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Archives for October 2022

Start Propagating Today! House Plant Swap

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When:     November 22, 2022
Time:       11:30am – 12:30pm (or as long as the plants last)
Where:    main floor of the Burnaby Campus Library

Would you love a free houseplant to brighten up your space?  Always wanted to try propagating, but wasn’t sure what you would do with the extra plants? Or maybe your plants multiplied during COVID? Then we have an event for you!

BCIT seed library is branching from seeds into plants!

How it works:

1) Bring any plants you have managed to propagate to the event.

2) Look for cute plants you want in your space.

3) Take them home! (Note you don’t need to bring a plant to take a plant, but the more the better!)

What you need to do now . . . find some yogurt containers or small pots and start making cuttings of your plants! Here are some resources to help you get started:

https://cityfloralgreenhouse.com/2020/09/houseplant-101-how-to-propagate-houseplants-easily/#:~:text=Start%20by%20cuttin…

https://www.houseplantsexpert.com/propagating-house-plants.html

Please contact Deirdre Grace (deirdre_grace@bcit.ca) or Alison Griffin (agriffin11@bcit.ca) for more information.  Hope to see you there!

New Food Support Hub for BCIT Students Experiencing Food Insecurity

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Food insecurity has severe implications for one’s health and wellbeing. Post-secondary students are particularly vulnerable, with over 50% of students at Canadian post-secondary institutions experiencing moderate to severe levels of food insecurity. The Food Support Hub is an all-encompassing service that includes several different avenues for all BCIT students to access support.

ABOUT THE BCITSA FOOD SUPPORT HUB:
Through the Food Support Hub, students in need, can access the following resources:

Food Pantry
Students who need immediate food support can access BCITSA’s Food Pantry on the Burnaby campus. This is a free initiative, located on the 2nd floor of SE2, where members of the BCIT Community can obtain accessible, nutritionally, and culturally appropriate food in a just and ecologically sound manner.

Emergency Food Fund (EFF)
Students experiencing emergent food insecurity, who are primarily based online or at the Specialty/Satellite campuses may be eligible to receive support for emergency food. Eligible students may access the service using the Wellness Support Services form.

Community Fridge
The Community Fridge is a safe, low-barrier, and non-judgmental way for staff, students, and faculty to support each other, reduce waste, and help to ensure everyone in our community can feed themselves and their families.

Quest Food Exchange Referral
Students may receive a 3-year referral-only membership to shop at this low-cost grocery store that operates from several locations (Burnaby, Vancouver, North Vancouver, Surrey)

Community Food Network
Discover a wide range of food supports on and off campus. Filter options by location, type of support, and cost (if any!).

GET INVOLVED!
The Pantry and Community Fridge are looking for volunteers. Learn more about the volunteer positions and apply here.

For more info, email foodsupport@bcitsa.ca or book a Wellness Support Appointment.

Overdue Fines? Not Anymore!

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Starting November 1st, 2022, the BCIT Library is joining the large number of Post Secondary Libraries in waiving fines for students. We will no longer charge overdue fines on regular material. We recognize this is a financially difficult time for a lot of students and eliminating overdue fines is an effort to improve the student experience and remove barriers to learning.

Effective November 1, 2022

  • Overdue fines are eliminated for all regular material.
  • Excludes reserve items, ILL, laptops, iPads, iTouches and other devices.
  • You will receive reminder notifications by email to either renew the item or return it.
  • If an item is not returned or renewed within 30 days of its due date, the item will be considered lost and you will be billed. There is no fine if the item is returned. However, if the item is not returned, you will be billed the replacement cost.

Go to our Students Borrowing Materials page for up-to-date details.

In Celebration of the New AskAway Chat Tag: Open Education

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By Elizabeth Padilla
Institutional Repository, Marine Engineering and Nautical Sciences, HITL
BCIT Library

The new Open Education tag allows us to track those questions when a service provider explains or provides access to Open Access, Open Education, or Open Textbook resources. This includes questions about no-cost textbook options, for example a student looking for an older version of a textbook from the library.

The role of libraries is evolving and expanding in our fast-changing information environment, and expertise in open education and open access is a crucial asset for modern library staff providing reference and information services. Libraries play an important part in discovery, development, description, licensing, curation, and sharing of Open Educational Resources (OER), as well as in advocating for and supporting their use:

  • Open Access to Scholarship
  • OER, Open Textbooks, and Open Courses in the classroom
  • Helping Faculty Find, Evaluate, and Adapt OER
  • Opening up your Institution

If you are a librarian or library technician in B.C.’s post-secondary system, you’ve probably come across the B.C. Open Collection maintained by BCcampus, which started as a collection of open textbooks in 2012. Over the years, the demand for open education in B.C. has grown to support a greater range of open learning and teaching resources.

“The success of open education in B.C. is attributed to the dedication of educators, librarians, administrators, instructional designers, educational technologists, and student advocates. I thank each of them for their contributions to making education in B.C. more accessible and affordable to all.” Amanda Coolidge, Interim Executive Director at BCcampus.

B.C. Open Collection by BCcampus

Visit https://collection.bccampus.ca/

There’s a new home for the collection, and not only does it look better and include more content, but also it provides a better user experience for anyone looking for OER for their course.

The B.C. Open Collection is a platform of open educational resources (OER). It includes open courses as well as a huge library of open textbooks, all with a focus on transferability in the B.C. post-secondary system.

It also includes all the specific learning materials of those open courses. For example, if you are asked about materials on plagiarism during an AskAway session, you can search for ‘plagiarism’ in the B.C. Open Collection and then filter by Material Type (ex: Reading Materials, Assessments, Assignments) to retrieve a number of open learning resources for plagiarism including quizzes. The course collection is still in early days, so the number of resources will only grow over the next few years.

Sharing is Caring

I had the unique pleasure to work with the BCcampus development team as a metadata librarian working to improving findability across the entire collection. Using metadata standards for learning resources, and schemas for structured data on the Internet, a shared vocabulary and some familiar library cataloguing techniques that I brought, combined with the remarkable coding and very talented user interface design, we produced a new home for the collection that will make finding the right OER course materials when you need them easier.

The new collection site currently includes 10 fully developed and openly licensed courses created by B.C. post-secondary educators and funded by a series of BCcampus open online course grants awarded over the past 18 months.

“We hope to see more open courses become a part of this collection,” said Amanda. “We will continue to add relevant open textbooks, open courses, and other vetted resources — ancillary materials with homework and test banks — into the collection, providing an experience to the user that makes them aware these are quality open materials they can use right off the web in their own courses.”

Why are Open Educational Resources (OER) important for faculty and students?

  • Equal Access to High Quality Educational Resources
  • Empowers Teachers In Having a voice in Sharing Instructional Content with their Students
  • Empowers Teachers to create Content and Not be Bound by What Publishers offer
  • Working with OER you Join a Fun and Supportive Community of Scholar Learners
  • Takes Worries about Copyright Out of the Classroom
  • Open Textbooks offer Students less financial Burden, and more success
  • Open Educational Resources offer global equity to Education

BCcampus will continue to support post-secondary institutions in British Columbia by adding relevant open textbooks, open courses, and other vetted resources into the collection, providing a resource of quality open materials that instructors can use right off the web in their own courses.

Learn more

Explore the B.C. Open Collection: https://collection.bccampus.ca/

Read about its new home: Creating a Better User Experience for the B.C. Open Collection / by BCcampus editorial team June 16, 2022 https://bccampus.ca/2022/06/16/creating-a-better-user-experience-for-the-b-c-open-collection/