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3 thoughts about digital facilitation
My thoughts are about scalability, the concept of teaching presence, and the most useful activities in establishing and maintaining a community of inquiry.
One problem I see with digital facilitation in a Community of Inquiry (COI) is the issue of scalability. Can the shared responsibility for sustaining social, cognitive, and teaching presence be used in a large-scale application? Acknowledging student contribution to the community and supporting the presences would be protentional taxing as the community members increase. Is a COI more effective with smaller numbers of participants? Would larger offerings reduce the teaching presence?
Another reoccurring thought is how to support teaching presences as a facilitator and what weight of design effort could be assigned to the categories of design, promoting communication, or direct instruction. Evans, Ward & Reeves (2017). Would this weighting reflect the methodology of the learning activity or impact the design?
The third thought regarding digital facilitation to ponder is what are the most useful activities to support a (COI) approach to digital facilitation? What design tips for each element teaching, social, and cognitive presences are common?
2 questions about digital facilitation.
What are the differences in facilitation between asynchronous or synchronous digital environments?
In addition to the COI theoretical frameworks what other frameworks are relevant to or adaptable for digital facilitation?
A Compact Disc Metaphor
From Discs to Digital Kendall (2020) A metaphor that describes my own thoughts on digital facilitation. Music content is now digitized but music like learning has existed in various forms since its conception. It is an adaption that requires the user to have the technology to access and can be an individual or shared social experience. Like music formats education is distributed very differently today and will continue to change and be offered in new ways.
References
Evans, S. M., Ward, C., & Reeves, S. (2017). An exploration of teaching presence in online interprofessional education facilitation. Medical Teacher, 39(7).
Kendall, J. (2020, August 27) From Discs to Digital: the Odd History of Music Formats [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://blog.landr.com/music-formats-history/
August 27, 2020 at 9:42 pm
Earl, I like your line of thinking re) scale and CoI. It is a great observation. I was also thinking about scale with the topic around facilitation in a MOOC as I think that is an interesting topic to explore as MOOC’s become more and more accepted and developed as a legitimate way to deliver education at scale. Can you facilitate a MOOC? What would that look like to try to facilitate a group of hundreds? Thousands? What strategies would you need to employ? Could it even be done?