[Spring Workshop 2024] Digital Literacy Today – Schedule

Time

Session

7:45 – 9:00

Registration & Breakfast

• Breakfast Deli Platter: Assortment of Ham, Prosciutto, Emmental, Applewood Cheddar, Provolone, Sliced Hard Boiled Eggs and Tomatoes (NF)
• Assorted Breads
• Assorted Greek Yogurt (GF, Veg, DF)
• Pitchers of Apple and Orange Juice
• Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Decaf Coffee, and Tea

Dietary requests will be provided

9:00 – 9:20

Territory Acknowledgement

Sialtinot (English name: Reeva Billy) is from the Squamish, Yale, and Nuxalk nations. Born and raised in Squamish traditional territory, her family is known for dugout war canoe building and racing. She has been racing in these canoes for 20 years, and as a teenager started helping her father and brother build and renovate dugout war canoes. However, she found her strength in the administrative aspects of the North Vancouver Canoe Club, taking on the roles of; grant writer, treasurer, and spokesperson. 

Recently, Reeva has taken on the role of the Community Programs Assistant with the First Nations House of Learning at UBC. She spends her week supporting the administration and facilitation of programming and events at the UBC Longhouse. She will soon be spending every weekend canoe racing with her family.

9:20 – 9:30

Amanda Coolidge | BCcampus welcome

9:30 – 10:00

Amanda Coolidge | Looking to the Horizon: Emerging Trends in Post-Secondary Education

The landscape of British Columbia’s post-secondary education sector is evolving, shaped by innovative approaches and a commitment to student success. As a leader in navigating these changes, BCcampus advances teaching and learning practices through our understanding of the wider context of post-secondary education and through collaboration with post-secondary institutions and partners in the province.

In advance of a strategic planning retreat at the beginning of the year, I researched emerging trends shaping the future of post-secondary education in B.C. and in the country overall to provide context and frame our thinking. The resulting environmental scan reveals a focus not only on educational structures and practices but also on wider issues of the climate crisis and student wellness. Some trends, like uncertainty around international students and the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence in higher education, are already top of mind for people in the post-secondary sector.

In this session, I will share findings from the environmental scan and discuss ways in which institutions can approach responding to the trends and also share how BCcampus is working towards a strategic approach for the sector.

• Amanda Coolidge is the Executive Director at BCcampus

10:00 – 10:30

Jo Axe, Rebeca Wilson-Mah, Ken Jeffery | Breaking with tradition: The digital teaching case flipbook

Teaching cases are a popular pedagogy in business and management studies. Typically presented in a traditional print style in black and white, the presentation of teaching cases tend to follow a conventional format. In this session, we will share an example of a recently written teaching case that is presented in a dynamic digital PDF flipbook including embedded images, audio and links. Working with the Centre for Teaching and Educational Technologies at Royal Roads University, the presenters will share their experiences with this project, some examples of traditional case presentation, and the flip book example. While the digital flipbook engages students with colour, imagery, and flippable pages, the audio recording embedded in the flip book improves accessibility for the visually impaired or differently abled. Digital flipbooks offer more accessible learning materials and are a positive advancement for the future presentation of teaching cases.

• Jo Axe is a Professor in the School of Education and Technology at Royal Roads University
• Rebeca Wilson-Mah is an Associate Professor in the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at Royal Roads University
• Ken Jeffery is the Associate Director, Learning and Design for the Centre for Teaching and Educational Technologies at Royal Roads University

10:30 – 11:10

Morning Break

• Assorted Baked Goods
• Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Decaf Coffee, and Tea

Dietary requests will be provided

11:10 – 11:35

Randeep Nota | There’s too Much Tech and I Don’t Know Where to Start! Peer Sharing as Professional Development

Do you feel overwhelmed with the number of professional development opportunities and learning resources available online on how to improve your digital literacy? Are you not sure where or how to start incorporating digital literacy into your teaching or professional work? Are you simply curious about how to infuse some fun into professional development? In this short presentation, hear how a group of colleagues across the country, working in a variety of roles in post-secondary, came together in an informal and nonjudgmental environment to share successful (and some not so successful) practices in improving their digital literacy skills. You will also leave the session with resources about why and how this approach to improving your digital literacy skills might work for you!

• Randeep Nota is an Educational Consultant (freelance) and a PhD student at the University of Toronto

11:35 – 12:00

Glenn Groulx | Developing Connected Writing Using Obsidian

Obsidian is a Personal Knowledge System (PKS) useful for students to connect their ideas to active learning by using markdown language (ml) for capturing ideas, note-taking, annotating, linking notes, adding photos and audio files and tagging collections of ideas. This demonstration will showcase the use of the Obsidian ‘Vault’ from the perspective of the lifelong learner for creating notes, adding and connecting links and files, and formatting ideas. The presenter will showcase lessons learned and implications for fostering connected writing skills in students.

• Glenn Groulx is a Professor at Coast Mountain College

12:00 – 1:00

Lunch

• Lunch Wraps
• Spinach Salad (GF, Veg, NF) – with beet, goat cheese, and grapefruit with caramelized orange dressing
• Veggie Platter (GF, BG, NF, DF)
• Selection of Dessert Bars

Dietary requests will be provided

1:00 – 1:45

Britt Dzioba | Supporting Digital Literacy Development with Open Educational Resources

The BC Digital Literacy Hub is a public, online collection of Open Educational Resources (OER) designed for instructors in post-secondary institutions in British Columbia. The goal is to help educators, including learning and teaching staff, integrate digital literacy materials easily into existing courses and improve their own digital literacy skills. In collaboration with the Ministry of Post-secondary Education and Future Skills, BCcampus developed this collection to support the implementation of the B.C. Post-Secondary Digital Literacy Framework. The collection was created for educators with the support and guidance from educational professionals across the province.

• Britt Dzioba is an Advisor, Learning and Teaching at BCcampus

1:55 – 2:15

Trefor Bazett | Creating Engaging Educational Content on Social Media

Social Media can be a powerful tool to help discover and support your passions. As both a professor and an educational YouTuber, I’ve found that teaching in these different contexts is complementary. While classroom environments allow for deep connections and sustained learning, the tremendous scale of social media allows instructors to leverage their content knowledge to make an impact on a global audience. In this talk I want to focus on the lessons I’ve learned to created educational content that works on social media, and ways in which those lessons have evolved my own pedagogical practices in the classroom. 

• Trefor Bazett is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Victoria

2:15 – 2:45

Afternoon Break

• Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Decaf Coffee, and Tea

2:45 – 3:30

Gwen Nguyen | Integrating Digital Literacy in Your Classroom: Skills, Stories, and Strategies

This interactive workshop is designed specifically for educators in British Columbia who are keen to deepen their understanding and integration of digital literacy within their classrooms. Aligned with the BC Digital Literacy Framework, this session will explore the core digital educator competencies, facilitate the sharing of inspirational success stories, and tackle the common challenges faced in embedding digital literacy teaching. Participants will have the opportunity to explore some practical activities from the Digital Literacy Hub’s mini-lesson plan portal designed to support them to effectively teach these essential skill sets. Regardless of your current stage in the digital literacy journey, this workshop will support you with the insights and tools needed to transform your teaching practices.

• Gwen Nguyen is an Advisor, Learning and Teaching at BCcampus

3:45 – 4:15

Luke McKnight | The Art of Storytelling: Personas and Anonymized Examples to Teach Accessibility

Langara’s EdTech Department has had great success incorporating accessibility into our workshop offerings. In accessibility focused workshops Langara’s assistive technologist has added anonymized examples of accessibility bugs encountered by Langara students. These examples illuminate the problems with inaccessible content in a concrete fashion to help workshop attendees understand the effect they have as content creators. In this session, Luke McKnight will outline their process to create examples and demonstrate some examples of common accessibility barriers.

• Luke McKnight is an Assistive Technologist at Langara College

4:15 – 4:30

End of Day Closing

4:30 – 6:30

Social Event | Butcher and Bullock

Join us for an informal social event at the Butcher and Bullock (911 W Pender St, Vancouver) on May 9 right after the sessions end. Attendees will receive two complimentary drinks tickets and appetizers and non-alcoholic beverages will be provided.

Time

Session

8:00 – 9:00

Breakfast

• Breakfast Wraps: Scrambled eggs, ham, and cheese (NF); Scrambled eggs, cheese and spinach (Veg, NF)
• Assorted Greek Yogurt (Veg)
• Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Decaf Coffee, and Tea
• Fresh Squeezed Juice

Dietary requests will be provided

9:00 – 9:05

Welcome Back

9:05 – 9:15

Ben Ferrel | Digital Learning Strategy Update

9:15 – 10:15

Brian Lorraine | Institutional Adoption of Blended Courses – A Multi-Year Pilot at SFU

From the Spring of 2022 through the end of Fall 2023, SFU piloted the adoption of a new course classification designated for Blended courses. The Centre for Educational Excellence played a key role in supporting instructors with the planning and development of these courses as they navigated a range of technical and pedagogical considerations. Despite the increasingly common refrain that “all learning is blended learning” in the current post-secondary education landscape, it is important to distinguish efforts at formalizing intentional blended/hybrid models. Framed by a mixed methods program evaluation, this session shares key findings from the perspective of teaching/learning centre support of an institution-wide initiative around Blended Learning as an alternative course modality. Given there is significant expectation of an increase in blended/hybrid learning across Canadian post-secondary institutions, while at the same time the sense that only a minority of faculty possess the knowledge and skills to teach effectively in this delivery modality (Johnson, 2023), this session will be of interest to all stakeholders – including instructors, support staff, and leadership – involved in the various aspects of adopting course delivery formats that are new or alternative to what is currently offered.

• Brian Lorraine is an Instructional Designer, Online & Blended Learning at Simon Fraser University

10:15 – 10:30

Sally Goldberg Powell | Assessing Assessments, PartyRock style

No this isn’t about the anthem by LMFAO. Instead, it’s about leveraging a free (for now) tool provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create no-code Generative AI powered apps. In this short demo, I will demonstrate how I created two tools used in teaching development consultations with instructors — The AI-Resistant Assignment Companion, and The Assignment Competencies Detector. Through the use of these tools, powered by Anthropic’s LLM, Claude, we are able to employ a focused approach to Generative AI experimentation, while prompting valuable discussions about (re)designing assessments for a Generative AI world.

• Sally Goldberg Powell is an Instructional Technologist, Digital Learning in the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Toronto Metropolitan University

10:30 – 10:50

Morning Break

• Savoury Platter     
• Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Decaf Coffee, and Tea

Dietary requests will be provided

10:50 – 11:35

Simone Hausknecht & Jasmine Feather Dionne | Multiple means of connection: A decolonial approach to UDL

As educators and designers in post-secondary institutions, it is crucial to create an inclusive environment where students are not simply included, but where multiple perspectives and ways of knowing are acknowledged and encouraged. Taking a decolonial approach to Universal Design for Learning (UDL), we discuss the addition of a category to the CAST model, multiple means of connection. With this as our focus, we use our practice as scholar practitioners to give examples of how we use this approach in our work as learning designers and instructors in post-secondary institutions. We will focus on open-space, Indigenous Ways of Knowing, land-based knowing, intersectional feminism, and connecting through multimodal approaches in online and hybrid spaces. We identify how we practice multiple means of connection with the land, waterways, communities, and self to bolster decolonial methods of learning, teaching, and knowledge production.

• Simone Hausknecht is an Instructional Designer at Royal Roads University
• Jasmine Feather Dionne is an Instructional Designer at Royal Roads University and a PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria

11:35 – 12:05

John Born | Sound by AI: AI-Driven Sound in Education

When you try to use online AI sound design tools,  you often encounter a message like ‘Signup for early access.’ But fear not, these tools are out there and readily available. In this session, we’ll explore using AI for sound design in a teaching and learning context. We will discuss sonic pedagogy principles and explore creative ways to add AI-generated soundscapes, music, and text-to-voice to lessons and course plans. This session is ideal for educators, instructional designers, and anyone interested in enhancing educational experiences with AI-generated sound.

• John Born is the Manager, Educational Media at Simon Fraser University

12:05 – 1:05

Lunch

• Sandwiches: Ham & Swiss; Smoked Turkey; Roast Beef; Mediterranean Chickpea (V); Free Range Egg Salad; Tuna, Dill, & Cucumber; Grilled Chicken BLT with Pesto; Canadian Italian
• Mixed Greens with Apples (GF, V, NF, DF) – with apples, pumpkin seeds, and cranberries with fig dressing
• Veggie Platter (GF, V, NF, DF)
• Selection of Dessert Bars
• Assorted Beverages
• Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Decaf Coffee, and Tea

Dietary requests will be provided

1:05 – 2:05

Kar On Lee, Arita Liu, Christina Drabik | Enhancing instructor digital literacy: Evaluating technological tools

In today’s educational landscape, teaching and learning heavily depend on the use of digital technology. There are many barriers that may hinder our faculty’s development of digital literacy competence such as inadequate training and institutional support, and limited access to resources. We will focus on Technology Support and Selection which is one of the competencies identified in the BC Digital Literacy Framework. We will also provide resources and guidance for evaluating and choosing potential technological tools that can help educators develop their digital literacy.

• Kar On Lee is a Learning Technology Specialist at Simon Fraser University
• Arita Liu is a Course Production Technician at Simon Fraser University
• Christina Drabik is an Instructional Support Technician at Simon Fraser University

2:05 – 2:35

Lynda Robbins | Did a Flipped Classroom Flop? Experiences after 7+ Terms

The COVID-19 pandemic nudged me, a long time post-secondary instructor, to go with a “flipped classroom” approach. I had been contemplating a flipped approach well before the pandemic. When we returned to in person teaching, I decided to continue this approach.

After 7+ terms using the flipped classroom for first year Computer Science, Java programming, I will share my techniques, experiences, and thoughts considering the institution, instructor, and student points of view. Leading a flipped classroom has been an experience. I will discuss advantages, disadvantages, and student feedback.

• Lynda Robbins is an Instructor at Camosun College

2:35 – 3:35

Gwen Nguyen | Enhancing the Human Aspects in Designing Learning with Generative AI

This workshop aims to empower educators to weave Generative AI into their pedagogical practices, with a strong emphasis on amplifying human qualities like creativity, empathy, collaboration, and personalization in learning environments. Through interaction discussion, participants will delve into the ethical and mindful application of Generative AI in education. This session also sets the stage for educators to co-develop a practical framework that maximize the human element in designing meaningful learning experiences with Generative AI.

• Gwen Nguyen is an Advisor, Learning and Teaching at BCcampus

3:35 – 3:40

Closing Remarks