A brief SCoPE update

We're off to busy start of a new year at SCoPE. There is always a constant flurry of activity behind the scenes. It's a part of online community life that is difficult to capture and make more transparent.

In late December we migrated the site to a new server at BCcampus. This process was very smooth thanks to Danny Lee in the Learning & Instructional Development Centre at Simon Fraser University and Scott Tearle at Lambda Solutions.

This is more than just a move to a new server. Now SCoPE is fully integrated within BCcampus Online Community Services. SCoPE had its start in 2005 thanks to the Learning and Instructional Development Centre at Simon Fraser University which provided design, coordination, moderation, as well as technical and media design services. With BCcampus support SCoPE members can continue to enjoy free and open access to seminar discussions and other online events. The new URL for SCoPE is http://scope.bccampus.ca

The January seminar is well underway: Open Educational Resources, facilitated by Scott Leslie. If you haven't dropped in yet you should! I can't think of one person in the field of Education that wouldn't find this topic relevant to their work. Here's the description:

The availability of Open Educational Resources is increasing almost daily. High quality learning materials from reputable institutions are available in many disciplines for both instructors to reuse or student self-study. But how do we find them? What do we need to know about creating, licensing, and sharing them?

Planning is underway for the next scheduled seminar: Professionalizing Post-Secondary Teaching, March 2 - 22, 2009 with Gary Hunt and Vivian Neal. I expect this will also be a popular topic. We want to ensure that we have participation from a) many faculty, and b) people from countries that have required programs to prepare faculty to teach. So please spread the word! Here is the description:

Has the time come for a made-in-Canada accreditation program for post-secondary teaching? During this discussion we will learn from countries that have developed frameworks of teaching expectations and we will explore questions related to the development and implementation of a program in Canada.

We can squeeze a seminar in during the last 3 weeks of February. If you have a topic to propose, and are willing to volunteer to facilitate please get in touch!

And one more thing to mention here...with the Learn Together Collaboratory (LTC) beta site up and running we are actively exploring ways to integrate services and resources planned for that site with SCoPE activities and resources. The very early beginnings of this project began with a SCoPE seminar faciltated by Nancy Randall from Vancouver Island University.

Now, off to welcome some of the new SCoPE members. We've had over 100 join since January 1!