See the assignment as a word document – LMS Proposal – Bell
School District 60 Budget Proposal: LMS Course Development
Learning in a technology enabled environment using a learning management system (LMS) becomes student-centred, allows for multiple learning styles, and instils the philosophy of life long learning into our community of learners (Anastasiades & Retalis, 2001). The purpose of this proposal is to seek funding for time for a district secondary teacher to develop online resources in our moodle LMS to improve learning opportunities for our students.
School District 60 currently hosts dozens of courses and course supplements in our moodle LMS. It is used from Kindergarten to grade 12 in our schools and is a very important tool in our distance education school, NBCDES. Learning Management Systems have been found to improve communication between teachers, students, and parents. (Perkins & Pfaffman, 2006)
Many teachers have experience working with moodle and creating materials. Using the SECTIONS framework for evaluating learning technology (Bates & Poole, 2003) moodle has been affirmed as the LMS of choice for our district.
• Students: Students have been exposed to moodle staring in elementary school
• Ease of Use: All students and teachers have access to moodle, easy to use
• Cost: Open Source, Free licenses
• Teaching and Learning: Supports social constructivist strategies, and assessment for learning practices
• Interaction and Interactivity: Supports social networking tools such as forums, wikis, blogs, chat, and embedding/importing of external learning objects
• Organizational Issues: Already implemented (2007), little or no organizational issues
• Novelty: Moodle is community supported and updated by thousands of educators and programmers, vibrant community that will allow for long term usage
• Speed: Courses can be started in minutes and maintained during classes
We also have a complimentary opportunity to participate in a provincial consortium called the BC Learning Network (BCLN). The BCLN costs five thousand dollars per year for membership. The responsibility of membership revolves around sharing and maintaining at least one moodle course to the consortium. The benefit of membership is that the school district would gain access to all courses shared to BCLN. We would be able to use and remix these courses for whatever purpose we deem necessary to our district.
Providing time to a secondary teacher would allow us to create one to two courses per year in moodle that we could share to the consortium. We would then be able to help our classroom teachers with full, pre-made resources that would help them get past the regular implementation barrier of the time required to develop materials. From there the majority of teachers would likely have an easier time of adapting materials to their specific needs. This project is valuable and sustainable because of the collaborative nature of the partnership and the opportunities for continuous growth of LMS resources that would be available to our teachers.
With respect to the timetable structure of our secondary schools and depending on the successful applicant and their current responsibilities it is requested that 0.2 to 0.25 FTE of teaching time be budgeted for this project. At a maximum salary of $89,000 for a top grid teacher with a masters degree (TQS 6) the project would require $22,250 for salary plus benefits (0.25FTE). At 0.25 FTE the successful applicant would have one uninterrupted block of time per day in a secondary schedule. Alternately, if the successful applicant were in a non-enrolling position that had the flexibility to increase or change the posting by 0.2 FTE, there would be one full day per week dedicated to the project.
Looking at the 0.2 FTE option, at one day per week there would be 43 days available. In addition to the 43 scheduled days, 5 more days of release time would be made available to be able to work with other teachers or provide professional development opportunities to the teacher. Release days currently cost $300 per day to cover a Teacher-On-Call ($1500 total). With 48 days at approximately 8 hours per day this provides 384 hours towards project development. Travel funding would not be required as meetings could take place using tools such as Elluminate Live which we are licensed for use.
Joining the BCLN and building course resources in our LMS with a focus on use in a blended (computer integrated with face-to-face classroom), distributed learning (DL), and a hybrid (face-to-face and DL) environments will mean that we have access to very flexible resources that can be used by many as a result of this project which would require $28,750 plus benefits.
References
Anastasiades, S., Retalis, S. (2001). The Educational Process in the Emerging Information Society: Conditions for the Reversal of the Linear Model of Education and the Development of an Open Type Hybrid Learning Environment. Tampere: ED-MEDIA 2001 World Conference on Education (13th, Tampere, Finland, June 25-30, 2001) (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED466129)
Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.
Perkins, Matthew & Pfaffman, Jay (2006).Using a Course Management System to Improve Classroom Communication. The Science Teacher. 73 no7, 33-37.
Jarrod Bell