Abstract:

The Plan Nord is presented as an exemplary sustainable development project that integrates energy, mining, forest, bio-food, tourism, and transportation development, the development of wildlife, environmental protection, and the preservation of biodiversity. It will be carried out over a period of 25 years. The territory that the Plan Nord covers encompasses all of Quebec’s territory north of the 49th parallel and north of the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It covers nearly 1.2 million km2 and accounts for 72% of Quebec’s geographic area. The territory’s population accounts for 2% of Quebec’s population, equivalent to 120,000 people, including 33,000 Aboriginals. The availability of healthcare and social services is a major issue under the Plan Nord. Existing infrastructure generally satisfies the needs of the populations residing in the territory concerned without for all offering the resources necessary to satisfy the newcomers and new workers and their specific needs. The 2011-2016 action plan (of the Plan Nord) initiates an improvement in service quality, seeking in particular to promote healthy lifestyles, and develop, with the partners, approaches to occupational health and safety adapted to local and Aboriginal workers. Within this context, our project is to build an occupational health’s virtual learning center using an instructional engineering method and a modeling tool to design IMS-LD units of learning. This paper will present how we have chosen to build IMS learning designs towards promoting the occupational health of the Plan Nord, focusing on different aspects: instructional designs, modelling tools and graphical design techniques. According to Paquette, we will firstly propose that instructional designs use a systemic and systematic instructional engineering method to build units of learning conforming to the IMS-LD specification. ‘MISA’ (the French acronym for ‘Méthode d’Ingénierie des Systèmes d’Apprentissage’-Learning Systems Engineering Method), which is an instructional engineering method developed in Quebec by Paquette (2002) and ‘MISA-Complex Collaboration Transfer’ will serve as the basis to our design approach. We will secondly present the selected graphical modeling tool, MOT+ (Paquette, 2002), and a representation technique to support instructional engineering.

Keywords:

Plan Nord, Quebec, Occupational Health, Virtual Learning Center, Learning Systems Engineering Method, MISA, MISA-Complex Collaboration Transfer, Population Health, Territory Health.