BC TEAL is proud to present our 2025 Annual Conference: Disruptive Educational Practices: Strategies for Transformation.
Educators shine in times of change to face unexpected challenges. This is when creativity flourishes by combining proven practices with fresh and innovative ideas. These times call for transformation which can be rooted in tradition or experience, or it can arise through unexplored approaches. The synthesis of old and new ideas drives meaningful progress. Join other insightful and creative educators as we flourish within the power of our community.
Participants in this workshop will be encouraged to share ways that they have transformed their online courses on platforms such as Avenue from cookie-cutter versions to something more personalised, more engaging, and more accessible.
The facilitators, who between them have 20 years of experience in blended and online environments, will share some ways that they themselves have made their online courses more user-friendly for the learners, while focusing on the goal of quality teaching and learning within online spaces. They will first briefly discuss the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.), which suggests that successful teaching in online spaces requires a teaching, social and cognitive presence, sharing how online courses can be transformed by creating these presences.
They will then briefly look at selected aspects of the Avenue Instructor Standards for Technology-Enhanced Language Learning and demonstrate how the standards can validate instructors’ current practices while guiding them towards innovation in their online or blended courses — to move beyond our current practices and the way we’ve always done things; to think about instructional design and to try some tested tools and resources in new ways.
Attendees will participate in two short breakout groups to discuss how they create presence in their online classes, to share their experiences in how they have been creative and transformed their own courses, and then report back to all attendees. The facilitators will collect these ideas, organize them, and share them with the participants, who will leave with concrete and creative ideas for disrupting their own educational practices, moving past the way they may have always done things, and using their own and others’ experiences to transform online learning spaces.
