Week 3 Overview

Hi all,

No video from me this week as I think you have likely seen enough of my mug between the CoI video and the synchronous session archive .

Thank you everyone for the excellent discussion this past week around how learners view themselves in a CoI. I have summarized the key points from the discussion as a final post in the forum. 

For this week, we are going to dive into some of the practical considerations of facilitation, moving from the theoretical COI model to some strategies you can use to design and facilitate asynchronous and synchronous activities. Please watch for this week's Moodle discussion prompt.

This week you should be meeting with your facilitation teams to start a draft facilitation plan laying out how your facilitation week will occur. One of your team members will post your team draft plan on their blog by Sunday. As part of the plan, I would like you to include a proposed date and time for your synchronous session so that we can begin to try to schedule those into everyone’s calendars. I only want you to do one synchronous session during your facilitation week and it should be between 30 and 60 minutes long. I will review the plans and provide some feedback early next week so that you have time to discuss and revise (if necessary) your plan before you post the final version at the end of Unit 1.

You also have your first assignment due on Sunday this week, which is to design an infographic and write a blog post about facilitation in a Community of Inquiry. I would like you to think about your own teaching and learning context and illustrate a minimum of 3 strategies for each presence that you, as a facilitator, could use that would address each of the different presences (Teaching, Social and Cognitive) outlined in the CoI framework. These strategies should be drawn from the readings, videos and discussions in the first 2 weeks of the course. You will then post this infographic on your blog along with a blog post of a maximum of 400 words that provides more rationale and context for your infographic, and submit a link to your blog post in the Moodle assignment dropbox.

Finally, everyone this week should test their access to the Moodle Innovate course shell that has been set up. You may not be using it for your facilitation week, but others might and I would prefer to know now that someone does not have access than find out at the start of a facilitation week where a team is using it. So please check your access to it this week.

I hope you have a great week and happy facilitation week planning.

Clint