Forum Discussion
Live Workshop After Students Complete Online Course
Hi there! We have an hourlong live class that meets every week. Before class, the students are supposed to complete the corresponding module before attending class. It's very much set up like a college class. But up until now, the live workshop has just been repeating the content they just learned. What should I do instead to make it more of a discussion and not a lecture?
4 Replies
Hey AngelicaVergara — great question. I actually used to run a similarly structured cohort-based course online for community managers where half the learning materials were more informational and the other half were live discussions meant to be more engaging.
I agree with you that it's probably more useful to introduce an engagement in your live discussions rather than just repeating the material. The basic idea is that you want to make the shift from "learn information" (lecture) to "apply information with scaffolds" (discussion groups) to, eventually, "apply information independently" (achieving mastery in the subject). If I were in your shoes I'd probably approach this with a combo of discussion questions and group work (I used to make a lot of use of breakout rooms to do this!).
I don't know what the subject matter you're working on is, but just to give an example that plays to my experiences, let's say the class is about learning to moderate a community. The 'lecture' might share principles of moderation—understanding and applying community guidelines, typical moderation and enforcement flows, etc—whereas in the discussion I would want to shift to having them apply the information with support ("scaffolds"). So, in this context what I might do is give them a mock community feed and a set of guidelines and have them do a group exercise where they moderate that feed according to the guidelines, and then have a discussion about any places where different groups applied the information differently.
Hopefully this helps get the juices flowing about how you might shift your format, and I would love to hear what you eventually decide to do, or hear more about your subject matter.
I'm also going to tag in a couple of other folks who I know are in the E-Learning space now but were previously college instructors / adult educators who I think might have some great insights to add here.CatRushton (sorry for two tags in one week, Cat, I just know you're so insightful!), TeresaVanderpos, and KelleenStine-Ch. What would you all add?Thank you so much! This was great!
Oh wonderful, so glad it helped! Hopefully you get some good other ideas in there as well :)
At Social Security our training model is similar to this with online task-based objectives designed using action mapping followed by interactive engaging workshops. The workshops often tie together multiple tasks and offer the learners the ability to ask questions and share experiences. This reverse classroom model allows us to get the most out of the gathered time.
