Your Educational Department has been busy this year

 

Sept 27, 2018

Boating 1 – testing with Transport Canada is continuing but will be upgraded by the addition of an appendix that outlines the recent changes to the Small Vessel Regulations. We will be including them in the main text when possible.

Boating 2 is being moved into Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) by Murray Richmond before we put this version of the course online asynchronously, i.e students can access the material 24/7 on their computers/smartphones/tablets as opposed to blended learning that is led by an instructor with classes online at specific times of the week.

Boating 4 is being researched by the Course Director Ross Bligh with an eye to shortening it slightly and possibly using the removed subjects and turning them into seminars.

Boating 5 has been re-written by Course Director Janet Fraser and passed successfully through Editorial Review and is ready (with the PowerPoint slides completed) for printing.

Maritime Radio course is being updated, modernized and shortened by combining both modules into one and removing some of the repetition. The committee is through about one third of a line by line review of the text at the moment and with updating the slides, editorial review and translation ahead of us we are not anticipating the new course to be ready before the early New Year.

The new Radar Course that came into service this last year using Kevin Monahan’s Radar book has been adopted by USPS/ABC as their Radar course after they modify distances from kilometres to miles and temperatures from Celsius to Farenheit etc. We are delighted to hear this because we do use their other course materials and radar techniques are the same on both sides of the border and it’s good to give something back. Why rewrite an excellent, up-to-date course?

Seminars. The library of Seminars is growing under the able leadership of ANEO Brian Reis. We have “AIS for Boater” and “Chart Plotting for Beginners” on the shelf ready to go out and available in French and English. We have “Paddling and Board Smart” ready for squadrons in English and the French version nearing completion. Two hour seminars are a cost effective way to increase public awareness of what we do. They help by bringing together squadron members socially for a seminar event.

Publishing Committee. This has taken off to a slow start, albeit progress has been made recently. The basic idea is to improve communications within and across the different committees that get a course from the author’s quill pen through editing, proofreading, preparing slide presentations, adding graphics and finally printing and stocking our bookshelves with marketable courses.

The Editorial Review Committee under Debbie Churchill’s leadership has being doing a great job of honing course material into shape and the new Boating 5 (above) is a case in point. This is absolutely essential work to make our courses as presentable as they can be, as indeed the author or Course Chair wants them to be. This type of work is not easy and consequently takes time, especially with volunteers who, like me, would rather be on their boats during the summer. As we are in the business of producing high quality materials and updating our current courses as well we asked for suitable volunteers to help Debbie with this awesome job. We were delighted by the response to the OnBoard article recently asking for volunteers. Debbie now has a team of ten which will cut her workload and speed up the editorial work.

Outreach. ANEO Carolyn Reid and her team have been busy this year with blended learning classes for Boating 2 and 3. In addition to the asynchronous (I couldn’t spell it either) Boating 2 Murray and Tom Beaver are writing a manual for instructors on how to teach using moodle LMS, so to make it easier for local instructor/proctors to support solo local students.

Instructor Development Course – The ID course has been adapted from a weekend course to being a one day course by removing three of the four student practice sessions and adding some modern instructional theory. Carolyn’s team has added a new section on how to use PowerPoint slides effectively (remember Death by PowerPoint?) and she hopes that this will encourage more squadrons and districts to use this excellent course to educate their own instructors.

Operations Training Course – This course is currently being adapted into short PowerPoint segments according to its topics. With this format it is hoped that the Squadrons as well as Districts might offer this course using the GoToMeeting format for new members in short sessions or at Executive Meetings.

Lastly and by no means least ANEO J-R Lavergne spotted a newly retired teacher, Eileen Germain from Cartier’s Trois-Rivieres Squadron who has expertise in video and graphics skills. In the course of modernising our courses and seminars for the consumption of the YouTube generation Eileen’s skills and ability will be used to produce and then add videos to the material, especially our online courses. Eileen’s committee is already hard at work making three to five minute videos demonstrating various instructional skills. These videos may well be used for a future Instructor Refresher Course.

As I said at the beginning – your Educational Department has been keeping busy this year.

Peter Bolton

National Educational Officer