Grade 9 Science, Applied
The SNC1P course site is intended for a continuous-enrolment course, to be used by students who are at different campuses, sometimes without a subject-specialist teacher on site. The student population has a high proportion of special needs or at-risk students. Last spring, in our department, we discussed SNC1P, and came up with some broad guidelines. At the time, I argued that we needed to give our students, who generally work in isolation from others, the opportunity to share ideas with other students working on the same course. Designing this course gives me a chance to show how this can work.
What made this project easy (hah!) is that I wrote for this real purpose – I believe an LMS like Moodle is exactly the platform we (at my school) should use to deliver and maintain our courses. Choices, such as how to structure groups and reasons for selectively releasing content, were clear in my content. Students are self-paced as they work through this course, so lessons are released dependent on pre-requisite activities being completed. Certain discussions, which featured topics that span all of the strands of science, involve the entire class. Other discussions, focussed on a particular topic, only involve students who are at that point in the course. Students are placed in a discussion group with others who start the course at the same time of the year, and are working at the same point in the course.
My Splash page focuses on the real benefit that an LMS offers our students – the communication tools that put them in touch with other students, and with a subject-specialist teacher.
The challenge
When I understood what this assignment involved – a course site with real content, written largely as web-pages – it was clear what I needed to do – what I couldn’t imagine was how I could possibly do it!
I’m not surprised at the amount of time it took – I’ve written courses for use in independent-study courses, and I’ve used an LMS to maintain and deliver courses, so I know how time consuming both of those activities are. But now I would not only have to construct a course within Moodle, but also learn how to create web pages!
Working on this course
Talk about seat-of-the-pants course site design! Everything about this, from the look of the pages, to the content of the course, has involved an iterative process! And it isn’t over. This course is at a resting point, but I will be picking it up again, soon.
What have I learned? I know how much I’ve learned when I think about how different my progress would be if I began this project now.
Building this course site has been like working on an absorbing, fascinating puzzle!