REPORT ON SECOND COMMUNITY POTLUCK

Wendy Porch & Vera Roberts
June 19, 2003

Theme: “Customizing Content”

Presentation by Jutta Treviranus (PPT Format)

On June 19, 2003, participants gathered at the University of Calgary Learning Commons for the second of four TILE Community Potlucks coordinated by the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC). The TILE project would like to express our appreciation to the Alberta Online Consortium for their role in organizing this event. Community potlucks are slated to occur once every quarter and are intended to provide partners and those interested in e-learning from the larger community the opportunity to collaborate and exchange information related to learning object repositories, transformable content and their impact on e-learning.

The Calgary potluck included representatives from the ATRC, Canadian Learning Television, University of Calgary, Athabasca, Argyll Project as well as front line teachers and other educators who specialize in e-learning. Jutta Treviranus, director for the ATRC, gave a presentation that provided participants with an overview of the day's activities as well as a framework for understanding the theme of the potluck, “Customizing Content.” Participants were asked to consider “What kind of learning activity structures can be reused?”, “How generic can the learning activities be?”, “How much can we modularize?” and “What supports do educators need?”

With these questions in mind, participants broke out into groups lead by the ATRC participants. Each group worked together on an activity that explored the concept of customizing content. Each group was asked to create nine learning activities through a process that changed content but not the activity or that changed the activity but not the content. In this way, the groups were able to consider and try re-purposing of content and learning structures.

In the afternoon, each group presented their learning activities to the other participants and discussion followed each work. Some of the themes that arose were as follows:

Support: Teachers require support for any technology successfully implemented. How can this support be provided? Various types of suggestions were made from teaching information technology in pre-service to requiring that teachers undertake continuing education in learning object repositories and related technology. These suggestion raised further questions around incentives; it was thought that time strapped teachers would require incentive to produce learning objects and upload them to repositories.

Rights: Who owns learning objects that are made on teacher’s off hours? Alberta has recently said that even if it was created in off hours that it is possession of board not teacher. What is the impact of this decision?

Object Information: Reading levels need to be addressed and teachers need this information to make choices from learning object repositories. Learning outcomes need be stated in the repository browser tool.

Granularity: Do we separate images from text in the LOR to enable accommodation of different reading levels and/or language skills?

Relevance: Curriculum correlations for materials in the LOR are important; who would update these are requirements change. Teachers said relevancy would be integral to the successful use of LOR. Maintenance is important so that content in the LOR retains usefulness and relevancy.

During the closing discussion, the participants agreed that the day’s exercise offered proof that content could effectively be re-used, however, one teacher posed a question about the learning templates: if content is stripped from learning templates don’t they all just become so generic that they all seem the same? Is there a danger of this happening?

Overall, the participants gave great support for theory of reusability of learning objects through repository although questions remain regarding support, training, incentives to participate, rights questions, training.

The TILE Community Potluck raised several significant points for further exploration and development and provided opportunity to test out some of the ideas around customizing content. Canadian Learning Television was on hand filming this TILE community potluck event for use in a television spot about the project to be aired at a later date. We will provide airing details for this material when they are made available.

Group Activity and Resources

To view the results of this exercise, please see the list below:

Breakout Group 1 (PPT Format)
Breakout Group 2 (PPT Format)
Breakout Group 3 (PPT Format)