Empowering students to design an online activity: case study

The presenter led a postgraduate module where students were on campus for a week, then away for 5 weeks then back for a week. These students were all in full time employment and had very demanding jobs. The aim was to ensure that the two weeks were linked--in some way and that students continued to reflect and learn between the on-campus components, but accepting that their time for learning would be limited. Considering that adult students should be selfdirecting , the students were given the responsibility to decide what commitment they could give and how to use the discussion sites--between on-campus sessions. This is a module entitled Managing People in Healthcare and one of the topics that were covered is the difficulty of communicating online (by email), where you don t have body language or the tone of voice to contextualise the language, so the task reinforced the content of the module.