Hello Siti and All!
What you have planned sounds really good to me, but it must be tedious to have to travel to regional centres to visit your students? You wrote: “The course I am planning will be a blended mode - some face-to-face sessions with online and printed materials given. The on-line session would be to provide the support and friendship among the students.” I assume that the online activities are there when the students went their separate way. As such, I think your strategy of making use of every opportunity (such as tutorials and discussions) to have the students to know one another better and therefore support each other in virtual space is great!
Are you including the “Post it” activity we did in Week 2 for the first 10 days? I heard of one icebreaker recently where they call it the Martian Stare! Each student jolts down what they s/he thinks of the other ie. favourite car, food, music etc (no sign language or body language allowed) before exchanging information about each other. Apparently it was quite hilarious.
Also I think your allocation of one Emoderator per 10 students is great! Only the cynical me is wondering how long before the administrators clamp down on the budget and have a ratio of 1:20 instead? It is not uncommon in uni. to have a lecturer facilitating 30 p/g students in an online course.
As for fasting, I often wonder how one can manage to abstain from food for so long??? I would not be able to do it! Wow! Hats off to you, Siti!
Thanks Siti, is great to keep in touch
Jenny
Siti wrote at October 27, 2003 06:13 PM
Thought I might give a try and see how you feel about my plan. I plan to have all the students to come in initially to the campus and get to know one another face to face. During the 10 days that they will be on campus, we will get them to identify with each other so that when they go online, they will be able to visualise each other and that may promote greater discussion and participation among themselves.
The course I am planning will be a blended mode - some face-to-face sessions with online and printed materials given. The on-line session would be to provide the support and friendship among the students.
I don't think I have any contingency plan as yet - it will have to be as I progress and as students evaluate the effectiveness of the online course. The blended mode that I will be using will require that I also travel out to meet the students at certain regional centres over a weekend in between the semester. During this time, i will be able to further ensure that they get to know each other as I can plan for tutorials and discussions.
Dear Jenny,
Glad to be of help. Yes, I do agree with you that after a while we may have to deal with more that 10 students - but we will begin with a small number until we get our bearings and also become "good" at moderating students' postings.
It is so true what you say that management will want to maximise the teachers available - so we will eventually be having one teacher to 20 or even 30 students as we progress with the course.
Cheers,
Siti R
Hi Siti
Best wishes for your course. And you will have us here as your sounding board!
P/s: When I was back in Singapore, I used to look forward to my Muslim friends breaking their fast at the end of the month as I get invited to their homes for cookies! So yummy! And we in turn invited them for Chinese New Year. And my Indian friends as well...so I got to celebrate at least 3 "Happy New Years" in a year!
Lucky me!
Jenny
Hi Just thought I'd pop in to say that it's good to see you're all active in this. I miss our interesting sessions but keep finding messages in the course.
See you all again soon.
Hugs to all
Val
Posted by: Val at November 1, 2003 01:01 AM