Tutor introduction video and transcript
Greg: Hi and welcome to the Teaching Online Open Course. I’m Greg Benfield, one of the three tutors on this course. I’ve been teaching online since about 1998, and this course itself is a new open variation of a course we’ve been running for about ten years in the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development (OCSLD). At various times it’s been called Online Tutoring, and Teaching Online; this variation is slightly different because it’s open. Anyway, welcome everybody!
Liz: Welcome to the course. I’m Liz Lovegrove, one of the other tutors. I’ve been teaching online for three or four years, living online for much longer, and I’ve done a lot of work developing and supporting various different online courses.
Marion: Welcome to the course from me as well. I’m Marion Waite. and I’ve been teaching online since about 2008, mainly in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at Oxford Brookes University, but more recently with OCSLD and particularly with the open online course development.
In addition to the three tutors you will also find that the course is supported by teaching assistants, and you will be able to identify them because hopefully in brackets after their name they will have ‘TA’. They are all experienced online practitioners and their main role is to help you find your way around the course. They will be able to offer additional perspectives because of their experience, and about various aspects of teaching online. In fact throughout the course our approach is learning by doing and through dialogue with others. We will also ask you to reflect on how we do things, on your own experience, and on the experience of others in the course so that you can make informed choices about the approach that is likely to work best for you.
Some people will be taking the course for credit, as module P70408. They will have an assignment, and course tutors will be available to support you in writing that assignment including by giving feedback on an early draft.
Don’t forget that we have a two week break for the university Easter calendar. During this period there will be no tutor support available. You are free to read, prepare your assignments, and post in forums if you want during that period but there will be no tutors available to answer your questions if you have any.
Liz: One of the things about this being an open course is that you have some choices about how to engage with it. We’re offering various different activities, discussions and readings each week and depending on what your preferences and interests are, you may wish to engage with some or all of those things or to dip in and out as it suits you. If you’re taking the course for assessment you might find you need to engage more deeply with all of the different activities; if you’re taking it for interest you may wish to dip into the week that interests you, take away some readings and post a couple of times in the discussion boards. Or indeed anything between those two extremes.
No matter what you’re doing, we urge you to think about contributing to the discussion boards, because that’s where a lot of the learning will be taking place, with people sharing their experiences and thoughts on the different approaches we’re discussing each week. You’ll find you’ll learn a lot from each other as well as hopefully from us.
We’ll be releasing all of our content one week in advance. If you’ve taken other online courses, particularly First Steps in Learning and Teaching , this might be different from what you’re used to, where some other courses release everything all at once. We’re partly doing that to demonstrate a different way of approaching the release of materials, and as with all the decisions we’ve made throughout the course, we encourage you think about the effect of that, and whether or not it would work in your context.
Greg: So in closing let me just emphasise that this course is about learning and teaching in general, but with a specific focus on techniques for teaching online in particular. So you’ll find that some of the resources and readings vary between those that take a general perspective about learning and teaching and others ask you to focus specifically on techniques for teaching online. That’s because as we see it the principles of learning and teaching apply online but there are some specifics about best practice and particular techniques and so on that you’re going to need to think about in order to make your way towards becoming an effective online tutor.
So for now, welcome, we would suggest that what you do is take a look around and familiarise yourself with this environment. Even if you’re quite experienced as an online learner and teacher, there are likely to be subtle differences about how this course operates and you’re going to need to figure those out. Some of the first things to do are to visit the arrivals lounge discussion board and let us know that you’ve landed safely. Then we recommend that you just plunge right in to the week 1 activity called icebreakers.
One last thing, I suggest you get out your diary and start planning now for how you’re going to engage with the course. Especially mark in the dates and times of the three live webinars - you’ll find them in the introductory materials, and you don’t want to miss those. And block out some time for the week 3 small group activity where you probably need to be able to engage online more frequently than in other weeks. And above all, try to meet some people and have some fun with this course. Bye for now, we’ll see you online.
Liz and Marion: Bye.