[Institutional Report] Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Contributed by Meg Goodine, KPU.


 Role and Institution
 I’m Meg Goodine, Manager of Learning Technologies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU). Together with my colleagues, Robin Leung and Jay Singh, we make up the Learning Technology team–part of KPU’s Teaching and Learning Commons.
KPU is located in the Metro Vancouver region, south of the Fraser River. We have four campuses in Surrey, Richmond, Langley, and Cloverdale, with a fifth campus set to open later this year at Surrey’s Civic Plaza. We serve over 12,000 full-time equivalent students annually.
Educational technology
Our team is responsible for supporting a core suite of tools that includes our LMS (Moodle), an integrated eportfolio platform (Mahara), a recently added video management platform (Kaltura), and various LTI plug-ins like VoiceThread and CanCred Factory (an open badge platform) that we have connected to our LMS.  We have explored BlueJeans and Skype for Business for web conferencing but are still looking for a tool that is a better fit for teaching and learning. We’ve been hearing good things about Zoom so may be taking a closer look at that in the near future.
While we have a growing number of courses that are delivered fully or partially online, most faculty use our core tools to enrich on-campus courses (roughly 1000 or more active courses per semester). We work closely with our IT department who provide first-level service desk support for requests and problems related to our tools. Being part of the BCNET Shared Service for Moodle and Kaltura is also a factor in how we can support so much with such a small team.
New or noteworthy
KPU is a strong supporter of Open Education and OER and we try to work closely with our Open Education Working Group to promote and support OER wherever we can. The Teaching and Learning Commons recently welcomed new Teaching Fellows in the areas of K-12 Transformation, Learning Environments, and Experiential Learning. We are excited to have a more direct connection with faculty working in these areas so we can provide better support for tools and technologies that can further this work.
Since we introduced Kaltura last summer, we have seen steady uptake in the use of video for teaching and learning, and with it, an increase in requests for support with video production and editing which we are struggling to meet with our limited resources. We would welcome any opportunities to share resources or participate in training opportunities with other institutions who have more expertise or resources in these areas. For example, we found the January meeting of the Kaltura User Group organized by BCNET so helpful for learning how our colleagues at other institutions are approaching the admin and support aspects of their Kaltura implementations.
We’d also be very interested in hearing what others are doing in the open badge space. After a very successful badge pilot with our Library partners on plagiarism awareness, we are now looking at expanding our open badging initiative. We are working with stakeholders to plan for how an open badge “ecosystem” might evolve at KPU.