If you are interested in being an MCLC facilitator please provide us with the information requested below and we will contact you shortly.
If you sign up to be a facilitator please enroll in the course you have signed up for as well in order to familiarize yourself with the course content, organization and progression. Thanks!
You’re invited to host a MOOC-centered learning community (MCLC) for participants in “An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching” and “Advancing Learning Through Evidence-Based STEM Teaching”. As an MCLC Facilitator you can:
Meet with your local community once a week for 60-90 minutes to share and discuss what you’re learning in the online course.
Your community can be part of a credit-bearing course or a non-credit seminar—or just an informal group of colleagues.
Utilize the course facilitator guide that provides suggestions for in-person activities that build on course materials and student interactions.
Connect online with other hosts and facilitators to share ideas for running your local sessions.
42 institutions hosted local learning communities during the Fall 2014 offering of course 1 and 43 hosted MCLCs during the Fall 2015 offering.
• MCLC participants completed the course at 50% higher rate than non-participants and reported they were highly satisfied with their in-person discussions.
Below are some samples of what the facilitators guide that we provide for course 1 looks like:
Table of Contents (PDF)
One Week from the Guide (PDF)
The facilitators guide for both courses will provide you with useful tools including:
Learning goals for each week.
Descriptions of course content (including videos and discussion questions).
Suggested activities for in-person meetings.
And much more information designed to aid you as a facilitator.
Here is what some of last year’s facilitators had to say about their experience:
“The extra accountability made me spend more energy and get more out of the online class. I found it enriching to discuss and process the material with my colleagues, and the discussion was great for me since I designed it.”
“I enjoyed facilitating a LC around the MOOC and the informal discussions that we had in our meetings. We offer a teaching certificate program for grad students and post-docs on campus wishing to pursue future faculty careers, so I was definitely curious to see what content you selected for the MOOC and compare that to the learning outcomes for our program. Running the LC kept me engaged in the MOOC, so that was one of my own selfish reasons for doing it. That said, we also decided to offer the LC b/c our certificate program only runs in the spring and the summer and we the MOOC provided a fall term opportunity for our students. Facilitating the LC was not a lot of work, but led to a good experience for the folks that attended regularly.”
“…The experience of leading this group was very rewarding as our 12 participants found the total experience to be very valuable with the local learning community being an important part, especially for participants with limited teaching experience and opportunities. / / We followed the flipped classroom model of assigning pre-work and an accountability assignment and then leveraged the pre-work during the session. This was a successful model for us as our participants were ready to engage on a common content which may not have been the case if we hadn’t narrowed down the content and/or if we didn’t have the accountability work…”
“I enjoyed the MOOC a lot, as well as running a learning community. Thanks!”
“Discussion was much easier than i originally anticipated. My first session I prepared similarly to other LC’s/classes, but by the second session, the participants were providing the ideas for our discussion – fun.”
90% of people who facilitated an MCLC stated that they would do it again and would recommend facilitating to a colleague!