As a course designer who is training to be a course facilitator for TRU-OL, this first course, concerned as it has been with design elements has been stimulating and frustrating.
I find it exciting to consider how courses can be designed to focus on the needs of learners, so that students don’t waste time in activities that are unproductive in terms of the goals and assessments that pertain to the course at hand.
However, the course I am about to teach for TRUOL has already been designed. Learning objectives may or may not be aligned with the activities and assessments that I will need to encourage students to complete. And I have no control over this. The optimist in me believes that the course that has been designed has attended to this value, but the realist in me knows that some designers have constructed courses along very different lines from the constructivist-collectivist model of learning. To anticipate establishing a community of inquiry (COI) in a course and to find that students are expected to complete the course individually and with little interaction and/or collaboration would be disappointing at the least.