Facilitating Online Learning Program

About

The Facilitating Online Learning is a professional development program for University of Melbourne staff with teaching-related responsibilities. It provides an introduction to the guiding principles of effective teaching for learning in blended and online environments. The program is based around forming a Community Of Inquiry (COI) exploring the Scholarship Of Technology Enhanced Learning (SOTEL) to inform online learning design using a Design-Based Research (DBR) methodology.

The program explores the general principles of designing for learning and applies these to the online context to consider what it means to become an online teacher and how the community of inquiry framework can be applied to develop teaching, cognitive and social presence. The program also explores a critical analysis of the key elements of effective, student-centred approaches in blended and online learning environments, including the flipped classroom, the design and facilitation of learning tasks, discussion board activities, feedback and assessment.

The Facilitating Online Learning program is evidence based, drawing on published research in the field, and also provides opportunities for participants to apply learnt skills by writing a proposal for, and creating a LMS mock-up of, a blended or fully online unit to use in their particular teaching and learning context.

Suitable for

This program is for academic teaching staff at the University of Melbourne:

  • Lecturers
  • Subject coordinators

Intended learning outcomes

At the completion of the Facilitating Online Learning program, participants should be able to:

  • Demonstrate a critical understanding of the guiding principles of effective teaching for learning in blended and online environments, including pivotal research informing these principles;
  • Apply these principles to the design and development of best practice units or programs, within specific disciplinary contexts;
  • Critically analyse and appraise key elements of student-centred approaches in blended and online learning environments.

Program schedule

The Facilitating Online Learning is a semester-long program involving online assessments and webinar/discussion sessions.

On successful completion of the program and assessment tasks participants will receive a Certificate of Completion.

Registration

The program is not offered in 2022.

Enquiries

Program content

Associate Professor Thomas Cochrane, Program Coordinator
cochrane.t@unimelb.edu.au

Registration

Dina Uzhegova, Program Officer
dina.uzhegova@unimelb.edu.au