Week 3 Mini Session Overview and Back Pocket Strategies

Week 3 Mini Session Overview

This week's mini-session facilitators will conduct an experiment in which you will all be major players as well as evaluators of the results of the experiment. 

Your faciliators, Tamora and Lucas, created a Week 3 Participant Guide. It contains the activity phases, descriptions, and timelines.

Duelling Tools Back Pocket Strategy

Selecting the best tool for the job

Online learning can be extremely effective and interactive but, just as face-to-face learning, it requires thoughtful design. We have so many tools at our disposal today and it may sometimes be difficult to know which one to use in any given situation, for any given group of students or to accomplish a specific outcome.  Instructor/designer knowledge and comfort levels with various tools is often a factor in making the decision, as do things such as accessibility, FOIPOP, institutional support, etc. 

This activity will focus on the strengths & challenges of various online collaboration tools. To get there, your students will approach the same topic, using different tools.And then we'll see what happens!

Here are the Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria you should be working with/toward for this activity

Ideas for facilitating this activity

Design an activity that has 2-3 parts.  For example:

• Brainstorm the advantages of online learning, then prioritize the list as you believe the advantages might appeal to first year college students. Re-prioritize the list for mid-career professionals.  (Recent retirees?  Students living in remote villages? Downtown Vancouver?)
• List 5 important things for Teams to consider before they begin a team project, then draft a sample team charter (1-2 paragraphs)
• List 5-10 differences between teaching face-to-face and teaching online then draft a statement of philosophy for teaching online

Identify 3-5 different Collaboration tools - be sure to have a mix of synchronous and asynchronous tools. Choose tools that are in Moodle or are readily available to all students. For instance: Discussion forum, Wiki, Collaborate. 

Divide the class into 3-5 teams and assign a different tool to each team.  Teams should be given strict instructions to use only the one tool assigned to their team to complete the assignment.

Finally, craft a sharing and reflection activity that gets at the learning outcomes for this unit. Examples:

• Conduct a Collaborate session where the class shares and discusses the strengths & challenges of various online collaboration tools
• Post a survey (Fluid Survey?) to gather the ideas (Share results with the class)
• Use a discussion forum to share and reflect
• Create a table in a wiki and invite participants to construct a matrix of strengths & challenges of various online collaboration tools or kinds of learning activities best suited for synchronous or asynchronous online engagement