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ETAD 804 - Distance Education
I took this course in the Fall of 2017, after taking off July and August from my Masters program. The pause allowed me to totally relax and recharge. I was actually quite excited to get back at my Master's journey this fall. The main reason was that I was luckily enough to be selected for educational leave for half the school year. I had applied back in November of 2016 and was notified about it in February 2017.
Not having to factor in teaching full-time would allow me to focus on ETAD and take my remaining courses in one semester. This was one of 5 classes that I would require to finish and I was taking them all at the same time. As a facebook post I put up in September stated "I like to push (punish?) myself." My wife affectionately stated that now I can do all the housework, since I would have all the time in the world. Other colleagues mentioned that "it must be nice to get a paid vacation."
Let me state that this was not the case at all! I found myself putting in full days just to stay on top of the 5 classes and at times the amount of reading, assignments and work seemed daunting. But I could see the end of this journey and I knew with hard work, I could learn a lot more and finish this program on a strong note.
September is always a wild month, but after the initial panic of being a bit overwhelmed by what was required, I finally fell into a pattern of readings, assignments and organization. It was interesting to basically return to being a full-time student, like my undergrad was ten years ago, with the added responsibility of a parent to three young kids.
ETAD 804 is all about distance education, and I was very excited to take this course as I felt this is an area that I would like to pursue in the future. The course was taught by Dr. Marguerite Koolle, who had arrived from Athabasca Online University, which happened to be where I was taking another course this fall online (MDDE 610). For this class we utilized two texts that were invaluable. "Teaching and Learning at at Distance - Foundations of Distance Education (6th edition)" by Michael Simonson and an online text made available through the University of British Columbia by Tony Bates titled "Teaching in a Digital Age - Guidelines for Teaching and Learning." You can access the textbook on the embedded website below:
The major assignment for this course is to develop a proposal for making a distance education course. For this project we were to work in groups of 3. The purpose of this was to develop our teamwork skills while designing a distance education proposal. My group members decided to focus on the Grade 9 science curriculum and look at delivering an online introductory human biology unit.
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I felt very fortunate with the two other group members I had. Meng Sun was a teacher in the Saskatoon Public School Division with a vast knowledge in her division's Distance Learning Program, which became invaluable in our project. Annie Beaumier was a teacher in the Catholic school division in Prince Albert and had brought a great understanding of instructional design and project organization. The fact that we had to work with a team to develop a proposal, that was worth 40% of our final mark, was designed in order to give us a real sense of working in a team environment on a project. My teammates were amazing and together we developed into quite the hard working, professional and cohesive group. Over the course of our project we met routinely, taking advantage of a new conferencing platform I had come across called Google Hangouts. We utilized Google Docs to collaborate on our assignments and we did a great job of splitting up the workload and managing our own sections while checking on each others, Given our close proximity we even had the chance to meet face-to-face. In the end we put together an in-depth proposal to deliver the Grade 9 Science Curriculum, specifically the unit of Reproduction, as a distance education course in the Saskatoon Public School division.
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This course was very interesting and by the end I was considering how my school division could begin to develop high school distance education courses for our students.
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The following PDF is a copy of our proposal.
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