NEW! Desire2Learn Instructor Basic Training Videos

New tutorial videos have been uploaded on the D2L homepage under Instructor Resources.

To access the tutorial videos go to: http://learn.bcit.ca/ and see the Instructor Resources listed.

Alternatively, you can find the tutorials listed here:

1. Logging on to D2L

2. Adding and editing News

3. Adding a Course Calendar Event

4. Adding and editing Content (Modules & Topics)

5. Creating Discussion Forums & Topics

6. Creating Assignment Dropbox folders

7. Roleswitch

8. In depth: Groups Tools

9. In Depth: Discussion Forums

Creating a Forum and Topic
Re-ordering Forums and Topics
Hiding and Locking a Forum and Topic
Attaching a Release Condition
Joining a Topic and Opening a Message
Searching Messages
Rating and Flagging Messages
Posting New messages and Replying
Setting Message Approval

ETUG Fall Workshop- Registration is now OPEN

Registration is now open for this fall's ETUG (Educational Technology User Group) workshop series. The theme is "Learning Design" and the event will take place October 20 and 21 at the Segal School of Business at Simon Fraser University.

The 2 day event is $50 + GST and includes breakfast, lunch, and refreshments.

• Day 1 : Grainne Conole from the Open University, UK, will help participants explore Compendium LD and Cloudworks – tools developed by the Open University Learning Design Initiative to help educators with the design process and sharing of design methods and approaches.

• Day 2: Grainne will give the opening plenary which will be followed by an exciting lineup of speakers on the following topics: learning space design, designing for engagement, large scale learning design, and collaborative learning models.

For more information about the workshop series go to: http://etug.ca/

What is a Charette?

BCIT’s School of Construction and the Environment is hosting a Sustainability Design Charette as part of a summit taking place in Vancouver called Resilient Cities: Urban Strategies for Transition Times.

Charettes are a facilitated workshopping process that come from the design world. They are collaborative sessions where groups come together in an attempt to address a design problem. Like World Cafes, large groups come together to participate, representing a diversity of backgrounds and stakeholders in whatever it is that is being planned/designed.

While each charette will be designed to meet the needs of the design problem and needs of the stakeholders participating, the general progression of the process is:

1. Opening speaker/maybe a presentation with content in order to inform the rest of the process.
2. Identification of the design task/design problem.
3. Break out into small groups, each group with a minimum of one representative from each of the representative stakeholder groups.
4. In the small groups, design a solution to the design problem/design task.
5. Reconvene in large group.
6. Each smaller group presents their efforts.
7. Come to common solution, through facilitation, reach a common consensus on a final design solution.
8. Post-meeting, prepare a report.

It appears that the greatest challenge would be the final task of reaching a common consensus on a final design, if that is one of the charette’s goals. The enormous amount of detail that gets discussed, hashed over, and negotiated during small group sessions can be so draining on participants in a small group, and then to have to go through the whole thing again in a larger group must be exhausting. It is for that reason that many charettes are planned over a series of days and/or weeks.

Describing the process:
A Handbook for Planning and Conducting Charrettes for High-Performance Projects

A local charette with a process that didn't require a big consensus at the end:
East Ladner Edge Charrette

Typography and the last great frontier of the web

Good typography has been described as one of the last great frontiers of the web, and a new, simple css rule called @fontface has brought us across that frontier. In a layman's nutshell, "Until now, web designers had to use the roughly 20 web-safe fonts for all live type. Web-safe fonts are the fonts that can be relied on to be present in almost all user’s computers. This is why most web pages now use Verdana, Times, or Arial. . . . New functionality in CSS means that web designers will be able to specify any font for a web page, and all that font will be readable across all platforms and devices," reports Sean King on the Type Directors Club blog.

@fontface (or web font-embedding) is about more than using non-standard fonts, however: it allows designers some of the nuanced control over letter-spacing, baseline-shifts, hyphenation, small caps, and figure selection. . . . just a few of the things that make print typographically superior to the web. Here's a sample:



Firefox 3.5 already supports the @fontface tag. If you've got Firefox 3.5 already you can see @fontface in action here. I believe IE supports @fontface as well. Don't know about Safari.

From an instructional design point of view, this is important: we can move away from unnuanced text settings to pages where designers can respond to the needs of each text. No more conformity of all text to an arbitrary standard. The tyranny of poorly set Verdana and Times New Roman may be at an end. And hurrah, I say.

Read more about this development here.

OECD Report Consistent with BCIT Digital Learner Study

The OECD has just released a report that reviews the Net Generation research and its implications for higher education policy. The conclusions of this report are remarkably consistent with the findings of the BCIT Digital Learners in Higher Education study which is underway.

New Millennium Learners in Higher Education: Evidence and Policy Implications concludes:
1) although an increasing percentage of higher education students may considered technologically adept, "it is misleading to consider that all them fit equally well into the image of the new millennium learners...for the purposes of improving teaching and learning in higher education, the diversity of students and situations matters most." In other words, as the BCIT study concluded, context matters.

2) The empirical evidence does not support the claim that students' increasing use of digital technologies is "transforming the way in which they learn, their social values and lifestyles and...their expectations about teaching and learning in higher education. " Most of them have a very cautious view of the role of technology in teaching and look to it to provide access and convenience but not a radical transformation in teaching. This is also consistent with the BCIT study which found that BCIT learners have a very instrumental view of educational technology.

One of the most interesting findings of the study was that students seem to be moving increasingly to the use of more personalized technology that provides for communication that is both mobile and not controlled by higher education institutions: "This may signal shifts in relationships towards more enclosed personal relations which will have implications for the way students may engage in the future as integrated participants within higher education institutions. Students seem to be moving along a life path within a shell of privacy, obeying the educational traffic rules but making contact only with other shelled individuals only as and when necessary."

New Issue of Canadian Journal of Learning & Technology

A new issue of the Canadian Journal of Learning & Technology has just been published an is available online.

Table of Contents

Editorial: CJLT: A Fully Online Journal with Roots in its History
Michele Jacobsen

Exploring Individual Differences in Attitudes toward Audience Response Systems
Robin Kay, Liesel Knaack

How Research Moves into Practice: A Preliminary Study of What Training Professionals Read, Hear, and Perceive
Saul Carliner, Regan Legassie, Shaun Belding, Hugh MacDonald, Ofelia Ribeiro, Lynn Johnston, Jane MacDonald, Heidi Hehn

Using Interactive Technology to Disseminate Research Findings to a Diverse Population
Denise Stockley, Wanda Beyer, Nancy Hutchinson, Jennifer DeLugt, Peter Chin, Joan Versnel, Hugh Munby

Relative levels of eLearning readiness, applications and trainee requirements in Botswana’s Private Sector
Paul T. Nleya

Monkeys on the Screen?: Multicultural Issues in Instructional Message Design
Debbie McAnany

Participation in Knowledge-Building Discourse: An Analysis of Online Discussions in Mainstream and Honours Social Studies Courses
Hui Niu, Jan van Aalst

Knowledge Building in an Aboriginal Context
Alexander McAuley

Learning for Teaching: Building Professional Knowledge on a National Scale
Elizabeth Hartnell-Young

Online Learning Journals as an Instructional and Self-Assessment Tool for Epistemological Growth
Clare Brett, Bruce Forrester, Nobuko Fujita

Models for Building Knowledge in a Technology-Rich Setting: Teacher Education
Gregory MacKinnon, M. Lynn Aylward

Online Resource for Online Learning

The University of Colorado has published an online learning handbook, available for free download. The CU Online Handbook is aimed at both experienced online instructors and those who are new to online teaching.

From the introduction:

"This handbook consists of four different sections. The first section is about trends and issues with online learning. The second section is about technology in action. The third section includes a brief summary of 25 different new emerging tools and applications. The last section includes different resources that you might use in your online classroom. Put together we hope to turn the CU Online Handbook into an annual publication, a guide to what is new, a celebration of what works and a toolkit for exploring new territory. Online education holds the promise to change the world. We’re excited about that future and looking forward to learning the hardest thing of all: How to teach differently."

Free Online Book on Mobile Learning

The University of Wollongong in Australia is making an edited book on mobile learning available for free download.

From the book website:

The purpose of this e-book is to explore the use of mobile devices in learning in higher education, and to provide examples of good pedagogy. We are sure that the rich variety of examples of mobile learning found in this book will provide the reader with the inspiration to teach their own subjects and courses in ways that employ mobile devices in authentic and creative ways. This book is made up of a collection of double blind peer-reviewed chapters written by participants in the project New technologies, new pedagogies: Using mobile technologies to develop new ways of teaching and learning.

The book begins with an introductory chapter that describes the overall project, its aims and methods. The second chapter describes the professional development process that was used for the teacher participants involved in the project. This is followed by 10 chapters, each describing a mobile learning pedagogy that was employed in the context of a subject area within a Faculty of Education. The final chapter presents guidelines or design principles for the use of mobile learning in higher education learning environments.

Research Project Studies Impact of New Technology on Teaching and Learning

The Learning & Teaching Centre has launched an international research project aimed at understanding how new and emerging technologies are affecting learning and teaching in higher education. Digital Learners in Higher Education: Implications for Teaching, Learning & Technology brings together BCIT, the University of Regina and the Open University of Catalonia. The research project will build on the study already completed which surveyed BCIT learners to determine the extent to which fit the net generation profile and to understand their communication preferences outside the classroom.

Read the full article in Update.

Does Online Education Really Beat the Classroom?

There has been a lot of buzz recently about a new research report that suggests online learning produces superior results than face-to-face teaching. A headline in the New York Times proclaimed "Online Education Beats the Classroom". But as Nicholas Carr points out in his blog posting, that conclusion is misleading and inaccurate. He highlights a number of critical limitations in the research and points out that the authors themselves state that the findings of the meta-analysis, "should not be construed as demonstrating that online learning is superior as a medium."

As Carr concludes: "Sometimes, the caveats in a study speak louder than the findings. I think that's the case here. A suggestion that classroom instruction supplemented by online exercises can lead to more learning than classroom instruction alone would hardly come as a surprise. But that's about the only firm conclusion I draw from this meta-analysis."

We're now on Twitter!

Learning & Teaching at BCIT (that's this blog) is now on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bcitltc. Now you can find us, follow us and subscribe to us via Twitter. (Of course you can subscribe via this blog's rss feed as well.)

Not on Twitter yet? Sign up now. Signing up is free and takes about 60 seconds to do. But you don't need to sign up to follow our tweets.