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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1458960
" Not a day goes by without a vendor trying to get in the door. You have to be really careful about what is actually relevant–what is actually going to have impact for our programs and students " –Tannis Morgan, associate vice-president, academic innovation, VCC O 46 BCBUSINESS MARCH/APRIL 2022 Educators across the province are leveraging new technologies to make schooling more affordable, flex- ible, accessible and engaging. B.C. colleges and uni- versities are using new tools to enhance how students learn—not just to navigate the health crisis. As Swinney's experiences illustrate, that's changing student life both inside and outside of the classroom. James Rout oversees teaching and learning resources for BCIT's 50,000 students and their instructors, as his school's associate vice-president, education support and innovation. He's also a doctoral candidate in SFU's edu- cational technology and learning design program. His team's role at BCIT includes developing and implement- ing new tech tools, but more importantly, it focuses on creating effective learning experiences. "It's all too easy to introduce some sort of tech- nology and put that in front of your students," Rout explains. "But unless it's thoughtfully designed to achieve an educational outcome, that doesn't always happen." BCIT students want skills they can apply in the workforce. In Swinney's classes, she practised using X-ray machines with specialized dummies. Instructors would challenge students to solve problems like helping a patient who started choking. Some dummies have syn- thetic bones that simulate real ones. "We would position them and take live X-rays, and then we would view our own images of them," Swinney recalls. Computerized tomography ( CT) scanners take 3D pic- tures of a body's organs in more detail than any dummy On some days, Swinney stayed home and used a virtual classroom platform called Bongo, which enables students to watch video demonstrations and have discussions with each other. For theoretical classes, she says, "I don't think it made a difference to me whether we were sitting in a hall with our instructors versus online at home." But to learn practical skills, she went to BCIT's Burnaby campus a few days a week to get her hands on medical equipment and use simulation labs.