Unit Notes - FDWO Week 2: The Deep Dive

Introduction

Now we have looked at how you will successfully launch the ISWO (by attending to pre-course preparation and Week 1), it's time to do the "deep dive" into the rest of the course: Weeks 2 - 5.

Each week in the ISWO is designed to provide resources and activities we consider "essentials" for facilitating online learning effectively.

The units follow a predictable pattern:

• readings/resources
• mini-sessions led by participant teams
• reflection and applying learning (journal shares, FLIF)

Once the mini-sessions begin, they become a focus for the units, and so your work expands to include attending to both the "meta" part of the ISWO course, as well as the people designing and facilitating mini-sessions. This is why putting the huge effort into Week 1 is important.  You'll need to have helped most participants to be on board, able to navigate the site, and have a fairly good sense of the structure and philosophy/approach of ISWO so that you can begin putting your energy and attention elsewhere.

ISWO Week 2: Theory into Practice

Week 2 is about exploring some of the relevant learning theory that will help support adult online learners.

The mini-sessions this week are:

• Course Review Task force - a "case study"/story about a course that got poor reviews on both the instructor and course design
  
  
• Wiki activity - asks people to facilitate without a forum and explore questions about how adult learners get their needs met onine

Please go to the ISWO Sandbox and review the BackPocket Strategies (they are in each unit) for both  mini-sessions to remind you of the details, learning outcomes, and suggested approaches.  This, combined with your own experience, may "twig" other ideas that you could add to the backpocket strategies and suggest to your participants.

Some of the material in this unit can be controversial - for example, learning styles.  In that case, we aim to highlight the "big idea" that people learn in different ways, and so we should aim to include a variety in our activities and content types - a mix of individual and team, text and media, etc.

Technical Details:  you will need to be able to:

• create and populate teams in the LMS (Moodle)
• support the wiki people, including how to create and link new pages, fiddle with tables, write the instructions on the main page and, if the wiki includes several pages, create navigation structures.

ISWO Week 3: Choosing Tools

This unit and mini-session is the "newest" in ISWO (as of this writing, Feb 2014). It was designed to dig deeper into the business of choosing the right tools for supporting learning.  

The mini-session this week is:

• Duelling Tools - The idea is to have people use different tools for the same activity (e.g., one group uses a synchronous tool, the other group uses an asynchronous tool), to see how the "results" played out. The mini-session facilitators have to design the activity itself, and assign technologies.

Please go to the ISWO Sandbox and review the BackPocket Strategies for this activity to remind you of the details, learning outcomes, and suggested approaches.  This, combined with your own experience, may "twig" other ideas that you could add to the backpocket strategies and suggest to your participants.

Tips:

• when assigning this mini-session topic, ensure that at least one of the people on the team has expressed interest and/or comfort with using technology.
• it is easy for mini-session facilitators to get excited about playing with new tools - it is your job to keep participants focused on teaching and learning strategies while evaluating how various tools support or do not support them.
• you should be facile with 3 or 4 technologies that could be used in this mini-session in case your mini-session facilitators need help or inspiration.

ISWO Week 4: Facilitating Online Teams

Week 4 is about facilitating teams, and dealing with group dynamics.

The mini-session this week is:

• Case: Team in Trouble - This is a story about, well, a team in trouble! It is based on real experiences of the team coach at RRU, and is intended to reflect some of the common conflicts that can arise in teams who are dealing with the expectation of working together under the pressure of deadlines.

Please go to the ISWO Sandbox and review the BackPocket Strategy for this activity to remind you of the details, learning outcomes, and suggested approaches.  This, combined with your own experience, may "twig" other ideas that you could add to the backpocket strategies and suggest to your participants.

Also in Week 4:

• people are asked to check in on their "self-assessment" of participation.

Tip:

• this is a good time for mini-session facilitators to think about:
  • how much team work is enough or too much in a course?
  • how do team, individual and class activites inter-relate?
  • should team composition stay constant or change throughout a course?

ISWO Week 5: Looking Back, Looking Foward & Assessing Participation

Unit 5 is about bringing the course to a close, inviting participants to do a final reflection and make concrete plans for next steps.

The mini-session this week is:

• Assessing Participation - this mini-session is introduced as an individual activity at the beginning (people choose or create a rubric with which to assess their own participation), and brought to a close at the end by a participant facilitator (or pair). This tends to be a "lighter" mini-session, and so is a good one to assign to someone who may be less comfortable with technology, but has good teaching experience, and perhaps has expressed an interest in assessment. Often the mini-session takes the form of a debate (i.e, "should online participation be assessed?" or similar question). The key struggle in this topic is developing a balanced approach - one that encourages quality contributions, and isn't too onerous for instructors to assess. One challenge for facilitators of this mini-session is people are tired, and they have to manage time carefully because the course ends on Friday - no additional weekend.

Please go to the ISWO Sandbox and review the BackPocket Strategy for this activity to remind you of the details, learning outcomes, and suggested approaches.  This, combined with your own experience, may "twig" other ideas that you could add to the backpocket strategies and suggest to your participants.

ISWO Units: Adding your own

As mentioned elsewhere, the ISWO has evolved over time, and we hope it continues to do so! 

Technology continues to change, and should be reflected here (will it soon be time for a unit on apps? on mobile learning?).  Also, "hot topics" in education, like flipping classrooms and MOOCs (should we have a flipped unit?) can and should be incorporated when they make sense.

One thing we hope is that we (all of us, in this community of ISWO facilitators) can continue to share our work. If you invent a great new mini-session, it would be ideal if the rest of us could hear about it. RRU is committed to keeping our OER version of the ISWO available (the plan is for the most recent one to be online).

Maybe we could also agree to contribute new ISWO units, mini-sessions, etc to a central place, like BC Campus' Shareable Online Learning Resources, SOLR?