History of Education Project (UBC – ETEC 511)

This was one of the first projects in the MET program for most of the members of my group. As a result, we did not yet have much background in the application of technology to pedagogy. We thus focused on presenting content in a way that made sense to us based on our past experience – we did not have any particular pedagogy or framework in mind. We were simply trying to prepare a learning resource, which would be appealing to young learners.

As is clear from the resulting website, we were very cognizant of our audience and the need for visual appeal and interactivity in order to keep students engaged (I was mainly responsible for “Task #3”). We also did our best to keep the content reasonably short, and even managed to verify its appeal with the students of one of our group’s members.

This being one of my first group projects in the MET program, it was my first exposure to the challenges of group work across a wide range of time zones – being separated from each other by 7-10 time zones made it difficult to schedule synchronous discussions.  We tried video chats, but scheduling a convenient time for everyone was a difficult challenge to overcome.  In the end, we came up with a fairly simple solution: using a Google Doc for the collection of project resources, work updates, and communication.

The level of communication in this project was something I really appreciated – the frequent comments/feedback and updates were really helpful to me, and I think having this constant exchange of ideas really helped us produce a high quality resource.  I have since been involved in numerous group projects, and not all of them featured good communication.  The projects where communication between team members was poor rarely resulted in final products that I was satisfied with.  I think the importance of good team communication was one of the big (hidden) lessons I will take away from my whole MET experience.