The Navigation and Sailing Report #5

Port name: ETEC 565A

Port Section: 66B

Port Website: http://met.ubc.ca/etec-565a 

Port Time Frame: (May-Aug 2013)

Port specialty: Learning Technologies: Selection, Design and Application (elective course)

Port Director: Dr. Natasha Boskic

Port Administrator: David Roy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overview

Learning Technologies: Selection, Design and Application. Special Course in Subject Matter Field

ETEC 565A is an online seminar that provides several theoretical frameworks to assist educators in evaluating, selecting and using various learning technologies. Students will gain hands-on experience using a range of learning technologies and platforms: web-publication, course management systems, communication tools, community and collaboration tools, multimedia, and social software tools. Students will complete a number of small assignments using different learning technologies as well as a larger project in which they bring several of these technologies together to design materials and activities to support student learning.

 

Objectives

The objectives of this course are as follows:

• Students will discuss the characteristics of their classrooms, their instructional strategies, and the technologies that support teaching and learning.

• Participants will explore a set of theoretical frameworks for analyzing learning technologies and apply those frameworks to help them select technologies appropriate to their context.

• Participants will develop skills in the use of learning technologies:

• Web-publication: html editing skills, CSS, website design

• Course management systems: WebCT, Moodle

• Communication Tools: synchronous and asynchronous environments, audio/video conferencing

• Collaboration Tools

• Social Media Tools: Wikis, Weblogs, and Social Bookmarking

• Participants will explore and analyze a wide range of formal and informal learning environments, including e-learning, computer-supported collaborative learning, instructional software, and social media.

• Participants will develop skills in the design of educational media, and the integration of design thinking with scholarship in education.

 

Artifact #1: Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) Proposal

 

Moodle (2013) is an open-source LMS with an intuitive interface that hosts a full range of collaborative tools and is fully customizable to meet all the College student blended learning needs. It is very well-supported by an open community of developers and users, and has an extensive on-line knowledge and support base (Moodle, 2013). There are many Colleges and Universities worldwide that satisfactorily use Moodle as their main LMS. Widespread use of Moodle creates a strong learning community and a potential support pool of experienced administrators, teachers and users that may collaboratively help in addressing newly-discovered bugs and problems.

 

LMS Proposal Project Description

This LMS project proposal to NorQuest College Educational Technology Board proposes Moodle as the new LMS to serve more than 10,000 college post-secondary students for implementation of project-based blended learning and collaborative methods for delivery of various courses in Language Instruction for Newcomers (LINC) program, English as a Second Language (ESL) program, Academic Upgrading program, Business programs, Health Career Studies,

Preparatory programs etc. (NorQuest, 2013).

I was already familiar with the Bates and Poole’s (2003) “SECTIONS” framework, but during the readings, discussions and by doing the assignments in this course, I realized that I, as other technologists sometimes tend to focus on some “more important” criteria, while others are considered less important or critical. This theoretical and practical refresh on “SECTIONS” helped me to thoroughly and equally consider every criterion for the quality evaluation of educational technologies.

I especially like this important statement, so I readily accepted it as my mantra:“…teachers or educational administrators making decisions about educational technology should have some theoretical model or framework that guides the choice of media and technology. If not, they will be constantly driven by the latest technology development, whether or not they are appropriate” (Bates & Poole, 2003, p. 80).

 

In summary, as a result of comprehensive analysis, the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) meets all the SECTIONS technology framework evaluation requirements and is highly suitable for the College e-learning needs.

 

Artifact #2: Digital Story - A day in a work of an educational technologist

 

This digital story depicts a day in my work as an educational technologist supporting the LINC program at NorQuest College in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Through this digital story I made you familiar with my average work day supporting teachers and learners in using evarious ducational technologies in the dynamic English as a Second Language Learning environments.
I thank all the NorQuest students, teachers, and staff who helped me to record and collect images and resources to make this digital story possible. Special thanks goes to my daughter Alexandra who spent a day with me taking pictures for the story. This Digital Story was authored using Animoto (pro) web tool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Digital Story Assignment for the ETEC565A-66B course. A Day in a Work of an Educational Technologist.

 

For my digital story creation, I explored a variety of Web 2.0 tools, from many Internet sites including the CogDogRoo, Creaza, Empressr, JayCut, Prezzi,Toondoo, Vuvox, Xtranormal and others, but I finally chose the Animoto from http://animoto.com/.

From the technological perspective, Animoto features the creation of extraordinary videos of our life and business, additionally providing the most beautiful way to share our photos & videos online. The Animoto tool features and effects depend on the style of the video, and have been controlled by the secret artificial intelligence logic and image analysis algorithm, and are applied with moderation, therefore not causing the distraction or unneeded video and/or audio noise.

From the pedagogical perspective, considering the fact that I work in a dynamic PSE English language learning environment, I needed the Web 2.0 tool able to capture and transfer the dynamics from the images of my work environment, into the dynamic video enhanced with the music and textual backgrounds, plus the intelligent and dynamic mixing, rotation, skewing and flipping of images. The Animoto as a toll with those dynamic features and effects was according to my taste, a medium able to capture and transfer the messages, I wanted to transfer from my dynamic work environment to the audience by using a digital story format.

Basically, there are the 5 main steps in using the Animoto tool, as follows:

• Insert Photos & Videos, by uploading them from your computer or grab from Facebook, Instagram, Picasa, Flickr and elsewhere.

• Customize Your Style by selecting a proper video style, suitable for the type of the video presentation.

• Choose some licensed background music for additional emphasis,

• Add a few words of your own text, to precisely depict the story, preview, create, download or export, and you’re done!

• Share & Enjoy the story by downloading, embedding, or sharing your video via Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, and more.

Initially I signed up with my Facebook account and experimented with the free (lite) account, suitable just for an evaluation, due to imposed limitations, such as 30 seconds video limit, so I had to spend some money to upgrade to the Plus account that gives more styles and features, as well as increases the video limit to 10 minutes. If we want to create a video in HD resolution, we have to additionally pay $10 for HD conversion, so I converted my story from 360p to 480p resolution.

I have spent many hours working on my story, and from my experience, here are the following weaknesses, lack of features or imperfections of the Animoto tool:

• The free (lite) account is practically useless, because 30 seconds is a very short time, so no serious story project can be made with the lite account.

• The length of the video depends on the background song length, which is inconvenient, and without a pro plan, only one song can be used.

• There are imposed caption and text character limits, so I had problems adapting and shortening my captions and still keeping my sentences grammar and style sound and correct.

• If we want to create HD videos (480p, 720p and 1080p) we have to additionally pay from $5-20 per video, for instant HD upgrade.

• The choice of the background audio is limited to the songs (300-2000) licensed for use with Animoto, so no external recordings, narrations or songs can be added.

All in all, the Animoto tool has a good potential, is not expensive (just $5-20 monthly, depends on the plan), and is able to create solid professionally appealing HD videos with the significant educational value.  From my experience, I believe that I chose the right tool to tell my digital story, particularly from a pedagogical perspective, and I am glad that my story precisely depicts my typical day at work using sound pedagogical arguments with interesting teaching moments, augmented with very well captured dynamics, effects and background music. The total story length is 7 minutes and 15 seconds, and I was limited to the use of only one song, and music style.

Additionally, the iPhone and Android owners, can download the free Animoto app, and create and share videos using their phone’s pictures and video clips, or watch and/or download the ones you’ve made on your computer. It’s easier, faster and dare, a bit more fun.

Additionally, I made this embedded digital story video HTML5 mobile friendly, but it may not be fully compatible with some blogs and CMS sites, so here is the story link on the Animoto authoring website: http://animoto.com/play/jCsbakcatrsb9AGZaUU66A

Moreover, as a backup option, the story is available on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWHWFyutaTk  and so far the YouTube buffering and streaming works the best, and is the most reliable.

 

Artifact #3: Moodle Lesson Project - Basic Computer Literacy for 21st Century Learners

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Moodle experience is a story for itself. Even though, I had some basic experience with the older version of Moodle (version 1.9), working in Moodle 2.5  was a really interesting and at the same time challenging experience, where I had to watch training videos and read lots of Moodle 2.5 manuals, tips and tricks, to be able to successfully handle the complex and demanding Moodle course project I started working on. I was creating the complete course with 5 training modules and quizzes on “Basic Computer Literacy for 21st Century Learners“.  The learning curve was steep, and interestingly, due to family reasons at the end of July, I had to travel overseas to Croatia, where I experienced Moodle course and quizzes creation, testing and final touches over a low bandwidth Internet connections (1-2 Mbps). I totally spent over 100 hours learning Moodle and working in it. I witness that Moodle as a Java based LMS is not responsive and appears that as the other WYSIWYG HTML editors, is not intended to be used over the low bandwidth Internet connections. Often I had to wait 1 minute or longer for page to open or refresh, or get 90 seconds timeout (“page not found / cannot find server”) and try again. My experience proves that accessing and working (authoring) in Moodle from the rural areas where ADSL Internet access is quite slow, unreliable and unstable is a hair pulling experience. I see that as a downside of the Moodle as LMS, and the space for Moodle access improvement, so it got me thinking about the practical ways to enhance Moodle accessibility over the low bandwidth Internet connections. That is definitely going to be a challenge for Moodle programmers to work on improving that low bandwidth Moodle access for the sake of many Moodle learners worldwide who do not have fast Internet connections. For example,by using the same connection, the authoring of Wikispaces lessons was less problematic, the lessons were loading faster and were much easily accessible.    

Creation and editing of quizzes in Moodle was a quite interesting pedagogical and technical experience, but nerve wracking experience, definitely not enjoyable over the low bandwidth ADSL Internet connection. Many times I had to refresh the page to be able to move forward and pray the God for the changes to be saved, otherwise had to do it again! Anyway, I put lots of time, effort and dedication into the Moodle lesson authoring, testing and development, did an excellent job, so this Moodle lesson assignment got A+ grade, (96%).

 

Captain's Log:

 

Warm summer of 2013 gradually tranquilized the MET Sea, making its warm waters and singing waves, gentle breezes, as well as beautiful sunrises, sunsets and bonanzas under the blue skies and starry nights so friendly, inspirational and highly motivational and conducive for leading edge navigational and sailing training in Learning Technologies: Selection, Design and Application at the ETEC 565A harbour and its busy docks. Evenb though it was a quite busy summer, I had lots of energy to fight with LMS proposal, the Digital Story, Moodle and  I was lucky that I was a part of the teams of excellent fellow navigators who did not take anything for granted, but worked hard to master the art of selecting, designing and applying, for the best navigation and sailing on the waters of educational technology.

 

Developing a comprehensive Moodle LMS proposal and the LMS evaluation rubric for selecting an online delivery platform was very useful and challenging experience highly applicable to real life situations in all formal/informal learning environments.

The learning, analysis and practical application of best theoretical frameworks such as S.E.C.T.I.O.N.S,  Seven principles, etc. was a steep but quite rewarding learning experience. In general, the ETEC 565A course has great readings for a theoretical update and refresh, as well a great practical assignments. Exploring Web 2.0 tools in Levine’s (2007) wiki and creation of digital story was a really interesting experience. I was already familiar with a majority of the listed tools and resources, and readily continued exploring a number of the tools listed on Levine’s site and selected some of them as the most suitable for my personal and professional use in the future. I created a digital story using the Animoto tool. I mastered building a digital story, and I was able to fully transfer the dynamic of my daily work environment using the Animoto tool for telling a digital story resulted in a kind of mashup of pictures, audio, video and text distinguishing Web 2.0, and according to Lamb (2007) statement that mashup is not only about remixing content, but also about remixing functionalities of websites.

 

The creation of the Moodle LMS course site was another task with the steep learning curve. Even though, I already had some Moodle experience, I learned well to create simple web pages in Moodle shell, create and edit the complex assessment quizzes, make a decent splash page with a customized GUI and create appealing group discussion forums. I also learned some new features as the image mapping tool during the splash page creation. Using Moodle over the low bandwidth Internet connection was valuable experience in understanding the Moodle accessibility issues that may have negative impact on Moodle accessibleness for mostly rural learners and millions of current and potential learners in undeveloped countries.

Even though, it was not possible to fully master Moodle in 100 hours, during the creation of my five module course on Basic Computer Literacy, I grasped Moodle authoring and got a lot of hands-on experience in Moodle 2.5, so I feel confident to independently continue learning of planning, managing and creation of decent Moodle courses, lessons and quizzes.

During my secondary and postsecondary education, I was gradually becoming aware of the critical importance of quality assessment tools for quality of learning, and that the assessment process is a very complex and challenging. Additionally, through the Assessment assignment I have updated my attitude toward the assessment realizing how complex, challenging and important it is for the learning process. Jenkins’ (2005) and Gibbs and Simpson’s (2005) articles states that assessment is the most influential factor on students’ learning, more influential than teaching itself. The latter article taught me that first I had to decide on the purpose of my assessment because the assessment is not just about assessing the learners knowledge or results. The other important assessment conditions supportive for students learning identified by Gibbs and Simpson (2005) include: focus of assessment on the most important aspects of the course and making sure that students will carefully read and implement ideas from the learning modules and pre and post-test feedback.

I definitely expanded my theoretical and practical knowledge about the social media by acquiring missing pieces. Exploration of Levine’s (2007) tools and creation of digital story using Animoto as one of the best available tools for the creation of my digital story, were especially interesting as I already mentioned.

The theoretical and practical knowledge acquired during the 565A course synergicaly and dialectically integrated with my previous theoretical and practical knowledge, so I feel much more empowered with the wast knowledge acquired on selection design and application of learning technologies, which is going to help me in my further MET courses and in my professional practice as an educational technologist. I am ready to bring new theoretical knowledge and practical insights and experiences into my PSE working environment for the sake of empowering of teachers learners, teaching and learning environments, improvements of learning technologies and the education in general.

 

At the end of ETEC 565A I can say that I have achieved all my goals, and even learned more than I expected, so I collected, loaded, stored, organized and traded lots of new theoretical knowledge and practical experience, and I feel that this course really helped me to learn and grow a lot on my way to gradually become an extraordinary expert in the decent selection, design and application of learning technologies.

Artifact References:

 

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.

 

Chickering, A.W. & Gamson, Z.F. (1987).  Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education.  American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39 (7), 3-7.

 

Perkins, M., Pfaffman, J. (2006). Using a course management system to improve classroom communication. Science Teacher, 73(7), 33-37.

 

UBC Public Affairs. (2009). CMS @ UBC: What is CMS. Retrieved 22 April 2009 from the University of British Columbia: Web Content Management (CMS) Web Site: http://www.cms.ubc.ca/welcome.html

 

Online teaching and learning resource guide (2009). Virginia Commonwealth University Centre for Teaching excellence. Retrieved from: http://www.vcu.edu/cte/resources/OTLRG/02_05_DesignConsiderations.html

 

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

 

Jenkins, M. (2004). Unfulfilled promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1, 67-80. Retrieved from http://insight.glos.ac.uk/tli/resources/lathe/documents/issue%201/articles/jenkins.pdf

 

Lamb, B. (2007). Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix. EDUCAUSE Review, 42 (4), 12–25. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ER/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume42/DrMashuporWhyEducatorsShouldLe/161747

 

Levine, A. (2007). 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. Retrieved from http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools