Having been raised in France, England, Germany, the US, and Canada, I had a chance to experience what it was like to learn in these different educational systems. While school of course provided a great foundation for my education, it was through travel with my family that I learned the most. I can not recall what happened year to year in school (with exceptions of course), but the summers and holidays where we went somewhere and saw something new became ironed into my mind. This trend persisted in University, where I had the chance to do two experiential semesters in my Marine Biology program. 4 years of learning, and I still recall vividly my experiences and learning in those two semesters… one working out of a Marine Science centre in New Brunswick and the other working in the field in South Africa.

with Omjay after speaking at the Indonesian Teacher’s Conference

Since then I have travelled a fair amount more. Teaching provided a good means to travelling, but I soon found myself far more interested in the art and science of teaching rather than just treating it as a job. After 3 years of teaching English in Indonesia, I moved back to Vancouver in 2006. There, I found myself involved in a school startup next to UBC. Being interested in both sustainability and technology I started to explore learning management systems as a means to create a paperless school. After 3 years of playing around with LMS and learning heaps through online forums and tutorials, the school had developed a functional means to get kids writing and communicating for more than their 90 minutes per week. The possibilities seemed pretty expansive… sure we could automate some things like quizzes, but far more interesting to me was the potential to integrate learning experiences (which would be their class time) with out of class time spent on reflection and communicating about the ideas experienced (hence the need for an LMS).

After 5 years I decided to move back to Indonesia, this time to build an eco-lodge on the beach. My hope was to eventually have student groups come out to the middle of nowhere and experience some raw nature. Preceding this experience I wanted kids to go through online courses that helped to build knowledge and understanding of concepts they would later experience. However, I got waylaid a week into my venture and was offered a job at Green School, which I simply could not refuse.

Working at Green School gave me the chance to really apply experiential learning. It also allowed me enough freedom to use eLearning to build students’ understanding of concepts and provide a platform for reflection on various concepts they were covering. I have since developed an LMS for Green School, which I named the Hive. Here, I have explored a number of methods to get kids interacting online. However, till I joined the MET program I was going based on experience and hunches… some of which worked well, others not so well. Since I have been continuously dabbling in learning technology, I decided that I should formalize this with a masters degree.

This course has interested me greatly on many levels. Using online platforms to expand the number of students I can engage with has always meant a lot to me, and I feel that there is a certain time sensitive element to doing this. My school currently has no qualms with me sharing the resources I create, but I feel that having courses which engage a larger body of students than just those at the school would ensure that the future of these courses remains open. eLearning can also provide good ways for students to extend themselves, simply by providing a greater body of content than you will cover in class.

In this course, I hope to help some friends who are starting a new venture which is close to my heart: Shift.Education Worldschool. They are a group of people who are looking at creating an online school which connects people around the world and has frequent meetups for experiences. They have a strong focus on the home school groups that are currently coming about, as well as unschooling. The concept is still in its infancy, and I suggested that I create a course using some of their criteria in this class. That way, I will be able to help them design an effective platform based on practices that have a sound academic background and are cutting edge. Incidentally, they are using vanilla Moodle at the moment, and working on modding it to meet some of their unique needs.

Resourcing this project will be fairly straightforward. I will need to have access to a build of Moodle that is compatible with theirs (I already do here). My friends at Shift(ed) will need to provide me with criteria they see as invaluable in their courses, and I will have to ensure that the criteria they have are compatible with the needs of this course. Following this I will find a topic that I would like to base my course on… it will likely be one which I am already passionate about (perhaps Marine Biology?).  A big part of this will be finding pictures and videos that I can use freely and ensuring I know how to attribute these media elements properly. Furthermore, I am really keen on learning how we can bridge mass social media (eg. Facebook) and an LMS (or if that is even a good idea?). Hopefully that provides a fairly clear scope of what I am looking for in this course… I look forward to hearing your feedback readers!