Manage Your Course

 We cover the facilitation process elsewhere.

Below is a summary of the basic tasks for management of an online course. The process has certain parallels to the face-to-face classroom, where someone must be responsible for erasing the chalkboard, running the slide projector, and passing out the blue books.

Post course materials.

Keep track of when you have scheduled the distribution of the various readings and other materials and see that they are posted on schedule in the appropriate location.

Open and close discussions.

Post regular discussion questions according to your schedule. When you feel that a topic has run its course, close the topic by alerting participants a few days in advance that access to that particular discussion will be terminated or, when you can’t control access, make the next topic the new focus.

Organize messages.

As your course progresses, the number of messages and topics can become unwieldy if you don’t organize them.

As the facilitator, you will undoubtedly perform some of these organizational tasks yourself, especially at the beginning of the course. However, in time you may want to assign some of this work to your students as part of their learning experience.

In either case, capturing completed discussion threads in a file and adding that file to the Web site links is an efficient way of organizing messages and archiving them for future reference. (See “Harvest and Weave.”)

Remove inappropriate messages.

An offensive remark that might pass by with only a few embarrassed titters in a face-to-face classroom becomes a permanent part of the written transcript of your online course. You may have to enforce your discussion guidelines from time to time by removing unacceptable messages.

Whenever you remove a message, for whatever reason, it is good practice to email the original author, attaching a copy of the removed message and explaining why you removed it.