Author Archives: Sally E

Assigment 5 – A scenario and a short case study

I decided to do a bit of both for Assignment 5.

ETEC 565A – Assignment 5 – a Scenario for the LMS selection criteria

The University of Z has been using a home-grown LMS for the past 15 years; while the LMS has served them well, it is missing a modern look, learning analytics, and other features for creating a better online learning environment for its students. It does do very well with regard to course management features such as, various course and assessment related reports, and, a gradebook that has all the features required for the specific and unique grading requirements of the University.

The University has wanted to move onto an off-the-shelf solution instead of keeping up with the development and upgrade of their old system. It is aware that there are different requirements for different groups of users. Continue reading →

Sally’s reflection on the content module

My reflection will focus on two main aspects: reflection as the “teacher” of the course, and, as a learner.

A quick reminder: the context of my course is a community of interest for learning technologies. It’s for staff to learn about new technologies and, if they want to, try something out in their courses. I can’t make them do any “homework”, but I can provide a platform to support them.

Reflection as a Teacher

Fitting a digital story in the module

The first challenge was to think of an appropriate digital story that would fit in with the content module. Luckily, our March session (run by my colleague) was on video making. It made my digital story on introducing video making rather appropriate for the module. It also provides an example of a video made by a novice video maker, me! So, if I can do it, they can all give it a try! Continue reading →

Sally’s digital story – a video about making videos!

This is my first ever video! So it was a deep learning curve but a great experience!

The background goes, I run a learning technology community group for staff. Last Wednesday in our face-to-face session, my colleague Odette, who is our elearning developer and the media specialist helped ran one for making videos!

We did start with a deliberately bad video made by me to generate some discussions about how “not” to make a video. 😉  Then she walked through tips and things we should do, should watch out for… etc. We had a quick hands on session in the lab, folks who turned up were very engaged! They took the practice recording tasks seriously and we got positive feedback from them.

I thought, it’d be great if I can then show others that, if you try, you can also make a video. It doesn’t need to be very complicated. (So I thought anyway!) Why don’t I make a short video about how to make videos? This would fit nicely in my content module as well as the digital story! The video ended with a call for action, as there are a lot more to talk through and those would be in the content module. But if they’ve done nothing else, they’ve hopefully learnt something.

Continue reading →

Introduction module reflection – Sally

My reflection will focus on two main aspects: reflection, as the “teacher” of the course and, as a learner.

Background about the course

This is a course for our learning technology community. The members are faculty, not students. Face-to-face meetings are the main focus of the community.

The Canvas space was originally set up for session notes and slides, as well as for our members to experience Canvas as a student. At the University of Auckland, we cannot have “fake” students or manipulate student enrolments in Canvas. But, the Canvas student view does not offer a true student experience, especially for external (LTI) tools. As such, I intend to use the Canvas course space to provide a student experience for the members.

I hope to turn it into a community space, with more online resources for those who are new, or have missed the meetings. I do not expect high participation rate, but I have to start somewhere. Continue reading →