Are you thinking about your Semester 2 FLO topics yet? The Online Learning and Teaching (OLT) team are and would like to encourage all Topic Coordinators to give them some thought too.
Pretty soon we’ll be in touch about how you want your S2 FLO topic sites set up so it pays to be aware of some key dates:
- 13 May: Teaching teams get access to the S2 FLO topic sites.
- 12 July: Last day to set up S2 shared topics.
- 22 July: Students get access to their S2 FLO topic sites.
- 29 July: S2 teaching starts.
What you need to do:
- If you’re a Topic Coordinator (as listed in the Student Management System), keep a look out for an email during the first week of May.
- Complete and submit the online form with details of any topic preparations you want completed, including setting up shared topics.
If you don’t respond within two weeks of receiving the email, eLearning teams will copy content from the previous teaching site.
You will receive a confirmation email when your topic has been ‘rolled over’.
For non-semester (NS) topics, with non-standard start dates, requests should be sent no later than two (2) weeks prior to the start of teaching.
Topic has been rolled over, now what to do?
This is a window of opportunity (mid-May to mid-July) to cull, tidy up and generally make your new topic site more usable from a student and teacher perspective.
If you have lots of items hidden in your topic, students won’t see them, but you / other teachers will, and it can be tedious working in a topic site that you need to wade through to make sense of. This clutter also makes it difficult for new teaching staff who teach into your topic.
If you are a topic coordinator, this is the time to think about your topic’s design / redesign – content, activities leading to assessment, and support resources. College Learning Designers can help advise on this process of renewal. Use Service One to set up a meeting.
So why not look at rollover time as an ‘autumn clean’?
- What is unnecessary?
- What can be improved, or discarded?
- What needs updating? (eg out-of-date resources, activity dates / settings, broken links)
- Is there something that didn’t work recently that you want to rethink?
- How can you incorporate feedback from students?
Additional support resources are also available:
Written by David Bain
eLearning Project manager (OLT team)