ocTEL starts today. Like the English first class cricket season, which begins tomorrow, play gets under way at the civilised hour of 11.00 British Summer Time. Like cricket, it’s best if you don’t rush.
We’ve put a lot of planning and preparation into the course, but we’ve retained a lot of flexibility and minimal central control. So when 900 people starting using multiple discussion channels, things are going to happen that we probably haven’t prepared for. Please give us your feedback, and sometimes a little of your patience as well, when this occurs.
We’ve deliberately stretched the first induction module to be more than a week long. Hopefully that means you can take your time. If you get stuck or confused at any point, you have time to recover without feeling pressured. The main thing in this first session is to get a feel for the different ways of communicating with each other and with the course. With that in mind, here’s an introductory screencast about how to login (more help here). Thanks to Martin Hawksey for this — Martin has built pretty much all of the course infrastructure.
Consultant and occasional writer, based in London. Chartered Pscyhologist and CMALT. Overall co-ordinator of ocTEL.
If you are interested in crowdsourcing the building of related course materials and templates for one another, join up at
Using Google Apps as a Free LMS
https://plus.google.com/communities/110147344160609001644
Please STOP the intro emails! Have just returned from leave to an overflowing inbox. Overwhelmed.
Hello M, We’ve posted some advice on how to remove the pressure on your inbox in the FAQ (and, as I’ve acknowledged in more detail elsewhere, we should have set the email discussion list to ‘digest mode’ by default, so apologies for the overflow).
David
What do I expect from the course?
To exceed my expectations at the start
Towards the end of the first week it seemed to be doing this 🙂
Two things that have impressed me the most are the interactions with the other course participants and the other is the speed with which feedback about the course is taking positive effect.