Title: Facilitator notes
Course: Certificate in Online Education

Facilitator Notes

Before you install and run this course with your students, please refer to the information below.
- Installing questionnaire module
- Delivery options
- Scheduling
- Assessment and assignment submission
- Suggested forum topics

Installing questionnaire module

You will need to have installed the following questionnaire plugin for Moodle: http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=84&filter=1 if you would like to collect survey data from the participants as they progress through the course (see activities "1.2 Initial Students Questionnaire" and "4.4 Participants Questionnaire"). If you don't install this module, then you may find this activity doesn't appear when you install the course.

Delivery options

Ideally this course would be given in a blended format with the first 4 topics being given during a 5 day face to face training workshop, followed by 4 topics in which the participants are expected to work in their own time. Each of these topics is expected to take 2-3 weeks of self study time.

The final reflective topic (9. Course Delivery Review) is designed to be taken during a 2 day face to face workshop. However, the course is also designed so that it could be delivered completely online, if arranging for face to face workshops is impractical.

Scheduling

This course is designed to be taken over the course of a semester (approx 3 months) and it's important that those taking the course are actively engaged in teaching (so they are able to develop their course content/activities). Alternatively you may wish to run this course over a whole academic year, with the teachers developing their course during semester 1, ready for delivery in semester 2 and taking the final topic (9. Course Delivery Review) at the end of Semester 2.

The course is designed to be flexible, so please run it however is best suited to your environment.

Assessment and assignment submission

Course assessment is through regular assignments and quizzes, plus a review of the final course development. How you choose to deliver the course (blended or online only) and the period over which you run the course will affect when you expect students to submit their assignments.

Most topics contain at least 2 assignments of quizzes. So if you run this course over a 3 month period, there will usually be at least 1 assignment due to be submitted each week (possibly 2). After you have installed the course, and have decided on the start and end dates, you can set the assignment submission dates (in the Moodle assignment activity) and inform your students. See below for the default settings for quizzes and assignments.

We have found it useful to post a message in the general course forum a few days before the submission date, to remind students about their upcoming assignments.

By default the criteria for quizzes is set to allow students to have 3 attempts and no time limit or deadlines are set. No penalties are applied to incorrect answers.

For assignments, by default no deadlines are set, students are allowed to resubmit and teachers will be emailed when a student submits.

Suggested forum topics

To help generate conversation and discussion amongst students, we found it useful to post occasional discussion topics and snippets of information about elearning to the general discussion forum. Some of the topics we have posted about (and you may find these useful too) are:
- Quizzes: how to use cloze questions and how to deal with questions with the same answer (eg 6 or six)
- Suggest subscribing to Stephen Downes OLWeekly email newsletter: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/login.cgi?action=Register
- Suggest subscribing to Educational Technology Debate blog: http://edutechdebate.org
- Start a discussion about the pros/cons of using OERs, how can you trust open content?
- How can we detect plagiarism?

We often also find that students will email us directly with queries about the assignments or course content. In these cases we usually reply via the course forum so the information can benefit all students.