SCETUG Planning Day 2013 at RRU

This post was prepared by kele fleming and Leva Lee.
Once again, the SCETUG committee gathered for its annual planning meeting on November 14th, this year at Royal Roads University, Victoria. It’s a great way for the committee to share ideas and review our past year’s activities, as well as plan for the coming year.  We had record attendance at our meeting – nearly everyone on the committee attended! We were especially pleased to welcome two newcomers who joined in September: Meghan Moore from Camosun College and David Try from Northwest Community College.
One of the major themes for the day was – “it’s not broken, so we don’t need to fix it!”  While we were reviewing the past year, we realized that over the last few years we’ve worked really hard to put some foundational community engagement initiatives into place.  These initiatives have been successful so no need to reinvent everything going forward.  Our Steering Committee Chair kele Fleming (UBC Vancouver) launched the day by leading us through a review of our past year’s achievements which were chock full of good things, such as our second series of lunch and learn webinars or “T.e.l.l. sessions” and our ETUG member profiles.  We then had a round table from the group on favourite moments from the year: the Spring workshop stood out as a high point for many and SFU Burnaby as a wonderful workshop venue. We were in general agreement to continue with our program of T.e.l.l.sessions, Member profiles and the monthly ETUG News, in addition to our Fall and Spring Workshops. Looking ahead to 2014 we have a significant milestone to celebrate: ETUG turns 20!  We all agreed we want to do something special to mark this anniversary, so stay tuned for more details in the new year!
Next, Amanda Coolidge (RRU) led us through an activity designed to share 3 great things happening at our respective institutions. This activity was based on one of the Liberating Structures that Nancy White introduced at our Spring Workshop.  We each had a “homework task” which was to bring 1, 2 or 3 great things to share. The goal of this exercise was to share these ideas with each other, but also consider ways we might help to extend these ideas with all of ETUG. Some of the great things we uncovered included:

• a new Studio setup at CTET, RRU
• an EdMedia Protege Program at SFU
• use of live broadcast instruction at Northwest Community College
• use of blended (Blended Learning Toolkit) and hybrid (Chang School at Ryerson University) learning models at North Island College
• a resource for integrating accessibility into distance courses at University of Victoria
• Poodll being used at College of the Rockies and a more structured approach to professional developement (e.g. educational techology competency levels)
• a new Faculty Teaching and Curriculum Development Centre at Langara
• a great exemplar of  BCIT ITunes U and a cool model of a knowledge base at BCIT
• the launch of flexible learning initiative and offering of Lynda.com training resources at UBC
• a successful collaboration with UBC to offer a Visual Facilitation workshop and an offering of Adopting Open Textbook workshops and offering of Instructional Skills Workshop Online (RRU ISWO) by BCcampus
• a successful use of Kaltura in Blackboard and Course Design Institute at UBCO
• a Demofest at JIBC
• the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE) planning for May 2014 conference with amazing lineup of keynotes at TRU

From this discussion we received a whole host of ideas for this year’s T.e.l.l. series and further ideas on programs, models, frameworks, and exemplars to share with ETUG members.
SCETUG then had a lunch break and took advantage of an opportunity to participate in a MOOC panel event at Royal Roads which resulted in interesting takeaways. This event was a great opportunity for SCETUG members to hear firsthand RRU’s considerations and questions in this area and gave us all an opportunity to reflect on similar threads at our own institutions. (SCETUG will share these in a future post.)
After lunch we discussed 2 initiatives we wanted to work on this year. SCETUG Vice Chair, Sarah Bowers (Langara) facilitated a discussion on ways to mark ETUG’s 20th Anniversary. Gina Bennett (College of the Rockies) facilitated a discussion on next steps in ETUG’s engagement with an experimentation with digital badges. Our committee then moved into breakout sessions in the style of a “World Cafe” and people self-organized by project of interest. An agenda, list of the projects, working groups and some notes appear in our wiki.
In all, it was a very fruitful working session for SCETUG. We were reminded that ETUG’s strength and spirit of innovation comes from it’s membership. Now its your turn! Please share your thoughts–a sentence or two–on the following in the ETUG community space in SCoPE (Go to the General Forum):

• What’s one really great thing that your institution has been doing this past year?
• What themes or ideas would you like to explore at the next ETUG workshop?
• How we should celebrate and mark ETUG’s 20th anniversary?

ETUGgers who respond will have their names entered in a draw for a prize! Details are posted in the ETUG community space.