For the final semester of my program, I decided to do something a little different. I decided to take a course outside the U of S through the Western Canadian Deans Agreement. The agreement allows you to apply to take courses at other Western Canada Universities and have those course credits count towards your degree. There were two reasons I choose this route. One was since I was on educational leave for the fall of 2017 and I wanted to finish my Masters over that semester. Unfortunately I could not find any courses I was interested in within the ETAD program, or the U of S, during that term. Secondly I wanted to see what other universities were doing in the area of Educational Technology and expand my understanding of current technology being utilized. I had a discussion with Patricia Gillies, graduate studies secretary and student helper extraordinaire, who suggested in order to finish I could look into Athabasca Online University to take a course.
Over the spring of 2017, I reviewed Athabasca Online University course offerings and came across MDDE 610 - Survey of Current Educational Technology Applications. I felt that this would be the perfect course to graduate with and have a good sense of the technology available and more importantly how and when to use it. After a bit of paperwork, a lot of waiting and excellent help from Patricia, I was finally accepted into the program on September 6th.
The course runs on the Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle which is a free, online, course management system (CMS). I found it interesting, though at times a bit frustrating, to learn a new online learning management system. While there are a lot of similarities to the way Blackboard works at the U of S, but there were some issues that made it hard to ensure all students were up to date on all the discussions happening in the class. As with anything, there was a learning curve involved and like any technology it had its benefits and drawbacks.
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The course was taught by Dr. Robert Power and covered a number of topics including:
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Technological Affordances
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SECTIONS Analysis
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Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) and Mobile Apps
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Online Collaborative Tools
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Cloud Computing
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Social Software and Web 2.0
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Video Conferencing
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Podcasts, Vodcasts and Instructional Videos
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Learning Management Systems and Course Management Systems
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There were three major assignments to complete:
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Course Enhancement Proposal (60%) - take a course you currently teach and think of ways that you can enhance the instruction of the course through technology. This project was broken into three parts. Problem Identification, SECTIONS Analysis and Briefing Note.
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Learn Something with CAI or a Mobile App (15%) - this was a fun assignment where you had to choose something to learn then go out and find a technology that would teach you. The assignment was to write a 5 - 7 page paper about your experience and a critical reflection of utilizing CAI and Mobile Apps for learning in general.
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Group Project (20%) - working with up to 7 other classmates we selected one piece of technology that interested us and produced a short presentation of that technology for the rest of the class.
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Below are links to my assignments.
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Assignment #1- Course Enhancement Assignment #2 - CAI Assignment #3 - Group Project
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Reflections:
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Overall I really enjoyed this course. I liked the fact that I had a chance to learn a whole new university learning system, to meet even more fellow international and local students (we had a guy from Dubai), and to learn about different technologies and how to implement them effectively within the classroom. A couple of the highlights for me were being introduced to Tony Bates' online textbook "Teaching in a Digital Age" (which also was introduced in my ETAD 804 class), having the opportunity to work with a Canada-wide team with amazing talents on our group project, and finally being able to design an effective course enhancement proposal for a current course I instruct and learn how to design these proposals for the future.
I would recommend this course to other graduates looking to broaden their horizons and experience other university programs. I found this course challenging, given that it was one of the five courses I was taking in the semester, but on its own the workload is very manageable. For more information on the program and Athabasca Online University please check out the embedded website below.
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