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FLO: history, context & philosophy

It started with ISWO

An online workshop called Instructional Skills Workshop Online (ISWO) was developed at Royal Roads University in the mid 2000's as part of the BCcampus Online Program Development Fund. The workshop, now called Facilitating Learning Online (FLO), was developed to provide guidance and practice in learning how to facilitate online learning effectively.

The workshop developers 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, participants design and deliver 3 mini-lessons of up to 10 minutes in the face-to-face classroom (and serve as "students" for everyone else). In FLO participants 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 workshop has continued to evolve in response to participant and facilitator feedback (e.g., new readings, technologies, and mini-session topics are added). In the early days, the original ISWO developers taught it a couple times, and then began the "baton pass" until they 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?

The name changed to FLO

In September 2013 the workshop was revised and implemented at BCcampus - SCoPE for the first time. Since that date FLO has been revised and offered many times, awarding certificates to faculty and staff from B.C. post-secondary institutions across the province.

In February 2015, the name of the workshop changed from Instructional Skills Workshop Online (ISWO) to Facilitating Learning Online (FLO), to more closely reflect the focus on online facilitation. The workshop continues to change and evolve with each offering, and is made available as an Open Educational Resource (OER) for anyone to use and modify. The challenge will be keeping track of, and sharing, the many revisions and thought processes that went into making them!

In February 2016, Royal Roads University and BCcampus, along with a group of FLO facilitators, participated in a FLO Design Sprint. The outcome of the 2-day sprint was an agreement on the core curriculum and intended learning outcomes, a FLO redesign plan, and commitment to continue to work together to maintain and advance the FLO offerings. We rolled out the "New FLO" in April 2016. 

Then it was renamed to FLO - Fundamentals

As we expanded the "family" of FLO offerings to include workshops that focused on synchronous learning, design, assessment, and so on, the naming became complicated! We decided to keep FLO as the anchor, but add on the focus. For example:

...and so on as new workshop ideas emerge.

Adoption of FLO

     Creative Commons License
    The FLO workshop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To date, variations of FLO have been adopted by other institutions (we have even seen a version running in China!). 

    Part of the reason for the Facilitator Development Online workshop is so that people can more successfully and confidently adopt the Open Educational Resource (OER). As we all know, it's the very human skill of teaching/facilitating, not materials alone, that makes a course great.

    BCcampus is actively developing a FLO Adoption Package to better serve institutions that want to offer FLO for their faculty.

    How are ISW and FLO related? 

     Important differences between the face-to-face ISW and the FLO:

    • FLO is about online activity design, facilitation, and learning, whereas the ISW is about those things in face-to-face settings.
    • The topics you will be facilitating in FLO are about teaching and learning, whereas ISW lessons are on a self-selected topic. 

    The "philosophy" of FLO has been described by FLO 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
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