As western Canada’s largest polytechnic malaysia telegram data institution, BCIT takes pride in its close relationship with industry and the hands-on nature of the education it provides. In addition to providing a solid foundation in theory, its courses have a resolutely practical aim: to give students the skills and experience they will need in the workplace.
“Our philosophy is that your career starts on your first day at BCIT,” says Bryan Fair, Supervisor of Educational Technologies in the Learning and Teaching Center. “Most of our instructors come from industry, so our students are learning from people who have spent years practicing the skills they’re teaching. That’s a key reason why our students do so well.”
The results speak for themselves: the employment rate for BCIT graduates is 96%. Nevertheless, the institution and its faculty are always looking for new ways to help students succeed. Lawrence Potyondi, an Automotive Instructor in the School of Transportation, is a prime example.
“When I started out as an instructor, I had an old-school approach, very much based around lectures, handwritten assignments and textbooks,” says Potyondi. “But as I looked at my students’ results and started listening to their stories and concerns, I realized that approach didn’t work for everyone. If you want to give your students the best chance of success, you need to keep trying new things.”
Personalized learning through technology
Truly personalized learning Building a student Building a student for oroetic: the gold buying every student is the ideal, but it’s difficult to achieve using traditional methods. Even a large institution like BCIT doesn’t have the resources for one-to-one mentoring. Instead, it groups students into small cohorts to maximize their contact with instructors and encourage peer learning.
Fair comments: “Time is the main challenge: how can faculty members focus on innovation and the strategic implementation of new ideas when everyone is constantly busy? We wanted to find a way to free up our instructors by empowering our learners to take an active role in their own learning.”
BCIT realized that technology could provide the answer. In a major consolidation project, it had recently replaced 10 separate instances of learning management systems from three different vendors with a single enterprise platform: Brightspace from D2L. This platform provided the foundation for an exciting new initiative around adaptive learning.
Success comes from preparation
When Fair and Potyondi saw a presentation about a new solution called Brightspace LeaP™, they quickly saw its potential to revolutionize a key aspect of the student experience at BCIT.
“Brightspace is now considered an enterprise system at BCIT, and it’s going to be the only platform we use for teaching and learning,” says Fair. “So, we’re always looking for new ways to incorporate Brightspace into our methods, and we saw LeaP as a really exciting prospect to help students reinforce their knowledge and prepare for tests.”
Many courses at BCIT focus on helping students gain professional certification from industry bodies, which typically involves sitting an examination that assesses the student’s overall knowledge across all areas of the professional domain. Preparing for this test can often be a disheartening experience—the course textbook may be hundreds of pages long, and students can feel like they need to learn every word in order to pass.
To give their students more confidence, instructors spend a lot of time revisiting topics that they’ve taught already. This helps to reinforce the key topics, but it doesn’t necessarily address the specific gaps in an individual student’s Building a student knowledge. If b2b reviews they don’t know what their weak points are, they can’t ask for help.Building a student Building a student