Getting ready for Meeting 4

The course is flowing quite smoothly now. When students can't make a session, they get in touch and we fix an alternative … just like on any other distance course. There's still plenty of outside distraction, but that's also pretty normal. I have to work on the principle that the best is the enemy of the good all the time anyway, so I'm aiming for something that's good, rather than something that's perfect for this course (besides which, if you've already achieved perfection, what incentive do you have to improve?!).

Once again, the preparations consisted of writing the lesson plan, creating the course visual aids and updating the web site. That process is also getting quicker, although a good deal of the reason for that is that we're on to the assessment part of the course now, so there's less direct teaching that I need to do. I also needed to design a new layout for the course database, so that I had a form I could both print out and write on on the day, and fill in via the keyboard and mail to the students as feedback. This is actually one of the trickier aspects of course design, believe it or not. However, once you've got a visual aid to hang your ideas about the assessment on to, the whole process of carrying out the assessment becomes so much easier.

This time around I decided to start with the 'Outrageous Opinions' exercise we finished with last time - it's really a warm-up for the students and an opportunity to make sure that everyone's up to speed with the technology again.

The assessment this time was Assessment 2, which is the role play exam. I'll describe it in more detail in my next post which is all about what actually happened at Meeting 4.

Then the plan is to finish off with a briefing about Assessment 3, the joint presentation, which takes place at Meeting 5 next week.