I’m in Singapore for the 2015 World Confederation for Physical Therapy Congress, which is the largest gathering of physiotherapists in the world. I’ve never been to a WCPT Congress before, so I’ve really been looking forward to this for a while now.
Tomorrow I’m presenting a half day course with Tony and Rachael Lowe from Physiopedia, called “Creating open online courses“. We’re going to try and figure out, together with participants, if there’s a place for these kinds of online (or blended) courses in formal physiotherapy education. I believe that it was one of the first courses to sell out at the conference, so there’s definitely an interest in the topic.
We’ve set up our workshop so that the major concepts we’d like to cover are presented, not as PowerPoint slides but as an online course that anyone can work through (see image below). We included our topics, learning outcomes, content overviews and resources on the wiki at Physiopedia, as well as set up a shared online workspace in Google Drive. Course participants will work through the topics in small groups, using the topics in the online course as inputs for discussion, and then collaboratively document what they are thinking and learning during the course. We will act as facilitators and guides, presenting the initial concepts, adding a few thoughts from our own experiences and then facilitating group discussions. We thought that this might be an interesting approach (for this topic in particular) where instead of participants simply being introduced to the concepts involved in open online learning, they actually work in that space themselves.
It’s a bit of an experiment so we’d really like to hear comments and feedback, not only from course participants but anyone else at the Congress who thinks that this might be a useful way to run future workshops. The hashtag for the workshop is #wcptooc, so please feel free to send a comment or question, whether you’re signed up for the course or not. We’d love to be able to incorporate thoughts and ideas from people who aren’t in the room.
On a related but separate note, part of the reason for me being here is also a funded research visit to try and set up meetings with potential collaborators for our International Ethics Project. If you’re interested in collaborating on an international research project that aims to develop and run a course in professional ethics across multiple institutions, I’d love to hear from you (there’s a Contact page on the site).