I’m thrilled to learn that the great work of Tony Carr and his colleagues at the Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town in South Africa is up and online. They recently completed the Facilitating Online: a course leaders guide (PDF here.). A few years ago I said to Tony that I really had not done a good job keeping my resources up to date and I wanted to “open source” them but in a way where others would build upon and improve them. Tony took me at my word and grabbed my stuff. He connected with the All Things in Moderation folks in the UK for their frameworks. Then with Shaheeda Jaffer and Jeanne Smuts, they created the guide. Now it is up and available to all of us. Here are the details:
Facilitating Online is a course intended for training educators as online facilitators of fully online and mixed mode courses. The Centre for Educational Technology (CET) produced a Course Leader’s Guide as an Open Educational Resource to assist educators and trainers who wish to implement a course on online facilitation within their institution or across several institutions. The guide contains the course model, week-by-week learning activities, general guidance to the course leader on how to implement and customise the course and specific guidelines on each learning activity.
See Facilitating Online: A guide for course leaders for a pdf version of the course manual as well the specimen course site.
Congratulations Tony. And thanks for keeping it in the accessible, public domain as well. That matters!
Hi Nancy,
Thanks for the glowing post about Facilitating Online. I’d done some online facilitation before joining your course in 2000 but thats what really got me moving. We really appreciate being able to adapt some of the wonderful activities and resources which you have developed for the more recent iterations of your course. Your review of the course model also helped us to get going.
Thanks for your support and encouragement over the years and your partnership in various projects including aspects of the e/merge online conferences. I’ve tried to bring much of what I have learnt from you about warm, effective, flexible facilitation into the design of the course and course guide.
David Shepherd of ATIMOD provided us with review of the course model and detailed and through advice on the redesign of several aspects of the course after the pilot. The course model and many of our activities were also inspired by experience of the ATIMOD course.
I took a quick glace through the document and there appears to be a lot of good stuff here. This should be of great use since I am in the beginning stages of designing some on-line courses.
Thanks very much for making it available.
George Hathaway
EVP
Center for BreakThrough Thinking