The Heart of Learning: Connecting People

  Rich, engaging learning happens when students interact with adults who care about them and the content that the students are studying.

The Questions

How can we connect students and teachers with passionate people who are experts in the subject matter and skills that are being studied in any given class at any given time, throughout the province? 

What technologies could we use to make that happen? 

Is there an organization in Canada that already does this? How do they make these connections? Does it work? 

How can we capture these interactions to create usable learning content that could be integrated into both face to face and online learning environments? 

Our First Steps Towards the Answers 

The EXCITE project aims to use video conferencing in its many forms to connect both students and classrooms to experts across all of the five sectors we have identified.  Video conferencing is integrated directly into most laptops and through tablets and smartphones, is becoming mobile. 

ADLC was fortunate enough to be introduced to the right partner at the right time.  Virtual Researchers on Call (VROC), a program out of Ontario run by Partners in Research, has been connecting classrooms in Ontario to experts in the STEM fields for the past several years, with great success.  We have partnered to bring this model to Alberta and have formed VROC Alberta.  VROC Alberta will be the organization that will try to connect experts to Alberta classrooms and students as a major element to the EXCITE project.  More about VROC Alberta and the types of programs it will offer in another post.

The last piece of this puzzle to fall into place was a new digital infrastructure from Cisco Systems called Show and Share.  The Show and Share environment will allow us to capture, meta-tag, and share all of the interactions between the experts and the classrooms that participate in the VROC Alberta sessions. We will then be able to edit this content and repurpose it for use in ADLC online courses and to share with every school in the province.  

That is the theory.  

We have the Show and Share hardware and software installed and ready to be tested.  Our friends at VROC have a working system in place that we have used to pilot our ideas for the last 6 months.  

We are now getting ready to roll the VROC Alberta idea out to a wider group of schools and teachers.  

Let's see how we do.

Jason   
 

A New Way to Think about Educational Content

"Everyone is a student."
"Everyone is a teacher."

                - George Couros keynote at #edtechbc 

Thinking about content differently

We are starting with the idea that there must be a better way of getting the resources we need to write our distance education courses.  We are looking down the road 3 to 5 years and seeing the massive change that is going on around us.  We are starting to realize that the courses we have for students simply do not meet their needs.  Linear, static text plus images webpages are not going to get it done. Different groups of learners are going to start demanding courses that are specifically tailored to their learning needs in a just in time manner. Taking this in account, the current types of learning resources accessible to students and teachers become even more inadequate.  

We need more content, we need content from different sources than are currently  available. We need free content and we need flexible and accessible content.  We need content to be searchable, rank-able and in formats that teachers and students can start working with quickly. We need content that is engaging and grounded in the real world and links directly to the future lives our students are aspiring to.

"We are going to need a bigger boat"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I91DJZKRxs

Where can we find these new types of educational content?  We are starting with the notion there may in fact be life outside of the K-12 bunker and that there may be people and organizations that might help if given the chance. 

We have broken the larger community into five sectors:

1. K - 12 
2. Post Secondary 
3. Industry and Small Business 
4. Community/Not-for-Profit 
5. Government     

We think there are three types of resources within each one of these sectors that we can use:

1. Each sector has within it passionate people who would enjoy sharing with students what they do and help students relate what they are learning about right now to the real world.
2. Each sector has already within it content that is designed for learning that could be modified to teach K-12 students.
3. Each sector generates massive amounts of usable digital content by simply doing what it does.  In theory, we could use this content to create rich learning experiences for our students.  

From theory to practice

These are the ideas that we are basing the EXCITE project on. 

We are starting to bring some mushy and messy ideas to life.

I will share what we have done so far in upcoming posts.

If we can get enough people to believe that everyone is a teacher and that everyone is a student, we might just be able to create something new.

Might be interesting, succeed or fail.

Jason

Jason.wiks@adlc.ca
@adlcprojects       
 

What is the EXCITE project?

Hello everyone. 

 My name is Jason Wiks. 

 Welcome to my blog about the EXCITE project.

What is the EXCITE Project?

The EXCITE project aims to create unique learning opportunities by connecting Alberta students and teachers to experts in every field and the digital data that they use in their day to day work.   

These connections will enrich the learning experience for students in both face to face classrooms and those learning in digital learning environments. 

Who are the partners in the EXCITE project?

The Alberta Distance Learning Centre (ADLC) has teamed up with Virtual Researchers on Call (VROC), CISCO Systems and the Alberta Chamber of Resources to kick the project off.  

We are hoping many other organizations will join us as the project grows. 

Where did the idea for the idea EXCITE project come from?

ADLC develops distance education courses.  we also partner with schools all over Alberta.  It has become obvious that the resources we need to create the type of learning experiences our students should have to thrive simply are not available to us because of copyright and other non-educational barriers.

We are swimming in this:

  And we needed to be swimming in this:

 

Through the EXCITE project, we are going to try to create a learning community that is rich in unique, free, open, editable, mashable, reusable content that will give students and teachers the resources they need to enable the type of learning that will help them succeed well into the future.

We have a few ideas that have started us down the road to making this happen.  I will share what we have done so far in the next few posts on this blog.

I look forward to your feedback and any ideas you may have on how we can build on our ideas, or point me towards similar projects that we can learn from. 

Jason 

Jason.wiks@adlc.ca
@adlcprojects