[Fall 2025 Workshop] – High-Impact, Low-Cost EdTech Schedule

Friday, October 31, 2025 (Online)

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Time

Session

9:30-9:35

Welcome

9:35-9:55

Networking & Socializing led by the SCETUG team

This is a collaborative activity and wall of wins where participants share what’s working well this semester. Edtech successes, unexpected wins, “aha moments” with digital tools, and resources worth recommending to colleagues. This space also welcomes reflections on technology frustrations that have been resolved, as well as personal interests like shows, books, or podcasts that help build community. Contributions can be shared directly or transcribed by an ETUG facilitator. It’s a place to connect with colleagues, exchange practical insights, ask questions, and discuss challenges and opportunities in educational technology.

10:00-10:20

Wahiba Chair & Elva Lee Fisher | Using Podcasts with AI Tools to Promote Reflective and Experiential Learning at No Cost

[Click to expand] Research shows that podcasts can enhance engagement and reflective learning in higher education (Kay, 2012; McGarr, 2021). This session demonstrates how to combine podcasts with AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude.AI to move students from listening to doin, at no additional cost. 

Using a case study from The Comms Major Podcast (co-hosted by the presenter), participants will explore how transcripts, guided prompts, and AI support can be adapted into high-impact, podcast-based experiential learning activities. Attendees will leave with practical tips, examples, and strategies for efficiently and effectively integrating podcasts with AI to promote students’ critical reflection and experiential learning.

Learning Outcomes

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

  1. Explain the evidence for podcasts as a teaching and learning tool.
  2. Identify strategies for creating reflective and experiential activities from podcast content.
  3. Apply AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude.AI) to design low-cost, high-impact, podcast-related activities. 
  • Wahiba Chair is an Assistant Professor at University Canada West
  • Elva Lee Fisher is a Research Associate at University Canada West

10:20-11:10

Elizabeth Childs & Robynne Devine | Co-Design with Us: BCcampus OpenGenAi Study Companion in the Making

[Click to expand] Join us for this interactive session as we explore the BCcampus Open GenAI project funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This is a three-year initiative focused on creating an AI-powered study companion that draws from the BCcampus OER collection. This tool will be designed to support student learning through various approaches, including dialogic learning methods.

In this session, attendees will gain insight into the goals and design principles of the Open GenAI project. Through a facilitated design conversation, attendees will engage with three design provocations:

  1. pedagogical principles for integrating artificial intelligence into post-secondary education;
  2. ethical considerations in this setting; and
  3. processes and frameworks to support capacity building.

These conversations will help to inform tool development and implementation and are part of a research project sharing the learning from this work back to the larger community. This interactive session is designed to foster an environment of openness, curiosity, and sharing of diverse perspectives on the use of AI in teaching and learning.

  • Elizabeth Childs is a Professor at Royal Roads University
  • Robynne Devine is a Senior Project Manager at BCcampus

11:10-11:20

BREAK

11:20-11:40

Vikas Menghwani | Building Immersive Learning Experiences Through Strategic Partnerships and Existing Resources

This project shares how a sustainability-focused virtual field trip was created through strategic collaboration rather than major funding. By leveraging intra-departmental camera equipment, institutional level visualization studio, and a small student-hiring grant, we produced an immersive VR tour of a biomass energy facility for undergraduate teaching. The project drew on cross-departmental expertise in media, engineering, and IT, demonstrating how internal partnerships can enable ambitious educational technology projects. There are practical insights on cost-sharing, collaborative workflows, and how to align diverse campus resources to support experiential learning in higher education.

  • Vikas Menghwani is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia Okanagan

11:40-12:00



Brian Lamb | User innovation toolkits: fast and cheap

The Learning Technology & Innovation team at Thompson Rivers University, in collaboration with the BC OpenETC, has been exploring ways to help educators, students, and researchers create more attractive, robust, and accessible websites in WordPress. This session will showcase practical techniques such as cloned starter sites and form-based authoring that enable rapid development of flexible, user-friendly sites.
We will also highlight new frameworks built on WordPress’s Full Site Editing themes and shareable Gutenberg block patterns that streamline design consistency and accessibility-focused practices. Showcasing recent examples from the OpenETC, TRUbox, and the TRU Open Press, and sharing adaptable strategies to rapidly launch and develop WordPress-based projects in the BC post-secondary system.

  • Brian Lamb is a Director Learning Technology & Innovation at Thompson Rivers University

12:00-12:45

LUNCH

12:45-1:05

Laraine Domingo | Teaching Through the Lens: Vlogs for Teaching and Learning

Go behind the scenes in this dynamic session exploring how educational vlogs can bring Social Learning Theory to life through observation and modeling. Discover practical strategies for creating impactful, low-cost video content that fosters engagement, reflection, and peer learning—no fancy equipment required.

  • Laraine Domingo is a Instructional Designer at Justice Institute British Columbia

1:05-1:25

Tania Elias & Jason Toal | Weaving Partnerships and Practices: Innovating with Open and Existing Tools

[Click to expand] Looking for ways to reuse, remix and leverage open tools? This session shares the story of the Digital Learning for Innovative Teaching (DLIT) website which is built on an an open-ETC hosted site and offers open resources that we’d love to share.

It contains a series of activity banks built to support digital learning among educators within and beyond the DLIT program. These activities reuse and remix openly licensed Open Education, Digital Literacy, genAI, UDL challenges developed by BCcampus and ETUG colleagues creating a one-stop shop for bite-sized, 15-minute PD activities open to all without logins or sign ups.

Participants will explore DLIT as a case study and get a chance to try out some of its activities. We will then discuss ways that we can stretch existing resources, remix OER.

Built to support a specific program, we also built it with the concept of “shared infrastructure” in mind. We would love to explore partnerships and support more educators at low/ no cost while building open, equitable learning ecosystems across BC and beyond.

  • Tanya Elias is a Manager, learning Design & Projects, Educational Technology Support Specialist at Vancouver Community College
  • Jason Toal is an Educational Technology Support Specialist at University of Victoria and a Visual & Digital Collaborator at Same Page Studio

1:25-1:45

Rebecca Short & Arianna Cheveldave | Marking OER: Building Transparency Into Course Registration

[Click to expand] In post-secondary systems where course registration is the gateway to students’ academic and financial decisions, transparency around course material costs is essential. Yet at many institutions, students are unable to identify which courses use open educational resources (OER) and low-cost textbooks until after registration, reinforcing hidden financial barriers and limiting informed choice.

This session shares the early stages and learning from a three-year, system-level initiative designed to improve the visibility and tracking of OER use across public post-secondary institutions. The project focuses on two core goals: enabling students to identify OER-based and low-textbook cost courses at the point of registration through standardized course markings, and developing a sustainable, automated approach to collecting and reporting OER adoption data. These efforts aim to strengthen both learner agency and institutional decision-making by reducing costs for students while increasing the availability of actionable data to guide institutional support, strategy, and growth in OER adoption.

The initiative includes strategic engagement with student groups to strengthen advocacy for course markings and build momentum for institutional change. It also emphasizes collaborative support for institutional change management, recognizing the technical, cultural, and operational challenges of implementing new system-wide practices. The initiative is grounded in voluntary, collaborative implementation, supporting institutions in developing context-specific solutions. Student groups are engaged as key advocacy partners, using their voices to push for transparency and institutional change from within.

The presentation will explore the early stages of the project and invite the audience to participate in brainstorming sessions and provide constructive feedback to support the success of the project. During the 50-minute session, a brief overview of the project will be given, then the audience will be put into break-out rooms to discuss provided questions, and using a tool, such as menti-meter, the audience will be asked to share feedback.

  • Rebecca Short is a Project Manager at BCcampus
  • Arianna Cheveldave is an Coordinator, Open Education at BCcampus

1:45-2:00

BREAK

2:00-2:20

Nicolai Gauer | WordPress as an ePortfolio platform

Together with the community we’ve tried to make WordPress easy to use as an ePortfolio platform. We’ve developed a site template that holds all the class/cohort’s student portfolios as author archives. It’s not PebblePad, but it’s working! We’ve developed granular privacy controls for private and public content, custom taxonomies for content types, categories and filter menus.

  • Nicolai Gauer is an Instructional Technologies Specialist at Teaching and Learning Centre at Emily Carr University of Art + Design

2:20-2:40

Paul Hibbits | What’s Been Cooking with the Open-Source Web Publishing Tool Docsify-This?

[Click to expand] With Markdown support expanding from AI tools to learning platforms and beyond, transform online Markdown files into styled webpages in seconds, or create entire websites – no hosting, no coding, no cost. Join open source author and former SFU instructor Paul Hibbitts for an interactive look at significant developments since 2023 that have made Docsify-This.net an even more capable OER publication and course content platform.

Discover new examples, templates and layouts, and load-and-go styling settings for seamless LMS
embedding. Driven by the six core design principles[1] of Docsify-This that enable rapid, flexible content sharing, explore recent features like custom image grids, presentation-optimized display settings for online sessions and workshops, URL parameter support for sharing styling configurations, and non-Docsify-This branded alias domains. This interactive session includes live demonstrations with provided examples which can be further explored after the session.

  1. Zero Setup and Maintenance Publishing, Separation of Content and Presentation, Platform Independence and Choice, Your Content Your Control, Support the 5 Rs of OER, and Authors Helping Other Authors
  • Paul Hibbits was a Sessional Instructor at Simon Fraser University and is now focusing on Paul Hibbits Design

2:40-2:50

Closing Remarks

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