I am excited about the idea of learning more about digital facilitation and how to further my skill in the field. I have some experience in virtual facilitation, but I don’t yet understand my shortcomings as I don’t know what I am missing. This course is a learning opportunity to uncover best practices and tools to further my facilitation skills. We now need to assume that digital facilitation is here to stay like working from home. I just hope that as we evolve in the future of learning that we find the right balance to engage our audience like organizations are trying to find the right model with their hybrid work environment.
My inquiries to understand better digital facilitation consists of two different practices. The first one is the practice of camera on and camera off, which fortunately our team will be exploring and reporting back on. It is the most frequent debate I’ve had with peers in the field; some say that a virtual group engagement should have 100% camera on while others state that camera should be on for interactive discussions and activities and the rest optional. It will be interesting to validate these assumptions in the upcoming weeks. The second question revolves around the ultimate length of audience engagement in a synchronous session. How long can attention be sustained in a virtual learning event? Intuitively, the answer will be it depends on the person; however, I’m interested in the research data and best practices to provide clarity on that topic.
And finally, I view digital facilitation like a comedian who needs to get the right timing for his or her punchline to get a positive reaction. Bull (2013) referred this as being a cheerleader. I believe you need to use both cheerleading and humour to create a positive energy to reach a good level of engagement with a group. By the way, why can’t a nose be 12 inches long? Because then it’d be a foot.
Reference:
Bull, B. (2013). Eight Roles of an Effective Online Teacher. Faculty Focus. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/eight-roles-of-an-effective-online-teacher/
September 6, 2022 at 10:58 am
Stephanie that debate about cameras has certainly become even more heightened during COVID and the pivot. I look forward to the facilitation week where this is addressed. Thanks for your post.
September 20, 2022 at 1:14 pm
Thanks Clint! As we starting to dig further into this topic, I realized that it is not a straightforward one. It is a need-basis one and I believe we nee to accept all the different challenges and make the best out of it to meet learners and facilitators’ needs. Thanks for your comment.