The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL) promotes and supports teaching excellence and student-centered learning at Vancouver Island University (VIU). Our team offers personalized support to enhance teaching and foster student engagement. Whether you’re refining assessments or trying new methods, we tailor our support to your needs. CIEL also helps students and faculty use VIU tools like VIULearn, Teams, and VIUTube. We offer many ways you can work with us.
Get personalized teaching support
One on one or in a small group, CIEL specialists are available to answer questions or act as sounding boards for your ideas.
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Contact us
Have a question or technology challenge you need support with? You can always open a support request by sending an email at learnsupport@viu.ca or calling us at 250.740.6179.
Our team is available Monday-Friday 9:00am to 4:00pm and we will get back to you as soon as possible. In particularly busy times it may take up to two business days to get a response to your question.
CIEL services
Throughout the year we offer a variety of sessions to help inspire your teaching. Sessions range from our 20 minute series where we look at one idea or tool you can implement in your teaching right away to multi-day institutes where you might redesign an entire course and lots of options in between. To find out what events are coming up and sign up, please see our Events Calendar.
Students are at the heart of everything we do at VIU. Our Early Feedback Service helps you involve students in developing your teaching by giving students the opportunity to provide feedback through as evidence-based questionnaire early enough in the semester that you can make changes they will see.
CIEL offers a number of Student Orientation to VIU Learning Technology webinars for students to provide an introduction to the learning technologies they may use while at VIU and the supports available to them from CIEL.
- Sign up for the self-paced orientation course (requires logging in to VIULearn)
- Watch a recording of the Orientation webinar
- Request an orientation for your students
We have a number of resources to support you while designing courses and learning activities.
- Active learning
- Building accessible course material
- Cases and problems
- Classroom community
- Course structure
- Designing and using rubrics
- Equity, diversity and inclusion
- Exam alternatives
- Experiential learning
- Giving feedback
- Groups and teams
- Learning outcomes
- Open education resources (OER)
- Peer assessment
- Quizzes and exams
- Starting the semester off right
- Using Teams in your course
Self service options
We know that not all questions happen during office hours. In order to support you 24/7, we have a number of self-serve options.