About LTIC
LTIC is UBC’s new Learning Technology Innovation Centre, mandated to catalyse and elevate learning technology application, innovation, and inquiry at UBC. Under academic leadership, LTIC will meet UBC’s needs for faculty and students in using and transforming learning technology.
Support
LT Hub is here to help
LT Hub, the help and support team in LTIC, is here to ensure that faculty and students never feel alone with their learning technology challenges, and always know that capable help is available.
Stability
Reliability and usability
The DevOps team is here to ensure a robust, reliable, and trustworthy learning technology infrastructure and service. The evaluation team ensures that software is fit to purpose. Our team maintains over 50 tools in our Learning Technology ecosystem, ranging from off the shelf, to bespoke and UBC-home grown.
Innovation
Partnering for transformation
The LTIC Innovation Lab is here to accelerate and catalyze faculty inquiry into teaching and learning technology to transform education through technology within UBC and influence beyond
The Road to the Learning Technology Innovation Centre
UBC has a multi-decade history of commitment to teaching and learning innovation, and embraced learning technology with force:
- 1990s: In 1997 UBC Access was renamed Distance Education and Technology.
- 2000s: In 2005 Distance Education and Technology (DET) was merged into the Office of Learning Technology (OLT)
- 2010: OLT and TAG merge to form the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (CTLT), combining to bring together educational technology, learning design, and faculty professional development and training.
- 2015: In 2015, UBC launches the Learning Technology Hub, to foreground pedagogy in learning technology support. The LT Hub was comprised of members of the CTLT and IT, and operated as a shared unit embedded in these two units.
- 2025: With technological changes, including AI, becoming prominent in teaching and learning at UBC, the LT Hub, plus some pedagogical tech members from the CTLT, LTIC becomes its own unit, with its own dedicated academic director.
LTIC provides the same essential help and support service as LT Hub always has, and maintains deep collaborative connections with both CTLT and IT, taking direction from both the Vice Provost Teaching and Learning, and the Chief Information Officer. It also takes on the mandate of being a place dedicated to an innovative and academic approach to learning technology delivery and transformation.
Meet the Teams
The Support Team: LT Hub
Support Analysts
The Support Analysis are the team that have their eye on the whole LT ecosystem, and are here to help answer all range of questions about learning technology challenges, from the simple to the technically complex.
Learning Designers
CTLT collaborates with LTIC to ensure that the LT Hub has the pedagogical insight and capability needed for when software questions turn into learning design challenges.
Rovers
Every year LT Hub staffs a team of Learning Teach Rovers – several co-op students from around the institution, to help both faculty and students with learning design issues.
The Innovation Team
Learning Analytics
The goal of UBC Learning Analytics is to help faculty better understand and improve the learning experiences of UBC students and learners through collection and analysis of course data. The team helps faculty navigate their data, and the permissions for obtaining access if doing a more complex data request.
LT Incubator
The incubator helps grow faculty ideas into reality. The incubator team is your lab on retainer – they handle hiring and tech management to get your learning technology project started and operating at scale. Faculty can retain the incubator team with TLEF or similar funds.
The Stability Teams
Dev Ops
DevOps refers to Development and Operations – keeping our systems online and running smoothly, reliably, and securely. The team maintains 100+ tools across the ecosystem, with some team members dedicated to particular domains, and others working generally across the ecosystem.
Evaluation
The evaluation team is responsible for examining the teaching and learning tech needs of faculty and students, and assessing the health and fit of the tools in our ecosystem. They lead our software pilots, and ultimately procurement. They also determine when it’s time to shut things off, or sunset, an application.
About the Academic Director
Elisa Baniassad is a Professor of Teaching in Computer Science. She obtained her MSc and PhD in Software Engineering, from the UBC Department of Computer Science, working with Gail Murphy. Her PhD focused on relating design rationale to code structure. She went on to do an NSERC Post Doctoral Fellowship at Trinity College in Dublin, where she focused on Aspect Orientation in requirements documentation and software process. In 2002, Elisa took up a faculty position at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she worked at the intersection of Software Engineering and bespoke domain specific programming languages. During her tenure at CUHK Elisa was honored with a Faculty-wide teaching excellence award. In 2003, she joined the faculty at the Australian National University as an Associate Professor, continuing her work on experimental DSLs. It was here that she began to focus on the social psychology of student software teams, working with Dirk Riele in student group dynamics. After a decade away, Elisa returned to Vancouver and took up a faculty position at UBC CPSC, returning at first as a sessional instructor, then as a lecturer, and finally as EL faculty. During this time Elisa was honoured with the UBC Killam prize in teaching, and the national CS Can/Info Can Excellence in Teaching prize for Computing education. Elisa became the Deputy Academic Director for the Centre for Teaching Learning and Technology in 2021, serving as acting director for 18 months across 2022 and 2023. Elisa is now the academic director for the Learning Technology Innovation Centre.