Three initial feelings about digital facilitation are that:
- Facilitation is harder online. Without the advantage of being able to see body language in person, I feel like it would be hard to understand learners’ needs as well in order to meet them.
- More accurately, facilitation needs to be developed more thoughtfully. Facilitators would need to have a good understanding of their learners’ situations in order to develop effective facilitation methods.
- Those facilitators who are good in person may not translate online. I know some amazing in-person facilitators who just didn’t click online. Part of it has been a technology learning curve and part of it has been just a difficulty in translating their own personality to another medium.
Two questions I have about digital facilitation:
- How do you find new stuff like Mattermost? There are SO many new platforms and delivery methods coming out all the time. How on earth do we find and keep up with them???
- How to build a community of friendly critics for beta testing? I would like a safe place, or safe group of experience facilitators, to review my ideas before launch.
One metaphor or simile about digital facilitation:
A recent class I took through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in July not only permitted group work for the final exam but encouraged it! It was a course on Management Systems that very accurately recognized that, in real life, we will never be working in complete isolation. The test was therefore designed to be better completed by choosing a peer/colleague whose knowledge complements our own. The result was a good collaboration experience in the final quiz, where we both brought our own knowledge and experience to the table. Here’s my image then:
Thanks Corie. I really like the collaborative assessment example you provided at the end. The issue of academic integrity and cheating really blew up during the pivot to remote learning during the pandemic and I think there were a few educators who took that opportunity to rethink how they do assessments to better reflect the always-connected word we live in.