Teach.On - Renovate your skills

By necessity, there will always be an element of practical work associated with skills based training.   In the current environment  the challenge now becomes how to find safe ways to continue vocational training and assessments during the COVID-19 pandemic.  As N/CVQ Centre Coordinator, the onus is on me to formulate and publish rules to facilitate training during this very nebulous times. Of greatest importance is the obligation to follow public health guidance. I examined the national regulations as well as communiques from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization to inform my N/CVQ Centre's Covid-19 rules. Critical considerations were for ways to eliminate contact and minimize group sizes to follow rules for social distancing, as well as restrictions on sharing equipment.  Based on my inquiry, five rules emerged as the most relevant for our N/CVQ Centre to comply with Covid-19 health and safety and social distancing re...

The first step in my roadmap for converting a classroom course to an elearning experience is to choose the course I want to convert, identify who my target audience is, and most importantly, question the rationale for  undertaking this assignment. Why am I doing this? In my earlier years teaching at a community college (1996 - 2010), my courses were considered to be unconventional because most of the activities took place outside of the classroom.   As far as I was concerned, students could only learn Tour Packaging and Guiding and Travel Consultancy skills through experiential learning. For courses such as Travel Geography with heavy content, I used a community service learning approach to ensure that the students connected with the material in a meaningful way.   In 2011, I also worked with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), through its Distance Training and Education Center (CECADI)  to develop an online agroecotou...