Course Overview
General Description:
My course is intended as a 4 week credit recovery exercise for grade 12 students taking Workplace and Apprenticeship Math 30 in the province of Saskatchewan. This course deals with the buying and leasing of vehicles and corresponds to curricular outcome WA30.6. As I describe in my course profile, students attending my school live in a neighbourhood that is highly dependent on personal vehicles. Therefore, this material is both relevant to their daily lives and required by curriculum.
Method of Delivery:
This course is mostly asynchronous with a some blended elements. Students will complete the majority of material online, but will come into class once a week to demonstrate their calculation skills, give presentations, and check in with the instructor.
Content:
A full video overview of my course can be seen at the link below on YouTube.
As my course is not accessible to users outside my school division I have provided links to key items below. This is not exhaustive however; please note that most assignments and quizzes are only viewable within the YouTube overview.
Course Profile
Gettting Started
Module one: understanding the difference between leasing & buying a vehicle
- Lesson 1 leasing versus buying (H5P video) and transcript
- Lesson 1 Part 2 video link and magazine article
Module two: buying or leasing a vehicle (the process & cost)
- Lesson 2 video link and website explaining car financing terminology
- Lesson 3 how to read a new vehicle window sticker (H5P video) and transcript
- Lesson 4 auto loan calculations video and practice problems
- Lesson 5 lease calculations video and templates for creating their own leases
- Final project/presentation
The Creation Process
Below you will find links to blog posts that detail the development of this course.
- Planning for student/instructor interaction
- Adding interactions using H5P elements (via Lumi)
- Working with peer feedback
- The challenges and opportunities afforded by AI
Wow.
That is a lot of links.
However, if you read this far I feel that I owe you an explanation of my process that is not an endless bulleted list.
When I began EC&I 834 I did not know what to expect. Like most instructors I had engaged in emergency remote teaching during the pandemic, and while I did learn a lot I feel it would be fair to say that my material was less than ideal. In the same way escaping a house fire does not make you a professional fire fighter, planning during the pandemic did not make me an expert in online instructional design.
My plan was very simple. Be the sponge. Absorb as much knowledge as possible until I figuratively weighed 6-7 times my regular body weight (boy, this analogy cam off the rails a bit). My first “ah-ha” moment came during our presentation on the ADDIE model – starting with a deliberate/meticulous planning process got me off to a strong start. Unfortunately, I was a bit trigger happy and plowed too far ahead. The online space requires that instructors pay special attention to engagement (which is challenging in an asynchronous environment). Not a problem. I would go back and revise the material I came up with and add more opportunities for interaction.
This process of planning and patching continued throughout the development of the course. H5P interactive elements? Better go back and put those in. Is your material accessible? Nope! Better go back and add transcripts to your videos. Did you use AI constructively to aid in the creation of your materials? Are your assignments something that could easily be completed with AI? How about some peer feedback? You get the general idea.
I think this exposed some fundamental flaws of my design process. I always want to race ahead and get things done now. This doesn’t allow for a lot of flexibility, which is strange because when I plan for in-person instruction I account for the unexpected. I naturally leave time for student questions, and have outright abandoned my plans when the needs of the class have dictated it. If you read my blog articles you can taste a hint of frustration as I try to get out of my own way.
If I could go back in time with the knowledge I have now I think that I would have produced a better course, but the learning process (including the frustration) was far more important than the artefact that I ended up creating anyway. I need to learn to relax a bit and work through the process naturally.
That’s growth, right?