Course Manual

Getting Home: Just click on the “ETEC522: Ventures in Learning Technologies” banner (immediately above this post) whenever you wish to get back to the home page.

Finding Your Way: This course is designed and conducted akin to your real life: a continuous stream of information. Everything in the course, including materials, instructions, assignments, discussions, etc, are all posts in the stream. The magic is finding what you need. To that end 522 employs a powerful “faceted search” engine on the home page. Here are ways you can manage the stream:

• Browse: The stream of posts is a feed with the most recent being first. You should be able to tell from the title, author, abstract, feature image (please always post with a feature image), etc, whether you wish to click the title or “Read More” to see the whole thing, or scroll downward.
• Search: You may type in any key word or search phrase to find all posts containing that content.
• Filter: You may narrow your content search in either of two ways:
  • Category: When you post something in 522 give it the right substream “category” so that it can be easily found by using the Category drop-down field to filter out all posts in that substream. You can then Search in that substream, for example. All of the course materials are in separate substreams.
  • Rating: Content in 522 is ‘curated’ by student-users, meaning that it is rated and recommended, so that you can use the Rating drop-down field filter out the best content in any stream or substream.
• Sort: You may sort any stream or substream consecutively by Title, Date, Rating and Recommendation

When a post is open you will typically see all of its content, plus a few things more:

• Ability to Rate: See the ‘five stars’ at the bottom of the post – hover your mouse over these to give it a professional rating (see the Participation Guide for details). Your rating of this content is specific to you – you can change it later if you wish. Some content isn’t being curated so the rating is turned off, but it is to your great advantage to always have your content set up for curation.
• Ability to Comment: The Comment field at the bottom of the posts enables you to add value to the content with a professional review, etc. You can also reply to other comments you see there, and sort existing comments by Date, Recommendations, etc. Some content isn’t appropriate for comments so this feature is turned off, but it is to your great advantage to always have your content open to discussion.
• Ability to Recommend: The “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” functionality attached to comments enables you to recommend contributions made by other students (see the Participation Guide for details), enabling you later to be able to find the most recommended comments attached to any post.

When you create a post you will select a category for it before publishing; when you are navigating the 522 stream you will use these categories to filter our the material you seek. The categories are organized as follows:

• COURSE – instructor-only posts to frame and guide the course:
  • Announcement – ongoing news and guidance from the instructor.
  • Content – readings and materials to support each week.
  • Instructions – orientation, schedules and guides for success.
• KITCHEN – posts to host discussions, activities and introductions:
  • Activity – launching posts and instructions for weekly activities.
  • Authors – self-introductions by 522 co-authors.
  • Discussion – launching posts for weekly discussion topics.
  • Eva’s Cafe – posts for any informal questions, ideas, findings and chat that arise during 522.
  • Uncategorized – this is the default category if you fail to select the right category for your post.
• KNOWLEDGE MILL – posts related to ongoing research and collective knowledge creation in 522. The posts here are meant to be ‘curated’ (reviewed, rated, recommended, etc. – see the Participation Guide for details):
  • (A1) Analyst Report – use this category when posting your Assignment 1 submission.
  • (A2) Opportunity Forecast – use this category when posting your group’s Assignment 2 submission.
  • (A3) Venture Pitch – use this category when posting your Assignment 3 submission.
  • Emerging Markets Poll – posts related to the Week 1 Emerging Markets Poll activity.
  • Founders Parade – posts related to the Week 4 Founders Parade activity.
  • Market Projections – posts related to the Week 2 Opportunity Horizon activity.
  • Pitch Pool – posts related to the Week 3 Pitch Pool activity.

Your first post will likely be your introduction post (choose the Authors category). You can save any post in draft form until you’re ready to make it live. For every new post you publish please ensure the following:

• it has a Title
• it has Content
• it has the right Category selected.
• it has a Featured Image set so that it can stand out in the stream.
• don’t change the default comments, ratings and voting settings unless there is a specific reason to disallow it’s ability to be curated by the cohort.
• when ready to go live, click the Publish button (sometimes it needs to be clicked twice to complete the posting).

For the quickest and most reliable communication with your instructor, please email him at david dot vogt at ubc dot ca. There is no internal email within this blog, so if you wish to communicate directly and privately with any peer for any reason please request a connection through your instructor. We have set up the Eva’s Cafe category for you to use to ask any general or content-related questions that might benefit from peer response. 

If you’re not used to WordPress, or even if you are, you’ll want to develop a strategy for managing the flow of this course. There are a lot of peers in this cohort and there will be a lot of posts, replies, reviews, etc, and it will be easy to get overwhelmed and lost without a strategy. You probably can’t read and reply to everything, and probably shouldn’t try. Make sure that you don’t miss any instructor Announcements, and don’t hesitate to reach out to peers through the EVA’s Café substream for Q&A and other support.

You may also wish to consider an offline RSS reader, a web browser RSS plugin, or an app for iPad or Android to help you manage your reading of both course content and colleague interactions.

You will be assigned either author or editor role in the UBC Content Management System (CMS), which will enable you to add, edit or delete posts. Support on using the UBC CMS can be found at: http://support.cms.ubc.ca/

Contacting I.T. Services

Each time you log on to your course, you will have to enter your Campus Wide Login ID (CWL) and your password. If you lose or forget your ID or password, contact the IT Help Desk: http://www.it.ubc.ca/contact/helpdesk.html

If you experience technical difficulties with this UBC WordPress blog, please contact UBC Blog Support.