TOOC welcome to week 1
Video transcript
Hi, and welcome to week 1!
This week is all about induction and socialisation in the online environment. We do these kind of activities in offline classrooms, too, but they're even more important online, and it's more important to be explicit about them - about what you're asking people to do, and why.
So, to follow my own advice, we've got several different induction activities this week, which are designed to get you talking to each other, sharing some information about yourselves, and starting to think about the course content.
You’ll probably notice quite quickly that one of the unusual things about this course is that it always operates at two levels at once: you’re doing something, and at the same time, you’re thinking about the process of doing that thing, of how it feels to you as a learner, about what it’s trying to accomplish, and of what you might change if you were to do something similar in your own context.
We encourage you to make a note of your thoughts about this as you go along. There are lots of different ways you can do this — a blog, a paper notebook, a Word document, for example, but it’s particularly important in this course for you to keep notes about how you feel about the experience of being an online learner, so you can use that experience to help your own learners. So note down how you feel, and then try and unpick why you feel that way, what it is about the course that’s having that effect.
And of course we encourage you to share your thoughts with us in the discussion boards for each week. Sharing experiences and learning from each other is a big part of this course. We’ve got people here from a wide range of different contexts, and everyone will have insights to share that will be useful and interesting to the rest of us. I’m certainly looking forward to learning from all of you.
Finally, I want to introduce this week’s key reading. Each week you’ll see one reading is marked with a star - that means ‘if you only read one thing this week, make it this’. This week, our key reading is Gilly Salmon’s influential ‘five stage model’ of online learning, and we’ll refer back to it later in the course. (If the image is too low-resolution for you to see clearly in this video, pause, and go and open the web page directly from the link at the bottom of the week 1 page, and then resume the video in the background.)
Salmon’s model suggests that online learners move through these five stages, getting increasingly comfortable and confident as they progress, and requiring different kinds of support along the way.
You’ll see that this week, we’re both working at, and thinking about, Salmon’s stages 1 and 2, that is, access and motivation at stage one, and online socialisation at stage 2. So at stage 1, we’re making sure you can get into the course site, that the basic set up works for you, and that what you see is encouraging enough for you to want to continue. At stage 2, we’re starting to do some communicating and socialising, and if all goes well we might start moving into stage 3, information exchange, later in the week. There are some criticisms of this model, which we’ll be talking about a bit in the webinar at midday GMT on Monday, so I hope you can join us then.
In the meantime, get stuck into the activities, and I hope you have fun.
