Author Archives: edwin

Final synthesis

1) Precis of my flight path

At the onset of the course I set out to become more familiar with setting up a course and gain practical experience working with an LMS. Through building the course I hoped to improve my understanding of basic coding and options for incorporating different activities to maintain learner engagement. I wanted to gain a better understanding of how students would interact with content and how multimedia is processed cognitively. From an assessment perspective, I wanted to improve my skills in developing valuable assessments both formative and summative to identify areas where learners would need more guidance. Becoming more familiar with how the LMS platforms is set up to provide feedback would enable me to create a supportive learning environment for learners. The support may come in the form of direct instructor feedback or student-led discussion forums. Through the discussion forums, I wanted to gain a better understanding what factors have an effect to make collaborative spaces encouraging for students to share openly. Lastly, I set out to broaden my experience with using different online tools to create an engaging online course.

2) Reflection of overall ETEC 565A experience

Looking back as the ETEC 565A course comes to an end I can say it was a solid learning experience. The course truly had combined the theory into practice. The readings by Anderson (2008, Bates (2014) and Chickering (1996) provided the theoretical foundation for most of my Moodle course creation. I found myself regularly revisiting those readings to confirm if my design decisions were logical and substantiated. I really enjoyed building the Moodle course because it gave me hands on experience with creating a course using a popular LMS platform that I have not used before. The knowledge gained from this experience will be invaluable when encountered with different LMS platforms. Even if the user interface may be different I will still be able to take the same approach of asking the proper questions to achieve the learning objectives of the course.

Part of my learning from ETEC 565A came from seeing the work created by my classmates. I would observe unique features that they have used for their Moodle course design and would try to find the feature in my own course shell. This broadened my understanding of more features available in the Moodle platform. Another source of my knowledge development came from discussion forums on weekly topics. The forums provided a safe space to question readings and share one’s own perspectives. Our course instructor Natasha has a unique was of encouraging students to try new things “just for fun”. In particular I recall in one of the Collaborate video calls that she facilitated, she gently suggested a classmate to turn on her video just to see if it works. This approach was effective instead of requesting that everyone must enable their web cameras for the video conference call which may have resulted in less students participating in it. Additionally, I found it rather welcoming when Natasha put herself out there by actually taking the lead on posting a video message which I felt empowered others to be less reluctant to post their own. Acknowledging the reservations that students may have with that particular communication medium really made the experience positive. I felt that watching other classmates video messages about their digital story making experience was the most enjoyable interaction. I likely spend the most time watching those messages since I was eager to connect with them on a different level as compared to the prior weeks of reading their discussion posts.

I gained a basic sense of some of the coding involved in Moodle; however, the html editor tool makes it easier for user to create pages without having to particularly know how to code. I took some time to research how to perform certain functions using coding language only for the purpose of modifying formatting issues that the html editor did not cooperate with me. Looking at the source code behind the html pages that were created was useful to gain an better understanding of how the coding language is structured.

I believe the most important factor that optimized my learning in ETEC 565A was “time on task” (Chickering 1996). The learning curve was steep at the beginning when I first logged onto my empty Moodle shell. Viewing examples from previous years’ work was both inspiring and intimidating at the same time. I found it helpful to spend some time each day whether it was while commuting home to work or waiting at a medical office to watch tutorials on Moodle to learn how to perform certain functions. The flexibility that I was granted with having access to tutorials anywhere drastically improved the efficiency and productivity in this course. Once I got home and was set up on my main desktop I already had more familiarity with what I wanted to do and how I needed to do it. Having access to the Moodle platform from both the author and student perspective was useful for carrying out user testing. I found myself switching roles from taking an instructor perspective and then taking a student perspective which helped to shape my course design to achieve intended goals.

All in all, I learned to become more critical when considering adding any form of media to my course whether it is an image, audio message or video. I understand that creating a technology support learning environment does not mean that pedagogical foundations can be marginalized at the expense of any decorative media. Through this course I have become more resourceful on the internet to find solutions to features I wanted to add to my Moodle course. These are the most important things I learned which I am grateful for since these transferrable skills can be applied to any technology based educational endeavor.

3) Reflection on my next steps

My steps to continue to build on the skills I have developed in this course is to explore in more detail the Articulate Storyline 2 software for building interactive courses. I will join their online community to learn from other experts in the field and expand my network. In the online community space I will grow my knowledge of design approaches. Learning the software will help to build my technical capacity in conjunction with building my theoretical framework from the remaining MET courses I have to complete my degree. I will set out to get involved with usability testing for patient education websites created by the University Health Network. Taking part in this testing will provide me with a different perspective of how end users actually interact with a website and challenges associated with it. Lastly, I will aim to attend the eLearning Alliance of Canadian Hospitals (eACH) conference regularly to keep informed about advances in technology among teaching hospitals.

References

Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in digital age http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/ (Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework

Chickering, A. W., & Ehrmann, S., C. (1996). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3-6. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples.htm

Content module and digital story reflection

Overall Experience

Reflecting back on the completion of this content module I have a better understanding of why the assessment strategies needed to be completed earlier on in the ETEC 565A course. I found myself reverting back to the learning objectives that I established for my Concussion College course frequently. My thought process throughout the development of this content module consistently asked “how will they be using this information when working directly with patients?” Establishing clear learning objectives for the pain management module was essential in order for me to choose the appropriate content to include.

In considering my own practice as a physiotherapist, I do identify mutual goals when working with patients early on in their therapy sessions. As I mentioned in my introductory module reflection I have not had prior experience creating an online course. Perhaps, I felt there was a different approach to that needed to be taken when teaching or guiding patients in an online learning environment. I was mistaken in this regard since the same approach of establishing end goals relates to how content should be designed in an online space. I had to avoid getting immersed in the capabilities of the technology at the expense of achieving the learning objectives. Moving forward, I will continue to use the backward course design approach when creating technology based online education programs.

I started off by considering how the content should be delivered in this module then realized the target audience would likely be individuals who have completed their high school diploma with possibly some post-secondary education. Reflecting back on professional development training courses that I have taken recently I noticed that content can be presented in text form and does not need to be overloaded with videos and distracting images. The more important aspect of the module became the design of the activities. Whenever I was uncertain if the activity was suitable I considered how I want the students to think differently at the end of the module.

Overall, the experience was extremely valuable to work through the creation of developing effective online content. Greater consideration needed to put on how content would differ or remain the same since the medium of delivery is not the typical face to face format.

Design

The design of the pain management module is very similar to the welcome page in terms of simplicity and clean appearance. I did not want students to be distracted by seeing all of the modules’ contents all at once as soon as they entered the section. Having created a graphical user interface in the introductory module assignment I found it much easier to create for the content module. The greater familiarity with the Moodle LMS for this exercise allowed me to focus less on the technical requirements and more on the pedagogical foundations.

Activities

The activities that I included in the content module focused on both formative and summative assessment. Having the students take The Pain Truth Test at the beginning of the module and reflecting on their answers later on in the module promotes the use of active learning techniques (Chickering 1996). Taking this tests also provides insight into the prerequisite knowledge and misconceptions that students may have so that content that follows may help to modify their understanding (Anderson 2008). The assigned group discussion also promoted students to share their own knowledge and identify unique characteristics of different categories of pain collaboratively.

It was critical that we were advised to carefully consider how our digital story would later fit into our course content. This affected the entire design and storyline that was ultimately created. Powtoon was the right tool for this task because it provided the flexibility to incorporate ‘user-paced segments’ described by Bates (2014) as I was able to use 20 second audio recordings for each slide which made the content more manageable for the learners. There are a number of other online tools that I could have used to record my voice to create a digital story; however, I chose to use one that I found to be more user friendly and flexible compared to others. I was able to upload as many images as I wanted for my story without having to upgrade my subscription service. Being able to do this helped to decide that this was the tool for me to use for my digital story. I wanted to use images that appeared to be standard images that people would recognize based on basic visual literacy skills. From a pedagogical perspective, I wanted viewers to think that the character Matt was just another stock character so that the emphasis would be more on my voice than the images. This approach aligns with how patients should be trained as healthcare professionals such that attentive listening skills should developed earlier on. Only at the end of the digital story is an actual picture of Matt revealed to demonstrate to viewers that even though they may think he is just another stock image that he is a unique individual with a personal story. This story would work within the course that I have developed as a multimedia case study for students to interact with in order to provide recommendations to Matt to help him through his symptoms and issues. The requirement of this task to submit an audio message is purposeful as I wanted students to practice providing verbal advice and hear their own voices. Student listening to classmates messages can learn from the approaches taken by their peers. The story depicts a very common clinical presentation of patients following a concussion which learners need to be prepared to deal with. The knowledge acquired from the other modules will assist learners to gain a better understanding of how to approach concussion patients.

Another aspect that I considered was to determine how many activities and how they would be spaced out within the module. I knew that the audio message response to the digital story would require the most time and planning so that was due towards the end of the week for the module. The other activities were simpler and less involved so they could be placed closer together. I used our own ETEC 565A outline of assignments and tasks as a guide to determine how the activities should be spaced out for a learning module.

References

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in digital age http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/ (Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework)

Glimpses of Health Care Nation already in progress…

I feel there is a divide of how health care professionals need to adapt to the current and future needs as it pertains to patient education. There are two groups that need to be considered; the population that is 65 years and older now and the people that will reach that threshold in the next 10-20 years. Both groups will require different approaches to teaching them to better manage their medical conditions. The thought process of selecting the proper technology to maintain interest and engagement still applies but greater emphasize needs to placed on how that age group prefers to receive information. Creating the coolest mobile app will not improve patient compliance with taking their medications for a chronic condition if end user simply prefers an automated phone call reminder. The group that is currently below the 65 years old threshold will demand more access to their own health information and value more the flexibility of maintaining contact with health care providers through web or mobile based mediums. This younger age group will likely have the pressures of caring for their elderly parents who are living longer and still provide for their own children. As such, flexible communication options and personalizing content will be most important to them.

I have already seen changes in how technology has improved the patient experience when I went to a walk-in clinic in Toronto. The group of clinics I believe was created by a group of young physicians and their technology friends. I was able to find the location that was nearest to my work and look up the current wait times on the internet. When I arrived at the walk-in clinic there were two kiosk monitors where you were prompted to swipe your health card and briefly enter the reason for your visit. You could choose from a list of doctors that were working in the clinic at that time and each one you selected would tell you exactly how many patients were ahead of you to see that doctor. I was called in shortly after and seen by a nurse who confirmed my reason for the visit and took my vital signs to make sure nothing more serious was going on before the doctor saw me. This is example of the expanding scope of healthcare professionals in different settings to triage patients. Overall, I thought it was a great experience and saved me time during my lunch time to get a prescription. Would someone in the over 65 years group have the same feedback on this type of experience?

When Alexander (2014) described campuses having agreements with hospitals in order to better place students and graduates it made me think of a recent partnership that our organization has completed. This is partnership is between the University Health Network and The Michener Institute which is the first of its kind in Canada for a hospital to merge with an applied health sciences education institute. I found it very interesting to read about it from Alexander and actually see it materialize with the organization that I work at. This partnership will strengthen the delivery of health care as students will be directly trained in line with the needs of the hospital.

References

Alexander, B. (2014). Higher education in 2014: Glimpsing the future. Educause Review, 4(5) Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/higher-education-2024-glimpsing-future?utm_source=Informz&utm_medium=Email+marketing&utm_campaign=EDUCAUSE

New Media Consortium. (2015). NMC Horizon Report 2015: Higher ed edition. Retrieved from http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2015-nmc-horizon-report-HE-EN.pdf

Blurred Lines

I have always been more of a private person so did not really spend much time trying to share things publically on the internet. I have periodically done a Google search of myself to see what shows up and as Colleen mentioned in her posts I am more mindful of the digital footprint left for the purpose of employment.

Physiotherapy students under my mentorship are an easier audience to address the issue of digital footprint. Patients who are under my guidance are receptive to information pertaining to their own rehabilitation but in terms of their activity on the internet it becomes more of a challenging. The education revolves more around health literacy when reading information on the internet. I encourage patients to consider the source of the information they are reading and if the author may have secondary motives to gain from the information they have presented.

Our program has recently encountered a case where an injured worker who was suppose to be off work posted pictures of herself attending baseball games and other social events on Facebook. This led the workers compensation board to initiate an investigation into her claim and its legitimacy. In this case, I am not certain what our team’s position would be in terms of educating this patient on what digital footprint she is leaving. It is interesting how in this case, it is not young students who need to learn about their digital footprint but adults.

I do not believe intellectual property is viewed the same with every culture. Certain cultures do not see copying a product to be an issue because they are dealing with much greater socio-economical issues such as low wages and poverty. It really depends on what your life situation is at the moment and your own personal challenges to some degree. At other times, it comes down to money. If someone is benefiting off of something that you have created then the stakes become much higher. An example of this is the lawsuit against Pharrell Williams and Allan Thicke for copyright infringements on their song Blurred Lines. This ties in nicely to last weeks topic on social media 🙂

In terms of teaching, I would need to be more conscious to not make any assumptions when dealing with a multicultural class. I need to ask direct questions about how perspectives may differ in their own cultures so that they can make sense of the concept of copyright in a North American educational system.

Assignment #2 reflection

Intro Module

Overall Experience

Looking back at creating an the introductory module using the LMS Moodle I feel it was a very valuable learning experience. I have never created a course online and this really challenged me to apply the knowledge gained from the ETEC 565A course readings and discussions into practice. From a learning perspective, having the freedom to choose a course or topic that we are already familiar with really kept my motivation throughout the assignment. I found myself starting at one extreme of being completely focused trying to figure out the technical side of how to get Moodle to work the way I wanted it to. This aspect took the most time at the beginning but once I got a better handle on it and shifted to the other end of the spectrum by focusing on the pedagogical foundations from our course readings. Over time, as I got more comfortable with the Moodle platform and what it was capable of I could more easily balance my focus on both course design and pedagogy concurrently.

Design Approach

In designing my introductory module I used the Bates (2014) SECTIONS framework to guide my decisions. The items that were given closer attention because they had greater relevance to the assignment included students, ease of use, teaching functions and interactions. Starting with the target audience (ie “students”) and considering what I see in the healthcare landscape from my own experience I realized that health care personnel come from a wide range of cultural backgrounds and ages. As a part of the introductory activity, I encouraged learners to tell share something about their own cultural differences. In particular, I wanted to get a sense of how the dynamics between a patient or family member and a health care personnel may be differ in different cultures. Taking this approach early on in the design process enable me to be more learner-centered in my approach such that cultural differences are acknowledged and accommodated (Anderson 2008).

With all online learning courses, there is an assumption of a basic level of computer and digital literacy. In designing the layout of the course, I strived to keep it simple and easy to use by having only four key tabs to navigate from the home page. Many of the background pages were purposefully hidden in the final layout to minimize the distractions and not overwhelm the students at first glance. I found it helpful to gain feedback from performing a user test with two family members. The feedback I received was valuable for me to continue to improve my design and make navigating the site more intuitive.

To carefully consider the teaching functions in my course design I found it particularly useful to take a backward course design approach suggested by our course instructor, Natasha. The approach encouraged me to always keep the desired learning outcomes at the forefront of my course design and more specifically assessment strategies.

From an interactions perspectives, students are predominantly interacting with the content in the introductory module to familiarize themselves with the course expectations. Through the discussion forum and invitation to provide a video or picture self introductions more opportunities for interactions between students are presented. There are less interactions with the course instructor as I feel that I would play more a role of facilitator.

Once I created the basic layout of the course I was able of fine tune the visual design to improve the look of the course. At times, there were technical issues that could only be resolved by taking a closer look at the actual html coding. This is where I turned to the Moodle community and YouTube for tutorials on how to edit specific things. The combination of the two options was optimal for me to learn how as it offered a variety of media formats to cater to different learning styles based on what I was trying to achieve.

Assessment Strategies

I chose to use the quiz tool in Moodle for only five questions and create an additional assessment assignment. In considering how the knowledge gained from the course will ultimately be deployed in the future I felt that assessments strictly in the form of multiple choice, matching and short answer limited the type of skills I wanted the learners to have. Coming up with the quiz tool feedback responses was challenging as feedback needs to be useful to the learner and acted upon in order for it to be of a value to their learning (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005). The essay question requires the instructor to manually review the answer and provide a grade. This limited the ability to provide an overall feedback at the end of the exam based on the partially auto-graded questions. The assessment strategies I plan to use with the student further in the course are predominantly formative in nature. The required tasks were designed engage students to work on productive activities that they can see the value in pursuing and put forth good effort (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005). The assignment grading values are progressively larger in order for the instructor to identify key areas of weakness early on and encourage students to keep adapting their knowledge. The intention is for students to ultimately apply their cumulative knowledge towards Assignment #3 which serves as a summative assessment. Assignment #3 serves to challenge students to problem solve by considering relevant questions when they are presented with limited information. This is representative of the type of critical thinking they will require when dealing with patients can be poor descriptors of their own symptoms. This assignment focuses on real world issues and students learn to solve authentic problems (ISTE 2008).

Communication Strategies

The main communications strategies that I will be using for this course are the discussion forums and email. There will be the option of a setting up a video conference depending on the needs of the class. I would like the students to use the discussion forum space to build a community of learners who can share ideas and learn to resolve issues through collaboration.
Through this approach I aim to encourage reciprocity and cooperation among students (Chickering & Ehrmann, 1996). It is anticipated that written communication will enable learners to be more thoughtful and reflective when formulating responses.

References

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in digital age http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/ (Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework)

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from  http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers

Can we expect students to think critically about a Twitter post on their free time?

I think incorporating social media can help students in their ability to critically analyze content. They can learn to compare and contrast opinions to their course content. By comparing new social media perspectives they can learn to construct knowledge and rationalize their own point of views. Social media can broaden students perspectives and learn to formulate respectful arguments in an online environment. The statement made by Keen “we are replacing the tyranny of experts with the tyranny of idiots. Not all information is equal, nor are all opinions” is quite extreme (Bates 2014). Experts may have very theoretical views and opinions that do not hold in the ‘real world’ when it comes to practicality.

Just adding social media to existing courses would be sufficient because information is being updated more rapidly and students need to learn how to analyze current information to construct their own understanding. There is no need to re-design entire course; social media is only one avenue of learning and the foundation should still be based on sound pedagogy. I think it also depends on the course that is being taught. Certain subjects may be more effective to use social media but if it is incorporated into a course then students should always have choice and options so they can gravitate towards areas of interests to them to maintain engagement. For example, for math classes student should have the freedom to choose an area of interests in their lives that applies math concepts and break down the problem versus everyone solving the same problem. Re-designing the entire course around social media would considerably throw off the sought after balance of finding the “middle ground between the total authority and control of the teacher” (Bates 2014). Students still need the structure to optimize their learning.

Bates, T. (2014). Pedagogical differences between media: Social media. In Teaching in digital age, Chapter 9. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-5-5-social-media/

November, A. (2012). How Twitter can be used as a powerful educational tool. November Learning [Weblog] Retrieved from http://novemberlearning.com/educational-resources-for-educators/teaching-and-learning-articles/how-twitter-can-be-used-as-a-powerful-educational-tool/

Case studies and assessments

In the healthcare context, I see a major opportunities for using technology to support patient’s in having a greater understanding of their own conditions to improve self-management. A particular example of this is the Bant app that helps diabetes patients better self-manage their blood glucose levels. One of the major challenges of using technology to support patients is that there is a certain level of basic computer and digital literacy that is required on the part of the user. If that basic level is not present then the technology will not serve its purpose. Technology in this case may result in a greater digital divide between those who can afford the technology and those who cannot. Often times it is those who are less educated about personal health that require more support but do not have the means to obtain it.

Another example that is more in line with the Gibbs and Simpson (2005) reading is with healthcare students. A key opportunity for technology to support assessments is immediate feedback on certain types of assessment questions. In healthcare, critical thinking and analysis are usually tested in the form of case scenarios. Learning occurs most often when students are able to justify their answer and use clinical reasoning to rule out alternatives. These types of answers are not well suited for technology to support them through automated response or feedback. Although the feedback may be immediate, is it “sensitive to the unsophisticated conceptions of learning that may be revealed in students’ work”? (pg22). As such, I feel that feedback is where teachers provide the most value for student learning and requires the most thought that technology may not be able to support at this time.

Has it ‘MET’ expectations

Prior to starting the MET program I have not enrolled in any online courses. I think that for the most part the courses I have taken have strived to create the learning environment described by Anderson (2008). I would agree with some of my classmates who have argued that “learner-centered” should be renamed “learning”-centered so that the needs of the teacher, institutions and society as a whole are factored in (p.47). Through the course introductions teachers have been able to gain a better understanding of the variety of workplace settings that the students are working in. This provides insight into their prerequisite knowledge. One area that has not particularly been emphasized in the MET courses has been acknowledging cultural variations with respect to how students interpret and build knowledge (pg. 47). I am not certain whether it is because the majority of the students have studied in Canada so there is not much of a need. There may be a need to change in the future if future MET students from overseas enroll in the program.

All of the courses have included a combination of formative and summative assessments in various forms. Some courses have required the completion of three short papers each with progressively greater value in the overall grading of the course. The feedback for these papers were valuable to both the student and teacher to evaluate a sample of writing. The courses all include a final paper or major project component in which the knowledge gained throughout the modules should be applied. Of course, being knowledge-centered is not complete without the opportunities for reflection of one’s own thinking (pg. 49) as evidenced by our ePortfolio in this course.

The community-centered component of Anderson’s learning environment has been quite evident in all the MET courses as well as before starting the program through the MET Forum. The forum allowed new students to start messaging others students/alumni prior to starting the program. This forum allowed me to learn from other students what courses they took and how valuable they found them for their own learning. The community-centered feel becomes more evident I found with each subsequent course you take and realize that you have worked with some classmates in a group project before. The group work has challenged me to become more open to different opinions and come to a consensus when deciding on the direction of project. These collaborative skills are invaluable for dealing with situations in the work place.

In creating meaningful interactions, I will consider the learning objectives and how the knowledge needs to be deployed. The learning technologies will serve to provide multimodal options for the learners such that differing learning styles are considered. A combination of both synchronous and asynchronous communications channels will enable both the introverted and extroverted learners to benefit.

References

Mobile technologies: taking the good and the bad

In the healthcare setting, mobile devices have become a useful tool for clinicians/students to look up information/terminology they are not family with on-demand. The issue is whether clinicians/students will take less time to try to problem solve the question in their own minds before seeking the opinions or answers from the internet.

In terms of who should be allowed to use mobile devices it is not clear cut. In the hospital setting it seems managers are the first to be provided with them. Although, currently I see much more often clinicians bringing their own smart phones where ever they go at work to surf the internet or text friends during weekly patient rounds if they are not discussing their own patient at that particular time. I am wondering what would the response be if managers prohibited the use of mobile phones in team rounds except for doctors and managers. There are many co-workers with young children and their rationale for keeping their phones so close by is for emergency situations with respect to their kids or elderly parents. I feel that is reasonable to allow; however, many of us managed before without mobile phones. With respect to the use of tablets/Ipads they have become more popular tools for rehabilitation. In the our patient and family resource center they have Ipads that can be used by patients and family. The trained medical librarian and volunteers assist visitors with using various health related apps that may augment the therapy they are doing in clinic. For example, more apps on brain games and stress/relaxation techniques are being used so that patients have more choice to find activities that are more interesting to them. I make a point to introduce the patients to the patient and family resource center so that they can search out additional information based on their own level of curiosity. The applications on the mobile devices provide patients with a level of both sensory and cognitive curiosity (Ciampa, 2013).

Only a few years back I recall a patient care manager who was notorious for having her buried in her Blackberry during patient team rounds and only looked up when the mention of “delayed discharge date” was mentioned. She did eventually get let go from the organization but the reason is not known to anyone. This example goes to show that if a patient care manager is suppose to be seen as a leader to direct reports they must lead by example. Do these devices make people less present and focused mainly getting through all their emails?

Teachers and students should be allowed to use mobile devices but the issues is how to you monitor what students are actually doing when they are on their devices. In the education or healthcare setting it must be relevant to their current work. Another obstacle is choosing the manner in which the mobile device will be used such that the student/patient that has the oldest device can still participate fully in the learning. If this is not considered careful then a wider digital divide may become evident.

I think the biggest change in the use of mobile devices for learning purposes for the MET program personally has been the flexibility to log into this course wherever you are and quickly find out what the discussion questions are for the week, save it in a notepad offline and have it available to revisit anytime. This flexibility allows greater time on task and one to reflect greater on their responses. Mobile devices have also advanced with so many different mobile applications that are multi-modal with sounds, tactile interaction and high definition videos. These variations allow the device to reach more learners who have different learning styles and physical/cognitive abilities.

Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation.Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf

Assignment #1 reflection

Assignment #1: Reflection

For the Online Delivery Platform Evaluation Rubric Assignment our group had to develop a rubric to guide the leadership team at BCcampus to decide between two learning management systems. Looking back at the process involved in creating a rubric has been a very valuable experience. It allowed me to apply the Bates (2014) SECTIONS framework as well as the ‘Seven Principles of Good Practice’ discussed by Chickering and Ehrmann (1996) to a specific case scenario. Understanding the readings was one thing but being able to apply them is a different challenge. Each criteria had to be considered and evaluated based on its relevance to the case at hand. Prioritizing the criteria that would be included in the rubric took time but working in a group with diverse educational backgrounds and work experiences enriched the discussion. Listening to other members rationale for their criteria choices broadened my own perspectives on what is considered to be most important. Our entire group had solidified the importance of keeping the pedagogical foundations a top priority and not letting the technical aspects of the technology distract us from focusing on the learners needs.

The one criteria that stood out to me to be most in line with the trends discussed by Spiro (2014) is customization. This feature enables learning to be more adaptive to individual learners, digital information curation to occur and learners to take more control in constructing knowledge that is meaningful to them (Spiro, 2014). This feature will align BC Campus to be more responsive to the needs of current and future learners.

The other five criteria chosen also play an important role in the decision making process. Support, access and functionality serves to make the software application or web-based technology usable without significant stress for the learner such they there distracted from spending time on the actual learning objectives that need to developed. The cost and organizational requirements serve a greater purpose to the leadership team in order for them to be financially responsible in their decision and consistently aligned with existing mandates.

All in all, when making decisions regarding learning management systems many criteria need to be carefully considered. Certain criteria may have greater importance than others but decisions should be made with the flexibility to serve the needs of future learners as well as current ones.

References

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in digital age http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/ (Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework)

Spiro, K. (2014). 5 elearning trends leading to the end of the Learning Management Systems. Retrieved from http://elearningindustry.com/5-elearning-trends-leading-to-the-end-of-the-learning-management-system