The plan for this new, enhanced offering involves the content, the team, the home base, and the promotion of Teaching Adult Learners Online (TALO).

• Enhanced Content – When funded, the current TALO project team will, in consultation with an advisory committee of representatives from other institutions, enhance the existing TALO modules to ensure that they reflect the realities of online and blended learning at all of the province’s post-secondary institutions.
  • The content currently reflects many of the contexts/systems across Ontario’s institutions. For example, Ryerson has already created versions of TALO suitable for users of the Blackboard LMS, as well as the Brightspace D2L LMS.
• Enhanced Team – In addition to the advisory committee who will consult on TALO content, a rotating roster of TALO facilitators will be sourced from participating institutions, to co-facilitate ongoing, cross-institutional offerings of TALO each semester.
  • Representatives from all institutions, who are currently involved in professional development for online instructors, will be invited to serve as facilitators. These could include staff from centres for teaching and learning, computing services units, and/or experienced faculty involved in teaching and learning.
  • In many cases, these facilitation duties, which would be four weeks in duration (10 – 12 hours per week), would not constitute net new work, just re-framing of current/existing elements of individual mandates.
• New “Home Base” – Critical information regarding the cross-institutional TALO offering would be housed in the eCampus Ontario portal, in its already existing “Teaching Resources” area. This area currently serves as a repository for articles, web sites and other helpful information in the area of online learning which have been recommended by representatives of the college and university sectors. 

When running, the course would be delivered in an open source LMS such as Moodle, CourseSites by Blackboard, Sakai, or others – potentially rotating through different a different LMS each semester.

• The current TALO course modules sit in a separate content management system, to which facilitators and participants can easily link from any LMS.

• Coordinated Promotion – The promotional vehicles currently in use for faculty development in Ontario institutions could be leveraged for promotion of TALO. In other words, faculty would learn of TALO from the same sources as they have always learned of professional development opportunities, and be directed from these sites to the eCampus Ontario portal for additional information.

What kind(s) of investment is needed to make this plan a reality? Find out by reviewing The Ask.