By Mark Brown, Co-Executive Director (mark.brown@skipatrol.ca)
The CSP is working quietly – and furiously – to revolutionize the way we teach, and our members learn, our education and training programs.
Since June of this year, when we signed a contract with Catalyst Inc to provide us with a new learning management system (LMS) based on Moodle Workspace, a team of patrollers from across Canada have been working extraordinarily hard to to move us to our first user pilot of the new platform. We are ready to do some user testing, moving beyond some tightly controlled developer testing.
Programing to synchronize the LMS with Yeti – in both directions – has been completed. Initial testing tells us that it works, however we need to move beyond the lab to confirm it. And, we’ve also discovered some data anomalies in Yeti that must be cleaned up before the system will work properly.
Every member can help here. Two areas that you can fix for us involve last names and email addresses. If your last name in Yeti is blank, we will not create an identity for you in the LMS. If you share a primary email address with someone else, we will not be able to create an identity for you.
If you’re in either one of these categories, please go to your Yeti dashboard and verify that your primary email address is a valid and unique email address and that your last name is in the correct field (not the middle name field, for example). Shared email addresses cannot be accepted.
There are three member statuses in your Yeti profile that matter: Active, Renewal Ready and Inactive. We only load Active and Renewal Ready members into the LMS. You are Renewal Ready 90 days before your membership expires, which may be different from your certification expiry date. When online registration is fully implemented, you will receive a notification to renew your membership so that you can continue to access the LMS, however that enhancement is a few months away.
Pilot participants will be able to review revised content and a completely revised student resources structure and provide feedback to us. This feedback will guide us in refining our content for the full roll-out of the LMS.
The pilot testing is between our staging site for the LMS and our Yeti staging site. This way, we don’t mess up testing member records. A total of 75 patrollers from the zones that signed up for the pilot will be invited to take part.
This is end-user testing. Division and zone training manager training is under development and will be rolled out before a full launch.
It’s been a big rock to push, but we’re moving closer to the finish line. Thank you for your patience and support.
This post is also available in: French