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Hello and welcome to Building Online Community with Emerging Technologies.
I am your facilitator, Michelle Pacansky-Brock, and I am going to take just a
few moments here to introduce you to the design
of our course.
I know that when you get oriented to any new online course you usually feel like
You are walking around in a home that you have never been in before, trying to
figure out where things are and how to find your
way around.
So lets take just a few minutes to talk about the way I have this course
organized and hopefully this will save you some time
this week because I know that there is
a lot to get familiarized with.
I hope you are excited about getting started; I think you are really going to
love what you are about to learn here.
So, for those of you who are new to Moodle, this may be, perhaps, more important
to you than to some of the others who have some
more experience with Moodle.
Moodle looks very different on the inside than some of the other course
management systems, particularly Blackboard, which was the one I was used to
before I started using Moodle.
And when you come into Moodle you may feel a little lost if you are used to
Blackboard because usually with Blackboard what you see are buttons over on the
left hand side that you click on to get into your content.
So with Moodle you do not have that. And instead you are taken to a Main Page
which you see (this is our course Main Page) and
Moodle lays out your content kind of like
a table of contents inside of a book. That is a good analogy. When I was
getting started with Moodle someone made that analogy
for me and it made a light bulb go off inside my head and I thought, Ok, that
is a good, that is a good tip for anyone
getting started.
So, what you are seeing here is the page that you will be greeted with every
time you
come into our course. And up at the top here is just a little welcome blurb
from me with some key links to get you started.
Now some of this stuff you are going to be interested in this first week:
You have already seen the Course Guide, in addition
to How to get Professional Development
credit (I hope you have checked that out), this is the Course Design tutorial
which you seeing now so you have obviously seen that
link, this is just a page that tells you a little
bit more about me and how to get a hold of me. My email address -- my all
important email address -- is here, my phone number. I regularly use Skype. If
you would like to Skype me if that were a tool that you use, you are welcome to
contact me that way. And some information about my background
that I have shared with you.
So, going back to the information at the top here, before we go into our
content, this is very important. The way I will be communicating
with you throughout our course?our course will be divided into four
weekly units that will appear down below.
This is our first weekly unit titled Introduction to Online Community. And that
is where all of our content will appear, divided
into these weekly units.
You will get your assignments and all of the really fun and intriguing tools
that We will be
jumping into each week will be shared with you in each of those units.
However, if I need to communicate with you between the beginning of each week, I
will be doing that in this area here called the News Announcements forum.
So this is just a general news announcements forum. If there is something I
feel like all of you needs to hear from me I will post
an announcement here in this forum.
And what I want to point out is that it says right here, This forum forces
everyone to be subscribed.
And what that means is I have set this forum up so that everybody has been
subscribed to it. So anytime I post something here, you are going to
automatically receive the message from me also in email
form.
So whatever email you have linked into your profile in Moodle, you are going to
get a copy of the news announcement that I post also in that email.
So if you are wondering why I am emailing stuff to you, that is why. I chose to
do it just to be sure that we all stay on the same page.
It is really important when I share things and if I just put them in there, in
the News Announcements, there is really no way for me to guarantee that you are
going to be seeing them because there will be a lot in this class that we will
be doing outside of Moodle.
So it is really important that I force subscribe you to ensure that we stay in
touch about particular content items.
And the next forum that you see here is called a Q&A Forum.
And this is an area for you to share questions about the course.
So as we move forward, if there are things that you need help with, if there are
things that you are not getting enough clarity on, things that you want more
information about, or just issues that you just need some resolution on, come on
into the Q&A Forum and go ahead and post them here.
Anything course related, go ahead and post a question here. And I am really
encouraging other students to stay in touch with what is going on in the Q&A
forum and also to answer questions as well.
That is going to be a big part of building community so that we can work
together and rely upon each other to answer questions.
But I want you to notice that you have not been force subscribed to this forum.
If you would like to subscribe, you just open up the forum and click on that
button that says Subscribe to this forum and you can do that on your own.
So that is how that is going to operate throughout the course. So moving down
into our first unit, Introduction to Online Community, each unit will look
similar: it will have a title, there will be a brief description of what we
will be covering in that unit, and then below that the first thing you will
always see, it will say Week 1 Summary: Introduction to Online Community.
And if you click there, a new window will pop up with your learning objectives
and your list of assignments for the week. It is just a static window of
content for you to refer to and keep track of what your assignments are.
So that is a good, simple way to check in at the beginning of each unit and be
sure that you are clear about what you will be learning and what your
assignments are.
And then down below is where you access those assignments and all the content
related to them.
The second thing you will find within each of the four learning units will be a
video announcement from me.
So, the next thing under the Summary will always be a video announcement. Now
this will be a video announcement that I will record live for each week.
So it will always be connected to our very fresh content and everything that is
happening within our class.
We will be talking a lot about how important video is in terms of building
community and you will get to know me better through my video announcements and
I want you to think about that and how that adds more social presence to the
class and helps you connect a little bit more with the content that you are
learning about.
So those are two things that will stay consistent with every learning unit.
And then from there, we will have a quick poll -- usually just a real quick
question that I will ask you.
And then we will move into usually a book of some type that I have written
reflecting on some of the content, reviewing some of the online learning
literature, and digging into some of the online tools that we will be learning
about and lots of really interesting information that we will be going through.
Ok, so that is the way the course is organized.
Over here on the right is just a real simple calendar and down below are some
upcoming events.
The upcoming events will just highlight things that are due for you.
So, hopefully that will help you stay on top of your due dates.
And if anything looks confusing or not correct, you are welcome to ask a
question in our Q&A Forum or you can shoot me an email about it as well.
I hope that was helpful and I look forward to getting to know each and every one
of you and have a great class!