Group items tagged

The facilitator must make participants comfortable with the system and the software that the conference is using.

This role involves setting the agenda for the conference: the objectives of the discussion, the timetable, procedural rules and decision-making norms.

Creating a friendly, social environment in which learning is promoted is also essential for successful moderating

Participants also highlighted positive aspects related to support received. Respondents to the PLENK2010 survey were appreciative of how the facilitators led without directing and also of the work and engagement provided by the facilitators. Thus, teaching presence, especially exemplified through course design and the type of facilitation, turned out to have a powerful effect on student perceptions of support, inclusiveness, and overall satisfaction with the course. The participants valued greatly the autonomy on connections and participation in networks: “We were given free choice and allowed autonomy about our ways to connect and participate in the network. I greatly value this approach to learning and working together.”

table, trusted, and valued, and where people can access and interact with resources and each other. The new roles that the teacher as facilitator needs to adopt in networked learning environments include aggregating, curating, amplifying, modelling, and persistently being present in coaching or mentoring.

Several of our speakers were able to shed light on the cause of this rising tide of faculty opposition to computer mediated instruction. Andrew Feenberg of San Diego State University summarizes the situation in the opening paragraph of his "Distance Learning: Promise or Threat" (1999) article: "Once the stepchild of the academy, distance learning is finally taken seriously. But not in precisely the way early innovators like myself had hoped. It is not faculty who are in the forefront of the movement to network education. Instead politicians, university administrations and computer and telecommunications companies have decided there is money in it. But proposals for a radical "retooling" of the university emanating from these sources are guaranteed to provoke instant faculty hostility."

The implementation of online education shows both promise and peril. Computer mediated instruction may indeed introduce new and highly effective teaching paradigms, but high-quality teaching is not always assured. Administrative decisions made without due consideration to pedagogy, or worse, with policies or technology that hampers quality, may cause much wasted time, money and effort of both faculty and students.

In training, a particular package of knowledge is imparted to an individual so that he or she can assume work within a system, as the firefighters do for example. According to Noble, training and education are appropriately distinguished in terms of autonomy (Noble, 1999). In becoming trained, an individual relinquishes autonomy. The purpose of education, as compared to training, is to impart autonomy to the student. In teaching students to think critically, we say in effect "Student, know thyself." Education is not just the transmission of knowledge, important as that is, but also has to do with the transformation of persons (and the development of critical thinking skills).

Develop student learning opportunities. This takes into account the course documents, the teacher's personal theories of teaching and learning, the student’s interest, their preferred learning styles and their understanding and skills. It is in this area that the teacher as facilitator is able to provide opportunities for student learning that will take hold of the students' interests and thus motivate them to engage in the learning opportunity. Harrison (1998a & b) has presented the S.P.A.C.E. model for creating optimal learning conditions. The conditions for optimal learning include the following: Self-affimation – the learner’s view themselves as effective learners and the teachers provide them with feedback to that effect; Personal meaning – the learners are able to find personal meaning in the learning. That is, the learning is relevant to them; Active learning - the learners are active in the learning, whether that activity is physically doing something (as for concrete learners) or intellectually doing something (as for abstract reflective learners). Collaborative – the learners are able to collaborate with others in the learning process and not to view learning as an isolating experience; Empowering – the learners are able to shape the learning process, to have control over what is learnt and the direction of the learning.

The role of the teacher is diverse and has several orientations. One important aspect is that of facilitator of student learning. The facilitator attempts to provide circumstances that will enable students to engage with the learning opportunities and construct for themselves their understandings and skills. This role will interact with those of teacher as learner, colleague and community partner.

A student’s beliefs about the nature of teaching and learning will interact with a teacher’s beliefs. The teacher therefore needs to understand what students expect and are willing to do as well as what they themselves expect of the students.

In order to change to a learner-controlled instructional system and to maximize interaction, I had to change my role from that of a teacher at the front of the classroom and the center of the process to that of facilitator who is one with the participants and whose primary role is to guide and support the learning process.

The result was a course designed as a learner-centered system based on dialogue and cooperation among students (1992, p. 61).

Such a move engenders a radical shift in the power and interaction structures in the classroom as the students must accept the responsibility for their own knowledge creation, and the instructor must relinquish a certain amount of control over the process.

  E-Pedagogy: Does e-learning require a new pedagogy?  5 The emergence of e-learning  As part of the technological revolution, the use of e-learning, or blended learning, isincreasing. This is particularly true of Higher Education, which offers most programmespartly or wholly online. In the future, e-learning is likely to be more widely used in thetertiary and school sectors. Another driver for e-learning is life-long learning, whichrequires on-going training and re-training of the adult workforce.In many cases, e-learning is delivered through a virtual learning environment (VLE),which is a custom built environment designed for online learning. VLEs, such as  Blackboard and Moodle , typically provide all of the software tools required for onlinelearning such as communication and file sharing facilities. These environments are oftenmodelled around the traditional campus, providing ‘virtual staff rooms’ and ‘onlinecommon rooms’. E-portfolios provide the digital equivalent to the traditional paperportfolio; these typically provide online storage for a range of media types (such asdrawings, photos and videos). Dedicated e-assessment systems, such as Questionmark ,facilitate large-scale online testing, providing many of the question types that arefamiliar to teachers.Some academics have pointed out the potential of e-learning to improve current practice.Garrison and Anderson (2003) write:“E-learning has significantpotential to alter the nature of theteaching and learning transaction.In fact, it has caused us to face upto some of the current deficienciesof higher education, such as largelecturers, while providing somepossible solutions or ways tomitigate these shortcomings. Seenas part of pedagogical solution, e-learning becomes an opportunity toexamine and live up to the ideals of the educational transactiondescribed previously.” New learning opportunities The changing environment facilitates new kinds of learning. Teachers have traditionallyfocussed on content; indeed, many consider the identification and delivery of learningmaterial to be their prime role. But it has been argued that the traditional skill of contentcreation is redundant in the information-rich learning environment. Some of this contentis very high quality, even world class, and certainly superior to a hurriedly producedhandout of the type often used by busy teachers.It has been suggested that the contemporary teacher should be more “guide on the side”than “sage on the stage”. The ready availability of information makes  facilitation moreimportant than direction . The pedagogic issue is not too little information but too much:the contempora

changing learning landscape poses fundamental epistemological questions about thenature of knowledge and how it is acquired. Dede (2008) writes: “In the Classicalperspective, knowledge consists of accurate interrelationships among facts, based onunbiased research that produces compelling evidence about systematic causes […]Epistemologically, a single right answer is believed to underlie each phenomenon […]The epistemology that leads to validity of knowledge in Web 2.0 media such as Wikipedia  is peer review from people seen, by the community of contributors, as having unbiasedperspectives. Expertise involves understanding disputes in detail and proposingsyntheses that are widely accepted by the community

hatever new theory of learning emerges in thenext decade, it will likelybuild upon thesepedagogie

Make the chunks or pieces of information small enough to appeal to and be processed by those who have only 15 to 30 minutes a day to log in. These small pieces of information can quickly be processed by the student who can then return later to finish other assignments. There can be more than one chunk of information per unit or module, but the unit itself should be broke into manageable chunks.

An online syllabus should also contain information relating to the length of time a given assignment is anticipated to take for the average student.

With an engaging course in which many students are active participants, the number of messages posted within any course discussion forum can quickly grow. When such a case presents itself, it is a good idea to give specific minimum (and maximum if necessary) requirements concerning the number of posts each student is required to submit. For example, in an ice-breaking activity, you could require each student to post responses to 2 other student posts chosen by selecting the student above and below that student in a listing of students sorted by some criteria such as alphabetically by login. When minimum requirements and other guidelines are given, students know how much work is expected of them for the assignment, ensuring that they will allocate enough time to do an adequate job and enabling them able to prioritize their time. Even an active student can have a busy week in which he/she must schedule time to properly meet this minimum requirement.

Students felt critical thinking was positively influenced when an instructor designed an organized course with clear goals and relevant assignments, provided direct feedback that was encouraging, timely, and specific, and actively facilitated discussions that kept everyone focused and participating at a meaningful level.

so I guess that will most likely be my audience.