Reflection #2 Facilitating E-Learning

In preparing my colleagues to teach an online professional development course I would be sure to focus on the various teacher roles in a virtual environment that can include four categories: pedagogical, social, managerial, and technical (Berge, 1995). I think these four roles are critical for instructors to be able to grasp the variety of functions that they will need to perform. These roles include effectively facilitating discussions, promoting social interaction and effective collaboration among participants, organizing and managing the logistics of discussions, and technically managing tools and the environment so that learning occurs in an efficient way. By focusing on these roles it will help instructors adopt a framework that will enable them to be flexible in their teaching and embody effective teaching practices. These practices involve setting clear expectations for learners, being able to facilitate high levels of critical discussion, and effectively diagnosing student understandings.

Another topic that I would emphasize include strategies for enhancing the instructor’s social presence. I would want to convey the abundant research that indicates that teaching presence is a significant predictor of students’ perceived learning, satisfaction, and sense of community. Social presence is essential to creating effective online environments and encompasses many strategies that the teacher does to create a community of inquiry. By teaching the rational for and strategies to enhance social presence, all participants within the online learning environment stand to benefit and their engagement and depth of learning will likely be enhanced.

Finally I would want to address various tools that can be used to promote synchronous and asynchronous forms of communication. Most successful online learning experiences incorporate a variety of learning strategies that enable learners to connect in live time through synchronous interactions and connect asynchronously through tools such as blogs and discussion boards. I would emphasize e various tools that can be easily learned and implemented that would help instructors use effectively both synchronous and asynchronous strategies. For example, many web 2.0 tools such as Voicethread enable multimedia forms of interaction but are not overly complex for instructors or students to learn. By incorporating a variety of asynchronous and synchronous tools instructors would have a larger repertoire of strategies they could employ depending on their particular learning goals and the needs of their students. Attending to this variety of tools would help prevent instructors from over-reliance on a limited number of their favorite strategies. While it would be impossible to cover every available instructional tool, focusing on some of the best current asynchronous and synchronous technologies will help provide instructors a framework to be able to make the best choices given their particular instructional contexts.

Reflection #1- Facilitating E-Learning

One aspect that I have been surprised by so far in this course is the extent and depth of planning that is needed to facilitate effective online learning experiences. I think the instructor notes assignments in particular has made me more aware of the detailed step-by-step instructions that are frequently needed for instructors who are new to online teaching. So far my experiences in facilitating online learning have involved just myself as the instructor. So, many of the steps involved in planning and delivery have been intuitively obvious to me and I haven't necessarily needed to detail them in a written step-by-step fashion. But now I see that to be able to train and support other instructors who may be asked to facilitate the same online teaching models it’s necessary to provide for them explicit directions for each step in the process. In my own work setting this process will be useful as we develop more online courses and will need to train and support new faculty members who might themselves be new to online teaching; they will need closely scaffolded support and an explicit structure to help them effectively facilitate in an online environment.

There are many facilitation strategies that are applicable to both face-to-face and online learning. In both contexts learners need to develop increasing levels of self-sufficiency and control over their own learning. There has been a lot of focus on in research on effective teaching on the instructor’s role as a facilitator for learners and on creating experiences where students can discover important insights for themselves. I think that is a critical point that applies to all models of teaching online or face-to-face. In that sense it is important to create prompts and questions that motivate learners and engage them in a process of inquiry. While it is frequently the case that instructors need to deliver content to students, particularly at the beginning of an experience, it is always important for learners to be self-directed and seek to answer their own questions. In an online environment the depth and richness of sources available on the internet make it possible to provide learners with infinite resources to help them engage in inquiry and discovery. No longer is content delivery strictly provided within traditional "lecture" modes where the instructor is presumed to have all the knowledge and then delivers that knowledge to students. Now it seems online methods make it possible for students to find their own authoritative sources and make their own decisions about what sources are useful and necessary given the particular question or project in which they are engaged. In that sense instructors may use more of their time with learners to help facilitate high-level discussions about content and operate more as a facilitator during their time with students. I believe therefore that online learning models provide greater opportunities for instructors to create self-sufficient learners who are truly engaged.