I teach at a high school for adult and alternative learners. Our adult learners have returned to school some years after leaving without graduating, and have a variety of goals, from simply completing their graduation requirements to gaining prerequisites for post secondary programs. They arrive with a range of study skills and technology skills. Our alternative learners have come to us usually after having some difficulty continuing in a mainstream high school. They also have a wide range of skills and goals. We have a high proportion of special needs students, and many students who have significant responsibilities outside of school.
This school is located across a number of small campuses, over a geographically large area. Many of the campuses have only two or three teaching staff, so each campus may not have a subject specialist in each teaching area. Students often don’t have the opportunity for face-to-face contact with a subject specialist.
Our course materials are largely text-based, and most assessment is by pen-and-paper assignments and tests. Registration in courses is continuous-intake, and courses are self-paced. Students get help from the teachers at their campus (who may not be knowledgeable about the course). Sometimes, we arrange a phone or email conference to provide extra help from a subject specialist at another campus. A student works in a classroom with other students – but rarely are they working on the same course, or at the same point in a course. Most interaction about the course material is with a teacher.
I’m working with a team of teachers who are updating our science courses to reflect recent changes in the curriculum. Our goals overlap with Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (1) in that we want to develop a variety of active learning assignments to support the varied needs of our students, in accordance with the principles of Universal Design for Learning and Differentiated Instruction (2). I also want to explore the use of social software, to provide students with an opportunity to interact with other learners and teachers at our other campuses. My goal for ETEC565a is to learn to select and apply tools that we can use to develop our science courses.
I am familiar with the Desire2Learn LMS, and expect it will be easy to learn about Moodle, and determine if it will be a good choice for our science department, and our students, using the SECTIONS framework for selecting technology (3). I have little experience with multimedia, and expect to spend more time learning how to use multimedia for enriching learning activities in order to appeal to a variety of learners. The area of greatest interest for me, and where I expect to spend most of my time, is in exploring the use of social software for assessment (4), and in order to build a learning community (5). I have some experience using discussion boards, but very little experience with blogs and wikis, and want to practice using them myself before I ask my students to use them.
I expect that mastering these technologies will require extensive practice, and so this would be a long term goal. Developing a working knowledge would be an easily achieved goal, and would not require a large outlay of time or technical support. Another factor needed to develop some skill with these technologies is a group to share experiences with, and that is my purpose in this course.
References
(1) Chickering, A.W. and Gamson, Z.F. (1987). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39 (7), p. 3-7.
(2) Education for All (2005). http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/reports/speced/panel/speced.pdf, accessed Sept. 19, 2010.
(3) Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers
(4) Dawley, L. (2007). The Tools for Successful Online Teaching. (pp. 205-225). Hershey PA: Information Science Publishing
(5) Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (1999). Building learning communities in cyberspace: Effective strategies for the online classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.