The more 'technical' post about the course design

It's a sign of generally busy an 'adjunkt' is that it's taken me until this day off to get round to writing about last Thursday's Course Launch in more detail. Since the launch of Oral Production, I've used Adobe Connect live for the first time, and started two new courses, each with 30+ students on it, one via Marratech from Kalmar and one in Sävsjö.

Back to OP … The first thing to do was to get the web site updated. As usual, it was the administrative side that needed doing first, so I defined the three course assignments in great detail. This covers both what the students have to do, and the number of marks they can achieve for each assignment, and for each aspect of each assignment. This is probably the most difficult and the most important aspect of designing an on-line course. You have a number of different factors to take into account, such as what the syllabus says, what the student work-load looks like, and the dynamic quality of the course. What this last factor involves is trying to keep the students excited to continue! And making sure that the rewards they get for continuing are proportionate to the amount of work they have to do.

Once you know what you expect of them, it's then relatively straightforward to design the actual lessons and supporting course materials. You've got the actual goals of the course clearly set, so working out how to get there is a lot easier. On this course there's an added complication in that I've never worked in this environment before, so I'm not quite sure yet how much ground we can cover at each meeting. Thus, I'm not designing more than one meeting at a time (although the fact that I need to give the students their assignments for next time too defines at least part of the following meeting).

The first meeting is going to be about polite language, the language of interaction, and a chance to practise presentation skills. I wrote a detailed lesson plan, breaking down the lesson into 10 and 15 minute sections. This lesson plan is now out on the course web site too, and I've invited the students to take a look at it before we have our next meeting. In one respect, this is a little foolhardy, since I have no real means of knowing whether the lesson plan is going to work. In another, though, it's a sensible course of action, since, if I involve my students in the entire work on the course, there's a much better chance that a) they'll understand why they need to do the 'inter-meeting' work I'm asking them to do and b) that they'll be tolerant of minor over-runs and glitches.

The intellectual model I'm using for creating course materials is, of course, my experiences of face-to-face (f2f) sessions. At the moment, I'm regarding SL as just another environment for f2f teaching. When we meet this Thursday, the main student-directed activity is going to be the report back from their experiences with the US students and on their own in SL. My plan is to run this like a kind of marketplace, where students set up 'stalls' from which they tell small groups of other students about what they've experienced. I'll be going from group to group to help out (and see if there are any interesting language points to take up).