Content Module Documentation – Eliademy Edge EdX (2)

Eliademy Course – https://eliademy.com/app/a/courses/7aaefb6ce5

Edge Edx – https://edge.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UBCx+ETEC565a-b+2015/info​

Having developed the Introductory Module using the Backward Design model, my group and I continued to explore the affordances and limitations of Eliademy and Edx Edge for the Content Module. We had to develop one module or unit and we decided on Unit 3, which in many ways represented the culmination of the students’ learning in the course: students would perform a poem that they had written in the preceding weeks. However, we found that we could not possibly ‘jumped’ into Unit 3 without thinking through Units 1 and 2, since those units were designed to build the students’ foundational knowledge of slam poetry and group collaboration skills and all the unit activities were integrated.

Having decided on Unit 3, we co-wrote the syllabus, instructions for the activities and evaluation rubrics, gleaning helpful material from various sources, which we referenced. We were careful to ensure that the language we used was age-appropriate, particularly for the slam performance instructions and evaluation rubrics, which we felt were critical to the students’ learning success.

As we fine-tuned the content, it became apparent that we had to make changes to a couple of items that we had included in our Introductory Module. For instance, this being a compressed (7-week) course, we decided to focus entirely on slam poets. Hence, we removed the three National Film Board videos which showcased more traditional Canadian poets. This was to minimize taxing the students’ cognitive load with anything that could be extraneous to the learning. Additionally, we discovered that Eliademy’s Calendar feature has affordances not found in Google Calendar (which we used originally), such as allowing students to schedule their own tasks and colour-coding them, integrating seamlessly with Tasks set by the instructor and displaying a side panel showing upcoming scheduled items. I think this process of tweaking things, being flexible and being willing to let go of things was a valuable learning experience for me.

The highlight of our course design was inviting a real-world slam poet, Mr. Omari Newton to take on the role as coach to the students. Mr. Newton recorded a video that was nicely paced, which we were sure would be beneficial to students. We too benefitted from connecting to a practitioner. We had included memorization and performance tips for students but it was Mr. Newton who recommended an online teleprompter that students could copy and paste their poem into for prompts. This would greatly scaffold the learning of students with difficulty memorizing poems.

I have to say that Eliademy seemed to throw up a few surprises now and then. For example, we were not able to create sub-forums in the discussions. Also, once we assigned the type of tasks students had to do in “Tasks”, we could not make changes to them. So we had to delete the tasks and re-create them. That, in my opinion, was a huge limitation because realistically, we should be able to continually edit things to improve them.

One of the challenges we had was that we were working in 4 different time zones. We all made accommodations which meant meeting on Hangouts in the wee hours of the morning. But we all managed and as one of my group project members said, it was a sweet experience.