Back to the grindstone

It's now deepest January, though today it's mild and sunny, so I shouldn't really complain. Very soon I'm going to be drafting the syllabus for the course … and then we can get down to business of actually offering it.

More coming soon …

Starting the design of the TIEISL course

One of the principles I work to in course design is to start from the end of the course and work backwards - and I managed to convince Peter to do this too! This means starting with the assessed tasks and then working out what the students need to do in order to perform well at them.

The current result of our discussion is to have three assessed tasks, although one of them will be divided into four parts:

Task 1 is an individual presentation for 20 marks which will concentrate on the technical and psychological factors involved in getting people working in English in Second Life.

Task 2 is a portfolio of four sub-tasks, which will be done at intervals throughout the course. Task 2 will give 4x10 marks.

Task 3 is a group project which will be presented at the end of the course. Task 3 will give 40 marks.

The pass mark limits will probably be 50/100 (Grade E), 60/100 (Grade D), 70/100 (Grade C), 80/100 (Grade B), 90/100 (Grade A), with the Swedish grade G representing D & E and the Swedish grade VG representing A-C.

We're thinking in terms of five 90-minute meetings in world, at roughly two-week intervals, with a Moodle site to hold everything together in the meantime.

All I have to do now is to write a draft of the syllabus - in Swedish!

On-line Meeting with Gavin Dudeney

Peter Carlsson and I had an on-line meeting with Gavin Dudeney, who's been offering courses in Second Life from his base in Barcelona for a while now. Gavin described the way he's set up his two-week course in how to run courses in Second Life, and very interesting it was too. Gavin's course emphasises technical matters a little more than we will, but it's clear that they're important too. It's clear too that we're thinking along the same lines, although we're working in the context of a university system, where everything takes a little longer! It's also very likely that our students will be well-motivated, since we're able to award university credits at the end of our courses.

Among the ideas we want to steal are the treasure hunt at the begin of Gavin's course and the idea of reflecting on expectations at the beginning of the course coupled to reflecting on the development of ideas at the end. With a bit of luck we'll be able to hire Gavin at some time in the next 9 months …

Peter and I then talked about some of the ideas we'd been having … and then headed off to the coffee room after the meeting to begin sketching things out. The next post is about what we discussed.

What is to be done …

Peter Carlsson and I need to get the Swedish syllabus written for submission to our Departmental Management Committee (in Sweden you approve your own syllabuses …). We're going to try to make a start on this before the holidays. It'll be something of a cobbled-together document, but these things usually are. There are all sorts of standard phrases you need to use, so that the 'learning outcomes' don't look too unfamiliar to the people on the committee who we hope will just rubber-stamp the syllabus.

Once there's a syllabus in place, we can get the course advertised on 'studera.nu', which is the on-line system for applications to any Swedish university course … and we're in business!

Actually producing the course comes in second place to this! Actually it's a question of producing the document which unlocks the piggy-bank to give us the money to actually run the course in the autumn.

Welcome to the TIEISL Course Team Blog

Högskolan i Kalmar, a small university in south-eastern Sweden is going to be offering a course called 'Teaching in English in Second Life' in the autumn term of 2009 (starting in mid-September).

This blog will be used by the course team to exchange ideas about what the course should contain and how it should be organised.