⚙️ Work

Students who are taking some courses on campus and some online will need a place on campus to connect to their online classes. At least 2 large classrooms have been designated for this (ICT 102 and Craigie Hall C 119), and there’s a map of other available spaces across campus. Hopefully, the campus WIFI networks will hold up to the load…

Oh. And I’m starting a new role at the TI as Associate Director, Learning Technologies & Design. I just posted a blog thing with info about the new role.

So this is kind of big news. I’m starting a new role at the Taylor Institute, as Associate Director, Learning Technologies & Design.

D’Arcy Norman will be taking on a new role as Associate Director, Learning Technologies and Design, providing strategic and administrative leadership for and helping to advance learning technologies and design within and beyond the TI.

I’ll be leading the Learning Technologies and Design Team, with both Learning Technologies Group (where I was manager prior to this) and Learning and Instructional Design Group, as well as our team of grad student Learning Technologies Coaches.

Our team is conducting 2 separate pilot projects this semester, to evaluate software that is used in a few faculties for potential use across the university. I’m not going to mention the products or the vendors.

In both cases, the urgent requests for doing a campus pilot project were forms of “we need this in order to do [interesting pedagogy], and we need it to be integrated with our LMS so we don’t have to spend a bunch of time doing admin-y things to use it. also, if it could be funded centrally, it’d be really helpful.”

⚙️ Work

Alan shared a link¹ to a tweet by Robin DeRosa, about our Teaching Squares Guide:

Kevin’s last day was Friday. He’s leaving some huuuuge shoes to fill. I’ll be posting for an edtech developer/designer position as soon as possible…

⚙️ Work

Jessica put together a new Recordings in Learning Environments web page as part of the Provost’s website, with info about recording in learning environments. It includes samples of what to put in the course syllabus to let students know ahead of time, and has links to policy documents and consent forms.

USask has a handy resource on developing contingency plans for potential in-person course interruptions due to COVID.

Our new Adaptable Course Design module is available, and should be useful for instructors to plan for contingencies.

⚙️ Work

A joint statement from the 3 research-intensive universities in the province was published, with new guidelines for COVID protocols. Rapid testing and masks are required for people who are coming to campus. Vaccines are strongly encouraged, and fully vaccinated people won’t need to have ongoing COVID testing throughout the semester.

Anna developed a great resource - 5 things you can do in Top Hat - to show some of the things that Top Hat can be used for, beyond just a simple student response system.

⚙️ Work

• Another return-to-campus planning week.
• The pilots for Hypothesis and Kritik are ready to go.
• We did a soft launch of the new “tools” mini-site on elearn, for feedback from a working group next week.
• Planning for an increased focus on using Top Hat in online, blended, and on-campus classes.
• Planning for making MS Teams more generally available for use by instructors and students.
• Refining the Brightspace LTI integration request process.
• Learning more about other microcredential/badge initiatives at the university. Our badges platform has been running for over 6 years, but several campus platforms now have “badges” as features, implemented separately. We’ll need to figure out a consistent strategy across the university so we don’t have confusion about what badges are, who can issue them, for what, etc…

🤔 PhD

Planning the mechanical details for conducting my first round of interviews. I’ll be field testing that protocol with my supervisors next week, and starting recruitment. Progress!

⚙️ Work

Finally sent out the invitations for the Kritik and Hypothesis pilots. Looks like Kritik may have hit a snag with their Brightspace integration. Hoping they can work that out before the kickoff orientation session in a couple weeks…

🤔 PhD

The ethics board certified my application! Moving on to preparing for data collection…

📚 Reading

Heather Clitheroe and Eric Donovan (editors): Getting to Proxima b (an ebook of student writing, exploring ideas about newly discovered planets around a neighbouring star)

The province announced that COVID restrictions are ending in a couple of weeks. Have COVID? Don’t need to stay home anymore. Testing is ending. So numbers will go down. Kenney is saying we’re the best in the world and that he’s leading canada out of the pandemic, but our vaccination rate is one of the lowest in canada and new infections are rising. And the province is forbidding post-secondary institutions from requiring vaccines before coming to campus. The data on new cases has a fun little ski jump at the far right end. This is also shown in wastewater testing in Calgary.

⚙️ Work

More return-to-campus planning, and setting up the Kritik and Hypothesis pilot projects for the fall semester.

Team members made some great progress on our new “tools” section of elearn. Phase 1 of that will launch by the end of summer. This is an important first step, making information about all online learning technologies available in one place. We have support info up already, but not “wikipedia-style” info about core and third-party software used at UCalgary. Profs need to know what people are using, what they’re using it for, and which tools they can safely use.

I got my lab results this week, ahead of the final maintenance infusion next week, wrapping up 29 months of treatment.

Looks like my immune system is still kind of janky. I’m hoping it will improve after having a chance to recover post-Rituxan. Not a fun time to have an unreliable immune system…

📚 Reading

King, S. E., & Cerrone Arnold, K. (2012). Blended learning environments in higher education: A case study of how professors make it happen. Mid-Western Educational Researcher, 25.

⚙️ Work

We had a “zoom-TI-meeting-free” week, to help reduce the “wow do we spend a lot of time staring at each other in tiny boxes” thing. Which was a bit challenging, as we had a new team member start this week. Working remotely for now because of the pandemic, but without a team meeting to meet the rest of the team. It’s an interesting experience, I’m sure. Team meeting on Monday to help with that…