ACCESS (Aboriginal Connections with Computing, Engineering and System Software): Making it accessible to remote communities through e-learning environments.
Presenter: Celina Gibbs
Canadian Aboriginal communities are growing at six times the national average, yet the percentage of those completing even just a high school education falls well below the national average. The ACCESS (Aboriginal Connections with Computing, Engineering and System Software) program at UVic promotes educational activities for all ages in largely local Aboriginal communities. But, one of the key characteristics of many Aboriginal communities is their remote location introducing unique delivery challenges. This workshop will consider current e-learning practises, where they fall short of the Aboriginal learner and finally what kind of design can provide better support.
This presentation will overview the Computer Science outreach initiatives under the ACCESS project to date in terms of the successes, challenges and lessons learned. This presentation will share our experience with the work we have done with the Tsawout Nation of Greater Victoria including multiple on-campus camps and in-community technical workshops for youth. We will also highlight the importance of community connection in this endeavour and how UVic's own Office of Indigenous Affairs with director Fran Hunt-Jinnouchi has established that bridge.
The second half of the presentation will be interactive and designed to generate discussion of the issues and requirements surrounding distance education for Aboriginal learners.
To date, most of the outreach initiatives have been in communities within Greater Victoria but this workshop will outline future plans to target remote communities on Northern Vancouver Island. While these initial plans include visiting the communities in person, we realize that this approach does not scale to the number of communities that exist. This workshop will outline the survey and proposal led by UVic's School of Child and Youth Care (CYC) in an attempt to address the demand for distance education courses by these same northern communities. From this survey came a proposal for a Virtual Learning Lodge (VLL) in which students would be provided with and interactive e-learning environment along with a full technical training program to start.
Though the VLL was designed with CYC in mind, this workshop will highlight the general requirements of a dynamic and interactive environment that is adaptable to new technology. Further we will identify the ways in which this model would apply across disciplines to provide learning opportunities in areas like language revitalization and even Computer Science and technology.
Celina Gibbs is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria. Her research to date has largely focused on software engineering principles of low-level systems infrastructures. In particular, she has been involved with both tool development and domain-specific language support for language VMs. Her current research interests lie in the application of her systems expertise to the domain of virtual learning environments in non-traditional learning environments including the remote communities of Canada's west coast Aboriginal communities.