Within our team we have developed a workshop to help colleagues with designing online activities. The approach that we take is that colleagues choose a face-to-face activity and create a plan for it noting
- Learning outcomes
- Student tasks
- Tutor task
- Resources and tools
Then they consider how they would do this online using a plan with the same variables as above. And that is the workshop. We have very few slides it is mainly facilitated groupwork. However, we have found that the best way to facilitate this is to have somebody from my team sitting with the group providing advice on various aspects and to situate the workshop in programme or module planning to ensure authenticity, which really as a service that we offer.
Although it is early days we have found that activities can be generic and the subject content, resources, learning outcomes are the discipline specific components, the generic aspects means that we can introduce an open approach to activity design which influences the facilitation of the workshop. Facilitation involves getting academic colleagues to talk through what would be feasible taking into account student engagement, tool use (not too many, inducting students into use) and issues of parity with f2f not equivalence.
