MOOCow Teaching Online for Beginners TOL4B October 4- November 152013

Who?  

Especially, for higher education faculty who are unlikely to prepare for this transition by taking a full online course themselves and who:

1.  Have already been teaching successfully;

2.  Have little experience with online courses;

3.  Are pressed to teach entirely online or to include more online resources and activities in their courses;

4.  Are busy now and will continue to be busy;  

5.  Care about their students and their students’ learning.

Overall Course Vision

We hope our participants will recognize that in 2013 all who teach and learn online are together exploring and developing new forms of education - the variety and potential of which we are only beginning to see.  

We want our participants to realize that teaching and learning online:

• Does not necessarily mean teaching and learning alone.

• Does not require being even more overworked, giving up your best teaching, or losing meaningful contact with students…

• Can be satisfying and fun.  

We also hope participants will continue after our MOOCow to develop additional online course components and learn even more.  We hope they will begin soon to teach online -  with more confidence, enthusiasm, and awareness of useful resources than when they began our MOOCow

How?

There is a vast variety of tools and resources now available for teaching and learning online.  In this MOOCow we try to select, use, and demonstrate those that are among the easiest to learn, the most reliable and widely accessible, and the least expensive.   We try (and likely sometimes fail) to demonstrate several different good practices with respect to planning and implementation of online courses.  We welcome participants’ constructive criticism.