Again, sorry to be late to the party.
My role is 'distributed learning facilitator' but I've spent a lot of time as an Instructional Designer. One of the things I enjoy most is working with instructors on creating engaging online courses. I'm working with someone right now who is new to online learning and was looking for a checklist. This led me think to think of creative ways to teach a group of instructors (online ) about what makes a good online course.
So, my activity is TRIZ.
I would use a wiki and have people contribute (I think I would give them 3 days) their thoughts on how you could create the most baffling online course for students to ensure they would never get through it. I will work on the invitation - clarifying that I'm not talking about difficult content, but rather things like navigation, instructions, etc. I would come up with the 'unwanted result' rather than have the group do a 1-2-4 all.
After the three days, as a group, I'd have them read through all the ideas and create the list of all the things we could do to achieve the worst online course. Then I would ask - Which of these things are actually happening in our online courses? Are we doing some of these and hadn't noticed? Continue in the wiki with the responses and then a discussion forum where individuals share which practices that were contributing to poor course design they will stop doing.
I think I could also tack on a 15% solutions - what one thing can you do without asking for money or permission - to improve your online course? It would be nice to see all the answers in one place so maybe back to the wiki for that?
I think this could be handled in one week of a course and could scale by using groups if the class is large. I would likely do a wrap-up at the end of the week.