Advocates Online Course

(Cross-posted on theAd4dcss blog)

As ad4dcss (Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success) has been up and running now for several weeks, it’s time to really get moving on the online professional development course that we have decided to create. This course will be a free moodle course (generously hosted on one of Professional Learning Board’s sites - full disclosure: I do consulting work for PLB) but we haven’t gotten past adding our names to a list of willing volunteers - this needs to change! I’m currently working on getting the volunteers added to the course so we can begin building it, but there needs to be a LOT of discussion before we can start. Some of the things that need to be decided are:

1) Who is the audience for this course? Teachers, parents, community members, administrators, everyone?
2) Will the course be self-study or will we have volunteers facilitating it?
3) What’s the curriculum?
4) Will there be some form of recognition upon course completion?

These are just some of the things that the we need to discuss - all of which need to be figured out before course-building can begin. I would like to have a real-time, preferably voice, discussion on this with at least a portion of the course volunteers in the very near future - getting the 4 things listed above decided is crucial and would best be decided in real-time (I’m thinking Elluminate) meeting.

As with any larger group project, certain people will rise to the top as leaders and certain people would rather hang back and do the behind-the-scenes work. I completely understand this (and depending on the project, settle into either group) and hope that at least a few of the volunteers will be willing to attend a meeting (or if unable to attend, provide copious input beforehand) - I can NOT make these decisions on my own for the group as a whole as this is much larger than me and my knowledge-base or agenda.

What can YOU do?

1) If you haven’t already, add your name to the course planning wiki page so we know who to contact for planning
2) Add your input in the comments here if you don’t wish to work on the course itself
3) Add your input to the discussion area on the course planning wiki page
3) Attend a meeting (to be announced soon)
4) Join the new Moodlers Diigo group (I just created it yesterday) to share resources for Moodle course creation with the course developers - these can be general moodle resources, not necessarily specific to this course

I’m also trying to determine the best way to communicate with course developers and volunteers - suggestions would be more than welcome! Right now the course planning page is part of the larger ad4dcss wiki page, so messaging within the wiki ends up going to the entire group. I’m thinking of setting up a separate wiki for this project………again, input on this would be appreciated! You can comment on that here as well.

If for some reason you need to contact me directly about this, you can email me at kolson29 at gmail dot com, but it would be best to have all input out in the open so the rest of the group can see it.

Let’s move on this!