Considerations

• Ensure the tutorial has a focused topic.
• Plan activities that are simple, short, focused, and learner centric.
• Plan an opening icebreaker- it could be personal introductions or a more structured exercise. Plan the icebreaker to make sure that students  are comfortable with the Collaborate features and understand the etiquette. As the weeks progress the icebreaker can shift from a more introductory/’getting sorted out’ emphasis to something more substantial - perhaps a recap or quiz question that relates to information from the previous week’s Collaborate session.
• Plan activities that assess student understanding of the content studied at home, particularly activities that extend and reinforce what they were set to learn that week. You could also plan activities towards the end of the module that are useful for revision purposes, for the whole or part of the unit or module. Plan activities that allow peer-to-peer and student-to-lecturer sharing and encourage comments and discussion.
• With a little creativity and thinking time, you can convert almost all your classroom exercises to an online format. For example, groups can work on the Collaborate whiteboard while they discuss a problem in a similar way that they would use a whiteboard in the classroom to complete a collaborative exercise.
• Avoid slipping into the broadcast mode of delivery where you are ‘delivering a lecture’ rather than allowing the students to participate in active learning.
• Plan in prompts for discussions and use these to introduce new topics, encourage feedback and bring ‘off-topic discussions’ back ‘on-topic’. However, this is a balancing act; try not to over ‘manage’ the student discussion with too many prompts and interrupts but still keep students focused on the topic.
• Plan so that you do not have situations where you ask (particularly in a quiet class) an open-ended question and receive complete silence from the class! This is where the polling tool is useful as it forces the tutor to frame questions with succinct answers so, for example, if a tutor is not getting much discussion or feedback from an open discussion question, they could re-frame it and insert a poll into the session to start drawing out the students and getting them to participate.

At the start of class where the open-ended question is asked “Has everyone read the week 1 home learning content?” and there is silence, change the question to an instruction and give it at the previous class for example, “Read chapter 8 and I want each of you to tell me at the start of next class, what you felt was the most important factor in the case study.” Then at the start of the next lesson ask each person for their factor. This will soon sort out who has not read the material as well.

• Combine Collaborate sessions with other tools (e.g. email, wiki, discussion fora), to run shorter concluding live discussions, following lengthier asynchronous collaborative working.
• Experiment with break out rooms to split larger cohorts into smaller (more manageable) peer learning groups.  This is the ideal setting for a micro teaching session for each group.  This approach exemplifies the necessary ‘learner centric’ pedagogies crucial for effective use of Collaborate.
• If you are finding it hard to juggle the moderator role  of taking care of all the practical button pushing, with the tutor role of directing and facilitating the activities, try experimenting with having a nominated student to assist with the moderating task. If trying this approach, practice at least once before any sessions.
• Accept that some things are not going to work or work every time so discuss with your students and peers why something may not have worked and how you can improve it.
• Design your session with some sort of student activity every 5-10 minutes. In a tutorial session of one hour for example, this may mean planning around 6 activities or so, depending on their length. If you do have to present material, try not to present more than 10 to 15 minutes of content at one time without some sort of interaction, sharing of experiences, or group activity.