Indicate what unit of your project you are submitting as the Assignment #3;
The title of this course is, Independent Living 11. The unit that is being submitted for ETEC 565a Assignment #3 purposes, is Unit 2.1.
The direct link to the platform can be found here.
The content of unit 2 focuses on hygiene and grooming, and unit 2.1 provides a general overview of the various hygiene and grooming practices. The unit provides video to explain the various processes/content and the assignments/projects were designed to ensure the students practiced what they learned, focussing on the ultimate goal of living independently.
Briefly (1-2 sentences) describe your organization and your target audience;
The course was designed for public or private, high schools or community colleges, to provide students another option for credits to attain an Evergreen diploma. The target audience is for teenagers or young adults who have a Ministry designation or for those who struggle with mainstream academic content.
Explain which functionality, affordances and limitations of your primary LMS or the combination of platforms you draw on designing your module;
The platform that was used was Moodle, because many districts use Moodle as their LMS platforms, and it is hoped that perhaps a course similar in nature could eventually be published within the districts.
The choice in layout format of the course was important because when one designs content for students with varying learning challenges, one needs to take into consideration the possible limitations in literacy and vision, as well as the academic ages and physical ages of the students. The font, organization, and colour all need to be taken into consideration. Therefore, I chose to use the Anomaly theme as the layout at it is not too distracting, and the number of blocks added to the homepage was kept to a minimum. Creating an uncluttered home page with minimal text and easy navigational features was very important. Cartoon navigational buttons were created on the homepage to ease the navigation and to increase visual interest. None of the themes seemed to provide a large enough font size, and the size of the font could not be manipulated to accommodate those with visual or literacy limitations. Therefore, text was written, cut/pasted and reformatted from word. This was a tedious process.
Once the content was developed, how to present the information was explored. Initially, the program called Articulate Storyline was going to be used as a formatting tool to present the content. An example of it being used can be seen in Joyce Chan’s course called, WCAG 2.0. Articulate Storyline has the capability of creating and demonstrating well organized and visually appealing content in a slideshow format, specifically designed for LMSs. However, the program is only designed for Windows applications, not for Apple, which was the technology available used to create Independent Living 11. A lack of time to explore other programs to format the content created a limitation. Therefore, the content was embedded into the LMS, this may result however, in students having problems navigating through the content.
One of the most appealing features of Moodle for this targeted audience, is the completion check box. The completion check box gives students a visual tracking method of task completion. This is a good tool specifically for those who have processing and short term memory challenges. This tool also helps parents or caregivers communicate with their children and helps with organizational purposes when working through the content with their children.
Another feature that appeals to this targeted audience is the ‘Level Up’ feature. This tool gamifies the course. As students work through tasks and content, their level increases. The ‘Level Up’ tool is visually appealing for students as it is a bright star that can be seen on every page, with the number level in the middle of it. Once a higher level is attained, a popup of the level appears. It is also appealing because levels increase with task completion, not on the assessment of the tasks. Although the ‘Task Completion’ and ‘Level Up’ tools may seem elementary to most users, they are powerful tools for this targeted group.
Moodle provides many assessment opportunities such as quizzes, assignments, and projects with the instructor being able to input and keep track of due dates, and scores. These features help the instructor with the organization, analyzing, record keeping and reporting of the assessments. The ability to create the quizzes and surveys within its platform is also appealing as it is less time consuming, and the results are documented in grades. However, this feature was only used in the Introductory unit to test out the features. Due to the font not being big enough for learners who have visual impairments, it was decided to use an outside application, and to embed the documents, and in doing so, may cause greater difficulties for the educator for reporting purposes.
Being able to differentiate the content, assignments, and forum questions within the platform also helps the students due to the varying abilities/challenges of the targeted audience. Therefore, providing choice in the demonstration of learning was very important, such as answering different questions in the discussion forum, for example: asking list (low level thinking) to reflect (higher level thinking) type questions, and being able to provide choice in assignments is a great feature in moodle.
Another great feature for educators is being able to create rubrics for assessment. The rubrics make it clear to students and parents how the students are being assessed, and they develop a clear understanding of where the student’s deficiencies lie. Rubrics were used for self-assessment purposes, which needed to be printed, marked, then a photo was uploaded after the assessment. Being able for a student to mark his or her rubric would be a good feature in Moodle.
Time was a big limitation in creating this course. Creating a course that was visually appealing, and that presented enough content in video format that reinforced the learning objectives was very important, as quite often, when there even minimal text, learners with challenges become easily bored and distracted. However, one could spend all of their time creating and looking for appropriate visual tools. Due to time constraints, there wasn’t time to create all of the videos. There were three tools that I particularly enjoyed working with. The first was using Tellegami which is a video tool that allows one to present text through speaking avatars. The second and third tools were Edpuzzle and Thinglink which were mashup’ed. These tools helped to locate and edit video content, and then they were easily embedded within Moodle the video. Four videos were displayed within one photo which helped lessen the space needed within the LMS platform. Due to time constraints, more practice materials and visual aids should have been provided for the students, close-captioning should have been provided to accommodate deaf and hard of hearing learners as well as audio for the visually impaired. There is a theme called Cloudy Day that is available as a plug-in for visually impaired students, as well as an accessibility plugin which could be downloadable.
(d) consider the stakeholders of your course and the extent to which your design addresses the requirements and values of each group, for instance, learners, (effective pedagogical approach and engaging activities), instructors (how much instructor’s presence is required: feedback and communication, updates and upgrades), organization (mission and regulations, IT support, financing), educational community (the dilemmas: of using open access platforms vs. using a locally hosted LMS, of protecting security and privacy vs. serving the principles of ubiquitous access and egalitarian educational values).
It is believed that there is potential in this course. There are many students who would benefit from this course and parents would be appreciative of the help and support in teaching their children the skills in becoming independent. It would be a good opportunity for students and parents to connect with peers for guidance and support, and to build friendships. Instructors would not only be providing feedback on assessment, but also providing helpful suggestions and ideas to support the parents, as well as suggesting community supports.
Instructor presence is vital in this course. It is important that he or she introduces him or herself through video and/or live chat at the beginning of the course to build a connection of trust with the students and parents. When trust is built, students will work harder to be more successful in their tasks. As well, parents will work harder at ensuring their children will complete the tasks. Weekly updates are important, as well as timely feedback on assignments and assessments. Weekly forums to further develop connections with the content of the material is also important.
IT support will be needed to guide students and parents through any questions or problems that may occur. A navigation video was embedded within the introductory unit, which should be helpful for students and parents, however, it is comforting to know if problems occur, someone is there to guide them through the process.
Due to the use of open sourced tools being embedded into the course, and subscriptions were not paid to prohibit advertising, the students have the potential to view advertising and be distracted from their tasks. As well, this opens up the potential to click on links that may lead them to unintended websites.
The dilemma of on-line safety came up in a conversation with a colleague in regards to this course. There was an initial intention for students to have the freedom to express with others their learning through video or photos. However, the environment of what was being learned in this particular unit took place in the bathroom, where one washes his or her hair, hands and brushes their teeth. The environment of the learning increases the opportunity for students to put themselves in precarious situations. Initially, the summative project was to create a demonstration or ‘How To’ video on either how to wash one’s hands, or how to brush one’s teeth. One YouTuber that is making a name for herself is In consultation with a colleague however, and in her opinion, students should never be showing pictures of themselves in their bedrooms or bathrooms, as this poses a threat to their safety on the internet. She made a good point. Students should not be asked by an educator to take photos or video of themselves in places where it is considered to be private, as this may put students in danger and may implicate an educator. However, an underlying intention of the summative video project was to demonstrate a culture that is similar to their peers. YouTube is filled with ‘How To’ videos created by many people, including teenagers, and young adults, and it was thought that this project would give students an opportunity to be creative and expressive like their age appropriate peers. The same colleague retorted with, ‘it is setting them up to be bullied on the internet.’ As the intention of this course is to help students develop confidence, accept their limitations and develop problem solving strategies to overcome their limitations, it was thought that the videos would be a teaching tool to help others with the same limitations, which is empowering. However, the intentions are not to make the learner feel victimized and therefore, asking the students to put themselves in a situation where there is a likelihood that their safety or privacy may be compromised, the tasks were not included. Perhaps this topic warrants further debate.