Decolonizing Cyberspace: Online Knowledge-building support for a MEd Program for Inuit Educators in Nunavut (2009)
Offered by UPEI in partnership with the Nunavut Department of Education, Nunavut Arctic College, and St. Francis Xavier University, the Nunavut Master of Education (MEd) Program will see 21 graduates walk across the stage in Iqaluit, Nunavut on July 1, 2009. The first graduate degree to be offered entirely in Nunavut, the Nunavut MEd confronted a range of geographical, socio-cultural, and linguistic challenges over its three-year life. An integral part of the program, and perhaps one of its most surprising successes was the use of an asynchronous knowledge building environment to enable distance course delivery, supplement face-to-face course delivery, and support an ongoing community of learners between courses. This session will explore the design decisions behind the online portion of the Nunavut MEd, illustrate how it worked in practice, and discuss some of the learnings that emerged.
Sandy McAuley worked for seventeen years with online learning environments as supports for very small isolated secondary schools in Canada’s arctic. His work with educators and students to create and investigate online bilingual knowledge-building communities for Inuit students became the basis for his doctoral research at OISE/UToronto. A portion of this work was supported by the Canadian TeleLearning National Centres of Excellence and as a member of this team Sandy contributed to the development of Knowledge Forum, a powerful collaborative hypermedia environment. Sandy joined the UPEI Faculty of Education in 2003.
Sandy’s background in teaching English literature and creative drama has resulted in an interest in how digital media can use sound, graphics, and user-controllable virtual spaces to support the construction of meaning and the creation of knowledge and identity. His work in the far north has contributed to an awareness of the kinds of issues that cultural differences may bring to the use of these media to support learning.