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Events, tools, initiatives

Archives for October 2024

Polytechnic Teaching Program for Educators

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BCIT is excited to offer the Associate Certificate in Polytechnic Teaching (POLY) program, designed for current and aspiring educators. As a premier polytechnic institute in BC, BCIT offers flexible, relevant, and future-proof education. This program is delivered by instructors with extensive experience in the field of teaching and learning. The POLY program emphasizes active and applied learning strategies, aligning with the hands-on approach valued in polytechnic education.

Who is the POLY program for?

The POLY program is designed for current and aspiring post-secondary instructors. The program is an opportunity for current instructors to enhance their teaching skills and gives aspiring instructors the knowledge and strategies to teach in an applied-skills environment. It’s also an effective way to build your resume and to make you a more competitive teaching candidate.

The POLY program can be completed in two to five years through BCIT’s Flexible Learning format (part-time). All courses are also transferable to the Provincial Instructor Diploma Program (PIDP) at Vancouver Community College (VCC), allowing program participants to further enhance their teaching credentials.

Key learning outcomes

Upon completing the POLY program, students will be equipped to:

  • Develop suitable learning outcomes for courses, ensuring that the goals fit the setting.
  • Apply learning theories to improve both teaching and the students’ learning.
  • Design online, in-person, and blended learning environments that adapt to various learning styles.
  • Apply teaching strategies using tools and technologies that meet specific goals and objectives.
  • Create strategies that promote an inclusive learning environment.
  • Evaluate instructional strategies to continually improve teaching methods.
  • Choose assessment strategies, techniques, and feedback mechanisms that align with the learning outcomes and result in effective student evaluation.
  • Create and maintain a professional development plan to stay current with trends and issues in your field and in adult learning.
  • Develop habits of reflection, self-awareness, and ongoing improvement.

Take the next step in your teaching journey. The Winter 2025 term course offerings for the Associate Certificate in Polytechnic Teaching are now available. Register today.

Want to learn more about the POLY program? Attend the online info session on November 5 from 5:00–6:00 p.m.

Teaching with AI at BCIT

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The LTC is pleased to announce our upcoming event, Teaching with AI, which is being held on Thursday, October 31, from 11:30 to 4:00 pm in the Town Square meeting rooms on Burnaby campus.

This mini-conference focuses on teaching and learning and helping BCIT faculty deepen their understanding of the challenges and opportunities of integrating Generative AI into their teaching practices.

Keynote presentation by Lucas Wright, Senior Educational Consultant, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, UBC, will commence at 11:30 am. Lunch will be provided at 12:15 pm, followed by various sessions from 1–4 pm. Several of the sessions will provide instructors with an opportunity for hands-on practice experimenting with AI tools for teaching and course design.

Afternoon sessions include:

  • Teaching Tales from the Crypt — a panel discussion of BCIT faculty using GenAI in their teaching
  • Developing Teaching Materials with the Help of AI
  • AI and Academic Integrity
  • Ethics of GenAI
  • AI Hands-on Lab
  • and more…

This is an open event — no registration required.

Food for Thought: Work Integrated Learning Faculty Toolkit

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A new academic year of Food for Thought lunch time sessions got underway on October 9, 2024, as Joan Pascual, Program Head of the Centre for Workplace Education at BCIT, presented a session on the Work Integrated Learning (WIL) Faculty Toolkit.

WIL offers students the opportunity to consolidate their learning in the workplace environment. The 170 WIL programs at BCIT include apprenticeships, co-ops, clinicals and preceptorships, practicums and internships, and industry and consulting projects.

The WIL Faculty Toolkit assists instructors whose students are participating in WIL, and was created to centralize the information related to developing and facilitating WIL experiences at BCIT. It is particularly useful for new faculty, and during program development and program reviews.

In addition to a course overview, the Toolkit has six modules:

  • Module 1: WIL definitions and quality
  • Module 2: How do I design a WIL experience?
  • Module 3: Risk management
  • Module 4: How do I design reflective activities for WIL experiences?
  • Module 5: What funding is available for WIL partners?
  • Module 6: How do I evaluate a WIL experience?

The Faculty Toolkit can be accessed through the BCIT Employee Learning Centre at pd.bcit.ca. Select Discover, then search for the WIL Faculty Toolkit, and select Enroll.

Food for Thought sessions are hosted by BCIT Library and the Learning and Teaching Centre throughout the academic year, and are opportunities for faculty and staff to showcase research, learning and teaching practice, student support services, and innovation at BCIT. The sessions are hosted on Teams and in-person at the Library Summit Centre (where a light lunch is provided). A calendar of upcoming sessions is available on the Loop.

QCon Question Converter: Manage Quiz Questions with Word

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When asked about the best feature of the Learning Hub, many instructors name the quiz tool for its efficiency in automatically marking quizzes and calculating grading components.

However, the Learning Hub quiz tool is designed to create and update individual questions one at a time. To develop multiple questions, you’ve had to use a software program called Respondus, which lets you create questions in a more familiar program like Word and then copy them wholesale to the Learning Hub. Unfortunately, Respondus has a lot of frustrating downsides—finicky formatting requirements and compatibility restricted to the Windows platform, to name a few.

To simplify bulk question management, the LTC’s Course Production team has developed QCon as a better tool for converting questions for use in the Learning Hub. Here are the main improvements that we’ve built into the program.

Key Benefits of QCon

  1. Platform: QCon is web-based, which makes it much faster and available to users of different systems (i.e., Mac).
  2. Formatting: In Respondus, correct answers are designated with an asterisk placed before the list number, which means you can’t use automatic list numbering. In QCon, correct answers are formatted with the asterisk after the list number.
  3. Error detection: Although both programs require questions to be formatted a certain way for the conversion process, many users find Respondus’ conversion error messages confusing. QCon provides clearer feedback to help you fix your documents.
  4. Randomizing answers: Both programs allow you to randomize answers, but Respondus makes you choose one or the other and then manually change the exceptions in the Learning Hub one at a time. QCon lets you designate exceptions up front.
  5. Images: In Respondus, the Media Wizard is used after questions are imported to add images, videos, or other media. In Qcon, images can be embedded right in the question in Word.
  6. Random pools: If you’ve created a “random pool” of questions in the Learning Hub, it’s difficult to see them all at once because normally only a portion of the questions will be selected and shown. This makes it difficult to manage your Question Library. By using Qcon, you can work with all your questions outside the Learning Hub, which makes it easy to see everything you’ve developed.

To find out more about how this conversion tool works with Learning Hub quizzes, see Overview – Qcon Guide (bcit.ca).