Category Archives: Case Study

Case Study

Case Study # 2 – Pro-D What Would Lenora Do?

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Case Study

Pro-D

Lenora is a grade 4 teacher at the Eliza Archie Memorial School, located on the Tsq’escenemc Canim Lake Band reserve. Last year she attended an anti-bullying professional development (pro-d) workshop offered by SD 83 (North Okanagan). There was a lot of valuable information in the session, but Lenora felt it often wasn’t culturally relevant for her First Nations community. When she discussed her experience with peer Aboriginal educators in the Cradleboard Teaching Project Teacher’s Circle (http://www.cradleboard.org/), many agreed. And many had stories to share about bullying in their band schools.

Indigenous online communities of practice like Cradleboard have really helped Lenora develop her own reflective practice. She’s decided to create an online anti-bullying resource for band teachers – a sort of online pro-d day – that offers support and suggestions from other Aboriginal educators and their allies in addressing the particulars of bullying behaviour in band schools.

But Lenora’s web access at home is dial-up only. It can take a really long time to upload and download files. There is broadband at her school, but after teaching all day and additional prep and marking time, she needs to find a way to make this work from home, since time with her own family is important to her. Plus she’s never created a web site before and doesn’t know anything about where one puts a website.

 

Solution:

First, the fact that Lenora is challenging her outlook on using technology to connect is something that should be applauded.   Sharing and communication a deep rooted tradition in the native community so it makes perfect sense to try and bring that ancient tradition in the present through the use of emerging technologies.  Having this site set up will not only create new community ties but also work to help once isolated students share their pain and work with their teachers to combat bullying in their community.

As for what tool to use to achieve her goal, there are many choices out there: WordPress, Google Sites, Squarespace, Wix, Sitebuilder, and Weebly just to name a few.  Since this is Lenora’s first website, I would recommend that the chooses Weebly.com to create her site.  This site is the best choice for her because it offers a very simple drag and drop interface that will not overwhelm her.  This is not to say that it is not a powerful tool, but it is something that even newcomer to website design can easily understand and take full advantage of.   The problem of dial-up can be circumvented though Weebly’s feature of adding images and videos through embed codes or URL.  If Lenora uses this feature she does not have to upload the image from her computer at home.  Simply add a link to it and Weebly will fetch the image/video for her.  Thus she would not have to worry about her bandwidth issue.  Weebly offers a number of online videos or text articles that can aid her if she needs help to understand how to do this.  Weebly also offers mobile editing of the site, so if Lenora has a smart phone (over 55% of Canadians have smart phones in 2014) she can use her phone.

 

I feel that setting up the site would really only require 2-3 weeks.  The first week would be Lenora planning out what message she would like to present and who she would like to present it to.  She should decide on the page structure of her site and also which social media tools she would like to include in her design (Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc.).  After this initial planning stage, it is simply a matter of creating the pages she thinks she will need and setting those pages up with content.

With a simple yet powerful tool, the creation of this type of site takes very minimal computer/website creation knowledge.

Case Study, Education

Benoit Cast Study

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Case Study #1

Moodle

        Benoît is a sessional instructor in the English department of a large, research-intensive university. Previously he has used WebCT Vista to disseminate lecture notes and readings for his face-to-face Business Writing course.

        His department head has approached him about offering an online version of Business Writing. However, WebCT Vista is no longer available at his university and Benoît must choose either Blackboard Learn (a new, enhanced version of WebCT Vista) or Moodle. Blackboard Learn is the university’s “official” LMS and has university-wide IT support, but the Help Desk is difficult to get a hold of and can be very slow in responding to email. Moodle is hosted within the Faculty of Arts, but operates as a stand-alone tool with no real technical support: instructors need to set up their own courses from scratch. More and more faculty and instructors in the English Department now use Moodle, since it isn’t administered by IT support: less paperwork, less red tape.

           Benoît is very comfortable in the design mode of WebCT Vista; he has also done some general web design, mostly for personal use. In terms of web design he has developed content, uploaded it via FTP and then left it there. He has heard from colleagues that Blackboard Learn is dreadful, that doesn’t have half the functionality of WebCT Vista, though he has not yet had time to do any evaluation himself.

            Because of his teaching load, Benoît estimates he could spend up to 5 hours a week developing the online version of Business Writing. The course would go live next semester.

Moodle for Benoît?

The first thing that Benoit needs to do is to apply the SECTIONS or Seven Principals method to his decision making process.  Using one of these tools will help Benoit take the guesswork out of his choice and to allow him to make the best choice for himself, his course and his students.

An important question Benoît needs to ask himself as he moves to an LMS from a face-to-face learning is “What kind of information and experience am I trying to offer to my students and which system gives me the features and flexibility for all participants in my course to interact in a meaningful and efficient way?”

Benoit should evaluate what information and or content is most important to the core ideals/message of what he is trying to teach is most important to the success of his course. This is an important question because content is the most important aspect to a course and should dictate the tools being used and not the other way around.  Too often, educators get excited about a new technology and choose the tool first,  then they attempt to make the content ‘fit’ which often leads to the course failing because the core is lost to fashion over function.

“Business Writing Online” Launch Time Frame

I think that it might take Benoit about 25 hours to transfer his offline course to an online LMS.  Since he can contribute 5 hours a week it would take about 5 weeks for him to do this task.  The rest of this time frame makes the assumption that Benoit will choose Moodle as his LMS.

Week 1

  • research the features of the Moodle LMS features using the SECTIONS method.  Moodle has extensive videos  and documents online to aid Benoit
  • create a plan of attack on what resources he needs for his course and the best way to structure his moodle page.
  • Being modular, Moodle is very easy to tailor to any instructors needs.

Week 2

  • begin to upload core documents to Moodle and layout the course structure.
  • replace any material that does not transfer from analog by creating digital content (audio, video, links)

Week 3

  • install LMS site or access existing LMS site,
  • develop the general site (theme, navigation, permissions, calendars, announcements, etc),
  • learn and experiment with basic orientation to structure, layout and interface,

Week 4

  • fine tune the layout of the site and begin to test for problems in navigation of the site.

Week 5

  • test site as both instructor and as student,
  • troubleshoot and fine tune,
  • publish completed site