Plan & organise

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Associate Professor Kathy Douglas shares her planning strategies – © RMIT University

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Planning your online class
COFA Online, © University of NSW

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It’s assumed that you know your course, are familiar with the assessment tasks (and how these tasks are assessed) and that you know all the key dates (start of teaching period, assessment due dates – and that you have them in your calendar). You don’t know until the teaching period commences how many learners will be in your class – but you can get an idea by checking enrolments and registrations. This will help with decisions about communication, group work and other activities. Do you use group areas? Do you use Google Hangouts or Blackboard Collaborate for web conferencing? Do you pair learners to respond to discussion posts? These are all ways that you can increase learner-to-learner interaction and, in the case of discussion boards, reduce the amount of discussion that you need to facilitate, monitor and moderate.

Always keep the course learning outcomes and assessments in mind. Most learning activities that you design or administer must prepare learners to complete the assessment tasks, which are aligned specific course learning outcomes.

“It’s that sharp focus on what is it that you want the students to be doing, experiencing, taking away…”

Prof. Peter Goodyear, University of Sydney

Strategies

• Write a list of people who can help with technical or learning and teaching ideas and issues – names, emails, phone numbers, areas of expertise.
• Create a schedule to manage your time and presence in the learning environment. Block out multiple times for these activities in your calendar, not just one block of time over a longer period. Many short bursts of activity throughout the week work best in online environments.
• Create a simple communication and engagement plan [doc 27mb] to identify when and how you will communicate and engage with your learners. At the end of this resource, we have provided a summary checklist to help you populate your communication and engagement plan.
• Facilitate at least one online learning activity for each week of teaching that is aligned to key concepts, readings, assessment or something generic (such as working in teams, referencing or report writing). The cohort size might lead you to increase some group or peer activity rather than encouraging all learners to only interact with you.

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Weekly communication and engagement plan – A communication and engagement plan will help you to plan your weekly actions, strategies and activities for the teaching period.

Communication strategies for online teaching (pdf) – More tips, examples and lesson plans for online learning and teaching from the University of Central Arkansas.

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Academics share their thoughts on managing time when teaching online.
Sourced from COFA Online, © University of NSW.
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Academics tell us how they integrate open educational resources.
Sourced from COFA Online, © University of NSW.

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