Unit Notes - FDWO Week 1: The Big Picture

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