Soliciting User Participation and Interaction (UBC – ETEC 522)
Resource: Self-Directed Learning OER
Main Site: http://etec522.lrnbl.com/
Course: ETEC 522
Audience: MET Students, Education Professionals
Course: ETEC 522
Audience: MET Students, Education Professionals
As my partner and I worked on our OER on Self-Directed Learning for ETEC522, we needed to plan some activities for our fellow students. We would need them in order to be able to host a week-long interaction with the educational resource we were preparing. We planned to release various parts of the website at different times during the week, but also wanted to to build in some interactivity for our visitors. Initially, these were going to take the form of discussion questions, but it occurred to us that we could use our site to help us collect data which we could analyze for our final report.
As a result, we decided to also include some survey-type questions on the site. We were able to then collect and analyze the data provided by our visitors to help strengthen the arguments presented in our final report. Thanks to visitor participation we were able to make an argument for increased use of SDL for professional development, and identified some of the common barriers to this form of PD. Not only did the participation of our peers made a significant improvement to the final product, but I feel that being able to exchange their personal stories helped our visitors connect with the material as well.
Expanding my Technological Knowledge Domain
In addition to learning about Self-Directed Learning (SDL), I also used this assignment as an opportunity to learn about desktop publishing.
I used SDL to learn how to design and produce a the above final report in a package called Scribus – an open-source, cross-platform desktop publishing program. It did take a little more time to produce the final report than it would have if I had simply used an office suite, but I think the visual quality of the final report made it worth the extra effort.
