Notepad:Learning Tech

The current team

Production: responsible for building and maintaining ~300 Open Learning courses. Managed by Carolyn Teare.

Media: build custom multimedia elements for TRU online courses. [Example here and here.] Provide support for campus users for video and media production.

Learning Technology - One developer (Troy Welch) working on UX, help documentation, special projects.

Challenges: Support for Moodle and other learning technology (staffing, resources, model). Managing migration to Moodle on top of existing (growing) production workloads.

What we've done

Initiated Documentation:Learning_Environment project, with goals of moving TRU to a single, enhanced learning management system, and to identify and address other needs.

Re-organized support model, initiated migration of OL courses to Moodle without any additional resources. (But we really need use some to achieve the goal.)

The KUMU wiki. Plan to initiate a single-source documentation for support materials, other relevant uses. Example... this wiki page is rendered here. This page lives here. A single wiki page can live in multiple contexts. When wiki is updated, it applies across all contexts.

Developed for open online courses (rMOOC, SHIFT), provided support for public-facing web resources such as ePortfolios (Alan Levine, Brianna McIlquham), or online web projects (https://juanazeme.wordpress.com/, https://abetopia.wordpress.com/).

Recognized challenges with introducing users to WordPress, and respecting privacy, developed and piloted SPLOTS. http://splot.ca/

• http://l21c.trubox.ca/
• http://imagery.trubox.ca/
• http://biol1210.trubox.ca/
• http://podcast123.trubox.ca/

What's cooking

Thanks to TRU IT for supporting the BC Open Ed Tech Collaborative. Current active institutional partners are BCCampus, TRU, UNBC, JIBC, uVIC, and Royal Roads. We have individual participants from every public post-sec and beyond.

Goals of the BCOETC

a collaborative WordPress installation, that is centrally provisioned, but with instances managed by individual institutions.

a community of practice to communicate, share code and applications (ready to run), best practices and new ideas (this is from Reclaim Hosting, another vital part of our global community of collaborators).

We are also utilizing H5p framework and tools, looking for ways to extend its use.

Should we be thinking about a shared service for online video for our community?

What I fear

We are critically short-staffed presently, and even with reinforcements expect that time will always be a challenge. Constantly looking for ways to enhance our efficiency. The coming months will be crucial and difficult.

What does our community want and need? ACTAC focus groups and survey being developed for fall and winter of this year.

How do we communicate with our community?

Can we provide training in more inventive, engaging, and flexible ways?

How do we support the adoption of Open Textbooks? (Student campaign.)