Rapidly Preparing for 6-Week Course Delivery

If you're reading this post, then there's a good chance that you're teaching an online course with the Education Department at Cape Breton University. In December 2023, the Province of Nova Scotia announced a new partnership wtih CBU to help address the need to rapidly prepare new teachers for the province's P12 classrooms (CBU, 2023; Pottie, 2023). In Winter 2024, CBU will be piloting an accelerated 8-month online Bachelor of Education program. CBU has had previous success with the online delivery of 12-week BEd courses during the COVID-19 pandemic (Power & Kay, 2023; Power et al., 2024). This post has been created to share some resources that will help instructors quickly adapt their existing 12-week courses for a 6-week delivery format as part of the new pilot program.

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Adapting Your Syllabus and Pre-Planning for Moodle

It is much easier to create or adapt online teaching and learning resources when you have a plan of attack. I cover pre-planning strategies, including storyboarding and blueprinting, in detail in my eBook Everyday Instructional Design (Power, 2023) (see Chapters 7-16, and Chapter 20). For our purposes, the quickest and easiest way to plan for rapidly converting our existing courses is to start with adapting the course syllabus for a 6-week delivery model. I walk through this process in the following short video demonstration.

Adapting Your Moodle Course for 6-Week Delivery

With your updated syllabus in hand, it is now much easier to figure out how you need to revise your existing Moodle (n.d.) course content from a 12-week format to a 6-week course format. In the following video, I walk through the process of preparing my blank course "shell," and importing my existing content from a previous term.

With my previous course content imported into my new "shell," in this video I demonstrate how I adapt that content for 6-week delivery.

For even more resources on working with Moodle, check out my Moodle Tips and Tricks for Educators playlist (compiled during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Adapting Your Existing Teams Space for Your Live Classes

Just like adapting our existing Moodle course resources, it is much easier to simply reuse the Microsoft Teams (2023) spaces that we have set up from previous terms. This avoids having to recreate or repost all of those useful resources, and having to set up a new "Join Code," and make sure that we have the correct code posted in Moodle for the upcoming term. In this video, I walk through the process of "cleaning things up a bit" so that the Teams space is ready to share with a different group of students, and scheduling recurring live class sessions.

For even more resources on working with Teams, check out my Microsoft Teams Tips and Tricks for Educators playlist (compiled during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Additional Resources

• Moodle Tips and Tricks for Educators (YouTube Playlist)
• Microsoft Teams Tips and Tricks for Educators (Youtube Playlist)
• A Rapid Transition to Online Learning Survival Guide (Blog Post from the COVID-19 Pandemic)
• Everyday Instructional Design: A Practical Resource for Educators and Instructional Designers (Open Access eBook)
• Digital Accessibility Resources from Power Learning Solutions
• Instructional Design Resources from Power Learning Solutions

References

​Cape Breton University (2023, November 30). Province of Nova Scotia Announces New Programs to Educate More Teachers at Cape Breton University. https://www.cbu.ca/newsroom/releases/province-of-nova-scotia-announces-new-programs-to-educate-more-teachers-at-cape-breton-university/

Microsoft (2023). Microsoft Teams: Meet, chat, call, and collaborate in just one place. https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software?rtc=1

Moodle (n.d.). https://moodle.org

Pottie, R. (2023, December 1). Nova Scotia to offer new fast-tracked teacher training from Cape Breton University. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/nova-scotia-to-offer-new-fast-tracked-teacher-training-from-cape-breton-university-1.7046820​

​Power, R. (2020, March 13). A rapid transition to online learning survival guide. [Web log post]. Power Learning Solutions. https://www.powerlearningsolutions.com/blog/a-rapid-transition-to-online-learning-survival-guide
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Power, R. (2023). Everyday Instructional Design: A Practical Resource for Educators and Instructional Designers. Power Learning Solutions. ISBN: 978-1-9993825-8-2. https://pressbooks.pub/everydayid/

​Power, R. & Kay, R. (2023). Higher Education Faculty Supports for the Transition to Online Teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Educational Informatics, 4(1), 49-72. https://journalofeducationalinformatics.ca/index.php/JEI/article/view/191

Power, R., Kay, R., & Craig, C. (2024). The Effects of COVID-19 on Higher-Education Teaching Practices. International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education, 38(2).