The CyberCafe: We encourage instructors to extend an invitation to their students to ‘get their feet wet’ and familiarize themselves with the forum tool by submitting an informal post to a special forum that we use for all non-academic content communications. Questions about the course, technical issues, how to get rid of voles in the garden, and more, are all welcome topics in the CyberCafe.
Online “office hours”: Using the text Chat activity in Moodle, we have experimented with having instructors offer to be online for an hour on a weekday night to address non-academic content concerns. We have found that this works pretty well with a small group, but it is very hard to follow the multiple threads that inevitably arise when many students are typing at once.
Group functionality: We can replicate small group work using the Moodle Groups functionality. An instructor will often create a full-class forum one week and a smaller group forum the next week and then alternate back and forth. Groups often work on a collaborative project and, although we do not have the resources to support a multitude of technical tools, we do offer to set up a text Chat or a group wiki in Moodle. We tell students about Skype, GoogleDocs, and screen-sharing technologies such as join.me. Presentation of group projects is usually done at face-to-face sessions, although we are now exploring the use of webinar software such as WebEx for this purpose.
Individualized work with instructors: Supporting our instructors is critical if we are to have successful HO courses. In addition to our Online Instructional Strategies course, we offer one-on-one training and 24/7 just-in-time support to our instructors. Working together in person, or remotely, our technical staff helps instructors deal with any situation that might arise.
Editing tools: Although we do the initial creation and setup of the course structure, we strongly believe that instructors should know how to edit their courses using the basic Moodle editing tools and train them to do that. Instructors know how to add resources and assignments and this allows them to respond quickly as they adapt to ongoing formative assessments.
Conclusion
We have welcomed the move to HO classes. In this day and age, it seemed inevitable.
The majority of our instructors are becoming strong HO instructors, because we take the time to introduce HO instruction individually. We offer an array of training tools for instructors, including:
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