Year of Competition: 2014
Grant amount: $2500
Project Duration: Single Year
Type of Report: Final
Period Covered: October 2014 - September 2016 (start was delayed for 1 year)
Description of Activity:
Using the funds provided by the CMS we created an online training video and have incorporated it into online training modules for volunteers who are set to start community visits in January 2017. In addition, these videos have formed the foundation of more in-depth training modules for volunteers for our various outreach programs including our highly attended (800+ participants per year) school visits program. It is our plan over the next year to continue to develop these modules and share them with various external organizations doing similar work.
Unfortunately the development of the longer proposed course has been delayed due to time and resource restrictions, however it is still planned and is being created on a slowed time frame.
This project was delayed for one year due to unavoidable time/resource restrictions of administrative staff involved in the program. However significant progress was made in August - October 2016 and further progress is planned for December 2016 - February 2017.
Assessment of Effectiveness:
The main beneficiaries so far of this project have been our undergraduate student volunteers who are being provided with training and resources on how to promote mathematics to the community at large.
We are still working with a community centre to create a broader training module that they can use with their volunteers as well. In addition, our volunteers, who participate in these community programs, are being trained by these resources and are applying these skills on a broader scale.
The Department of Mathematics has also provided further financial support for this program in addition to the in-kind support in order to continue to build and grow the initial training videos to incorporate more training videos and additional content for our outreach website and new departmental website (soon to be launched).
Future Plans (if any):
We are continuing to develop the training modules and expand them into a more substantial resource for both our volunteers and volunteers at partner organizations. In the next few months our lecture hall will be equipped with live-stream technology that we hope to implement in making the training and resource videos more widely accessible.
In addition, we would still like to create shorter 'podcasts' that can be shared with parents, teachers and directly with students.
Financial:
In addition to the $2500 requested from the CMS we also received in-kind support from the Department and a recent influx of additional funds to assist with continuing to build our volunteer training and curriculum for a large number of school/community mathematics visits.
The $2500 received from the CMS went towards the salaries of the training instructor (who created the content and video for the training video and ran two in-person pilot sessions).
Additional funds have gone towards the creation of additional materials for the community visits programs and to strengthen the skills of our volunteers involved in these free, publicly accessible, programs.
These funds were influential in setting the foundation for this training program and we will continue to build upon it in the next 6 - 8 months.
Contact Name: Pamela Brittain
[November 22, 2016]
