[Spring Workshop 2023] Schedule
Wednesday May 31
6:00 pm – Pre-Workshop Get Together – The Canadian Brewhouse
We have a large table reserved for us to meet new friends, catch up with old colleagues and celebrate the return to a (partially) in-person workshop. Join us at The Canadian Brewhouse – Richmond (1305 – 4755 McClelland Rd. Richmond) at 6:00 pm on Wednesday May 31.
Thursday June 1
| Time | Session |
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| 8:00 – 9:00 | Breakfast |
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| 9:00 – 9:30 | Introduction and Elder Lekeyten’s Welcome |
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One of 20 Kwantlen First Nation Elders, Lekeyten grew up within a very large family in Chehalis First Nation near Harrison Lake. Here, Lekeyten attended day school. Similar to residential schools, day schools did not require students to stay overnight and they returned home at the end of every day. But the teachings were the same, said Lekeyten, and he and his classmates were taught to be quiet. As a result, Lekeyten spent more time in nature than in school, and he soon found his voice. Fast-forward to adulthood, and Lekeyten has been avidly involved for more than 20 years as a guest speaker and presenter at all levels of elementary, secondary and post-secondary education as well as trades and conferences in the Lower Mainland. His talks are about the environment, land and water use, fishing, and issues of conservation and its traditional importance. Lekeyten is a proud father of three daughters and two sons. He is also extremely proud of being a grandfather of nine. Lekeyten and his wife Cheryl Gabriel have been together for forty years. He loves and respects his family wholeheartedly. His advice at the Elder in Residence installation ceremony: “Never shut up.” |
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| 9:30 – 9:40 | Amanda Coolidge | BCcampus Welcome |
| 9:40 – 9:50 | Briana Fraser and Julian Prior | Share your Data Privacy Challenges | Slides |
Briana Fraser and Julian Prior will take 5 minutes to present an example of a privacy challenge they’ve experienced at Langara College and encourage participants to share their challenges, concerns, thoughts, on the ETUG Mattermost Privacy channel.
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| 9:55 – 10:40 | Jessica Gemella | DIY Toolkit for Digital Literacy | Padlet |
| In response to requests from faculty interested in how best to use emerging technologies in their classroom, Jessica started to build a Digital Literacy toolkit. Anwen was subsequently invited to collaborate on expanding the toolkit. The result is a toolkit that supports higher educators to facilitate conversations about the ethical use of digital technologies for meaningful collaborations within digital communities. Specifically, the toolkit aims to support faculty in facilitating the co-creation of class agreements that address the ethical use of digital technologies and media, netiquette, and digital citizenship to maintain well-being. The toolkit will help learning communities to:
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| 30 minute networking break | |
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| 11:10 – 11:30 | Faeyza Mufti, Jamilee Baroud | Showcase: Digital literacies and inclusive design practices | Slides |
Our short session will showcase modules that feature digital literacies and inclusive design practices. Designed as a CC Attribution Non-Commercial Creative Commons license resource, these modules build and expand knowledge and application of digital competencies that are particularly relevant to designing learning for hybrid spaces that intersect with the online and face-to-face spectrum. The goals of this resource are to: Increase digital literacies and digital knowledge mobilization and citizenship awareness; Explore interactivity built into all hybrid learning environments; Enable legal and fair use of various ways to share knowledge remotely, such as creative commons licenses; Consider the design of inclusive digital spaces; Increase feelings of confidence and competency in online teaching and learning spaces; Expand understanding of the safe, social, and ‘professional’ use of a wide range of technologies. In showcasing these modules, we hope to share interactivities for participants to actively engage with digital literacies, accessibility, and inclusion, and expand upon how these modules can be used in various, multi-disciplinary education settings.<
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| 10 minute break | |
| 11:40 – 12:00 | Lisa Gedak & Sam Kirk | Celebrating the Whole Student: Using ePortfolios to create meaningful learning experiences and authentically assess learning | Slides |
| ePortfolios are digital collections of learning artifacts created by students for their courses. Though seemingly a simplistic activity, the supported practice of folio-thinking, namely curating, organizing, reflecting, and connecting learning experiences, can capture holistic aspects of a student’s life beyond the classroom. ePortfolios can allow for integrating the personal self into the academic self for more profound, more connected learning experiences. Through frequent instructor and peer feedback and reflective opportunities, students can demonstrate their growth and development over time and better articulate their learning. This 20-minute presentation will present and discuss contemporary research examining the use of ePortfolios to support and celebrate the whole student’s learning journey and to assess learning authentically.
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| 12:00 – 1:00 | Lunch |
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| 1:00 – 1:20 | Gwen Nguyen | (Academic) Integrity and ChatGPT | Slides |
One of the most controversial concerns about ChatGPT in higher education is related to academic integrity. In this short session, I discuss dimensions of (academic) integrity and propose how educators can promote new integrity framework to address some dynamism and complexities when using ChatGPT in teaching.
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| 10 minute break | |
| 1:30 – 1:50 | Grace Seo & Traynor Hansen | Why are we Doing This Again?: Will AI writing tools push us to reconsider the way we assess? | Slides |
| AI writing tools, such as ChatGPT, use natural language processing and machine learning, which can generate a wide range of outputs, including text-based responses to prompts, creative writing, translation, summaries, etc. Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, many academics have expressed their apprehension about this tool. What does it mean for our assessment practices if AI writing tools can resemble student work, complete assignments, or even pass their exams? Will students use AI writing tools as a shortcut around other forms of learning? Despite these widely publicized fears, we may see ChatGPT push teaching and learning in different directions. In the same way that the global pandemic forced us to take different approaches to teaching, the introduction of AI writing tools ought to challenge us to reconsider how we measure student learning. If ChatGPT can produce bad essays that are good enough for students to make the grade in some circumstances, how does the advent of AI writing tools force us to change how we assess student learning? Will this prompt us to reconsider our assessments, such as how the strengths and weaknesses of AI writing tools relate to the goals of writing assignments in our classes or disciplines? Why are we doing this again, and why are we asking our students to do it? Join us to explore these questions as ChatGPT changes how we assess learning.
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| 45 minute networking break | |
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| 2:45 – 3:30 | Susan Bonham, Erin Hagen & Alex Samur | Managing the Panic, Highlighting the Opportunities: Generative AI workshops for faculty | Slides |
Generative AI, and ChatGPT in particular, is a huge concern for faculty at most institutions, including ours. Starting in January, Langara’s Educational Technology Department (EdTech), Teaching and Curriculum Development Centre (TCDC), and Student Conduct and Academic Integrity Office (SCAI) started receiving separate requests for support, information, and training in connection with ChatGPT. In response, we’ve joined forces and together are offering bespoke workshops for requesting departments. These interactive workshops cover both general background (e.g. a primer on generative AI) and each department’s specific needs (e.g. how their assessments might embrace or be negatively impacted by AI). Feedback, so far, is that these workshops are helping departments start an ongoing conversation about generative AI and take steps to respond to it. However, keeping our workshops current with the recent rapid developments in this field, and tailoring each workshop to a department’s particular needs, can be challenging. In this presentation, we’ll reflect on what’s working well and what obstacles we’ve encountered as we try to support faculty response to generative AI. We’d also like to invite participants to share how they are responding to AI tools, including how they are supporting faculty at their institutions and what support gaps still exist. We’d also like to hear participants’ thoughts on how we can continue to have open, informative and nuanced discussions with our students, our peers and senior leadership about the role of AI in higher education.
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| 10 minute break | |
| 3:40 – 4:00 | Elle Ting & Andy Sellwood | Navigating Change and “Normalcy” in Online Learning | Slides |
This presentation will be a summary of a research project on VCC students’ perspectives on academic integrity, alternative assessments, and stress management. A summary of data will be shown based on a survey of 181 VCC students in February 2023. Highlights will include a discussion of changes in assessment from the pre-COVID era to now, a look at student perceptions on cheating and plagiarism, and a deep dive into the sources of student stress with regard to assessment. Data will also be summarized that connects to disruptors such as AI and the changing teaching and learning landscape.
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| 10 minute break | |
| 4:10 – 4:30 | Dave Smulders & Junsong Zhang | Evolving Considerations for Experiential Learning Design in Digital Environments | Slides |
| The Justice Institute of BC (JIBC) has had a long history with Experiential Learning, from its scenario-based learning activities all the way to full-scale multi-agency simulations. As stated in our most recent strategic plan, “our curriculum emphasizes real world hands-on experiential learning in training that has an immediate and lasting impact.” While multi-faceted experiential learning design has always been part of our work at JIBC, in recent years, we have been attempting to provide more training in digital environments. Transforming the idea of “hands-on” learning to new and innovative formats poses some interesting challenges for our teaching-and-learning-centre-based instructional designers when working with stakeholders such as subject matter experts, students, administrators, and instructors. In effect, our collaborative work often involves integrating different notions and experiences of what experiential learning actually means. In order to develop our collective capacity, we have reconsidered aspects of our design process, especially for digital learning projects, and attempted to map out a set of principles and procedures for collaboration. Reflection includes a comparison of our curriculum development activities in light of the eight competencies identified in the digital literacy framework from BC’s Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills. Now when we talk about learning design, we try to bring together our complementary interests and skill sets, from the importance of authentic, learning experiences in the field to the concerns for accessibility, inclusion, and technological competence. The result offers a broader approach to instructional design and the use of educational technology to accomplish our ongoing commitment to experiential learning. This short session will outline some of our approaches to and experiences with an instructional design process that strives to be more inclusive of our partners and stakeholders.
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| 4:30 – 6:30 | Social Event |
| Join us for an informal social event on June 1 right after the sessions end in the Melville, Centre for Dialogue space. Attendees will receive two complimentary drinks tickets and appetizers and non-alcoholic beverages will be provided. We will offer complimentary taxi vouchers for when you leave the social event. Please do not drink and drive. | |
Thursday June 1 | Friday June 2
Friday June 2
| Time | Session |
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| 8:00 – 9:00 | Breakfast |
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| 9:00 – 9:10 | Land acknowledgement, welcome back |
| 9:10 – 9:30 | Diane Thompson & Susan Bonham | Beyond the ePortfolio: Enhancing digital literacy with Pebblepad | Slides |
Digital literacy has become a critical skill for students to succeed in the digital age. As educators, we must ensure that we equip our students with the necessary digital literacy skills. The use of technology such as Pebblepad can aid in the integration and development of digital literacy skills.
This presentation aims to explore the integration of digital literacy using Pebblepad as the key technology. Pebblepad is a digital learning platform that offers various features to support learning and assessment. PebblePad can be part of an institution-wide digital education strategy to support effective personal learning and other innovative technology-enhanced teaching. Specific examples will be highlighted to show how we have used our ePortfolio tool (Pebblepad) as a way of enhancing digital literacy within specific courses at Langara College. Using Pebblepad to strengthen competencies related to digital writing and reading, the digital design of content and materials, and the skills to edit, publish or share them on the web will be demonstrated.
The presentation will also provide some practical and lived experience for participants on how Langara came to pilot Pebblepad as an educational tool with diverse uses. Reflecting on “What? So what? Now what?” (Driscoll and The, 2001) in connection with this pilot, we have identified important lessons.
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| 10 minute break | |
| 9:40 – 10:25 | Sue Hellman | ChatGPT: Foe, friend, or paradigm-shifting challenge | Google Slides PowerPoint |
| Technological innovation comes in 3 flavours: catastrophic (the sky is falling!); sustaining (helps us do what we’ve always done, but better); or disruptive (what doesn’t kill us can make us stronger). Education articles about ChatGPT generally take the first 2 perspectives. Many warn that cheaters will prosper because ChatGPT is getting better and better at passing typical tests and at generating fakes that fool many of us a lot of the time. Others suggest we should embrace AI and use it ourselves to improve our work/life balance or with students as an ‘intelligent’ tutor. We may not be able to beat ChatGPT at its own game, but we can change the game by shifting to a flipped classroom model and designing learning experiences that ChatGPT cannot do. During this hands-on session we’ll dig into how to redesign activities and assessments to:
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| 40 minute networking break | |
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| 11:15 – 12:00 | Gwen Nguyen | Supporting Students’ Well-Being when Learning with AI | Slides |
| We are all immersed in technology for our social, personal, learning and working needs. Even though general well-being has received attention across higher education due to its inseparable connection to learning, many educators still struggle to have a comprehensive wellness curriculum to help students navigate digital spaces safely and ethically (Harward, 2016), especially with AI tools. In this presentation, I will discuss the dimensions of digital well-being and propose how educators can apply PERMA, which is a framework for practicing positive psychology to support learners’ well-being (students’ positive agency and global citizenship skills)when learning with AI tools.
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| 12:00 – 1:00 | Lunch |
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| 1:00 – 1:20 | Lightning Rounds |
| 1:00 – 1:10 | Carrie Fry & R. John Robertson | Risks, Realities, and Ruminations on the Probabilistic Web | Slides |
Current AI tools use large language models (LLM) to create original text, using probability to build it word-by-word. What does this mean for determining if something is real? If AI output is based on how often words are found together in the resources the tool has trained on, is it only as real as what is freely available online? How does this question of what is real intersect with other tools, techniques, and technologies? Using AI-produced academic papers and their reference lists as our case study, we will examine how tools like ChatGPT may alter our understanding of our current information landscape and allow us to interrogate a path forward. Reference lists create an accessible test case, as fact-checking is a little more straightforward than for the paper itself. ChatGPT assembles references that may or may not exist, merged references that contain real DOIs or article titles blended together beside completely invented references. What happens if judging something as real becomes too much of a barrier? Readers might not have access to the evidence to refute incorrect citations as most scholarly sources are locked behind paywalls. Then too, reviewing sources could be too time-consuming; most professors only give the references a cursory skim, unless they notice a problem. Is it reasonable to expect them to take time out of grading to research the references closely. While these decisions could be off-loaded to other detection tools, they are not keeping up, for example, Turnitin’s AI checker returns at least 1% false positives. Finally, is there hope for a semantic web, where AI tools recognize and evaluate their sources and know what a citation is, not just what it should look like?
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| 1:10 – 1:20 | R. John Robertson, Michael J. Paulus Jr., Traynor Hansen & Grace Seo | From DX to AI: Developing digital wisdom to respond to the shifting landscape of Higher Educaiton | Slides |
| What does digital wisdom look like for an institution? We will share some of the approaches that, as faculty developers, librarians, instructional designers and writing professors, have strengthened our institutional capacity to engage with emerging opportunities and challenges. Our presentation will explore the different approaches, what we have achieved, and the questions and confidence we have as we engage with creative AI tools. A series of initially independent efforts in faculty development, student support, and institutional initiatives are coalescing under what we’re framing as digital wisdom. Efforts in faculty development have included workshops on backwards design and on AI writing tools, efforts in student support have including rethinking writing support as a more comprehensive research, reading, and writing studio, securing grant funding for writing around AI, providing grant funding to create OER, wider efforts around digital transformation, and thinking about how to expand from information literacy to digital literacy in a reform of the general education curriculum. These efforts have encouraged resiliency and a thoughtful approach to pedagogy. In this context, these are some of the AI-focused questions we are wrestling with:
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| 10 minute break | |
| 1:30 – 2:15 | Michael Sider | Supporting and Increasing Accessibility in Video | Slides |
| In some ways it’s never been easier to make video more accessible. At the same time there are new challenges, as we learn more about the variety of barriers that learners experience with media. Captions, ASL, descriptive video… as producers of educational media, navigating the landscape of accessibility in video can be overwhelming. UBC Studios at University of British Columbia has been researching and deploying a wide range of solutions toward universal design in video, and supporting university faculty and staff in their use of these solutions through workshops and consultations. The solutions range from free and fast, to expensive and labour-intensive. Join Michael Sider, Producer at UBC Studios, as we explore together the barriers and opportunities in the work toward universal design in educational video.
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| 10 minute break | |
| 2:25 – 2:45 | Afsaneh Sharif, Natasha Boskic & AC Deger | Campus Wide Collaboration for Accessible and Inclusive Design | Slides |
| UBC is striving to foster a sense of belonging and promote equity and social justice for all members of the community by prioritizing inclusion and accessibility through a variety of initiatives. One of these initiatives is Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Fellows Program. This initiative is funded by the Provost and Vice-President Academic office. It is a collaboration between the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, the Centre for Accessibility, and Faculty Instructional Support units. The UDL Fellows Program will support faculty and staff to develop expertise in UDL through a cohort-based professional development program. It will be comprised of a series of facilitated workshops, online modules, and a project-focused set of activities to help participants use UDL principles to redesign their courses to be more inclusive and accessible. Courses impacted by these projects will benefit students from all backgrounds, not just those with accessibility needs, by providing more options and flexibility through the design of resources, tools, and course delivery. The UDL Fellows program has three core elements: Professional development workshops: Course-focused UDL implementation project and Accessibility Hub resource. There are 18 projects that will be part of the UDL Fellows program. Each project has an academic lead, a dedicated staff such a Learning Designer and an assigned UDL consultant. The launch of the program is May of 2023.The presenters will talk about the collaborative effort taken to launch this initiative, the organization of different working groups and the plan to achieve the goals of the Program.
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| 20 minute break | |
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| 3:05 – 3:25 | Luke McKnight | LMS Accessibility Orientation | Slides |
| Students are expected to master a deluge of technology and software when they begin a new academic journey. When students use assistive technology, there can be additional barriers and a rapid increase in the learning curve for those platforms. At Langara, we found some students using assistive technology spent an inordinate amount of time learning how their assistive technology interacted with our learning management system, Brightspace. In this session, Langara’s assistive technologist will provide an overview and demonstration of a Brightspace course developed to orient and familiarize students with the learning management system. The course is a self-register, voluntary course for students that use assistive technology. Ideally, students would enroll in the course before their first class and learn how their assistive technology will interact with Brightspace. By providing tailored instructions and a sandbox to experiment, we want to let students focus on their schoolwork, not mastering yet another unfamiliar web platform.
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| 10 minute break | |
| 3:35 – 3:45 | Closing |