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<\/a>Camosun Sociology instructor Peter Ove is one of the coordinators of the SIC. He applied with other faculty to receive funding from the school through the Creativity and Innovation Grant; they decided to use the money to offer prizes in exchange for innovative ideas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe idea would be for students to find something that would make life better at the college,\u201d says Ove. \u201cAnd so we thought, well, we\u2019ll find some students to do that, and then we\u2019ll hold a pitch-style event, like a Dragon\u2019s Den<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of the original 56 applicants, there will be nine teams presenting their concepts to the final judging panel. Contestant Christine Clark heard about the challenge from a professor and decided to get involved (Clark is also a Nexus<\/em> contributing writer). As a student of the Community Support and Education Assistant program at Camosun, Clark has been made aware of some of the problems on campus that need to be addressed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe had an opportunity to use a wheelchair for about an hour on campus, just to kind of experience that,\u201d says Clark. \u201cI went into the Fisher building in my wheelchair, and had lunch in the cafeteria, and that was okay, but then afterwards I wanted to go into the washroom to wash my hands, and I actually could not access the women\u2019s washroom on the first floor of the Fisher building.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clark had to investigate to find out that the only washroom she could use was on the second floor of the Fisher building, accessible by elevator, with no signs or directions on the main floor to guide her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo if you start thinking about a kid who\u2019s new to the school who maybe has mobility issues,\u201d says Clark, \u201cor even anxiety issues, or any of the other kind of disabilities that people have, what would that be like if you didn\u2019t have the confidence to ask around? That\u2019s a barrier to access, because maybe people are going to say, \u2018I don\u2019t even want to try.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the reasons for the challenge is to increase student engagement on campus. Clark was surprised to find out how low student participation is in extracurricular activities at Camosun, but she was even more astonished by the lack of response to her requests for information and feedback from faculty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was also a little bit surprised about some of the faculty,\u201d says Clark, \u201cthat there was a lack of interest and engagement there too. Not all, not all by any means; there\u2019s definitely some people who\u2019ve been really supportive and interested in talking to me. But there\u2019s other faculty members who I\u2019ve actually emailed, and I just get no response whatsoever, like not even a, \u2018Hey, that\u2019s not a very good idea, we\u2019re not interested\u2019… nothing, just nothing.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite a lack of feedback or participation from some at the college, there is a large team of faculty working hard to give Camosun students a platform to express their ideas for the improvement of life on campus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSome of the ideas are pretty out there,\u201d says Ove. \u201cSome of them are pretty cool, and feasible. So it\u2019s neat to see what other students have come up with, and are willing to put some work into, and put themselves on the line to present in front of a significant panel for the college.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How can the student experience at Camosun be improved? The college\u2019s Student Innovation Challenge (SIC) is attempting to answer that question. Based upon the criteria of demand, impact, and feasibility of concept, students have an opportunity to present ideas to a panel and possibly win some money with their innovative propositions. For the challenge, students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,227],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus","category-february-20-2019"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17181,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17179\/revisions\/17181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}