Hi everyone at Moot Global and in the Open EdTech Community!
I've been training faculty to teach online at a small liberal arts college in Montana for a few years. I also facilitated one of the beta tests for the MEC and have done some trainings for other institutions in my spare time.
I've landed on a pretty digestible set of principles that I think can help guide online development for educators in the event you need to create a home grown online training plan for teachers. Here they are:
Be Present
Students need to know you are "there." Establish patterns of communication and be proactive reaching out to students. We learn in social context, so try to make yourself as present as possible for your learners.
Be Engaging
Students need to do cognitive work with the content you wish for them to learn. To achieve this online, you have to require students to stop regularly during the delivery of content and do some sort of work with it - assignments, quizzes, H5P activities, workshops, and forums are all tools that can help you do this.
Quality Content Matters
The quality of modern professionally developed online marketing and entertainment content is exceptional. Our students have expectations that online experiences be visually appealing and easy to work with. Keep this in mind and make an effort to reduce clicks and confusion in everything you make.
Know your Tools
This seems obvious, but is difficult to achieve with Moodle for beginners. Moodle is the most flexible and robust LMS on the planet. This is a great thing, but it makes Moodle fairly complex - after all, the more options you have the more buttons there are to click. This can be overwhelming. Teachers just starting out in online education should have the chance to see working examples of as many tools as possible before designing their own courses. Otherwise, they tend to end up with an over reliance on a single module or use the wrong module for a given objective.
I have attached the syllabus for this course, which contains a complete bibliography. I am also including a link to a presentation about this from NWMET 2015. I originally designed this course in 2014, so the literature needs to be updated, but I'm sharing it here in case anyone wants to use it.
As I redesign this for 2020, I want to include some more current literature about this topic and replace a few readings from the bibliography. I would appreciate it if anyone has suggestions in this area.
Thanks, and Happy Moodling!
