I’ve been working on some interesting writing, research, design and facilitation projects lately so I thought I’d talk a little about them here. This wide variety of educational projects has been keeping me busy and engaged. Here are some highlights:
FLO Facilitation Guide project for BCcampus
I’ve been collaborating with colleagues Sylvia Currie, Sylvia Riessner and Gina Bennett to write a facilitation guide for the FLO courses. FLO stands for Facilitating Learning Online and the “FLO Family” of courses now consists of FLO Fundamentals, FLO Design, FLO Synchronous and FLO MicroCourses. These courses help people develop skills to design and teach online courses. Our guide puts all sorts of things in writing that we’ve been doing while facilitating FLO courses for many years. Stay tuned for this open educational resource to be available from BCcampus sometime later this fall!
Teacher Training Course for WITS Programs Foundation
Those of us with kids in elementary school likely are aware of the WITS Program, which teaches kids basic conflict resolution and healthy relationship skills. (The mnemonic WITS stands for Walk Away, Ignore, Talk It Out, Seek Help). The WITS Programs Foundation trains teachers and community leaders how to implement the WITS programs in schools, and I’ve been working with WITS to significantly rebuild an e-learning course they have for teachers for this purpose. (The course for community leaders is next!)
LMS Search project for the BC SPCA
The BC SPCA has many physical locations across BC and offers a large number of online courses for their staff and volunteers. They were looking for a new Learning Management System (LMS) to hold their courses. Last year I reviewed their current LMS and recommended a switch so this summer they asked me to carry out a search project to find a new one. I reviewed dozens of LMSs in Canada, the U.S. and beyond and gave BC SPCA a short list of recommended LMSs that meet their list of requirements. They are currently in the testing phase to make their final pick.
Facilitation of Community Consultation Sessions for the IRCC and ICA
For the last couple of months I’ve been working with the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria (ICA) on behalf of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to design and facilitate two half-day community consultation sessions with immigrant and refugee-serving communities here in Victoria and up island. The sessions were part of a series of four regional sessions organized throughout the province by IRCC and had the purpose of identifying priorities, gaps and trends related to program and service outcomes for newcomer immigrants and refugees. Information from the sessions will inform the IRCC’s next call for proposal process in 2019. We’ve now had the sessions and I’m currently working on analyzing the data and writing a report.
What else?
Well, as you might expect, I’m working on various other projects too but didn’t feel the need to detail them all here. I’ll write about a few more of them this fall. (I even have some holidays coming up!)
