Welcome to episode 28 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode, I’m chatting with Whitney Loewen the manager of E learning and special projects at The Immigrant Education Society (TIES) in Calgary. I reached out to Whitney after discovering their Newcomer Introduction to Classes Online project, or NICO.

NICO is an online course designed to help newcomers overcome barriers to online learning. It offers a flexible, self-paced curriculum that can be accessed online at any time. Upon completion of NICO, participants will possess the digital literacy skills required to undertake online language studies. That sounds great, and is needed. But what particularly got me excited was that they created NICO to be an open digital literacy educational resource, free for other agencies to use. If you’re using Moodle as your Learning Management System, you can get the full NICO curriculum to use with your clients. I had a great discussion with Whitney, and discovered even more innovative work The Immigrant Education Society is doing. I hope you find this as interesting and useful a discussion as I did.

If you’re interested in transferring the course materials to your own Moodle LMS, contact WhitneyLoewen@immigrant-education.ca.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript of our conversation using Otter.ai. The transcript has not been edited. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for listening to the audio.

Marco Campana 0:03Welcome to the technology and Human Services podcast. Can you start maybe by telling me a little bit about yourself and the immigrant education society?

Whitney Loewen 0:31Yeah, sure. So my name is Whitney Loewen. And I’m the manager of E learning and special projects at the immigrant education society. We’re otherwise known as ties and we’re a newcomer serving agency in Calgary, Alberta. We were founded in 1988. by Mr. Swenson do and he was an immigrant from Pakistan at the time. And so he noticed, even at that time that immigrants were having a very difficult time accessing English language training, never mind getting their credentials recognized. He was an engineer himself. And so he wanted to help other people have a slightly smoother transition into Canada. And so he founded our first our first location and Forest Lawn, which is in the southeast quadrant of Calgary. And today, we have three locations, actually, throughout the northeast and southeast. So these are really vibrant communities. They’re very multicultural, most people don’t speak English at home work may not be their first language. So I don’t think it really fits the stereotype that a lot of people have, but what Calgary is from the outside, they’re beautiful communities to work in.

Marco Campana 1:31That’s great. Yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, I think people when people think of Calgary, they don’t think of the same kind of multiculturalism that exists in Toronto, or Vancouver or Montreal, but, but it is a vibrant, thriving, multicultural community. So it’s really great to kind of place the organization in that space. Thank you for for doing that.