Project Overview

The Digital Learning and Media Center (DLMC) is a highly visible, open learning space that serves as a collaborative studio, a formal classroom, a computer lab, a showcase for student work, and a hub for media equipment use and lending. Each year there is a partial turnover of the student staff of Media Mentors, and an orientation needs to be run to promote team morale, train the new staff and offer the returning staff the opportunity to teach workshops and set personal goals for their own media scholarship.

This year a 3-day orientation will train 5 new Mentors and refresh the skills of the 9 returning Mentors. The goal of the training will be to have the new hires achieve mastery of the systems we employ and a comfort level and working knowledge of the software. Another goal is for experienced Mentors to partner with new students to encourage teamwork and act as another resource for their development.

One of the terminal objectives of the course if for the new Media Mentors to be able to match specific utility applications to their primary uses. The Enabling Objectives are two-fold. First, students will be able to identify our most frequently used utility software packages and their key purposes, and secondly, they will be able to recommend the best utility for a given scenario when asked.

In the past this has been done in a face-to-face training, demonstrating the various utility app, explaining the key features, and differentiating the key features that make them valuable in the lab. For this course, I have created a Reusable Learning Object which enables the students to absorb the materials at their own pace, practice with a matching quiz until they have memorized the content and then applied that information in three scenario-based situations. The module can be completed more than once, is not graded, but is meant to be a self-paced module for the students to guide their own learning.