Reflections after a crazy week 2!

Well, week 2 is designed to be challenging, but this was particularly so, both for participants and tutors!!

The VLE system being on downtime unexpectedly for a full day last Tuesday, and yesterday morning, have added significantly to existing difficulties the teams experienced in their group activities. This meant that we needed to extend the deadline for the group activity, and as tutors we have needed to increase our input significantly over the weekend to try to support the teams effectively.

As a tutor, before running a course in the future, I will be extra careful to try to find out about any scheduled downtime, and to find out if there is any possibility of unscheduled downtime too! I'm not sure how easy it will be to avoid such problems occurring in the future, but I will be discussing this tomorrow with senior staff in OCSLD to see if there is any action we can take.

The two groups experienced many challenges in completing their task - relating to technical issues (accessing their wikis as well as accessing the VLE), the challenges of communicating in an asynchronous forum, planning for the task, and co-ordinating activities and contributions. The challenges of trying to work as a team in a short time frame have been particularly clear - more-so than usual due to the limited VLE access during the week.

Unsurprisingly, the group task this week has brought about a variety of frustrations for all concerned, as indicated in participants' reflections on week 2. However, these reflections suggest that people feel they have learned a lot from this week, which I hope will help them to plan and design online activities realistically in their future work as online tutors.

I hope that now everyone can take a deep breath and move into week 3 with renewed energy!