Week 0 Induction activities
The first few days of the course are designed to allow you to get into the site, introduce yourselves and to get focused on the tasks ahead. The first tasks guide you through the technical and social skills you will need to participate effectively through the course.
In the first few days we expect that you will:
- Listen to our welcome podcast
- Meet the tutors and other course participants
- Plan how you will manage your time for working on this course
- Complete your personal profile on Moodle so it can be shared with the group
- Complete a short reflective quiz
- Complete a short introductory reading on IoC.
As soon as you have access to the online course pages on Brookes Virtual you can start these induction tasks. The better you know your way around the online environment, the easier you will find it to engage fully in the scheduled activities.
Below are some activities to familiarise yourself with the course materials and learning environment. By the time you've worked your way through these you should be able to:
- navigate your way around the different course areas, read discussion messages and post a message to the appropriate area
- navigate your way around the course materials and resources so that you can quickly find information related to the scheduled course activity and your own areas of interest. 'Quick guide to Brookes Virtual' includes information about the layout of courses in Brookes Virtual as well as some information on how to post to the course discussion forums.
Week 0: Activity 1: Post a message in the course Arrivals Lounge discussion area
Purpose - to confirm arrival on course.
[Aim to post this as soon as you can after you arrive]
Read a tutor's message in the Arrivals Lounge discussion area and post your own message in reply to it to let us know that you have arrived safely.
You will find the Arrivals Lounge area within the Week 0 Induction Activities and on the All discussion forums page from the top of the main course screen.
We will be using discussion intensively during this course. It is important that you abide by principles of good practice in working online (sometimes known as Netiquette).
Week 0: Activity 2: Complete the Time Management quiz
Do the quiz on managing your time.
This task is designed to help you think through how to engage effectively with this course over the next month. This is a short self-assessment quiz with five questions. When you submit you will receive some automated feedback. You can take this quiz as many times as you like. (The quiz is not assessed by tutors).
There are instructions with the quiz. Don't forget to click on 'Next' at the bottom of the page, then 'Submit all and finish', when you have completed the quiz.
Week 0: Activity 3 - Complete your personal profile
[Aim to complete this task before or by Monday of week one.]
You will know from the face-to-face teaching that you have done how important it is for participants to know something about each other and to feel comfortable in the group for effective learning to take place. The same applies in the online environment as we have few visual clues to help us build relationships and initially rely on the information provided in profiles to help us get to know each other. So we encourage you to include more detail rather than less in your profile, and to include an image, which will appear beside your discussion board posts (although this doesn't need to be a photo of yourself if you prefer to use something else).
Your profile might include information about:
- Your current job and role and how you came to be there
- Where your position is located (perhaps within the institution, faculty, department, subject centre?)
- The roles you are expected to take in curriculum development
You might also like to include some non-work related information in your profile, for example, about your family, interests, area you live etc. If you would like to share your email address with other course participants, do so here as we do not publish your email elsewhere.
Access your profile by clicking on your name in the top right hand corner of the screen, and then edit it by clicking on 'Edit profile' in the bottom left hand corner. You can also read our guide to creating your Moodle profile for more information.
You can view other people's profiles on the course participants page, or by clicking on their names in discussion board postings.
[Aim to complete your profile by Monday of week one].
Week 0: Activity 4 - Reading task
The last task of this Week 0 is an introductory reading designed to begin to challenge some of the assumptions that you might hold about IoC. [Aim to complete this task before the start of Week 1]
You might also like to start reading the first chapter of the text book Internationalisation of the curriculum for global citizenship in higher education.
