FOC 2010 Week 5 Reflection

As part of our 'homework' for the course, we are asked to write a reflection on what we have learned over the last 5 weeks, with the following questions as a guide.

• What is online facilitation?
• What skills do you need as an online facilitator?
• How does a facilitator build an online community or network?
• What are the key things to remember when facilitating an event, meeting or education course, especially when working with people who are new to online technology?
• What is the difference between teaching and facilitation?

Some of these questions appear deceptively simple, but I think answering them is probably not easily done in a single blog post, so please forgive me if my responses seem a little superficial...!

My understanding of online facilitation has definitely evolved over the past weeks. At the start of this course I saw the role of the online facilitator as a simple one of preparing a course with online resources, and being available to students as they work through it. I have come to realise that the role is much more complex. It appears to me that the online facilitator weaves multiple roles, including teacher, technology advisor and community builder, together to create a flexible backdrop against which students can construct their own learning. To do this a facilitator needs to be a skilled juggler, crisis manager, multi-tasker and problem solver, unflappable under pressure, ready to step in at any time but confident enough to take a back seat to allow student-centred learning. As if this wasn't enough, an online facilitator probably needs to be a bit of a techie-junkie too, as clearly remaining up-to-date with the latest technologies will be key to successfully facilitating online.

Things to remember when facilitating? I think it would have to plan, plan, plan... and then have a back-up plan, just in case. I haven't actually facilitated a session yet, but my experiences of the elluminate classroom suggest that the sessions that appear most effortless and flow most smoothly are probably carefully planned and strategised beforehand. Being a newbie to any technology can be really intimidating, and so making sure that things run as smoothly as possible seems essential. Giving students time to practise using the technology in a 'safe' way, as Sarah did at the start of this course, was also really helpful. I also like the way that, throughout the course, facilitators have been comfortable admitting that they don't know it all... I think it's really reassuring to a student to see lecturers solving problems collaboratively and without flapping!

The differences between teaching and facilitation are probably more appropriate to a PhD thesis than a brief paragraph in a blog! In one respect, good teaching is facilitation, but the two are not interchangeable, are they? Facilitating implies that one is allowing students to create their own learning using their own pathways, whereas teaching seems more like the old, traditional chalk-and-talk, but it really is all just a matter of semantics. Or is it? Would an online facilitator always teach, or could they simply facilitate the teaching of others. And if so, does that not make them de facto teachers too? I'm looking forward to reading other posts on this topic.

The Value of a Social Media Fan….Priceless

This was tweeted on The Next Web today - a really interesting look at the commercial value of Facebook.

The Value of a Social Media Fan….Priceless

Using discussion forums

I've just caught up with Lorraine Mockford's discussion on facilitating asynchronous learning, which is part of the FOC2010 course. It was interesting to hear her describing her approach to discussion boards, and listening to the discussion helped crystalise some ideas that I have had floating around, but hadn't really tried to formalise.

1. Lorraine talks about having a Week Zero, before the course actually gets going, in which students engage in a mix of synchronous and asynchronous activities in order to facilitate the development of an online community within the group. During the week she does things like getting students to introduce themselves in a  forum post; provide a fact about themselves that she woudl be unlikely to know otherwise; post a favourite link or website, etc. These are all great ideas which would help students overcome their nervousness of posting to a public forum in a pretty non-threatening manner.
2. Lorraine talks about the importance of the lecturer holding back. This makes sense - after all, one is trying to enable the students to develop a community amongst themselves, rather than a series of one-to-one relationships with the lecturer. I have to admit that I have a tendency, when students put up a technical query, to jump in with the solution as quickly as I can, but I think I need to step back and allow the students to help one another instead.
3. She also sets up discussion boards before the course runs, and allocates a specific board to 'off-thread' discussions. This is a great idea as it provides a place for students to share ideas and ask questions without interrupting the flow of a particular discussion.
4. Finally, Lorraine mentioned using rubrics to assess forum posts. This is something we are currently grappling with... assessing forums would make students more likely to post to them (or would it?) but then it does detract from the spontaneity and the community aspects of a discussion forum. I'd be really interested to know what other people think and do regarding this. Does anyone have examples of rubrics that they could share?

Improving e-learning

As part of my 'homework' for the FOC2010 course, I watched a presentation by Stephen Downes entitled Web 2.0 and Your Own Learning and Development. In it, he talks about 'guerilla tactics' for e-learning. I have read and listened to Stephen on a number of occasions and he never disappoints. This particular video lecture was especially interesting to me because we are grappling at the moment with ways in which to help students become better e-learners, and Stephen works through this so methodically and thoughtfully. Some of the points he makes are:

• The importance of interaction and participation in a community. I have realised this myself in my engagement (or lack thereof) with the FOC sessions. Having human contact makes it so much easier to stay engaged and current. Watching recordings of the ellluminate sessions isn't nearly as satisfying as participating. I will be working on helping lecturers to find ways to maintain the human element when their students are engaged in working online.
• Usability and simplicity. I got this wrong when I first started working on Moodle, and my Moodle pages were long and needed lots of scrolling. I've definitely improved in this respect, and the students have responded well to my new design. However, I still have some way to go. I design interactive learning objects using, primarily, Adobe Captivate. This produces a great finished product, BUT, we have had no end of trouble with students being unable to access them because of browser updates or uninstalled flash players. I think perhaps that I have become so caught up in the intellectual exercise of producing 'clever' learning objects that I have forgotten that most basic rule that 'form follows function'. I will definitely be revisiting this based on what I have learned about online learning.
• Relevance. I'd like to think that all the learning we require of our students is 'relevant' to their desire to become nurses, but I have to wonder if we convey the relevance clearly and accurately enough. Would they engage more with the independent learning if we were better at convincing them of the relevance of it to their success? (Beyond the, 'it's in the exam approach'!)

I have embedded the presentation below as an aide-memoire to myself - I need to watch it regularly to help me stay focussed. It's 20min, but well worth the time.

Time's winged chariot

More than a week has past and I've fallen horribly behind with the Facilitating Online Course.. and it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'm learning to have a new respect for everyone out there who manages to juggle study, work and family life. I realised just how out of touch with FOC2010 I have become when I received an email today from a work colleague who sent me a link to a really interesting article called 15 practices to deepen human connection and engagement online. It's a great article, and it suggests some simple and practical ways to improve social engagement online. Turns out though that she got the link from a tweet from Sarah Stewart! And here I thought I'd be able to bring something new to the group when I finally managed to catch up! Just goes to show the efficacy of Twitter though!

I have been reading some of the blogs of other course participants. One member blogged about her first experiences of Second Life, which were fairly unpleasant. I had similar experiences when I first got into SL, encountering all sorts of funny-bunnies making all sorts of strange propositions. What struck me most though was the visceral nature of my reaction to these rather odd avatars... I actually felt panicky and anxious and found the experience quite upsetting. (A colleague sitting next to me even started whispering in case the avatar on the screen could hear her!) Reflecting on the experience made me realise exactly how powerful a tool Second Life can be for that very reason - if an encounter with an oddball avatar could make me react so strongly, the scope for semi-real-life Second-Life learning experiences would be huge. Although there has been little uptake of SL at my institution, for a number of different reasons, I do believe virtual worlds are a technology whose time has yet to come.

Reflecting on facilitation skills

I have just been going through the assignments for the FOC2010. The video, Seven key skills of workshop facilitation, gives a really clear overview of some key skills. It also got me thinking about my own teaching. I realise that I relied heavily on body language when I was a teacher. Moving around the class; being a physical presence; creating and holding eye contact, all these were strategies that I used as part of classroom management.

What I am wondering is how one compensates for this when facilitating online? Does it become as intuitive as it does face-to-face? I imagine it must be much harder to get the feel of a bunch of voices, most of which belong to people one has never even met! I'm looking forward to trying out some online facilitation and getting the 'feel' for the virtual classroom.

On a completely different note, Heather Lamond, the librarian in charge of distance students at Massey University was at Ucol this morning, showing us some of the independent learning packages the Massey library staff have developed to assist students learning how to access information in the library databases, and so on. They work mainly in Captivate and Presenter, and they've produced some really useful, interactive stuff. Heather clearly ran a very well-organised and planned project to get these learning objects created, and it was good to hear her talking about how she went about things. She was also talking about the value of creating a virtual repository for learning objects, where these sorts of things could be stored, in an editable format, for people from other organisations to access and download.

I know many tertiary institutions are moving towards the Creative Commons approach and sharing materials, but wouldn't it be amazing if there were an organised library of these learning objects? A sort of one-stop-shop where materials developers went first, instead of reinventing wheels! The Open University, UK, is already doing something along these lines... check it out here.

Image downloaded from Sthacker's photostream,http://www.flickr.com/photos/sthacker/13622219/sizes/m/in/photostream/CC-BY-SA

FOC 2010 Goals