Purpose aim: What do you want the audience to do after reading/consuming the text? Don’t just give the verb of the action (ie. persuade, educate, call to action, entertain, inform, shock, etc.), instead, discuss the specific argument or type of entertainment or action to complete.

The audience will be educated on specific exhibits and components within the museum. They will be able to navigate, interpret and perform their duties for the specific area they trained at after completion of the training.

 

I hope the volunteers are this enthusiastic about my courses!

Audience (intended, secondary, & tertiary): Things you might discuss about the audience include: age, experiences/beliefs (especially in relation to the purpose and/or topic), gender, occupation, location, socio-economics, parents and peers, education, culture, etc. Be sure to discuss what are the expectations of the audience based on these details.

The audience ranges in age from 11 and up. 11-17 are Junior volunteers. 18+ are Adult volunteers. There are also group and family volunteers. Junior volunteers 11-13 must be accompanied by a parents when volunteering. The parent much become a volunteer and take any training. 14+ volunteers can be by themselves. Occupation, socio-economics, education, culture all vary. There are many volunteers who have interest in science and nature, because of the type of museum. The expectations of the audience are based first through the onboarding process. Volunteers are screened by an interview process and their potential areas are determined by skills, ability, age and interest. The audience are presented with a manual of expectations for behavior along with a code of conduct in which ensures they understand what behavior is expected and acceptable.

Subject/topic: What is the exact, focused, topic being conveyed and/or argument being made. Most of the time you will cover this while discussing the purpose aim.

The focus of this is to develop a new training program for volunteers that uses an online learning management software to ease the time from the limited staff of educators. This will make the program more efficient and easier to manage. The software would be preferably free, because of budget restrictions.

Tech/app: Which technological application will you be using for the project? While discussing which application, be sure to address:

I decided to go with Canvas by Instructure to create a training course for free. The site allows instructors to build courses and manage content and grades for assessments.  I have reviewed the options and they have a lot! There are so many content options for modules and it allows for autograded assessments, which is very important for the time and amount of volunteers we have. This is a very functional interface and seems easy to use for our volunteers and our educators. I met with the education director at the museum on Wednesday and I introduced this. He really liked the options it gives us. He set up an account and is going to play around with it too. Our main goal is to give volunteers information up front before they even come in for face-to-face training. We sometimes on-board volunteers in periods between trainings. This causes volunteers to have wait up to a month to come in. Sometimes they forget training and others they almost forget what they were to expect of it. The online component will give us a way to get them into the information immediately and hold them accountable for knowing a certain level of information prior to coming to the in person training portion. We can reduce the amount of time it takes going over the introduction and get right into the important features of learning in person. For example the Touch Tank:

• Canvas componet:
  • Modules
    • Overview
    • Sea Star
    • Whelk
    • Horseshoe Crab
    • Spider Crab
    • Hermit Crab
    • Handling procedures
  • Assessment
• In person component
  • Handling the creatures
  • Handling at the tank
  • Interacting with guests

So as this shows, we can get the volunteers immediately handling the creatures, if they completed their assessment and passed.

Experience– I have no experience with this. I think it will be fun to learn how to use.

Access-The access is easy. You just have to set up an account and you can begin to build the courses as an instructor. The students will have to create an account as well and we can give them access to the course.

Learning-This LMS gave a great option to create an account and learn how to use the site with a tutorial type set-up. The education director and I both set up trial accounts so that we can play around with the tutorial courses that they give you. This gives me an idea of the options that Canvas has to offer.

 

 What are you excited about this project? Why?

I am excited about creating training courses that are applicable to my job at the museum. I have never created online courses before and this LMS seems to be a good beginner to try out. I also will be working with my supervisor and the education director at the museum on this. They are aware of the project.

What are you concerned or worried about? Why?

I am concerned that this might not meet all that is needed for what we want. I hope it does. I think based on my research it is the best free LMS I could find for what I know we are looking for. There were better ones out there, but they are far too expensive for the volume for volunteers.I am also concerned about the time involved in the project in conjunction with the reading and trying to understand the theories. One day at a time.

What 2-3 theoretical concepts (do you think) inform this project? Why? How?

Interactivity is applicable to this project, because the point is that volunteers will interact with the courses in order to be trained. Three of the four concepts are relevant: technically informed, human agency and communication between users. The site enables students to interact with the modules and content that are posted by the instructor. The students can then interact with other content that is enabled by the instructor or respond to them.The amount of student interaction will be something I will need to scope out for this platform. It really is not important for the training program, but I am interested in the offerings in comparison to Blackboard.

Interface comes to mind when thinking about the interaction and technology. The LMS that will used has an interface that allows students to communicate with the technology in order to perform a task. It is the medium between the user and the technical component. The user-friendly nature of the interface was something I was looking for in researching potential LMSs. This was dubbed very user-friendly and I hope to find that this is true. We have such a wide range of volunteers and they are not all tech savvy.