It was great to meet you all today and I am looking forward to the term ahead. Thanks for your engagement in class and I appreciated all of your questions. I hope you have clear picture of the course expectations and I am happy to address additional questions as they come up. I will check in again next week to be sure and continuously throughout the term.
In response to the question ‘What comes to mind when you think about learning design?’, I captured the following word cloud of responses. The larger the word is the more often it was used in the responses. I hope to unpack and engage with many of these ideas in the weeks ahead.
I have managed to secure our first guest speaker for next week. Chris Reck specializes in empowering educators to integrate mindfulness-based practices into teaching and learning. Considering that mindfulness, wellness, and safety are critical for meaningful learning, I believe this is a useful departure point to begin our course on learning design. I know many of you have experience and interest in this topic, so come with questions and ideas for discussion.
As we have Chris coming this week, I will hold off on issuing the first course readings till the following week.
To do list for week two
For all learners
- Watch the Most Likely to Succeed Film and consider questions and reflection for discussion next class.
- Post your introduction video to Flipgrid. In the video you should introduce yourself, tell us why you are interested in learning design, share what you believe makes for a positive learning experience, and explain how you approach the task of designing learning experiences. I will post the password/username to create the Flipgrid in the Mattermost. Please reach out to me if you prefer not to use Flipgrid for this task. Please complete by January 13 and review your classmates’ videos before January 16.
- If you have any questions or want to share resources or ideas, please post to our private  Mattermost Channel once invited
- Think strategically about your project topic for sharing in the coming weeks.
Additional tasks for EDCI 335 Learners
In this course you are being invited to create a WordPress site that can serve as a professional practice portfolio/website. EDCI 565 students have already setup their sites.
The WordPress Portfolio would be used for your reflective writing as part of assignment one. This would be owned and fully controlled by you and would be available for you to develop beyond the duration of our course should you decide to take it forward. IT may also become useful for the final project if there are resources, links, or tools that you want to share with the members of the course. There are many ways to control privacy and access by the public on a site wide or individual post/page level.
To setup your WordPress site:
- First review WordPress blog portfolios reading
- Second review the opened.ca Code of Conduct
- Sign up for a WordPress blog no later than January 14th
- Explore what makes a good blog post
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