⭐ 1.1 Educational use cases

Before we begin with the nerdy stuff we should ground our exploration in the appropriate practice of teaching and learning. Let's consider our own educational context through use cases.

Please review the following use case before sharing your own.
 
I have included a use case below from my experience that describes one possible pedagogical use of image sharing as a classroom activity.

Image gallery activity

School: Simon Fraser University
Course: BISC 326: Biology of Algae and Fungi
Course details: This course provides students with a broad understanding of the biology of algae and fungi.
Activity: Weekly image post

Date: April 2020

Description: During the first ‘pivot’ to online learning, I was working as an interaction specialist in the teaching centre at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Instructors were anxiously trying to figure out all the things, in particular how to deliver the kinds of teaching they had been doing in the classroom to a remote and online environment. In many cases, they did not want to simply post their slides and a recorded video but rather they were hoping to make those interactions engaging and meaningful. SFU was using the Canvas learning management system (LMS) and although it is a useful and flexible tool, there were some web publishing standards it was not able to easily reproduce: specifically, the ability to display a series of images on a single page. Request: The instructor wanted a simple website that students could upload a picture to every week.

Requirements:

• Title, description and date for each image.
• Easy to browse the collection
• Simple to use, requiring little training
• Publicly accessible
• Anonymous posting with no private information
• Ability to leave comments on each others work

Thinking like a web publisher and interaction designer, it seemed to me they wanted an image gallery.  I knew a few ways the Canvas could get close to these requirements, such as setting up a discussion forum or a file folder and having students upload their images to it but other criteria could not be met.

Solution: https://fungilab.opened.ca/ (SPLOT!)

The Fungi Lab Photo Collection for BISC 326

Check out the final website that was created for this instructor. We will get a chance to build one of them for practice.

https://fungilab.opened.ca/