Professional Development for Distance Educators

New-to Distance Workshop

This two hour workshop is for people who have not taught a distance course previously or have not had to develop one. The New-to-Distance workshop introduces you to how distance learning happens at Otago. It explores five areas of critical importance to effective distance courses and provides a brief and easy introduction to them. The areas are:

• Learning goals and content: Preparing good instructional materials, “why” and “how” are as important as “what”.
  
• Interactions: Facilitating interactions and engaging students, especially online, but with technologies too.
  
• Assessment and evaluation: What’s special about assessment in distance education? And how do you manage it?
  
• Instructional media, tools, and technologies: It’s so hard to choose! What should I use, and how should I use it?
  
• Learner and course services and support: … but they are independent learners, surely they don’t need support! Well, do they? And if so, how do we best provide it?
  

The New-to-Distance workshop will be run two times in 2020. Normally, the workshop, tailored to suit your needs, will be run via Zoom, but a face-to-face workshop or discussion can be arranged for a group or individual. 

Contact the Distance Learning Office.

DISTAID Programme

Those of you involved with distance teaching may be interested in the DISTAID programme: an opportunity for you to engage in an extended professional development experience.

DISTAID, as a professional development activity,works by supporting your:

Distance teaching, through your
Investigation of the
Services and support,
Tools and technologies,
Assessment and evaluation,
Interactions, and
Design
of your courses.

Programme components

Topics are organised around five core areas that are critical to distance education. The addition of an introductory workshop completes the set of 6 workshops making up the DISTAID programme:

Introduction to DISTAID: Making a change in distance teaching

• DISTAID 1 - Course  DESIGN for distance papers
• DISTAID 2 - Engaging your students and INTERACTING at a distance
  
• DISTAID 3 - Choosing and using TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES in distance education
• DISTAID 4 - Supporting learning and teaching through ASSESSMENT of distance student work
• DISTAID 5 - Get them and keep them! SUPPORTING distance students (and you)
  

All workshops will be run using Zoom in 2020, so you can participate from wherever you happen to be at the time. Keep an eye on the Distance Learning  online booking page for dates and registration details.

Carpe Diem Kia Tū, Kia Māia - A two day workshop for people planning to (re)design a paper to be taught at a distance and/or in Summer School

The practical workshop aims to provide you with an opportunity to redesign your papers in order to gain maximum teaching and learning benefit from the core digital environment that the University provides for staff and students. The workshop will focus strongly on rethinking how teaching and learning occur in a primarily digital environment in your programme and its constituent papers. It will involve staff from the Library, ITS e-Learning team, instructional design expertise, and Distance Learning.

Please discuss this process within your programme team. 

More information about this programme and planned dates for 2020 can be found here.