ETEC 522: Ventures in Learning Technology, an elective course in UBC’s Master of Educational Technology Program, teaches students how to launch a successful learning technology-based business venture. Over the last couple of years, this pioneering course underwent two major redesigns. Course co-author David Porter, Instructional Designer Jeff Miller, and MET students, Jarrod Bell and Deepika Sharma, described the experience of moving beyond WebCT as a course management system into several social media environments during their presentation at the Canadian e-Learning Conference.
ETEC 522 takes an entrepreneurial/ interpreneurial approach to the global learning technologies marketplace. Students in the course are invited to explore new business opportunities in the field of educational technology or to assess ways of making existing educational businesses better. The course uses a student-centred venture analysis format similar to the Vancouver Angel Forum, a forum where investors gather together to provide feedback to entrepreneurs who are interested in starting new ventures.
During the five years that ETEC 522 has been offered, the course has always maintained four basic elements:
1. An emphasis on emerging market research
2. A business boot-camp, which gives students tools to assess and develop business plans for ventures
3. An overview of trends in technology and problem-based learning environments, including social media, mobile technology, gaming, informal learning, one to one learning, and collaborative learning
4. A virtual venture forum where students can pitch their ideas to their class cohort. This is usually done in teams of four: students teach their chosen topic for a week and then complete a summation of their project
One of the great challenges in designing – and then redesigning – ETEC 522 came with trying to make a venture-based course manageable in an online format. After several years of offering the course through WebCT, the design team decided that ETEC 522 would benefit from a more flexible platform.
In 2007 the discussion portion of the course was partially moved into a social-bookmarking application called CrowdTrust. CrowdTrust, which is organized largely on a system of memos and tags, proved to be a challenging work environment for many students as it required them to learn how to track conversations beyond threaded discussion environments. For some students, the environment was quite liberating as it allowed them to search for material according to tags in a non-sequential fashion and to author new memos or tags to create new constellations of meaning based upon their own personal sense of connection.
In 2008, the ETEC team redesigned the course again, this time placing the entire structure of the course in WordPress Multi-user. This flexible platform could be fully integrated with the UBC CWL system, allowed for simple contact tagging and was easy for students to learn. In fact, most of the content on the current course site is student-generated.
The redesigned course has won plaudits from ETEC students. Two former ETEC 522 students used web conferencing software to participate in the conference session virtually and give their perspectives on the course. Jarrod Bell, Vice Principal of Technology for School District 60 in Northern British Columbia, emphasized how much he appreciated the flexibility of the new course format, noting that the platform gave him an opportunity to “sit in my backyard and apply the course material on my iPod.”
Another distance learner, Deepika Sharma, a consultant with NGO World Links in India, also gave an enthusiastic review of the new course design: “The weblog was liberating in that it did not bind me to the overpowering structure of a learning management system. It presented me with a whole world of open learning spaces.”
So where will the ETEC 522 go from here? The course is still a work in progress, in many respects. One of the biggest problems faced by the design team has been the complexity of the course structure and content. Some students have had difficulty with ETEC 522 due to cognitive overload and fatigue associated with learning across several different interfaces. The lack of a learning management system like WebCT has also proved disorienting for some students, particularly those with weak technical skills. This is a phenomenon that David Porter refers to as “grieving for the LMS.”
Other issues involve a question of balance. During the presentation David Porter cited the importance of emerging technologies in ETEC 522: “students need to be in touch with the pace of change and develop the skills and attitude to cope and thrive in such a dynamic environment.” In the context of an online course, however, the power of social media is offset by the need to maintain a community space that is supportive of course outcomes.
Balancing the public and private space is another consideration: many students are uncomfortable posting their work in a public domain. Should they be? How much public exposure should be required of students who sign up for a course? These are questions still being grappled with by the ETEC 522 design team.
During the discussion at the end of the presentation, several audience members wondered what happens to all of the entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial ideas that students come up with over the course of ETEC 522. “A challenge that we have is that we feed student work into a form that is enduring,” admitted Jeff Miller, indicating that a follow-up initiative might be planned in the future, perhaps a repository for student projects or a new course that allows students to continue to refine and build on their previous work in ETEC 522.
Stay tuned.
