Assessing Readiness of online learners

R U ready???
Is anyone ready to learn??

In Activity 1.5 for ocTEL 2014  the question is asking about assessing readiness to be an online learner. This question comes at the perfect time for me... since our college and my educational technology team is working on the Instructional Design for a proposed course on How to be a good online learner.

This tends to be an interesting aspect that I hear often from students. "I'm ready to be an online learner. It can't be that hard." Online readiness engages many aspects such as motivation, organization, technical skills, time, and engagement. I think it is important that we address each of the areas with the online learners. I think it is imperative that we experience the online learning process prior to teaching an online learner. In our college, we have the faculty participate in a professional development course revision workshop as a student -- with all the good and bad pedagogy that occurs. I will state that we do stress to the participants that they will get both good and bad experiences, however we want them to learn from this experience, so when they are teaching online, they can avoid the common issues. This technique seems to work with our faculty.