Digital facilitation – summative reflection

Image Darren Wilson via Midjourney

Wrapping up our MALAT course work, I was struck by just how much we have learned, and how putting it into practice through the Community of Inquiry framework connected all those ideas brought them to life.

3 Thoughts, Ideas, or Feelings

1. I learned a great deal about facilitation and how it is different from direct instruction, which is the teaching mode I am most familiar with. While I’d say I still have a lot of work to do in developing my facilitation skills, I have a greater understanding of how to connect the social, cognitive, and teaching considerations in my teaching practice. 
2. Teaching presence is a critical component of the Community of Inquiry model of teaching and learning, and is something I am working on doing better at in my practice. Although Boettcher (2022) and Bull (2013) suggest almost daily engagement, for my teaching load in post-secondary education, that kind of commitment is unsustainable. It’s more important to have meaningful engagement and to read the needs of the participants to gauge the level of presence required.
3. This course has given me a lot of ideas and insights for practices to include in my teaching and facilitation. I am grateful to my team and my classmates for bringing such depth and richness to the learning over the last nine weeks.

2 Questions (answered)

When instructional designers create courses for others to facilitate, how do they manage the needs of the learners and the needs of the facilitator(s)?

In our roles as designer-facilitators, we were able to assess our needs, our strengths, and our time commitments to create a program that was manageable but also hit on all of the key engagements with social, cognitive, and teaching presence. If we were designing for third-party facilitator, that might require additional collaboration and consideration with the facilitator(s) to design something with the appropriate level of teaching presence.

Moreover, it is important to consider that teaching presence does not necessarily mean direct instructor presence. Learners can be engaged in teaching presence in peer-to-peer socialization of knowledge.

SWUX LXD (n.d.) emphasizes authenticity as a core sustainable goal in learning experience design. In situations where the facilitator is not the designer, how might they manage delivering a learning experience design that feels inauthentic to them? Is there room for flexibility?

I believe there is room for flexibility in how we scale up or down our engagement to suit the needs of the learners, the subject matter, and our own needs as facilitators.

1 Metaphor

I stand by my metaphor of describing teaching as a performance art, one which may be highly scripted, or which might have a loose structure with room for improvisation, and anywhere in between. 

This means anticipating and preparing for those “off script” moments as best as we can, but generally performing within a fairly predictable and orderly structure. Improvising is a useful tool to be able to pull out as needed, either to explore material that is being unpacked by students in unexpected ways, or to bring things back to the script as it has been laid out, but improv should generally not be the core mode of delivery. Learners like predictable schedules and outcomes.