Category: Work Reflections (Page 2 of 5)

This week was about getting my feet wet in Brightspace. 

I started the certificate course and am working through the modules. There were a couple of points of confusion but it’s pretty straightforward.  I am almost finished module 2.  

Jen and I met a couple of times to plan our training sessions for the first group who will adopt Brightspace. 

I attended the Increasing Access Faculty Learning Community. Not a huge turn out but some very enthusiastic participants.  I enjoy talking about UDL.  The access conversation is quite broad, because the subject is. 

I gathered some links for Open Access week that is coming up later this week. I see that BCcampus is asking around for what institutions are doing so there may be some more offerings to share. 

I came across this Inclusive Access piece last week and then Tannis tweeted it (so I looked at it again) and she shared this twitter feed: 

The student debt crisis isn’t merely attributable to spiraling tuition prices – there’s a whole menagerie of feral hogs scrumming to get their snouts in the student debt-trap trough.

Take textbook publishers.

1/ pic.twitter.com/eK60ftPGcd

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) October 7, 2021

A good reminder that one important  part of access is affordable resources – and Open Educational Resources are worth advocating for. 

for the upcoming week I’ve started booking specific times in my calendar for each of things I need to get done. We’ll see how that goes. 

It’s going to be busy.

We had our third and final Brightspace training session on Monday. The trainer does a great job. They were good sessions for me to get a general understanding and now I’m looking at my practice course to see where I would add  more specific information for sharing with instructors.

I tried attending some of the OE Global conference this week. Between time zones and other commitments I didn’t engage as much as I would have liked. I did see a couple of live sessions and found a recording from U of Edinburgh (info below). This conference is almost too much – there is a lot of information in pre-recordings and recorded access to the webinars as well as some asynchronous activities.

University of Edinburgh – short online courses. ‘micro’ masters that ladder to masters degrees. Certificates (Digital Marketing) that ladder into post graduate degrees

Courses can be enrolled in for free on EdX
Presentation: Short Online Courses Making a Global Impact

A general theme that I picked up by listening to a few presenters – particularly around the areas of adoption of  Open resources and related policies  – is that stakeholder input and buy in are really important. I hope I can make some time to go back and listen to some of the recordings. The conference goes on until Monday and I’m sure there will be recordings available for a while.

I am trying to work my PD plan and my CTLI to do list into tangible deliverables. I know that most of my time in the next while will be Brightspace related. I copied my section of the CTLI ‘important things’ document and pasted into a Google doc where I had started a rough PD plan. I added a column so I could make notes on where I’m at. Part of that is a plan for open and access. When thinking of a plan for open/access at NIC I imagine a holistic model. “Rethinking the Teaching Itself” is part of the Widening our Doorways plan so it makes sense that access is baked into what we do rather than sprinkled on top. This goes back to the message I was picking up from the OE Global sessions.

We had a College Conversation with the president and it was Truth and Reconciliation ‘day’ Thursday – single quotes because we all know it’s not just a day of the year that we’re supposed to work on this.  I feel like we may be on a path to something more than lip service with some of the activities. Not to say it’s only been lip service so far but the path to doing something useful/meaningful is fraught with tripping hazards. Suffice to say, I’ve studied a lot of this history and am still learning and these conversations make me feel heavy.

I have a big to do list for next week. I forgot about writing a summary of the training so that should be first up. I am supposed to start the certificate course on Monday but so far haven’t heard anything from them. Jen and I will get together and start planning our upcoming sessions for the pilot group of instructors moving to Brightspace.  I’m going to work Monday morning for a while just to get organized. I need to carve amounts of times to focus on one thing at a time so my attention isn’t split and I can start tackling my list.

I don’t know why this picture… it’s kind of a bright space right? It was a melting chunk of ice in a spring bulb that was coming up.

This week was primarily focused on Brightspace.  We had our two training sessions which were very helpful. I’ve been playing in my DEV course and enjoying it so far. I really like some of the options for creating content. I’ve made a couple of modules with sub-sections and add to them as things come up. I have created a few outcomes for myself of things I hope to be able to do when I’ve completed my modules.

The options for ‘elements’ are nice. I like how easy it is to add in tabs and accordions. Elements also offer some nice features for pull quotes and blockquotes. They include lists and tables as elements but those can also be created using the text editor so I want to see if that makes any difference – I think the display might be different because plugging an ordered list in as an element creates big green numbers. I imagine the editor will not as it won’t be attached to a style sheet (?) we shall see.

I want to practice customizing the banners – I was able to embed an image in a tab element but ran out of time trying to figure out the banner. I don’t see an easy ‘replace image’ but I know it can be done.

There was an article in Ken Steele’s  (Academica.ca) newsletter that caught my eye:  Students with Disabilities concerned over loss of online learning.  There are links to articles about it at  U of A and UVIC

The U of A article is more about practices adopted during the pandemic than a loss of online learning but both address student concerns related to delivery and assessment practices.

I got my PD paperwork sorted out for the OE Global conference next week. It took me a while to find a schedule. Since it’s global some of the webinar events are not going to be in a practical time zone for me to attend live. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to take in but I’ll spend some time this weekend to see if I can figure that out.

I often refer to September as ‘all bets are off’ for scheduling my time and that’s how it’s been. October should see a little return to ‘regularly scheduled programming’.  I can now see Margaret’s calendar so I can get an idea of when she’ll need to be in the office. I know we’d both like to have set work days for the most part but things come up and we can share the space accordingly.

Next week in and around the OE conference I’m going to spend more time in Brightspace and do some work getting my PD plan together and coming up with some CTLI deliverables. I’m looking forward to the certificate training to see how it’s structured and to work through tasks set by someone other than me.

 This week: Since I’m focused on planning I thought the NIC cookie from Widening Our Doorways was fitting. By the time I got mine it had seen better days 🙂 

I met with Liesel to do some planning and now I have some planning to do. I’ve been going over the ‘Important Things’ document and will work out some timelines – where I can – for some deliverables. 

I found the NICFA Professional Development Plan template that I didn’t know existed and started filling in some bullet points that I will expand on and then tie to the most recent version of the institutional plan. It is a good exercise as it makes you really think of where you want to put your learning beyond the next conference.  Up until now I’ve just discussed PD with whomever I was reporting to so it’s not like there was never a plan before this, just a different procedure. 

I’ve been looking at Bright Space – watching some videos and recorded webinars. It will be clearer when I can get my hands on it and see which options/widgets etc. will be available.  I think that will also help define the type of training/resources we’re going to need  too. 

I started working through the Bright Space course for instructors and it occurred to me that one reason so many institutions re-invent the wheel and create their own training  is that not all features are turned on for every install. Just something that popped into my mind while watching the videos. Some of what I’ve seen is a little more geared to K-12. 

I am about halfway through the tutorial course and I have to say I do not enjoy being tutored by a cartoon moose. The course is okay – they’ve plugged in some activities so you can try things yourself.  The sections don’t take long to work through. 

Further to LMS training, it seems to be standard to break things out into ‘communication’, ‘assessment’ and ‘content’ (or, whatever terms apply) and I’ve done that myself because it makes sense. As I think ahead I will be watching  to see if there are other ways that work – I don’t want to be in a ‘we’ve always done it that way’  rut but also, don’t want to unnecessarily complicate things . I’ll be looking at other institutions and their approaches as well. 

Camosun has some on there site under D2L Tutorials

I signed up for the Open Education Global Conference

I was looking for UDL conferences and all I could find for the  Pan-Canadian version is the one I attended at RRU. Seems like ages ago. I did find this UDL-IRN International Summit for next spring however. 

I put this link here early in the week and I think it’s because there are case studies on how institutions implemented accessibility strategies and I was probably thinking about it in relation to introducing Open practices (pedagogy, resources):

From the BCcampus newsletter:  BC Campus’ Accessibility Journey

So while it feels like I don’t have much that is tangible to show for the week, I’ve been immersed in thinking about, and setting up plans for,  the next few months.  Next week we start the D2L training sessions and hopefully will have access to a course to practice in. 

This week was a little ‘all over the place’  a bit of  this and a bit of that. We’re at mid-September now so regular routines should re-emerge for a while.  The eagle is here to oversee that.  Next week will have more direction. I spied him on a church spire in Alaska.

I did a session on the Open ETC and that was fun. We talked about the possibilities as well of some of the potential problems associated with using WordPress and Mattermost. I like to see the wheels turning as participants imagine trying new things, or, re-imagine something they’re doing now.

I was able to help Margaret test a connection before her story circle, although, I managed to add a little trouble to the trouble shooting by not noticing that my mic was muted on my headset switch. 🙂

I also helped an instructor figure out what was causing her problems with Learn. It was the wrong browser and I haven’t seen that in a while because I thought college machines defaulted to Chrome now. Anyway, an easy fix.

Friday was my last Education Council meeting. I really value my time with that group – 4 years. It was so great to learn more about the inner workings of the College and to hear from colleagues (and students) from various areas and get their perspectives.  We could all bring something to the table and the meetings were always respectful. Student members would comment on how they had no idea how much care went into programs, courses, and policies.  Time for me to step aside and let someone else take a seat.

Next week – we plan – and figure out what I’m going to work on next. I’m looking forward to digging in to the D2L training. I’ve signed up for a FLO Friday: Accessible Course Design: Separating Content from Delivery. It sounds really good but doesn’t happen until the end of October.

Strange week this week. Things were very up and down. This is Luna, she gets it.

My one participant for Monday’s session cancelled so I spent a bit more time working on the OER presentation content.  I want to have enough (read: too much)  to cover whatever questions might come up but package it so it’s not overwhelming.

I went to campus for the welcome back lunch on Tuesday. It was nice to see some people and I got to meet Joel and Neil in person.

My ‘day in the office’ on Wednesday didn’t work out very well. I managed part of the morning but stupid things kept happening and I was getting easily frustrated.  I think it was mostly because I knew I had the afternoon session and I wanted to feel relaxed and prepared. The office was not relaxing – rolls of paper were falling over,  usb cables were the wrong size (universal my ***) , my monitors would not show my open programs… things like that that on a normal day I would have just dealt with but on this day, were driving me to distraction. So, I went home. I delivered the session in the afternoon with Neil and one other participant and I really enjoyed it.  The attendee was really keen to try new things and we had a great customized kind of session where we talked about OER, possibilities, authentic assessment and other things. I had a nice talk with Neil afterwards and that turned the down morning back up.

I ran the accessibility session in sort of a ‘back-to-back’ format on Thursday. I had one participant cancel and one faculty member ask if they could join so – 4 people. 2 showed up late and since we had covered most of what the accessibility checker could do, the early people left and the late people stayed and we did it again.  I got to meet a new instructor and she brought up a great question about accessibility and voice over with PowerPoint. We had a quick look together and it looks like it may be possible to caption voiceovers but maybe not easy and maybe not without additional software. So, that’s something I’m going to look into for next week.

I helped a couple of people with some course related Blackboard questions so between that and the sessions, and the welcome back lunch, talking to, and sharing with, other people were the highlights. There is some overlap in my 3 session which is fun to play with when the numbers are small as they have been.

Lots of on and off anxiety this week that I am attributing to a few things – first ‘the news’ . My week started with this article from the CBC: Western provinces driving Canada’s 4th COVID-19 wave as physicians warn cases ‘out of control’. I think I was also picking up on the stress in the air after the president’s conversation as well as my professional network – people are not feeling great about a return to campus. The first week back is always a bit weird anyway when you live on an academic calendar and then add a layer of pandemic fatigue to that…

So, yeah… Onward. Next week I’m going to look into that PowerPoint question and look through teach anywhere to see what kind of resources I can add/create that come out of my sessions. One more session to deliver on the Open ETC and I’ve got the ‘Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone’ book to go through and looking forward to talking about UDL. Also hoping for some kind of happy news (I can hope right?) and planning on focusing on mental health this long weekend.

Re-entry, or, diving back in… I took  this picture last summer while we were out fishing with one of our tourism instructors (Harley Elias).

I have been off for most of the summer so there was a lot to get caught up on.

I’d been reading emails over the summer but I gave all the CTLI content a closer look this week.  There were also a couple of updates from Senior Leadership. There is a lot going on – at NIC, in Post-Secondary and in the Province.

I worked on my upcoming workshops, focusing on the Accessibility Checker first since that’s going to be my first session. So far, only one person but that’s okay. I created some documents to run through the checker so we can see the errors and warnings and fix them.  My attendee had the wrong link and luckily I checked with her by email so she could get to the session. It was a nice re-entry to have a conversational session and by the end I had a couple of more examples to add to my practice document as I thought of them on the way through.  We could get into a little bit more advanced content with only two of us, and I was able to share some resources like: Creating Accessible Tables in Word.

I’ve been writing scripts and sourcing information for all the workshops. I’ve got some good examples to share for the Open ETC.  I still need to update some stats for the Open Educational Resources session but there’s time.

I attended a PressBooks session from BCcampus as that’s something I want to work on. It managed to be both basic, and a lot. I learned a couple of things but I think re-watching parts when I’m actually trying to create might be more useful. I also checked out the H5P kitchen (again). I’d like to spend some time on that too.

I watched a few D2L videos and there were some new features in BlueJeans to get familiar with. I caught up with Margaret and sent a ‘hello’ email to the new CTLI team members. I’m looking forward to seeing some colleagues and friends next week at the welcome back lunch. It feels like it’s been a really long time since I’ve talked to anyone at work.

I think I’m caught up (famous last words) and will refine all the workshops and tighten up the Open Ed resources next week.

I chose this picture because I imagine this is what I’ll be seeing a lot of on vacation since we really can’t go anywhere 🙂 . Not a hardship.

This week I spent some time digging up resources for the August sessions. Got into an OER wormhole through the OE Global Connect site.  If I wasn’t taking most of the summer off I’d be looking at a project. A lot of time was spent reading through the resources I’m collecting and working out outlines for the sessions.

I’ve been looking for resources for the Open section of the Teach Anywhere site and found this gem courtesy of Alan and Press Books: Crowd sourced introduction to OER  

I’ve started mapping out how I think the resources could be grouped on the web site and writing a few descriptions. That will be my deliverable for next Tuesday before I go on vacation.

I went into the office to check on the move and pick up a key. No one was at facilities and they were waiting for IT to move the computer equipment off the desk. By Thursday everything had been moved and I picked up my new key.

I’m still working on the one English course and meeting with the instructor. I had to write her a ‘don’t panic’ email because she looked pretty desperate at the end of our meeting.  This is a course that could have benefited from a one on one, full-time collaborative effort for a couple of weeks. It’s been copied so many times and it’s had a few owners so the language needs work, the style needs work, the fonts… so… many… fonts.  There’s was also the obligatory  clean up of Blackboard extras that come over with every copy. We’re almost there. I’ve cleaned some of the code and we’ve organized the content. We’ve got one more meeting on Tuesday next week to finish it up.

Not part of my NIC work but something I worked on last winter that I’m really proud of: Preventing and Responding to Sexual Violence on Campus. It was a very collaborative and well managed project. I got to work with the Subject Matter Experts and do Instructional Design and help with evaluations.  I was sent the press release last night so thought I’d include it.  Also, it’s Open.

I think I’ve used this picture before but it kind of fits with the office tidying and prep that I’ve been doing.

This week I spent some time catching up on all the organizational changes that recently happened at the college. I’d only skimmed them while I was off.

I’m still working with an English instructor on what will be a 7 week asynchronous course starting in July. We’re getting there but there’s a lot to do. I’m trying to not look too much at the aesthetics and prioritize the content to make sure the instructions are clear and the naming is consistent. She’s doing well with the homework I give her after each meeting. Hopefully there will be some time to pretty it up a bit and clean up some fonts.

I cleaned up my office on campus and actually got to see Margaret in person. We’re going to be sharing after vacation. It was a good opportunity to tidy up and get rid of some paper that I was keeping for, who knows why…

I’ve got 3 sessions lined up for August that will revolve around Open education and accessibility. I’m going to explore the accessibility checker in Microsoft and explain why all students, and not only students who need accommodations, can benefit from accessible content.  I think this is a pretty low risk/ low barrier entry into the accessibility discussion and something easy for people to do.  I’ve been gathering resources and trying to outline the sessions. Hoping to get a good grip on that next week so that I can feel prepared when I get back in August.

etug buttons from etug 2014 taken by Dennis Yip

This week I attended the etug spring 2021 conference.  I didn’t realize just how much I have missed gathering with this group. I’m editing to add there were some very emotional moments.  The news out of Kamloops about the Kamloops residential school was a big part of day 3.

I have a lot of notes and links to explore. It’s too much to process for this post but the themes resonated and intersected. It gave me a lot to think about as Margaret and I have noticed that our areas intersect a lot and I have some ideas for our collaborative project.

When I am back from vacation next week I intend to explore some of the tools I learned about – like untextbook from rethink learning design   that was shared by Irwin, Michelle, Michael P, Tannis and Tom Woodward. Paul Hibbits as always had some cool things to share about docsify and I learned a little about hyperdocs.

I’m just going to throw some links in here for me to remember:

Digital Citizen
Camosun faculty stories – shared by Emily

Four Directions Teaching From our fabulous keynote Dr. Jennifer Wemigwans

Learning activities -TRU

Not the reflective post it could be but I am still processing. It was a well spent three days of learning and I am so appreciative of the generous people who form this community. When I am back I plan to get stuck into pressbooks and now have some more inspiration to explore H5P having seen some in action.