Festival of Learning

Open Session Limited to 50 Participants (First-Come, First-In). This session takes place in a large ballroom environment, with one other session happening concurrently at opposite end of the room. (Area 3B)

For most students, the institution's website is usually their FIRST experience with that institution, drilling down to program and department pages (and ultimately course pages on the LMS).

Considering the tremendous increase in the diversity of our student populations, we need to ask the question, "Are we welcoming or alienating diversity through our institutes’ digital personae?"

The notion of measuring and crafting "the student experience" has become widespread, yet could fail to take sufficient stock of the subtleties of diverse student populations’ responses to our “official” digital presence.

Learning Outcomes/ Importance of topic to teaching and learning with technology:
This panel provides a hands-on, interactive analysis of select post-secondary websites using a framework of discourse analysis (how social relationships are defined through communication choices) combined with audience participation and reflection. While the hands-on focus of the session is institutional web presence (the “official” website), the ground that we cover should open our eyes to how the digital personae of institutions can also be expressed in other messaging such as the wording on course outlines, course web pages, and program descriptions, for example.

So, whether you are looking at institutional, department, or course communications, you should be able to take away concrete ideas from this session. For our hands-on practice this session we will be using an examination of how certain student populations are represented on the institution web site (e.g. students with Learning and Ability Differences, students with Cultural Diversity).


Presenters
Shannon Kelley, Continuing Education Program Head, School of Computing and Academic Studies, British Columbia Institute of Technology
Zaa Derik Joseph, Advisor, Aboriginal Services, British Columbia Institute of Technology
Yearin Kim, Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University