By the end of this session, you will:

• Learn strategies for effective online facilitation in a learning community model and apply them in sample scenarios
• Be able to identify the qualities of successful online facilitators
• Learn techniques to incorporate mobile learning opportunities in online facilitation

Ten Tips for Effective Online Facilitation, EdTech Leaders Online
This short list outlines several key tips for effective online facilitation.

BE VOCAL: Characteristics of Successful Online Instructors, Journal of Interactive Online Learning
VOCAL is an acronym for Visible, Organized, Compassionate, Analytical and Leader-by-example. The VOCAL approach summarizes the key characteristics that a master instructor utilizes to be effective in an online environment.

Time Management Strategies for Online Instructors, University of Wisconsin
This reading highlights a number of strategies to help online instructors to maximize their time.

Welcome Message Assignment

When you began this course, you received a welcome email message from your facilitator. A good welcome email is a vehicle for: introducing yourself to your participants, establishing a friendly and welcoming tone, describing your expectations for participants, and conveying essential information (such as how to log on to the course, user IDs/passwords, course schedule and pacing, key deadlines, etc.).

During this session, compose your own customized "Welcome Message" for the course you plan to facilitate, and submit it to your facilitator by the end of this session. Click here for Assignment Details.

In your Facilitation Planning Guide, add any strategies or techniques you’ve learned in this session that you want to remember when you facilitate. It may be helpful for you to organize your plans according to what you will need to do before, during, and after facilitation. You are also encouraged to consider what mobile learning strategies you might include in your facilitation.

• Pre-Facilitation: List any specific steps or tasks that you need to complete in preparation to launch your course. (For example, will you have a role in recruiting participants? Are there supplemental materials you will add to your course? Will you organize a face-to-face meeting to kick off the orientation?)
  
• During Facilitation: Brainstorm a detailed list of the tasks and strategies that you want to remember during facilitation (For example, drawing on your experiences in this course, think about what your facilitator has modeled in his/her weekly email communication, facilitation of the asynchronous discussion, tracking participation, etc.)
  
• Post-Facilitation: Think about the follow-up steps you will need to take as participants complete your course. (For example, will they get Certificates of Completion? What will you do with the information from the Final Survey?)

As a facilitator, you interact with your participants on multiple levels. Some situations call for dealing with participants on an individual level, while others involve managing your group as a whole. Each of these categories may call for different facilitation strategies. Two potential participant-level and two potential group-level scenarios are listed below. Share a facilitation strategy for addressing the situation by responding to at least one scenario in each group.

Participant Scenario 1: Superficial/Off-Topic Postings

After a lively Orientation Session, you kick of Session One of your course feeling confident that your participants are comfortable with using the discussion board and conversing with each other. You check in on the discussion board after being offline for the weekend and are excited to see lots of posts from your participants. Opening up the first thread, you find the following exchange.

Larry has started off this discussion with a great original post, but how would you respond to David and Carla’s replies? What can you do to encourage and foster meaningful dialogue and higher-order thinking in your discussions?

Participant Scenario 2: Tension/Misunderstandings

You are facilitating a course with a mix of teachers and administrators. In responding to the prompt of "What do you see as the biggest barrier to integrating technology into every classroom?" the following exchange occurs.

Often in a course you will have participants who come at a question from multiple perspectives. Coupled with a lack of visual and verbal cues, disagreements can sometimes digress into an argument. How should you respond to perceived tension in an open forum?

Group Scenario 1: A Lack of Momentum

You started Session 2 on a Wednesday and by Sunday night only two participants have posted to the board. Session 1 was more active but you noticed that the majority of posts came late and that participants seemed to be doing the bare minimum to fulfill the discussion requirements. What range of strategies might you use to help foster a more dynamic conversation on the discussion board?

Group Scenario 2: Facilitator’s Role

You are eager to be a supportive presence in the course you are facilitating. In the Orientation session you reply to every post, welcoming the participants individually. In Session 1, you try to answer all the questions that come up and if you don’t know the answer you point participants to additional resources. But at the same time you notice that participants don’t seem to be engaging with each other’s comments as much as you had hoped. What might you do in this situation to foster more peer-to-peer interaction?

Please be sure to make a minimum of three substantive contributions to the discussion using the ETLO Discussion Board Expectations.

Have you:

• Completed the readings and watched the video in this session?
• Composed a welcome message for your future online course and emailed it to your facilitator?
• Added facilitation strategies from this session to your Facilitation Planning Guide?
• Made at least three substantive contributions in the online discussion?

All links in this course are checked regularly. However, content on the Web is ever changing, and at times links can go down without our noticing.

Please contact ETLO to report any broken links within this course.

Note: We can only update links that are on our course pages. If you find a broken link within a course resource, please contact the Webmaster of that website, as only that person will be able to fix internal links.

---