Course Outline

Introduction

Welcome to the FDWO (Facilitator's Development Workshop Online)!

This course is about learning how to (co)facilitate the ISWO (Instructional Skills Workshop Online), which is itself a course about learning how to facilitate online learning more effectively.

Invariably,  when describing this to people, it's difficult to avoid making a reference to nested dolls...

Image Courtesy of Paul Martin Eldridge at freedigitalphotos.net

If you are familiar with the ISW (Instructional Skills Workshop), you will recognize the pattern: ISW is a course about learning how to improve classroom teaching skills, and the FDW is about learning how to teach the ISW. 

Same idea here: ISWO is about facilitating online learning, and FDWO is about how to facilitate the ISWO.

Learning Goals

The overarching goal, of course, is to prepare you to co-facilitate the ISWO.

To get there, we will spend 2 weeks in a community of supportive peers, exploring the architecture of the ISWO from a facilitator's perspective. 

You will learn about the "behind the scenes" work and prep required, and you will be given opportunites to actually do some of your own ISWO facilitator prep here, by creating artifacts and accessing resources and tried-and-true checklists you can adopt and modify in your own teaching of the ISWO.

Because the main prerequisite of this course is having completed the ISWO, we will dive right in, assuming you know what we mean when we say things like, "mini-session" or "FLIF" (if you don't remember, you can look to the ISWO Sandbox course, or post a note to the Q & A forum)

Also, all topics and resources in the ISWO (e.g., about giving feedback, managing your time, supporting adult learners online, etc) have direct application to your facilitation of ISWO. For this reason, we won't be exploring those from scratch. But we will have a look how they apply specifically to your work facilitating the ISWO.

This journey is intended to be short, practical, and rich with community participation and sharing from all of you, experienced ISWO participants!

FDWO Learning Activities

The key learning activities in the FDWO are:

• Unit Notes:  provide context and content for each week, including required readings and resources. You will find a variety of resource types (e.g., text, videos, etc), and if you remember feeling there was a heavy amount of reading/viewing in ISWO, rest assured, there is less here :)
  
  
• Activities & Cases: you will find a varity of activities designed to get you thinking and preparing for teaching the ISWO.  Sometimes these will be done together, or done individiually and then shared. Some of these will be in the form of  short "cases" that highlight issues you are likely to encounter while facilitating the ISWO. The idea is to give you a chance to think ahead in a supportive community so you'll be better prepared.
  
  
• Discussions: a huge source of the learning in this course is going to come from sharing our experiences through discussions. To facilitate this, there will be asynchronous (forum) and synchronous (web conferencing) discussions each week on a variety of topics.
  
  
• Learning Journal: you are asked to use a learning journal to reflect and record the what, so what and next steps you will take away and apply to your ISWO teaching. Like the ISWO, we invite you to record your key learnings in any format you like, and share brief "nuggets" each week.
  

Learning Journal

We're fans of learning journals. We know that unless and until we actually jot notes as we go (those "hey neat" or "a-ha" or "I gotta remember to talk to Bob about...." moments), we often lose many of the details that could help us transform ideas/thoughts into action.

So, like in ISWO, you're asked to record what you are learning and want to remember in the form of a journal.

You are welcome to use whatever format you like for your journal (blog, paper notebook, Google doc, etc) - it is private and yours alone.

And, we ask that you share a short nugget from your journal each week in the Weekly Journal Share forum. Here are some journal prompts that may be useful as you go:

What will YOUR journal format be?

You may remember this from ISWO - it applies here, too...

Participation Guidelines

Just like the ISWO, this course depends on your active particpation. The most important resource in this course is all of our many and varied experiences in the ISWO.

You need not respond to all posts, but select several that cause you to think more deeply or that raise a question for you or that hold a brand new idea – reply in a way that advances your own learning/thinking and that of your colleagues.

Privacy & Confidentiality

It is common for workshop/course participants to agree to "Vegas rules" - what happens in the course, stays in the course. 

Ground rules and confidentiality pledges enhance the level of trust , which supports learning. Online, as elsewhere, it's important that we respect and protect confidences and identities.

In this course, as a part of our learning, we expect to share stories and experiences from working with others in ISWO and elsewhere - please remember it's a small world. Thank you for doing your part.

Business Man Holding Small World in his hands- Image courtesy of jannoon028-freedigitalphotos.net