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.