Facilitator Roles - Reflections

In the second part of the course we have been looking at facilitator roles and I realized how little I knew. When you are the facilitator you have to consider so many different things: time management, planning the course, technology, pedagogy, and creating a social community. All of these are necessary and must all be present and in balance to have a successful class. You can utilize the most cutting edge technology but without proper planning or taking into consideration the needs of the students your course is a failure. And once we have everything in order that is not the end, but the beginning. We will be constantly examining our course to ensure that everything continues to function.

So what is involved in creating our classes, lets start with pedagogy. The definition is: the art, science, or profession of teaching. That sounds simple, but it doesn't explain what is actually involved. It is not simply standing in front of a group of students and lecturing, especially when we are talking about an online course. Pedagogy is actually the accumulation of everything I mentioned earlier.

We need to understand our students and how everything in their lives will affect how they learn. They are coming from different ethic groups and age groups. They are going to have different learning styles and different personalities. Why is this important? If you have someone with a personality that is very "out there or pushy" they might end up intimidating someone who is more reserved. I as a facilitator will need to be aware and be able to offer an outlet for the student with lots to say as well as encourage and make the reserved student feel comfortable. Different ethnic groups and cultures also affect how a student learns. If they have been raised to respect authority figures, they might not feel comfortable questioning the instructor. These are just a few of the things to keep in mind. Is this an impossible task? No, it just means that we must pay attention to our students and keep in mind that they are all individuals with their own unique backgrounds. Just as we are the sum of everything that has happened in our lives, the same applies to our students.

This barely scratches the surface when it come to the art of teaching. We also need to consider how we plan to teach, because that too is a part of the art of teaching. Are we going rely on lecture notes? interactive material? lots and lots of reading? We need to figure out our teaching styles first then work to build the course. Right now I prefer the instructor led design, I feel it best suits how I want to teach. I want to include technology and readings on the web to support the topics. I will also encourage feedback and interaction among the students. But this alone will not make my course a success. I need all of the components including: Time management

Time management is a part of the planning stage as well as the maintenance. How much time to allow for assignment? Too little time allowed is a quick way to overwhelm the students. Too much time and your students are bored and not learning. When deciding on how much time to all you need to consider: number of hours in a day. Then split it up: sleep, work, other classes, family, and unexpected. Out of all this, how much can we reasonably expect them to have for our class. Are we asking them to read, post on discussion groups, and do weekly assignment? How much time would we have to spend? Then ask ourselves, are we slow and need time or we don't need much time? Probably somewhere between the two is reasonable. On the topic of time how much time are we going to allow ourselves to grade tests, assignments, respond to emails and spend on the discussion threads? What is reasonable? For this, I will ask advice from those with experience because I would be guessing.

And while we are on the subject of planning I learned that my syllabus has to clearly spell out everything that I expect from my students. I need to tell them what my policies are, what type of turnaround they can expect when they send me an email or turn in an assignment. As important as the syllabus is, I need to make sure I have an icebreaker activity for the 1st week of class. I want the students to get to know each other so that they will be comfortable asking questions, responding to posts and working together if group projects are involved. Why the icebreaker? To start to foster a sense of community. That is as important as everything else mentioned. It will enrich the learning experience for both the instructor as well as the student. The sense of community will allow for better discussion threads as students develop connections with each other.

By now I was thinking that that had to be everything, right? Wrong, now come maintenance and keeping up with technology. Technology is evolving quickly and even if we are using all the latest things out there, we need to know that they exist. How can we do this? By attending conferences, keeping up with research and talking to others in Online Teaching to mention a few ways. Perhaps we will discover things that will help us with maintaining our courses. Perhaps something to help us check links, keep track of bookmarks etc. We also need to keep an eye out for new articles to keep our readings up to date. Have I thought of everything, I doubt it. Do I know everything I need to know? No. Will I ever know everything? I hope not, I don't ever want to lose the excitement of learning something new. I hope to always be learning something new that will help be create an even better course and be a better instructor.

But I do know this, I know more today than when I started and I know I am on the right path to becoming the instructor I want to be.