Dr Leeann Waddington, Associate Vice President, Teaching & Learning, Dr Nishan Perera, Director, Learning Technologies and Educational Development and Samuel Kirk, Teaching & Learning Strategist from KPU (Kwantlen Polytechnic University) held a panel discussion at PebbleBash 2024 on the topic ‘Inspired by our core principles: Using interdisciplinary PebblePad workbooks to advance ePortfolio use.’ Click here to watch the video with the full transcript or if you’re having trouble viewing the video above.
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We wanted to share with you a little bit today about one of the strategies that we’ve been using to advance ePortfolios, and it’s really inspired by our core principles as an institution, and our design principles as a team.
And and that strategy revolves around using interdisciplinary workbooks. So often times, we talk about specific programs and their needs. We’ve tried to create some things that that can be used across different faculties in our organization, and we’ve had some good success with that. We’re going to share some examples of them today.
Some of you have heard us talk today and we wanna give special mention to two very special colleagues who are not here with us today.
Lisa Gedak, is, one of our teaching and learning strategists. She works alongside Sam, And Gillian Sudlow is one of our faculty members who works 50% as an educational consultant in our center.
And these two ladies do the bulk of the work around supporting faculty directly, with ePortfolios, at KPU. And, they work tirelessly, definitely many more hours than a 50% release, and so we wanted to make sure to honor them here because they were both hoping to be able to come and had some personal things that prevented that.
We also want to acknowledge that, our university lives on the coast salish land of seven, local nations, and, we feel very privileged to share that diverse history, and to, honor, the care of the land and to work towards, you know, reconciling some of the wrongdoing that’s occurred in the history of Canada. And I know this is sometimes less familiar of a topic in some of the other countries, and we have some, you know, bad news around most of those things. So, really, one of the do we share that example in the in the presentation, the territorial acknowledgment?
We don’t.
Yeah. So, the one of the things that we’re trying to do is encourage that practice across the institution and, Gillian created a template to help faculty engage in conversations with students about territorial acknowledgment. And so that is one of the, cross institution templates that we use.
So, one of the things that was really important at the beginning when we made the case use for PebblePad and as, Gail said, we were the first ones in our province to really, embrace ePortfolio practices and folio thinking, was to really look at our academic plan, and the places in which we could align this practice, to encourage the uptake.
And so it is aligned in terms of, our student success components of our plan, our teaching excellence components of our plan, and our open learning, components of the plan.
So under, student success, we have these two, goals around focusing on curriculum, teaching excellence, and dedicated support systems that prepare students for independent thinking, with strong, technology skills.
So there’s a very natural alignment for us there.
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