campus. She is particularly interested in how technology can be leveraged to make learning more flexible, accessible, and human centered. She previously worked at the University of Alberta as an instructor and as digital learning consultant, and at Red Deer Polytechnic as an instructional designer. She lives on the traditional and unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation with her husband and her cat.
Jessica Gemella (she/her) is a curriculum, teaching, and learning specialist (CTLS) at VIU, situated on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples including the Snuneymuxw, Snaw-Naw-As, Quw’utsun, and Tla’amin. Jessica has a background in teaching horticulture and has also served as VIU’s trades and applied technology CTLS. With a commitment to enhancing the quality of digital education, Jessica is pursuing a Master of Arts in Learning and Technology at Royal Roads University. Her research interests centre on building resilience in higher education, faculty development, and digital literacy.
About the Session:
This event is a part of the OER Production Series.
In open education, the goal is to increase access to education by changing the way we think about knowledge. Instead of bundling knowledge in an expensive textbook or putting it behind a paywall, open education sees knowledge as a public good that should be freely available to everyone to learn from, build on, and customize for their own purposes. In this session, we will explore open education as a philosophy and consider the benefits of open educational resources (OER). We will explore how to find, use, and share OER. We will discuss copyright and Creative Commons licences, look at examples of OER, explore OER collections, and identify ways to get started in using OER.
To view the other events in this series, visit OER Production Series.
Register now!
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 Facilitator:
Josie Gray (she/her) is the manager of open education at BCcampus. She has eight years of experience navigating the technical, legal, and practical elements of creating and adapting OER, including Pressbooks, accessibility, copyright, and open licences. Josie brings an equity-informed lens to the design and creation of OER, and her expertise is further bolstered by her Master of Design in Inclusive Design from the Ontario College of Art & Design University.
About the Session:
This event is a part of the OER Production Series and represents part one in our exploration of accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in open educational resources (OER).
In this webinar, we will introduce how to design OER that meets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We describe the principles behind WCAG, introduce assistive technologies, and explain how to create accessible tables, images, videos, audio, links, and math equations. By creating educational materials with accessibility in mind, we can ensure these resources are more useful, powerful, and accessible to all.
To view the other events in this series, visit OER Production Series.
Register now!
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 Facilitator:
Arianna Cheveldave (she/her) is a coordinator on the Open Education Team at BCcampus. Since 2018, she has been dedicated to enhancing accessibility in educational materials. She finds joy in educating others on strategies to ensure educational resources cater to the needs of all learners.
About the Session:
This event, part of the OER Production Series, is the first of two sessions discussing how to use Pressbooks to create and share open educational resources (OER). We will introduce Pressbooks and show you how to create and share OER with students and fellow educators. Pressbooks is an online self-publishing tool available to all post-secondary faculty and staff in B.C. and the Yukon. Topics include how to create an account, how to create a book in Pressbooks, and an overview of the Pressbooks editor. The webinar will also introduce such topics as creating math equations using MathJax, importing content, H5P, and sharing books in multiple formats.
To view the other events in this series, visit OER Production Series.
Register now!
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 Facilitator:
Harper Friedman (he/him) is the coordinator of Open Textbook Publishing at BCcampus, helping to create OER, primarily in Pressbooks. Through this work he has developed his knowledge of Pressbooks and LaTeX as well as accessibility best practices.
About the Session:
This event is a part of the OER Production Series and represents part two of our exploration of Pressbooks, an online self-publishing tool available to all post-secondary faculty and staff in B.C. and the Yukon. This webinar will explore various advanced features of Pressbooks. Attendees will get to see a Pressbooks web book edited in real time to demonstrate complex Pressbooks topics in a hands-on way. Topics included are basic H5P, LaTeX, adding users and user roles, internal links and anchors, footnotes, the glossary tool, importing content, and custom styles. To view the other events in this series, visit OER Production Series.
Register now!
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 Facilitator:
Arianna Cheveldave (she/her) is a coordinator on the Open Education Team at BCcampus. Since 2019, she has contributed publications to Pressbooks, and has picked up some valuable skills along the way. Arianna enjoys sharing her expertise and addressing inquiries about Pressbooks through open@bccampus.ca.
About the Session:
This event in the OER Production Series is part two of our exploration of accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in open educational resources (OER). In this session, we build on what we know about technical accessibility to explore how to go beyond minimum accessibility requirements. We dig into concepts like the social model of disability and how UDL can be applied in the design of OER. We explore multimodality as well as the benefits, challenges, and considerations of digital versus print formats. The session will include concrete examples and opportunities to apply learning.
To view the other events in this series, visit OER Production Series.
Register now!
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 Facilitator:
Harper Friedman (he/him) is a coordinator of Open Textbook Publishing at BCcampus, helping to create OER, primarily in Pressbooks. As part of his work, Harper has been learning and teaching about accessibility best practices in OER and making educational resources more accessible for a greater variety of students.
Session Description:
Join us for a short drop-in session to explore how alternative format textbooks and course materials are provided to students. You will also gain valuable tips on how to improve the accessibility of your classroom materials.
Agenda:
- Introduction to the Accessible British Columbia Act and how course materials are addressed in the education standards from other jurisdictions
- Presentation on the accessibility features of alternative format course materials
- Examples of common accessibility issues in course materials and how they cause problems for assistive technologies
- Question and answer period.
Register Now!
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 Facilitator
Your Facilitator for this session will be Jennifer Weldon.
Jennifer (she/her) is the accessibility librarian at the Centre for Accessible Post-secondary Education Resources BC (CAPER-BC). CAPER-BC provides accessible learning and teaching materials to students and instructors at post-secondary institutions in B.C. who cannot use conventional print because of disabilities. Jennifer is responsible for outreach activities, providing accessibility training to faculty at post-secondary institutions, and for overseeing special projects.
About the Session:
Educators have described their classes and institutions as “safe spaces” with increasing frequency and certainty since the 1990s. This certainty, implying that a safe space is somehow better for learning outcomes, has been widely adopted with little critical consideration of what it truly means and what is expected when an educational space is labeled “safe”.
Join this free one-hour Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) discussion, exploring “safe space” as an educational metaphor unconsciously communicating both explicit and implicit expectations about the nature of teaching and learning relationships.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Recognize “safe space” as an educational metaphor
- Explain their obligations to others when they welcome them to a safe space
- Identify the implicit promises others make when a place or situation is labeled a safe space
Register Now!
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 Facilitator:
Your FLO Friday Facilitator for this session will be Bhuvinder Vaid.
Bhuvinder Singh Vaid (he/him/his) is a philosopher of education and an educational developer at the Centre for Teaching Excellence at Capilano University. Bhuvinder’s nearly two decades of work in higher education and consultancy with subject-matter experts are informed by his recognition that teaching and learning exist as uniquely relational practices that are not easily standardized. This understanding has informed his work studying the positionality of seemingly straightforward educational concepts such as safe spaces, efficiency, free speech, and most recently, how to pedagogically engage with Coast Salish canoe stories. You can reach him at bhuvindervaid@capilanou.ca.
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:
Your FLO Facilitator for this FLO Lab is Randeep Nota.
Randeep (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.