Course Design for Indigenous Students

The paper "Design for a Culturally Affirming Indigenous Computer Literacy Course" provides some good advice for the design of courses for Indigenous students.

The key points

The hidden curriculum is alive and well. Indigenous students feel it and react to the assimilationist nature of our courses, even though we do not plan it to be that way.

The use of ICT in all courses can be a great asset because it can be used to facilitate

• greater use of visual-spatial learning assets
• tactile
• patient (activities can be repeated without anyone needing to feel frustrated) and with lots of positive reinforcement
• can have lots of multimedia
• allows teacher to become coach on the side and removes the temptation to be judgmental and so students getting more 1 on 1 attention that delivering to the group style of teaching
• learning materials can be more easily customised to suit.
• learning can be more easily negotiated.
• opens the door to my project based learning
• can be used to facilitate collaborative activities
• facilitates lots of options for creative expression
• feedback without shame - basically a computer delivering a quiz result is better than a teacher doing it.

Strong case for eLearning I reckon.