Learning Webs' Beginnings

Camosun College Adult Basic Education (ABE) faculty are perhaps unique in British Columbia educational institutions. Each continuing instructor has two months of faculty development time in addition to holidays. This time can be devoted to curriculum, organizational and professional activities. In an age where the capabilities of computer systems and software are expanding exponentially, updating faculty and staff information literacy skills is critical. To further compound training needs, many ABE instructional staff, like those in most public educational institutions, are only just becoming computer literate. The first step in developing an electronic curriculum is to provide the information literacy training necessary to leverage the curriculum development and delivery expertise of ABE faculty and staff.

To reach this goal the college contracted with a corporate trainer, Irene Buck of Interface Ventures Inc., to provide training in the use of email, the World Wide Web and development of electronic documents using hypertext markup language (HTML). The first in a series of sessions began Friday March 1, 1996 at 1:00 PM. This first group of instructors and support staff continued to gather every Friday afternoon through to the end of June. Other streams of instruction were offered to faculty and staff who were unable to attend the Friday sessions or needed to catch up on a missed session. The training took place in the ABE department’s computer lab consisting of ten Internet connected, multimedia capable 486 computers.

The first session began with the assumption that each participant had only very basic computer literacy skills. That is, they knew how to turn the machine on, start up a word processing program, type something in, save it, print it and then exit.

Session One, Harnessing the Internet -- Friday March 1, 1996
Session Two, Education on the Internet -- Friday, March 8, 1996
Session Three, Exploring the Net -- Friday, March 15, 1996
Session Four, Basic HTML Coding -- Friday, March 22, 1996

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