Introductory Module of a Course Prototype: Project Documentation
Organization, the Learners and the LMS
Developing meaningful enrichment opportunities for highly able learners can be a challenge in a regular classroom setting. In order to address the needs of gifted students in the District of Vancouver, the Vancouver School Board has created a three-tier support system to ensure all students receive equal access to learning. The Challenge Centre is a tier one, gifted outreach program that provides enrichment opportunities for highly able learners. The online Challenge Centre program, Global Citizenship, has been designed to effectively provide individualized and relevant enrichment opportunities for students who have been identified by their home school as needing enrichment opportunities outside of their regular classroom activities. The British Columbia Ministry of Education (2016) explains that “gifted students need a learning environment that provides opportunities for challenge, opportunities to work with intellectual peers, encouragement to become independent learners, and curriculum enrichment”. When creating differentiated curriculum for gifted and highly able learners, it is essential that educators present content, in an in-depth manner, that is related to a particular theme or problem, allow students the opportunity to select their own topic of study within the topic theme, provide students the opportunity to develop higher level thinking skills and research skills and encourage students to produce products of learning that produce new and innovative ideas (Kaplan, 1986, p.183).
The Global Citizenship program incorporates much of Kaplan’s criteria for curriculum development for gifted learners. In the program, students are to assume the role of a UN delegate for the country of their choice. In order to create an action plan, in the point of view of a particular country, students are required to conduct effective and reliable research on the country they have chosen to represent. Through the course content, students will learn about key components of UN procedures and implement these procedures in a model UN conference held at the end of the 12 week course. At the conference, each delegate will speak on behalf of their country, exchange ideas and collaborate with their peers to solve real world problems affecting the world.
When integrating the goals and structure of this Global Citizenship course into the Moodle framework, we started with some specific goals that harken back to our ETEC565 “Flight Paths”. Brittany was looking to develop the pilot and an online course for the Vancouver School Board Challenge Centre in which she works. Josh’s goal was to investigate ways to increase student engagement in online learning. Towards this end, both Brittany and Josh sought to apply the best of what they explored in their analysis of course structure and design activity in weeks 4 and 5 of ETEC565 (both explored the EdX LMS).
In initial discussions, we decided that we wanted to develop a course that was not only strong in pedagogical framework, but also presented with a modern, visually appealing and engaging learning experience. To maintain student engagement, we followed a “watch-read-do” throughout the course design, while allowing for variations on that theme. Presenting information in a variety of ways is key to ensuring content saturation with participants. Finally, we felt that it was important to provide captioning for key videos, so we made use of YouTube captioning options, and will continue to do so for subsequent videos.
We both wanted the course to be as contained within the LMS as possible (for content, communication, and assessment), and wanted a variety of media integrated into the learning. Moodle was an excellent choice considering the goals we wanted to achieve. Moodle allowed us keep the entire course within the Moodle course site. We were able easily embed resources and learning tools directly into the site and made use of the Moodle discussion forum.
Role of the Instructor
One of the great challenges in online learning is personal connection, and teacher rapport. In attempts to overcome this, we created a personal introduction video introducing the participants to Brittany, and filmed the video in the Challenge Centre itself. We feel that this featured video, presented at the outset of the course, helps give students context to who is teaching the course, and prepares them for the face-to-face meeting in week 12. Josh introduces himself in the Website Tour video, also featured in the opening week.
Often in e-learning courses, the instructor’s role is front-end heavy as they are required to create and implement the program. We decided that we wanted instructor presence to be ongoing during the entire course. To do this, instructors will regularly take part in discussions and provide feedback to individual students on a regular basis. Communication is important and stressed in the Introductory Module of the course. Students are encouraged to message and email the instructors when they are in need of help or clarification.
Ease of Accessibility and Security Concerns
Online courses should not be confusing. We are cognizant of the fact that many of the participants in this course will not only be new to the Moodle platform, but be new to online learning. In order to help students through this adjustment, we decided to keep navigation consistent and predictable. All text is left-justified, all embedded videos are center-justified, and although we experimented with various activity types that Moodle offers for content navigation, (i.e. workshops and lessons), we decided to stick with individual pages with hyperlinks for navigation.
Another goal that we had for course layout was that students proceed through the course materials and activities in a linear fashion. While it is good practice to give participants the scope of the course in advance, we decided to only make weekly activities available in real time as the course progresses, thus keeping the community of learners connected through semi-synchronous content delivery. In the first draft of this Moodle, course navigation was mono-directional, in that page links only kept the learner moving forward. After some constructive feedback, we have added links to allow navigation through course pages multi-directional, while maintaining a flat-plane of navigation (learners cannot skip pages or steps).
References
British Columbia Ministry of Education. (2016). Gifted Education: A Resource Guide for Teachers https://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/specialed/gifted
Kaplan, S.N. (1986). The grid: A model to construct differentiated curriculum for the gifted. In J.S. Renzulli (Ed.). Systems and models for developing programs for the gifted and talented (pp. 180-193). Mansfield Center, CT: Creative Learning Press, Inc.