Hi everyone,
Thank you so much to all those who attended and participated in our last Focus Friday on October 2nd.
Today, I’ll be joined by Simon Bates for a conversation about learning management systems (LMS) and their role in higher education. We’ll be talking about what these platforms are designed to do, how their use has changed since the pandemic, and how recent developments in AI and cybersecurity are raising new questions about their future. We’ll also touch on the challenges of balancing instructor efficiency with student agency, the institutional costs of LMS platforms, and what might come next for this technology.
I’m especially looking forward to discussing how we can think about these tools more holistically, keeping students at the centre of the conversation.
Focus Friday is 12:30–1:30 p.m. Eastern and you can register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/HL5wMK7NQGSaf1W0OTLfMQ#/registration
Looking Back
Two weeks ago we had Alan Roberts join us. He’s the CEO of InSite Information Systems, and runs the ShiftIQ platform for competency based assessment. The discussion focused on how internationally trained professionals are assessed, credentialing, assessment of competency, and skills recognition. After a discussion of what this looks like in practice for the BC Nurses and nurses across the country now using Inspire Global Assessments to ensure competency equivalency we moved on to talking about why we are shifting from credential to competency, as Alan said “A credential tells you where someone studied. A competency assessment tells you what they can do.”
The discussion also went over how in Canada competency isn’t just something for internationally trained professionals, it also applies to the increasingly important economic priority of interprovincial mobility. Right now provinces are working out how best to ensure the competence of professionals moving from one province to another without requiring extensive retraining. The shift to assessing competence rather than simply reviewing credentials gives that rigour. This is about assessing the person, not job titles or program titles, and it supports the intentional transferability between roles with similar competencies even when the credentials look different, a topic we touched on with our discussion of forest professionals in Canada. We closed out the first half with a discussion of what life after credentialing looks like in Canada with continuing professional development for regulated or certified professionals.
Moving into the full group discussion we went over how these ideas work in the higher education sector, especially the colleges, as well as what it looks like in prior learning assessment.
You can access the recording on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/XM9K_3Sy0pU
