Progress?

I have been thinking this last week about Assignment One and what is the best way to go about it. I also have been reading with interest Sarah and David's blogs and what their thinking is shaping up to be.
I think it is extremely hard to completely do away with some face to face interaction course such as Psychology in Occupational Therapy. Ot's are expected to work with people one on one and probably about 75% of their work involves that nebulous 'non-verbal' part of human interaction. This includes the subtle nuances of body language, reading patients fear and joys, seeing an environment and how best the occupational practice might enhance 'occupation'.
I have therefore come to the conclusion that blended delivery is probably the path that I will take. I do, however, have a plan which I will develop through my Wiki http://www.wikieducator.org/Psychology_in_Occupational_Therapy.

I must admit that I am a bit in favour of the 'secret squirrel' approach so I will initially develop some solid ground rules. By this I mean a solid foundation of what are course requirements, what equipment is needed, what level of expertise participants must have with soft and hardware ( I might even have a course pre-requisite). I do this because I still see at eight weeks a number of technical and competence problems surfacing in a group of experienced learners.
Next I will establish a solid line of communication and one central method of conducting the course. At the moment I see nothing that is better than Blackboard ( please someone - enlighten me) but participants will be encouraged to have an individual Blog and to be actively involved in group discussion. Indeed, this will be one of the assessment requirements and I will quantify how much is expected. I will also designate one person who is the central point of contact for course concerns with a guarantee that queries will be responded to within 12 hours in business hours.
Assessment will be at three stages. Stage one will be withing four weeks of the course starting and will essentially consist of an informal assessment of work completed so far. It will not count toward a final mark for the course but will encourage participants to complete by giving guidelines as to what they need to learn, what they have done well, where they may look for resource to help them. I have used such an approach in my face to face teaching and found it to be very successful and appreciated by students.
I will have a clearly defined course structure ( more detail in the Wiki) and although there will be some room for flexibility this will be negotiated with the group. Because I am delivering this course to 40+ students I will have to develop some method to overcome this.

As to the content of the course I will provide resource that will encourage students to develop specialist areas of the Wiki which will form part of their assessment. I will also consider having students rate each member of their small group using a specialist scale of have developed for my face to face classes. Although this usually gives an overly optimistic mark it does encourage active participation.

I still have a ways to go but this is my starting point.