MicroCourse Handbook

1. Introduction

FLO MicroCourses are part of the Facilitating Learning Online family of courses. Unlike the longer and more comprehensive FLO courses, MicroCourses are one week in length, single-topic, and designed to give you an immediate and practical jump on your course preparation and facilitation. 

This week, we will focus specifically on designing effective rubrics. Often touted as the panacea of good assessment practice, rubrics routinely fail to deliver on their promises - they take a lot of work to build, students rarely use them, and they don't necessarily lead to valid and reliable assessment. 

But, designed and used well, they can serve as amazing learning tools and make grading more efficient and fair. I look forward to engaging with you this week on this important topic. 

2. Your participation

The course officially goes for one week, but engagement with the content can continue beyond that week. You can expect to spend at least 60 minutes per day over the five days; however, you are welcome to invest more time if you want to work on your own rubric design as you make your way through the course. Active participation will make a richer experience for all participants.

There will be two synchronous sessions:

Monday 6 June, 2022, 11.00 am PST (recorded)

Friday 11th March, 2022, 9.00 am PST (drop-in conversation)

Learning forum subscriptions are set to "optional", meaning you need to subscribe if you would like to receive forum posts via email. You may also adjust how to receive email (digest, individual posts, etc), subscribe to RRS feeds, and modify tracking for unread posts on the forums settings. 

3. Navigating the Course

• BOOKS - You will find the content organized into two books located in the first two phases. 
• Meet & Greet Forum - Use this to introduce yourself and get to know the people in your FLO cohort. (Participation required for badge)
• Synchronous Sessions - There are two synchronous sessions available for you to join live (Monday @11 am and Friday @9 am PST). The Monday session will be recorded for those who cannot make it. You will find the Zoom link in the Hub on the front page.
• Sharing & Feedback Forum - this is where you will post the rubric you'd like to get feedback on from your peers. (Participation required for badge).
• Rubrics Tools and Resources Collaborative Document - this is a shared space where you can provide links to resources and research about rubrics. 
• Reflection Forum - A place to reflect upon the biggest takeaways and identify the commitments you'll make to apply what was learned to your practice. (Participation required for badge)

4. A short history of FLO

In 2013 BCcampus began offering Royal Roads University's Facilitating Learning Online workshop (then called Instructional Skills Workshop Online and now called FLO-Fundamentals). Shortly after the first offering we developed Facilitator Development Online, a course designed to prepare future facilitators of the FLO courses. From the beginning, our goal was to prepare educators across the BC post-secondary system to effectively facilitate learning online, first by hosting, refining and growing the collection of courses, and then by supporting the adoption and expansion process in a way that maintains a high-quality experience for faculty and staff. All FLO courses are openly licensed and available for institutions to implement in-house. We are now focusing on the second phase: adoption.

Over the years participant feedback has informed our curriculum revisions and development, resulting in the redesign of FLO-Fundamentals, and the addition of two new courses: FLO-Design and FLO-Synchronous. Several other suggestions for course topics have emerged, such as assessing learning, multimedia development, open pedagogy, and digital literacy. 

In June 2018 we began rolling out a new series of FLO MicroCourses. These are short, single-topic, hands-on/practical, and free. In one week participants dip into the FLO experience and leave with something practical and useful for your own teaching practice.

Topics are emergent and relate to designing and facilitating and learning online.

We welcome suggestions for MicroCourse topics, contributions to building the FLO curriculum, and offers to facilitate! And, of course, you are encourage to implement MicroCourses at your own institution. 

 
This course is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.