Online Training Courses

Being an effective, online facilitator requires a set of skills that is similar to those required in the face-to-face classroom. The online or blended learning facilitator must be able to build community while having little to no face-to-face contact, offer clear and informative feedback, communicate effectively in a medium that lacks body language and tone of voice, as well as use instructional strategies that are independent of time and space to support student learning. The added aspect of the required technologies, like Moodle, also comes into play.

This course will introduce you to the many facets of online facilitation as you build skills in four areas: technical, managerial, social, and pedagogical. Finally, to synthesize all you have learned, you will build a Facilitation Checklist to help guide your ongoing facilitation needs. This course is facilitated by an instructor.

The goal of this course is to help teachers get started with online course design. While teachers know how to design a course for the face-to-face environment, they don't always have the knowledge required to design an online one. Designing online courses requires a paradigm shift in thinking about what a course is and how it is delivered. It can be more challenging than most expect. For this reason, we've created this course to aid in easing the transition and in creating an online course that meets the needs of both students and teachers.

This course introduces participants to best practices for online course design, and it provides an Online Course Planning Document to use while planning and designing online courses. A course facilitator will review submitted design documents and provide feedback to course participants. This course focuses on course design and is not platform specific; therefore, it is relevant to all users, no matter the system participants plan to use for delivering courses.