ETUG Stewardship Committee 2019 Planning Day Highlights
(Image credit: Tracy Roberts, BCcampus)
This year, on October 17, the ETUG Stewardship Committee (SCETUG) gathered at BCIT’s Downtown campus for our annual planning meeting. It was a full and productive day with 10 participants representing BCcampus and 8 post-secondary institutions across the province. And this year, Tracy Roberts of BCcampus took us through a special liberating structure activity to help us pull apart and reconstruct who ETUG is and what it offers our community.
After some quick introductions, there were some brief reflections from the new Chair, me, Emily Schudel (Camosun College) and the rest of the leadership team (Terri Bateman from North Island College and Keith Webster from Royal Roads University), followed by Emily Renoe (UBC) taking us through an engaging icebreaker before the fun really began.
First up was a reminder of all the great things we did in the past year, from our member survey, to our 25th anniversary conference in Kamloops last June. Then a recognition for all our SCETUG members (I’ve already mentioned Terri and Keith and Emily Renoe, but also need to acknowledge Bonnie Johnston (BCIT), Andy Sellwood (VCC), Jason Toal (SFU), and Hope Miller (Douglas College)) and the great work they do, as well as welcoming our new member, Amy Severson (Justice Institute of BC). We welcomed our new BCcampus liaison, Rebecca Shortt, and welcomed back Tracy Roberts, who is also supporting us from BCcampus. Finally, we recognized our Institutional Reps and the support they give us by promoting our work to their institutions. If you are interested in joining our SCETUG team or our Institutional Reps, let us know!
The rest of our day was spent reflecting on who we are, what we do, and planning for the next year. To get us going, Tracy led us in a new liberating structure called Strategy Knotworking.
First we looked at who we are, using 1-2-4-All to generate an ETUG Purpose Statement, which we now proudly display on our website:
“The Educational Technology Users Group is a community that exists to empower and inspire all who design, develop, and support learning experience.”
We then moved into a Conversation Café to explore what is happening around us right now that demands creative change, and then into an 25/10 Crowd Sourcing activity to look at or ambition – given our purpose, what seems possible now? Finally, Terri Bateman moved us into Ecocyle Planning to look more closely at what do we do now, what should be put to rest or repurposed, and what can we do – and how will we know we are successful?
After the Ecocyle, it was a good time to map our year, find volunteers, and set some solid goals. So, here are a few highlights:
- We will stick with our main communications channels: our website, etug-archive.bccampus.ca/, the monthly newsletter, Twitter, SLACK, and LinkedIn.
- We will also continue with our workshops, both face to face and online: our 2020 Spring workshop will be part of the larger Festival of Learning, our Fall workshop is tentatively planned for November 6 (stay tuned for a “save the date” post in the new year), and we will be adding a series of half or day-long webinars to our schedule (we held our first webinar on November 1 this year!).
- Additional activities will be the 12 Apps of Christmas, which will become Appy New Year, starting in January 2020 with one app per month, as well as a re-working of our website to include more member posts and resources related to teaching and learning and educational technologies.
If you have questions about who we are, how we support you, or how to get involved with ETUG more, please drop us a line!
Emily Schudel (Camosun College), Terri Bateman (North Island College), Keith Webster (Royal Roads University), Leadership Team, SCETUG.