Week 2 - Introduction

Welcome to the second week of FLO! This week we are exploring the theme of building community, a key component of a successful online learning experience. You will have opportunities to:

• Recognize the relationship between community, presence, and effective learning, especially as they relate to learning in online environments;
• Relate the Community of Inquiry framework to online learning communities;
• Recognize facilitation strategies that develop social and teaching presence; and
  
• Reflect on strategies for engaging learners in an online learning community.

This week also kicks off the peer facilitation component of FLO, so the week will look a little different to last week. The week is divided into two parts:

• Learning activities (Monday – Thursday): In the first half of the week, you will be guided through a series of learning activities by a team of your peers. Good luck, peer facilitators!
• Reflection activities (Friday – Sunday): In the second half of the week, we zoom out to take a “meta” view of the peer facilitation, offering our feedback to the peer facilitators and our reflections on what we have learned about facilitating learning online. Note that this portion of the week will follow the same format every week.

Before we move into the activities for this week, we invite you to begin reflecting on these concepts: community; human and non-human connections; and relatedness. The TEDxUManitoba video below is titled What Does an Indigenous University Look Like? The video features Niigaanwewidam (James) Sinclair who shares with us a story of connectedness, relatedness, and community. We invite you to get comfortable with a glass or cup of your favourite beverage as you view this video in preparation for the week's activities.

Video length (17:41 mins.)

The importance of diversity and inclusion in online communities

Many factors contribute to increasing diversity in today's classrooms, including global population mobility, internet communications, and knowledge economy demands for lifelong learning. In Canada, more domestic students now access post-secondary education, our international student population is booming, and with the progress of Truth and Reconciliation, we are also enjoying an increase in Indigenous student participation (Universities Canada, 2017). With over 200 immigration-based ethnicities, English (or French) is often a second or additional language for domestic as well as international students (StatCan, 2016). In addition, as Tony Bates (2015) notes, the student average age is also increasing due to the fact most students now need to work at least part time to meet expenses. Learners need flexibility to meet competing life demands, thus often look to online learning options. While student prior knowledge, experience, learning goals, and contexts are still the key characteristics to pay attention to (Bates, 2015), students will be looking to educators for mentoring, support, and flexibility to navigate the dramatic changes in today's learning conditions.

Activities this week

There are a number of activities to complete this week, so please refer to the Course schedule  for a complete list of what needs to be completed. In general, please complete activities sequentially in the order that you see them on the course page. Look out for a kick-off post by your peer facilitators in the Announcements (Peer facilitators) forum first thing Monday morning! If you have any questions, please post in the Open forum (Class) or send your FLO facilitators an email.

Good luck peer facilitation team! 😊

(Photo by John Schnobrich  on Unsplash )

[Note for FLO facilitators: We recommend you include an audio option for the text above here if using a platform that does not have an audio feature built in. Remove this note before offering starts.]