Unit Notes - FDWO Week 1: The Big Picture

FDWO Week 1 - Introduction

In week 1 of FDWO, we will get aquainted with the "big picture" of the ISWO, a bit of history/context, and explore the work involved in "pre-course" ISWO preparation, and in facilitating Week 1. 

In these Unit Notes, we'll hear from experienced facilitators on questions like:

• preparing to facilitate ISWO - what do you do?
• what's the best and most challenging aspects of facilitating ISWO?
• how do you manage your time?
• tips on giving feedback, and what you look out for?

And we'll also share a bit about what you need in terms of technical skills to perform comfortably in the ISWO facilitator role. In the FDWO, you'll get a lots of opportunity to practice Moodling on the companion ISWO Sandbox site.

Getting a strong start in facilitating the ISWO is really important. Because the ISWO is designed around participants' active work in facilitating mini-sessions from week 2-5 , how you initially support the set-up of the course site, the community, and the expectations around time and team work will have an impact on how the rest of the course flows. It is important that participants get a good grasp of where to find stuff by week 1, so they can get on with the business of engaging with the course.

Some typical challenges early on (pre-course and week 1) include:

• navigating the site - it's a complex course, with lots of moving parts. We've jigged and re-jigged the placement of many items  (e.g., Backpocket Strategies!), hoping to make them easier to find. But we know there is always room for improvement (this might mean simply moving stuff around, or it might mean exploring different tools, modules, and plug-ins for Moodle in order to bring something new to the site navigation/user experience)
  
  • tip:  always include direct links to parts of the course you're referring to in all  messaging
  • tip: consider including a "navigation screencast" for your version of the ISWO
  • tip: consider trying some of the less-used tools like glossary, database, etc
  • tip: check in with people about their comfort level navigating the site during week 1 collaborate session, address any grey areas in that session, and in a summary post afterward for those who miss it.
• complaining about the amount of work/reading ;) - people sometimes remark that there is a lot of (too much) reading in ISWO.  There is less now; we've pruned the readings list quite a bit over the years in response to this feedback.  Therefore, we feel pretty solid in pushing back gently on this complaint, and reminding people that this course is intended to be informed by research and theory, and we have chosen readings carefully to be both high quality and a reasonable length (you could also ask them to suggest a better alternative reading that is shorter :))
  
  
• expectations around time  - even with the pre-course messaging about the amount of time needed, people may still expect to be able to slide their ISWO work in on the weekends, off the side of their desks, or in little bits and pieces between other daily tasks. This can leave people feeling they are "always" working on the course, but actually their time on task is short.
  
  • tip: repeat the suggestion to book time in all early messaging, intro videos and posts, Collaborate sessions, etc. Encourage people to book time to work with their mini-session partners (and you, if they wish) well in advance

ISWO: brief history, context & philosophy

The ISWO was developed initially at Royal Roads University in the mid 2000's in response to a growing need for a course that helps instructors learn how to facilitate online learning effectively.

We were inspired by the successful design and broad uptake of the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW), which places an emphasis on doing, reflecting, giving and receiving feedback from a community of peers, and doing some more. In the ISW, particpants design and deliver 3 mini-lessons of up to 10 minutes in the f2f classroom (and serve as "students" for everyone else). In the ISWO, particpants plan for and facilitate mini-sessions that run for a week online (and serve as "students" for everyone else).

In the Royal Roads context, the ISWO continues to evolve - it's tweaked often, in response to participant and facilitator feedback (e.g., new readings, technologies, and mini-session topics are added). At RRU, the ISWO runs 2-3 times per year for RRU faculty members, and usually another 2-3 times per year for other, external audiences who contact us. In the early days, the original ISWO developers taught it a couple times, and then we began the "baton pass" until we had built a large community of capable ISWO facilitators to meet the growing demand (the "baton pass" goes like this:  A + B co-facilitate, then B + C co-facilitate, then C + D co-facilitate, and so on. Pretty soon you have a group of 6-8 people who can work together in any combination to co-facilitate). Can you see this working at your institution?

RRU also shares an OER (Open Educational Resource) version of the  ISWO, and we are so pleased that others have taken it and run with it (we have even seen a version running in China!). 

However, part of the reason for this course is so that people can more successfully and confidently adopt the free OER.  As we all know, it's the very human skill of teaching/facilitating, not materials alone, that makes a course great.

The "philosophy" of ISWO has been described by ISWO facilitators as follows:

• Experiential Learning Lab: we believe in doing, observing, reflecting, and doing some more!
• Do it! Try it! Take Risks! Fearless experimentation +  safe place =  learning!
• Technology let you down? Shrug, smile and keep going!
• Very structured and co-dependent environment in order to simulate and model "real" online courses

How do you prepare? (videos)

Facilitating the ISWO is a team sport.

The strength and quality of your co-facilitation partnership will make a huge difference in your experience, and in the quality of the learning opportunity you are providing.

Maybe, you'll be working with someone you know pretty well, and perhaps have "team taught"  or co-facilitated with before, either online or face-to-face. So, you'll have a sense of their strengths and preferences. If not, it's a good idea to lean heavily on your common experience of being ISWO participants, and have some productive planning conversations (using the ISWO Facilitator Checklist or your adapted version of it) well before the course starts to decide who's doing what.

In addition to connecting with your partner, you also need to connect with the course - here are a few words from experienced ISWO facilitators about how they prepare:

What's challenging about facilitating ISWO? (videos)

Here are a couple perspectives on some of the challenging parts of facilitating ISWO from experienced facilitators.  When you hear what they have to say, consider what you might do to address these concerns. You might like to jot a few notes in your journal. 

What's your favourite part of facilitating ISWO? (videos)

Here, facilitators share some of their favourite parts of facilitating the ISWO.  As you might imagine, a key  theme is seeing the experimentation and learning that takes place.

(Deanne gets a bit cut off here, but what she's saying toward the end is how powerful it is for participants to be in the students' shoes - in taking the ISWO, instructors get a real sense of what it's really like to be a student in an online course. Many describe this as the most powerful part of ISWO, and say it has a powerful and lasting impact on their design choices going forward)

Managing your time (video)

Work-life balance is a concern for many - people are busy, and often "plugged in" to work anywhere, any time.

The reality is, many of you will facilitate the ISWO above and beyond your regular work life and duties. And, the same goes for your participants - they will usually be fitting their ISWO work into evenings and weekends, above and beyond their regular jobs and family lives.

Our advice to ISWO facilitators is the same given to ISWO participants: plan for it, book time in your calendar for reading, thinking, responding, giving feedback, and so on. Schedule time to connect with your co-facilitator to initially plan, and to debrief/discuss how it's going (don't wait until the end).

And, an observation:  the demand on our time as ISWO facilitators tends to spike in some predictable ways, which can help you choose when to book time:

• before the course begins - significant time is required to prepare the course site, review survey responses, reacquaint yourself with the course content, and connect with your co-facilitator. Start this process at least a couple weeks before the ISWO begins.
• end/beginning of  each week - you want to plan time (Sundays are often good) to review where things are, and write your weekly post to the group. This will take some time, to dig around the site in search of highlights you want to draw attention to. 
• the week before your groups' mini-sessions - a "design frenzy"can take place as the Sunday-before-the-Monday of participants' facilitation week draws near. We have spent several hours on many Sundays coaching people through the frenzy. If you know your Sunday is booked, let your groups know in advance when you will be available to help them.
• the weekend after your groups facilitate their mini-sessions - you need to review FLIFs and give rich, constructive feedback in a timely way (not only to help their learning, but also because you're modelling)

Here are some tips from Amanda Coolidge on how she manages her time:

Giving Feedback in ISWO (videos)

As an ISWO Facilitator, you will give feedback to participants in a variety of ways:

• in forums
• in supporting participants' mini-session design (often, they will share their design plans with you, and you will give them feedback before it goes live)
• on FLIFs - each participant completes a reflection after their facilitation, and you give feedback on that

Here are some ideas about giving feedback to ISWO participants - experienced facilitators share examples what they look for, and what sorts of feedback they tend to give:

Your Technical Skills

Facilitating the ISWO requires intermediate-to-advanced editing/creating skills in a Learning

Management System (we use Moodle) and a web conferencing tool (we use Collaborate). 

It is also preferable to have some knowledge of at least a few fun, free, easy-to use external/3rd party tools up your sleeve to demonstrate and pass on to participants. The idea is to model technology use to serve teaching and learning goals, and one trap of any LMS is it tends to force the over-use of forums. In ISWO, we want to encourage people to explore other tools for collaboration and communication: pick the right tool for the job.

During week 1, there is an activity where everyone contributes images of community that are "knit" together into a video, with music added (in our case, this tends to be done in PowerPoint, and then converted to a web friendly format).   If you don't have these skills, how/can you either get them fast, or secure support to get that job done? 

Learning Management System (LMS)

You definitely need to be comfortable editing in the LMS (we use Moodle). Part of your job is about mentoring others in creating and managing their own online environments, and so relying on others for these skills gives an impression that it's not important, and is also inefficient if you have to go back and forth with someone else about "how tos". 

The Least You Need to Know...

You should be comfortable setting up tools to support any mini-session design your participants dream up. In our experience, the most common are:

• Forums - both classwide and (sometimes complicated) team set up. You should be able to set up multiple sets of separate teams using groups and groupings in Moodle. We tend to go with open forums, but there are actually a lot of settings that can create new possiblilities for structuring activities.
  
  
• Polls - the moodle term is "Choice". This is handy for any time you want people to indicate a preference (e.g., "what time should we meet in Collaborate?", or vote on a single question.
  
  
• Wikis - particularly after the wiki activity, you will probably find a lot of people will want to try a wiki in their activity design. You need to know how to create additional pages (add square brackets around a page name to create and name subsequent pages, like this: [[Page 2: Use a Good Title for Pages]]. You'll also probably need to coach them toward articulating their intentions - wiki is not always the best tool.

Need to learn more Moodle?

• moodle.org offers moodledocs - TON of "how-to" information, right from the source
• ISWO Sandbox - a course set up as a companion site to the FDWO - it is a place for you to play around in "edit" mode and try things out that you'll need to do as a facilitator (e.g., hide/reveal units, create polls, edit activities and resources, etc.)
• Mastering Moodle is a course at RRU that we have made available as an OER - it has a lot of "how to's" for editors.

Web Conferencing

Depending on your group, your co-facilitator, and your own preferences, you may have more or fewer live web conferencing sessions throughout the ISWO (we use Blackboard Collaborate, but it could be any equivalent tool, like Adobe Connect, etc).  You and/or your co-facilitator partner should be comfortable in the moderator role.

Sometimes, you might encounter a group that has little experience but special interest in learning how to moderate live/synchronous sessions (you might glean this from their pre-course survey responses, or their intro posts). If this shows up, you might discuss with your co-facilitation partner whether you want to work in some "moderator training" for synchronous sessions. It could be a worthwhile "add", because it would enable participants to explore the "mixed mode" combination of synchronous and asynchronous online facilitation in their mini-sessions.

At minimum, we recommend a live session in week 1 to check in and clarify any questions.  We have found some groups really love it, and others either aren't as drawn to it, or find the business of scheduling live sessions near impossible. We always record the sessions, and share the recordings.

Web Conferencing: The Least You Need to Know...

• how to create and upload a PowerPoint
• how to help participants troubleshoot their audio, run the audio setup wizard
• how to function comfortably in the "moderator" role

Facilitating ISWO Week 1: Getting Started & Community

ISWO Week 1 - Getting Started & Community

A lot of important things take place in the first week that will lay the groundwork and set the tone for the rest of the course.  Not only do we get to know each other (through Introduction posts, etc), but we also aim to foster an atmosphere of active participation and experimentation.

Like much of the ISWO, Unit 1 is very "meta" - we learn about community by building community.  As a facilitator, it is important that you

• have your introduction posted before the course begins
• be brave and transparent in using technology