What defines an excellent course?

The answer is easy, it’s design and facilitation. Because after all, content is just content without it. That’s where we come in. Through Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) and Facilitator Development Online (FDO) workshops, we guide educators in these 5-week and 2-week intensive sessions to learn how to actively facilitate learning.

flo-facilitators — From left to right: Sylvia Riessner, Beth Cougler Blom and Sylvia Currie

As we mentioned in an earlier post, our FLO and FDO sessions continue to draw in educators from across the province to learn how to facilitate learning. These sessions evolve as the needs of the institutions, students and instructors change and as such, we’ve modified our courses to stay current and ahead-of-the-curve.

We have many FLO development projects on the go, here are a few to keep an eye out for in the late fall, early spring:

FLO – Design (5-week online workshop)
This is a complementary workshop to Facilitating Learning Online – Fundamentals. Both incorporate an experiential approach — one workshop focusing on facilitation, and the new one on design. Taking both workshops will lay the foundation to teaching online. Tentative date and length for pilot: January 16 – February 17, 2017. Designer/Developer – Sylvia Riessner.

FLO – Synchronous (3-week online workshop)
In this workshop, participants are introduced to best practice strategies for all phases of synchronous online learning events– planning, facilitating, and follow up. Tentative date and length for pilot: November 28 – December 16, 2016. Designer/Developer – Beth Cougler Blom.

Facilitator’s Guide:
A practical guide to facilitating FLO workshops online, harvesting contributions by FLO facilitators and participants.

Institutional Adoption Package:
We want to help institutions adopt FLO workshops at their own institutions. Will offer all course materials and instructional guides, mentorship, technical and facilitation support.

Have you completed FLO?

Consider taking it to the next level by enrolling in FDO Nov. 7 – 18, 2016. This will prepare you to facilitate FLO at your own institution or to join the BCcampus FLO facilitation group.

Notable quote

“I came into this class with the idea that online courses require less investment, and essentially run themselves, and boy was I proven wrong, in a positive way.” – Candy Ho, Instructor, Co-operative Education, Kwantlen Polytechnic University