Otago Polytechnic/Educational Development Centre/Assignments

There are 3 assignments designed to ensure you study the material, communicate with others and have the opportunity to put into practice what you learn. These assignments are what is used for assessment - should you require formal accreditation.

Assignment 1: Your course blog
Set up or use an existing blog for this course. Your blog will represent your online presence and efforts, and will be a key communication tool. Your finished blog will be used as evidence for assessment.

Follow the course schedule, read the assigned material, complete all tasks, participate in events, and post notes to your blog for each topic in the schedule. You should also post progress reports on your assignments. Title and tag your posts so that facilitators, assessors and other participants can easily locate your work. The common tag word for the course is FOC09. To keep up with the contributions of other participants, you may wish to set up an (RSS) news reader and subscribe to their blogs. This will assist you in learning from the work of others.

Your blogging should demonstrate your understanding of the topics, tasks and events, and should include original thoughts, synthesis and references to the work of others. Don't just summarize readings or events. Making connections between the weekly topics, or previous blogging (of your own or of other participants) is strongly encouraged.

Assignment 2: Facilitate an online event
Plan for and facilitate an online event for the /course mini conference/. Your task is to identify a topic of interest expressed by participants in this course. You are to arrange for a guest speaker, panel or other online activity and facilitate that event as part of a series of events by other participants. You will need to negotiate with the guest speaker/s, arrange times and locations, promote and document the event and facilitate attendance and delivery. You will coordinate your session with others in this course so that together, and you will field inquiries and handle technical issues during your session. The course facilitator will coordinate the week 9 conference over all.

The following plan might help you to prepare:

After you have established an event which you will facilitate, create a plan of how you will facilitate it. Include things like:
 * Title for the session
 * The aim of the session
 * Promotions for the session (contact list, flier, bios, summary)
 * Key links for the event, dates and times, background information, and discussion starters
 * A description of technical support services available
 * A contingency plan for technical problems, poor or over attendance, and other disruptions
 * An indication of whether recording will be done and where it will be made available after the event