It's a while since I had the time - or the reason - to add to this design log for the Teaching in English course. We've been waiting for the final decisions to be made about the allocation of resources to all our courses this autumn, and there's not much point in going further until we know how many places, how many hours and who's in the course team.

I've just received most of that information … so now we're on our way.

The department has officially decided to allocate 50 places to the course this autumn, 25 of which will be offered to the 'international' applicants, who applied by 15th January and 25 to the 'Swedish' applicants who applied by 15th April. I've been allocated 80 hours for my activities on this course, and the other two members of the course team are Jean Stevenson-Ågren and Sheila Feldmanis (who both happen to be Scottish). Jean and Sheila are established members of our department (i.e. they've both got tenure), and they both have a lot of experience teaching language skills and ESP. As far as I know, however, neither of them have ever even been into Second Life, so it'll be interesting so see how they get on as newbies. I need to check with Jean and Sheila how many hours they've been allocated to teach this course too. I've worked with both of them before with both online and IRL courses, and they're both familiar with online working, using Adobe Connect and Moodle. One slight complication is that we're upgrading our Moodle server this summer and changing all our Moodle sites to Moodle 2.4 (from 1.9), which could be an advantage - or a disadvantage.

We're going to be working until 24th June and then we all have 35 working days of holiday, which means that we'll be officially back at work on 12th August (which is week 33 the way we reckon week numbers). We won't be starting the course until at least week 37, though. I've suggested to Jean and Sheila that we start the process of getting the course ready as soon as we can. We're going to need quite some time to be able to work together in SL, and I may well ask partners to help induct Jean and Sheila into working in the environment. A trip through the environments used by people like Gerhilde & Claus, Hanna and Robin (and others) could be a good early event.

It's a really busy time of year at the moment … but it feels good to be finally getting down to work.