Teaching Online Open Course (2016)

Somewhere to have 'off topic' discussions, to relax and have a chat with a mug/glass of your virtual beverage of choice.

Post here to ask for help if something's not working for you. And feel free to answer other people's posts if you can advise, and to post useful tips about getting the most out of the technology.

Arrivals lounge (5 minutes)

Post in this forum to say hello and let us know you've arrived safely.

Share your ideas (up to 2 hours)

Talk about induction, ice breakers, and preparing to learn online. Share your previous experiences of online learning and teaching, and your hopes for future ones.

Contribute to inventory of online activities (badge activity) (no more than 2 hours)

Think about an activity you have used, or one you’ve encountered as a learner. Pick a framework to describe it, and share that in the ‘sharing learning activities’ discussion board. Think about what your ...

Learning design discussion (no more than 1 hour)

This is a space to talk about learning designs. What makes online activities different from face-to-face ones? How can you best represent your learning designs? How useful are the different models you've looked at? Are different ones suitable for ...

Get to know your group, make plans for next week's group activity

Use this group discussion space to start getting to know each other, and planning how you're going to engage with the collaborative writing activity in week 3.

This is your group working space for the collaborative writing activity - you will only be able to see discussion posts from your own group.

Discussing collaborative working (no more than 1 hour)

In the small group activity (Task 1) you experienced working in an online team. In this task we ask you to reflect on that experience and more broadly the complexities of supporting online groups.

What do you think about the differences ...

If you want to continue working on your small group activity over the Easter break feel free to use these discussion forums.

Please post your critique of scenario A here and respond to other postings from other participants.

Please post your critique to Scenario B here and respond to other participants postings.

Planning support in the online environment and evaluating critical incidents (no more than 1 hour)

On reflection of the week 4 resources (support in the online environment videos) and key readings, write a short statement (no more than 250 words) about strategies you could employ in order to ...

Assessing the small group presentations (no more than 90 minutes) (badge activity)

Take another look at some of the small group presentations from week 3. (Click here for the public Google drive link.) Prepare a proposal for an effective means of assessing this task. What criteria should be ...

Assessing online contributions (no more than 1 hour)

This week, our plenary discussion focuses on the assessment of students' online contributions. Specifically we ask you:

If your participation in this course were to be assessed, how should it be?

In deciding how you will contribute to this ...

Articulating good practice (no more than 2 hours)

Early in the week each person should compile their own brief inventory of good practice in online tutoring, drawing on your own practice, research, and experience and drawing upon the literature on online pedagogies introduced during the ...

This final discussion topic has been created as one of the methods we use to seek your feedback on this course. It differs from the others in that we may publish anonymised extracts of comments posted in this topic.

We are asking for this feedback for three reasons

• To help us to improve the ...