Extending your online course

A chance to experiment with a wide range of educational technologies and tools.

This is the second in a series of three courses, which together will help you prepare for planning and teaching online courses.

• Teaching online courses
• Extending your online course
• Designing your online course

This course focuses on enhancing teaching and learning by harnessing the potential of new technology and tools for interactivity and engagement. The environments within which you can create online courses have changed rapidly in the last few years, now including social software such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Flickr, as well as the collaboratively constructed and published information such as wikis, social bookmarking and blogs. The challenge for teachers is how (or indeed if) to incorporate such tools into authentic learning activities.

This short course will give you a chance to explore a range of up to date tools and assess their suitability for use in online courses. You will discuss with your peers the issues they raise including privacy, disclosure, and digital and information literacy and explore the extent to which new pedagogies are required to teach in this digital age. 

This short course aims to:

• Support the unpacking of the issues, including contested issues, around embedding new technology in the learning environment
• Help you identify any changes in your practice required in order to incorporate new technology in engaging learning activities.
• Provide opportunities to experience first hand collaborative engagement with new tools.

Expected learning outcomes

By the end of this course you should be able to:

• Identify learning opportunities that are appropriate for interactive engagement with particular social software tools
• Develop and integrate the tools into interactive and authentic learning tasks
• Identify challenges and contested issues related to adopting them in the learning environment.

Course participants

The course is designed for teachers and trainers from all education sectors and all disciplines who are interested in exploring the ideas and potential for learning beyond the hype around for example Web 2.0, the net generation and social software. It will be of most interest to staff that intend to or already make use of online learning environments and interactive discussions.

A previous participant said:
'I've learned so much about learning design for on-line courses as well as the intended learning outcomes around social networking applications'.

Learning and teaching activities

The course will be online and interactive and will require you to work through guided readings, record your thoughts, share your individual work and work collaboratively with others in your group.

• Week 1: Identity, privacy and disclosure in online spaces

• Week 2: digital fluency, information literacy, and the net generation

• Week 3: the benefits and challenges of online communities

• Week 4: integrating tools into learning activities.

Through these activities you will explore and use a range of public domain social software e.g. blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and podcasts.

Assessment

OCSLD online courses are not formally assessed or accredited. We do offer Certificates of Attendance to those who participate in each week’s learning activities. We expect that in order to participate in the course activities, you will need to set aside six hours a week.