How To Use This Guide
Use our Facilitator Guide in concert with the Connecting for Climate Change Action course
This guide accompanies the eCampusOntario funded course “Connecting for Climate Change Action”. The body of this facilitator guide, like the course, is broken down by module. For each of 4 modules, we provide learning outcomes, a summary, overview of lessons within the module, and recommendations for incorporating modules into your own courses. Recommendations fall in two distinct categories:
Pedagogical Recommendations
With some of the module components, you’ll see a separate box with pedagogical recommendations. Here we provide advice for instructors to enhance the learning experience, or make in unique to you. For example, at times, you will see that local examples and our own experiences are included in the course. In some cases, it will make sense to inject your own experiences, background, or local examples.
Online Learning and Technological Recommendations
The Connecting for Climate Change Course was built in Sakai, the Learning Management System used at Western University. As such, you may find that some aspects of the course will be a challenge to import into your own Learning Management System.
We provide recommendations for you to implement activities in your own learning environment. Most Learning Management Systems will have access to the simple but pedagogically sound tools we use in this course, including quizzes, discussion forms, and the ability to embed external activities. The ability to embed will be important as we have incorporated several StoryMaps which are embeddable and interactive learning activities that allow students to investigate and take their time with key visuals and figures.
There are some additional aspects to the module pages that are not covered in this guide, but are useful for course instructors to note.
- Lesson learning outcomes: Each subpage (lesson) has learning outcomes, which will help you determine if the module aligns with what you aim for students to learn in your course.
- Module checklists: Each module and lesson has a checklist, which is for student use only. That is, it does not automatically track what they have completed, but is used for students to track their own progress.
- StoryMaps: Within each module, we include interactive StoryMaps that were created in ArcGIS online. These embeddable learning objects provide students with a chance to investigate key topics and figures, and receive formative understanding through quizzes with automatic feedback. These activities are ungraded, so if you want to use them as the basis of an assessment, we suggest making an accompanying activity that can be handed in.
- Glossary: Within modules and lessons, you will often find “Terms used in this lesson”. This list links to a glossary, and may not transfer easily to your LMS. Our recommendation would be to copy the glossary terms and allow students to look up terms in the glossary as needed.
You can find out more about how we used ArcGIS StoryMaps for our course in a video we created for GIS Day at Western University.