Online Course Facilitation

This workshop will support participants in developing the skills required to effectively facilitate online courses. Prerequisite: Module instructor, Desirable: Module designer.

Workshop outcomes

On completion of this workshop, participants will be able to:

  1. Follow the ‘five-step’ model, designed by expert e-moderator Gilly Salmon, for supporting online communication and learning.
  2. Facilitate, and support student facilitation of, online discussions.
  3. Manage student activity using discussions, assignments, groups and selective release of activities.
  4. Facilitate the use of other communication processes such as blogs and wikis.
Workshop overview
  1. The five-step model (Gilly Salmon)
    This process orientates and socialises students in the online environment so that they can become progressively more deeply involved in communication and learning online. This not only supports enhanced learning, but also encourages students to become more independent learners.
  2. Facilitation of online discussions (e-moderating) requires some understanding of how this differs from face-to-face communication, and what can be done to encourage effective participation. Asynchronous (discussions) and synchronous (chat and whiteboard) communication tools will be explored.
  3. Apart from the discussion tools, there are other Vista functions that an instructor can use to manage student activity, such as group management, selective release and publication of assignments.
  4. Additional online communication tools may be used, such as blogs and wikis, and online audio- or video-conferencing. When is it appropriate to use these, and how can they be incorporated into an online course?

All sections of the workshop are accompanied by hands-on activities for participants to use the tools and processes discussed.