Course Syllabus – FLO Design
Welcome to the FLO – Facilitating Online Learning – Design Spring 2019
Course Dates: March 18 – April 28, 2019 – 5 weeks with facilitation (suggested time investment 3 hours/ per week + time for unit design)
Course Instructor: Joerdis Weilandt (with assistance from my Teaching Centre peer in week 2: Dave Adams)
Land Acknowledgement:
I am grateful to be facilitating this course on Kainai land– (Blood tribe of the Niitsítapi = Blackfoot Confederacy), where five First Nations (the Siksika (Blackfoot), Piikani (Peigan), Stoney-Nakoda, and Tsuut’ina (Sarcee)) signed Treaty 7 with white settlers in 1877. Since I moved to Canada, I have been making an conscious effort to decolonize my life and teaching. Learning Blackfoot, making friends, and reading resources like these have been greatly helpful.
Pre-requisites:
An honest interest in high-quality facilitation of online learning is key to success in this course. You should have a basic familiarity with personal computers – without this, the course is too frustrating. You will allow me to differentiate my teaching to better speak to all of your different backgrounds by doing this very brief pre-assessment before you start the course.
Course Enrolment: You can access our course by sending an email to<EMAIL_ADDRESS>I will then enrol you and confirm the enrolment by emailing you soon after.
Course Description:
This course is designed to provide you with a safe space, in which you can formulate your own pedagogical preferences and beliefs about learning. The understanding of different pedagogical approaches will prepare you to design, plan and prototype authentic meaningful learning experiences for your students in your future online courses. To help you see what your future online students will see, you will navigate our online course from the student perspective. This will allow you to become aware of challenges with regards to course navigation, comprehension of goals and instructions, engagement and assessment.
Who is your facilitator?
Call me by my first name – Joerdis (she/ her). I am very excited to be working with you in the next 5 weeks. Being a teacher trainer for teachers of German in all possible educational settings in Northern America (K-12 to Higher Education) as well as an (online) language instructor, allows me to connect with peers and students over vast distances. I have taught in face-to-face classrooms since 2001, but started teaching in the online modality since I came to Canada in 2011.
Most of my professional interactions in my full-time assignment as an educational developer for the UofL Teaching Centre happen face-to-face during the day. However, much of my online (language) teaching takes place in the evenings and/ or on the weekends, when my working students and I are “off” our primary job clocks.
Being a passionate open educator, it’s kind of logical that I do a lot of my own learning online as well. I’ve always had a strong interest in plants and the