Preparing and Running Your Workshop
After you have completed your ETLO program, you will be fully prepared to facilitate ETLO workshops. This reading will highlight the support available to you as a graduate of an ETLO program and outline the steps involved in running a successful workshop.
The ETLO Forum
As a graduate of an ETLO program, you will continue to receive ongoing support from ETLO staff as well as access to resources and ideas shared by other members of the ETLO community. This support will take place largely through the ETLO Forum, an ongoing forum for program participants who are facilitating online professional development workshops for educators, teaching virtual school courses, or developing and running their own courses for either educators or students. The purpose of the ETLO Forum is to provide a place where facilitators, instructors, and designers can “meet” and “talk” with others who are involved in the ETLO community and share ideas, questions, reflections and comments about the experience of online teaching and learning. It also serves as a place to get immediate feedback and assistance from trained ETLO staff and facilitators regarding problems or concerns that may arise when you are wrapping up the design of an online workshop or course, instructing virtual school courses, or facilitating online professional development workshops for educators.
Finally, the Forum provides a rich and growing collection of online professional development and virtual school resources, such as recruitment and evaluation materials; facilitation support documents; graduate credit resources; and scheduled synchronous chat sessions on topics of interest to the ETLO community.
Running Your ETLO Workshop
Scheduling Your Workshops
As part of the Facilitating and Implementing Online Professional Development program, you and (if you are working on a team) your fellow team members will choose a workshop to facilitate or co-facilitate. Your local coordinators will submit your workshop requests online before your workshops can be made available. As you schedule your workshops, consider your school calendar and vacations and any outside obligations your participants may have. Also consider the best day to begin your sessions. ETLO has had a great deal of success beginning workshop sessions on Wednesdays and ending them on Tuesdays. This allows participants to use the weekend to get caught up on coursework and discussion postings. You may choose to start on any day of the week that you feel will be most effective for you and your participants. We recognize that in some circumstances you may need to change the dates or facilitators for your workshops. If your plans do change, we need to know at least five days beforehand. Your local coordinator may enter any changes using the online workshop submission form. Please do not contact ETLO staff members directly to make these changes.
Requesting Additional Workshops after your Initial Training
Once you have completed the Facilitating and Implementing Online Professional Development program, you are qualified to be a workshop facilitator and are welcome to run additional workshops at any point. There is a fee associated with doing this, and you will need to contact ETLO in advance to ensure that your workshop is copied and prepared in time. For a current list of fees, please check the ETLO website ( or contact Joyce Balich at .
Preparing to Facilitate your Workshop
Getting Started
Once your local coordinator has successfully requested your workshop, you can sit back and relax until your start date approaches. Workshops that are run on ETLO’s Blackboard or Moodle server are created on a regular schedule, and yours will be made available to you approximately six to eight weeks before your scheduled start date. You will receive an email from an ETLO staff person when your workshop is available. If your workshop will be run on your organization’s own course management system, your local coordinator will be in touch with you when your workshop is ready.
Personalizing ETLO Workshops
When you facilitate an ETLO workshop, you will have Instructor privileges and can therefore enroll your participants and personalize the workshop for your organization. Please remember, however, that the only area you can modify is Local Material. All other areas are copyrighted! Copyright also extends to the look and feel of ETLO workshops. Therefore, you should not change button styles, colors or the banner. If you have any questions about copyright issues, please contact Joyce Balich at or your ETLO facilitator.
Recruiting Participants
One of the most important components of running your workshop or course is the participant recruitment process. How your organization recruits will depend largely upon your target audience and organization’s goals. For instance, if you plan to run an online workshop for high school math teachers, your recruitment strategies may be different from those for a workshop on Internet resources open to any teacher in your organization. As an individual facilitator, you may or may not play a direct role in recruiting participants. If you do, ideally, you should work with your team coordinator and organization leaders to identify a committed group of participants. In the ELTO Forum you will find a sample brochure for marketing ETLO workshops within your own organization, which might be helpful in your recruiting efforts. Remember that there will always be a small number of course members who are unable to participate at the last minute. To account for this, you may want to register extra participants from the outset. (For instance, if your target class size is 20, you will probably want to recruit and register as many as 25 participants.) Please note that you may not enroll more than 30 participants in an ETLO workshop.
Publicity
Think about how your organization will advertise workshops so that participants are aware of what will be offered and when. In the past, organizations have done this by advertising online professional development offerings either in their printed professional development catalogs or on their websites. Many organizations also mail professional development catalogs to teachers during the summer before the academic year. You will find a collection of brochures, letters, and other publicity materials from participating organizations in the ETLO Forum.
Incentives and Compensation
Incentives and accountability go hand-in-hand in online teaching and learning. It is important to balance the need to hold participants accountable for their work with the need to provide compensation for the time they spend. Our research has shown that facilitators and participants who received incentives from their organizations showed increased motivation and participation, and successfully completed workshop or course final products. Many organizations have arranged to provide Professional Development Points (PDPs) or Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for facilitators and participants based on the number of hours spent. Other organizations have formed partnerships with local colleges and universities to offer graduate credit for ETLO workshops and/or courses they have developed. ETLO has a collection of syllabi for our workshops which are available for you to use for this purpose. They are located in the Workshop Syllabi section of the ETLO Forum and in the Overview/Goals section of each workshop (accessible from the left hand navigation bar). Finally, some organizations have provided local facilitators and participants with stipends or hardware or software for classrooms. You should work with your organization to decide whether compensation or incentives should be offered and what this will entail.
Preparing Yourself
Once the work of advertising and registering participants is done, you will need to turn your attention to planning. If you have any questions about the pre-workshop period, this is an ideal time to get involved in the ETLO Forum or to contact ETLO staff. If you registered to receive graduate credit for the practicum associated with one of the ETLO programs, you will receive a separate email from the course instructors detailing the practicum requirements.
Getting to Know (and Love!) Local Tech Support
Hopefully, you and the other members of your ETLO team will already have established a good working relationship with your organization’s technology department by the time you start preparing to facilitate. However, the month before your workshop or course begins is a good time to reacquaint yourself with the networking and infrastructure technical support staff in your organization so that they can be prepared to answer any questions you may have. This should also give you enough time to find out about any upcoming changes that might affect you or your participants and your ability to access the course site. As you know, the technical demands of facilitating or taking an ETLO workshop are minimal, but occasionally there are cases where local tech support is needed. You will probably want to have handy the name and number of a specific technical support staff member to whom you can refer participants if they encounter problems.
Preparing Your Workshop
If you are facilitating and ETLO workshop and we have notified you that your workshop is ready, you are encouraged to explore it, update your personal information, and begin enrolling your participants. The ever-changing nature of the Web makes it a good idea to check the links in the first one or two sessions before you get started. You can report any broken links using the form at the bottom of each session page.
Preparing Your Participants
In the week before your orientation begins, you should plan a strategy for preparing your participants. Bear in mind that some participants may be wary of or inexperienced with new technology, so you may need to reassure them as the start date grows closer; you will find some ideas for doing this below.
Making Contact
Prior to your start date, you will need to send a group email to your participants to ensure that everyone is receiving your messages. Be sure to do this the week before the scheduled start date so you have time to track down the correct email addresses of “lost” participants. You will also need to send your welcome message to help participants locate the course website, to inform them of login details, and to provide any other relevant information.
Face-to-Face Meetings
Although ETLO workshops are designed to stand on their own online, many organizations have found that scheduling one or more face-to-face meetings for participants to complement the online program is an effective way of motivating the group and creating a sense of community. This is not essential, but you might consider pre-, mid- or post-workshop/course gatherings. Such meetings can be useful for introducing the course management system, creating and sustaining enthusiasm, answering questions, and recognizing and sharing work. If you schedule face-to-face meetings, make sure to notify participants well in advance.
Sample FAQs for Local ETLO Workshop Participants
This Sample FAQ is meant to be edited by ETLO Facilitators for use in their locally-run ETLO workshops. Feel free to use any or all of the information provided, edit the content, and/or add additional questions and answers to reflect your local program needs. Once you have modified the FAQ to suit your local needs, you can share it with your workshop participants via email, by distributing it at a face-to-face meeting, or by posting it in your workshop.
Q. What are the prerequisites for this workshop?
A. Participants in this workshop are expected to have regular access to computers. In addition, participants should be proficient with using email, browsing the Internet, and navigating to computer files. (Add other minimum technology requirements here, based on your workshop.)
Q. How much time should I expect to spend on the workshop every week?
A. Most participants are able to complete all of the assignments and discussion board requirements in 2-4 hours per week. It’s a good idea to get in the habit of checking the discussion board at least every 2-3 days, and scheduling specific periods of time each week to dedicate to the workshop, just as you would in a face-to-face professional development workshop.
Q. How will my work be evaluated?
A. Participants in this workshop are expected to complete all assignments, including active participation in the discussion board and completion of the final product. (Additional evaluation measures may be determined locally.)
Q. Do I have to read every post in the discussion board?
A. In this workshop, the discussion board and interaction with other participants is at the heart of the learning process. It is very important to read and contribute to the discussion board every week. If your schedule occasionally does not permit you to read every post, just try to read as many as you can. Your facilitator will also summarize each week’s discussion as a reference for you at the end of each session.
Q. What if I feel I don’t have anything new to add to the discussion?
A. Your contributions are valuable, even if you are simply offering an example from your own classroom experience to affirm what someone else has said. The act of posting and engaging in discussion will keep you involved and spark others to respond to you.
Q. How long will I have access to the workshop?
A. Workshops are available for one year following their end date. Feel free to return to the workshop to review the discussions and resources after it has been completed.
Q. Is it possible to receive graduate credit or PDPs for participating in this course?
A. (To be determined locally.)
Wrapping Up Your Workshop
Providing Closure for Yourself
As the last week of your workshop approaches, you’ll need to prepare yourself for the task of closing and saying goodbye.
Wrapping Things Up in the Course Management System
As your workshop or course enters its final days, there are a number of details you’ll need to attend to in order to officially close out your online classroom. First, you’ll need to remind participants to take the final survey. This survey will help you evaluate the success of the workshop. You may also want to post an announcement congratulating your participants on their successful completion of the curriculum. If your participants are posting their final products in the discussion board or group areas, be sure to download these files to your own machine so that you can archive and exhibit these products within your program or organization. Finally, when your workshop ends, email your group to let them know that you appreciate all of their accomplishments.
Self-Evaluation
Whether and how you conduct a formal self-evaluation of your performance as a facilitator will depend largely upon how your organization has decided to assess your online professional development program. However, even if you are not required to complete a formal evaluation, you will want to build time into your schedule to reflect on your experience and on your successes and challenges, particularly if you plan to facilitate additional online workshops and courses in the future. Many facilitators and participants also find that their experiences online inform their classroom teaching practices and administrative approaches.
Recognition and Commendation
After the discussions have ended and you have collected and provided feedback on final products, you may want to recognize all of the time and effort that participants have put into the online workshop. ETLO provides a Workshop Certification of Completion Template which you may elect to use/modify and distribute to your local workshop participants. Participants will also appreciate having an opportunity to share their work, be it online or off. A face-to-face follow-up session can provide an ideal opportunity for presenting certificates of participation and acknowledging the hard work participants have put into the workshop or course; however, this is an extremely important component of the online learning experience even if you do not plan to hold a gathering.
Follow-Up Sessions
Many facilitators choose to hold face-to-face follow-up sessions at the close of the workshop to provide a venue for displaying and recognizing work and to allow participants to meet one another and socialize offline. If you plan to end your workshop with such a gathering, be sure to schedule this well in advance, and have a clear idea of what the follow-up session’s objectives will be and how you will schedule activities.
Program Evaluation
Just as with any professional development activity, it is important for you and your team to work together to assess the impact of the learning experience on participants. In addition, the online professional development medium is still relatively new, so it is helpful to collect feedback that can be used to refine the online environment and the nature of the experience.