Welcome to our course in online facilitation. During the next five weeks we will learn together about online facilitation in this completely online course. If we want our students and participants in our online projects to be develop skills of online communication and learning then as educators and facilitators we will also need to have learnt these skills.
Your course leader is name etc who will be assisted by name etc
This is an open access course in online facilitation for university educators in Anglophone Africa. The original open access materials were developed by Tony Carr and Shaheeda Jaffer from the Centre for Educational Technology at University of Cape Town and Jeanne Smuts of Human Development Africa with the support of David Shepherd of All Things in Moderation and Nancy White of Full Circle Associates.
This online facilitation course adopts an active and experiential approach to learning. The course is based on the following principles:
This course fosters the capacity to build online learning communities and communities of practice within the context of courses and conferences. This course is also designed to provide participants with an experience of engagement in an online learning community. Online learning communities are encouraged through developing online interaction and learning conversations amongst participants. Acknowledging,valuing, respecting and accommodating diversity as a combination of similarities and differences plays a central role in fostering and maintaining online learning communities. The course creates awareness of the benefits of online facilitation as a step towards becoming leaders of online learning communities.
While the Facilitating Online course mostly uses online discussion, chat and e-mail, it also introduces the opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 technologies for developing and maintaining online learning communities.
The course uses play as a bridge to learning by attempting to make learning fun. Playful learning involves participants taking small risks, playing with ideas, keeping an open mind and making connections where they are not obvious. Participants are encouraged to express their creativity through developing their ability to challenge, question and explore.
A key principle underpinning this course is the emphasis on reflection as a learning process. Reflection on your own learning helps you to take ownership of your learning process. Articulating your reflections makes your thinking available for comment and feedback. Reflection is an important facet in the development of online facilitation skills and strategies required for the establishment and maintenance of online learning communities.
Keeping a journal is a great way to reflect on your learning. You are encouraged to keep a journal of your experiences on this course from the outset. This will help you to monitor your own growth as an online facilitator and to review how much you have learned at the end of the course. You can keep a paper journal or record it electronically as a word processing document. This is a private space for your eyes only, where you can say anything you want at any time!
You will also be encouraged to bring some of your reflections to the course community in a shared journal, which you will find as a topic with your name in the ‘Journals’ forum for the course. This will help you to contribute to the course and to receive feedback from others. Some of these reflections will also help you to participate in the end-of-week ‘Reflections’topic, which is the last activity each week. Some of these reflections will be directed by questions posed by the facilitator. However, you should feel free to share reflections or ask questions about anything else related to the course. Please feel encouraged to post messages in journal topics owned by colleagues in the course if you want to engage with their thinking. On the other hand, you are not obliged to reply to comments by anyone else on your journal topic.
Here are some questions that will help you to start your learning journal:
start?
Be as specific as possible and enjoy using your journal on your learning journey.
The course website is available to you from noon on insert date. Log on to the course site before insert date for Monday of Week One. To do this you will need to come to insert web address . Use your username and password to login. Your username will always be the e-mail address that is used in correspondence about the course. Your password will be sent to you by the site by Wednesday this week. When you have logged in you will need to click on the tab for the “Online Facilitation Course”. When you have done this read the opening announcement and explore the structure of the site by clicking on a few of the menu items in the left hand margin of your screen.
If you experience problems logging on to the site please contact the course leader by e-mail on insert e-mail address.
We'd recommend that you change your password to something that you will find easier to remember. When you're in the course site you will find a "Profile" link in the left hand menu. After clicking on this link you will find a Change Password option towards the right hand side of the page. Enter this twice and then click on "Set Password".
As we prepare for the start of the course on insert date we need to consider ourselves as a new online learning community. It will be much easier for us to make contact with each other and to start working together productively early in the course if we know something about each others interests, goals, and expectations. We have designed a survey to help us to share some information about ourselves across the class. From the results we will be able to see information about each participant and about our course community as a whole. Our survey will be live and available to you from noon on insert date eg for Wednesday of Week 0 from the "Our Survey" link on the left hand side of the course website.