Applied research day, badging, faculty development and iPads: Week 8 in review

WordPress theme:  I changed the theme for this blog, and it feels like a new pair of fabulous shoes.

JIBC Applied Research Day: We seem to struggle to attract a big audience to our annual research day, but this year was one of the best IMO.  Instead of a keynote, the day kicked off with a series of presentations by students on research they are doing as part of their Bachelors program capstone projects. This was quite impressive and a testament to how integrated applied research has become in our programs, albeit quietly it seems.  The speed research presentations were also fun, and I continue to love this format. Missing was an opportunity for discussion and questions, which I think is necessary in a 3 minute format.  Moving a keynote to an afternoon slot and giving up the prime time morning keynote slot to the students was a stroke of genius, and wouldn’t it be nice to see that happening at other ed conferences?

An added bonus was that the fabulous @ginabennett from COTR attended and we got to catch up on our ed tech worlds.

Student-centred learning and faculty development on iPads:  lots of resource gathering for our UG project has pointed to some gems worth sharing here (weeded out from numerous listicles). First of all, Rebecca Hogue (@rjhogue) has some really great resources on her various sites.  Here’s an honest description of various ways faculty at Palomar have tried iPads in their teaching, with a helpful list of limitations.

As part of this project, I’m back in the hands-on-with-emerging-tech sandbox.  One of the things I tried this week–Learni.st – which has decent potential for a class curation site. Also made my first Canva poster, and really love the template options and drag and drop of this app.

Badging:  We were forced to put our heads into the workflow of issuing badges via a WordPress/Learndash setup that will be hosted by us for Worksafe BC, but won’t technically be for JIBC students.  We’ve created a plugin for Learndash that will email a certificate of completion to the student, but Worksafe would like the student to be able to collect a badge to display somewhere.  This goes beyond my badge knowledge, so I found this resource really helpful.  When students take the micro learning course we are hosting, they submit an email, but beyond that there is no student registration system with either ourselves or Worksafe.  That puts it on Worksafe to be a validator of badges they issue (if we want to avoid handing all that over to a service like Credly), which I suppose could work like this:

1.  Students get their certificate generated by Learndash and email it to a Worksafe contact.

2. Worksafe sends them an embed code to a badge or a jpeg or something

Alternatively, we are looking at whether the plugin that emails the certificate can also include a badge at the same time (Yes, this is the most obvious route, I know).

Is there something I’m missing?  Does it have to be harder than that? Can it even be easier?

Things that wow’d me:

I swear I’m not trying to be smug about YVR’s mild winter this year, but in contrast to those crazy east coast snowbanks, I loved this photo of cherry blossoms by @harrietglynn, who happens to live my #fraserhood.

Blossom run. pic.twitter.com/uoS6Kp8fdb

— harriet fancott (@harrietglynn) February 20, 2015