The Realities of Facilitating

LInC Classes

We have worked hard to prepare high quality materials for use in the LInC courses. Over the years of developing the course we have learned much about what it takes to offer successful face-to-face classes in engaged learning and even more about what it takes to have successful online courses on EL.

Despite the growing popularity of online training it is still a new experience for many people. We needed to adapt our teaching skills to this environment, and have learned that often it takes students a while before they adapt to this online classroom environment as well.

People planning to offer their first courses have often asked:

What is it really like to teach an online course?

The Myth

The Reality

The convenience of an online course is that it takes only one evening a week. True, the course chat is scheduled once a week, but you'll also need to allocate time outside of this for e-mailing participants, responding to questions, reviewing project work, and preparing for class meetings. In addition, you'll need to schedule office hours once or twice a week, especially towards the end of the course.

I can read all my e-mail and CMC postings once during the week when I have some "flex time." Wrong. The secret to running effective online courses has to do with contact. You need to respond to e-mail in a timely fashion, (within 48 hours). It is easy for online participants to fade into the great Internet abyss or to decide you just don't care. If you are to be their mentor, they need to have frequent and timely communication.

I can use the assignment sheet and chat schedule from the last course. Engaged learning is about the needs of the learner. This course needs to model what we want participants to do in their classrooms. Depending on the skills of the participants, the scheduled assignments and chat schedule will most certainly need some modifications during the course as you see how participants are progressing.

Thanks to the application, I know all of my participants meet or exceed the prerequisites for the course. This has simply not been our experience. Most participants are more than capable, but there usually are several who find it difficult to master the engaged learning concepts because they are either not comfortable with the technology or with letting students direct their own learning.

The participants will buy needed software at the start of the course because it is listed as a requirement. They may be busy and forget to do this. You need to send out several reminders and caution them that they need to order it as soon as possible because it may take some time to arrive. You should remind them in the first, third, and fifth week of the class at a minimum.

Since this is a course about engaged learning and integrating technology, participants can use any web editor they want.
Technically, this is true. What has to be considered is support load for instructors. The course requires a lot of instructor time in general. The technical question load on instructors was reduced when the animations for web editors were created. Also the tutorial Web pages with screen pictures are available. If these resources are not available for the editor you choose, you will spend much more time helping participants through technical questions.

If you are offering an online or partial-online course, you must know your Web editor so well that you can help people with your eyes closed because basically you are helping people with your "eyes closed" in a chat. If you offer a choice of Web editors, you will need more technical breakout sessions for the different editors, you will need to know the Web editors very well, and you will also need to purchase the Web editors for all the instructors. Keep in mind, it would be better to provide participants with excellent help and resources with one Web editor rather than average help with more than one Web editor.

The participants will understand engaged learning by reading the materials. Many participants will be able to talk the talk and identify engaged learning indicators in other projects, but will have a difficult time walking the walk. They won't be able to recreate the indicators of engaged learning in their own projects.

The best thing about teaching adults is that they are enthusiastic learners. They wouldn't be here if they didn't want to! Participants take the course for many different reasons. Sometimes their agenda does not match yours. LInC is about engaged learning. It is a curriculum course. Sometimes participants think LInC is a technology course. Sometimes they come because an administrator has "encouraged" them. Some participants think it will be less work than a traditional college course.

It will be nice to concentrate on the content. There's little administrivia to distract me.
There is little administrivia, but there is some and it needs to be addressed. You need to make sure the chat schedule is current as well as the assignment page. The assignment status page needs to be updated as soon as possible. Participants check it often. It is a great tool to reinforce the expectations for the participants. Make sure that the CMC is updated regularly with the current week's new discussion/reflection prompts and that people are using it. The course home page may need to be updated periodically to show "What's new?" information.

You are the contact participants have and they will depend on you to help them out in a wide variety of ways.

Adults are independent learners, and since the material is all posted, there will not be much I have to do.
Online learning is still new to most people. They are still waiting for you to tell them what to do and when to do it. You will need to help them learn how to be an online learner.

People Won't Read - You need to bring the participants to the pages you want them to see and get them started reading. Once they see the huge amount of information at their fingertips they will become more independent. However you will need to do this several times. It is not enough to send an e-mail message telling them to read. You need to be much more directive than that. Send the e-mail, post it in the assignment page and show them the pages briefly during the chat sessions or during office hours. The amount of information available can seem overwhelming to participants at the beginning, so your directing them to the materials they need for the task at hand can be very helpful.

If I provide the information in one way or one place, the participants will find it and use it.
Just as in your classrooms at school, you need to address multiple learning styles as far as possible. Many participants miss information if it is not given in several ways. It is best to say/post things in three to five ways such as in:

Assignment sheet.
Chat schedule.
Course home page.
E-mail message(s) to team from primary facilitator.
E-mail message(s) to class from lead facilitator.
U.S. mailed hard copy.
Tutorial with screen pictures on a Web page.
Animation with video and audio.
Electronic bulletin board.
Chat discussion.

Participants will know how to find what they want in the online materials.
This does not happen by itself for most participants. An orientation and tour from you in the beginning can go a long way towards empowering them to help themselves to needed information throughout the course. During this orientation and tour, be sure to mention the navigation aids such as:

Annotated home page for each main topic listing what resource pages are available.
Search.
Table of contents organized by topic which links to all the resource pages.
End products page which links to descriptions of all end products and rubrics.
Navigation bar at the top of every page which links to all of the above.
Assignment sheet which links directly to resource pages needed for each assignment.
The participants' guide is a print out of the Web site (some folks do not realize this).

It is not enough to ask participants if they understand the organization of the pages. Many will say yes because they don't realize how much is there. A guided tour or scavenger hunt is needed during the first or second session to ensure they can find what they need later in the course.

The chat topics are already selected; what could be easier? The chat topics have been listed, but your group may have special needs. Ideally, participants will be selecting the topics they want and they may request topics that you hadn't expected. We have covered the major topics you need to address. But that doesn't mean you won't want to prepare some additional questions or set time goals for your conversations. If more than one person is facilitating, try to get together to plan out the chats. We have found it especially helpful when facilitators chat from the same location.

As a facilitator, I can just show up at the chat to do my job without thinking about it ahead of time. The chat IS your class time. You'll need to prepare for it in the same way you would prepare to teach a face-to-face college class session. If anything, even more planning is needed for an online meeting.

Participants will go to the right chat channel because the schedule is posted. Especially in the first few weeks of the course, you'll need to have a facilitator responsible for helping people check the schedule and get to the right channel. We call this role the "traffic director." If after time the participants are still not checking the schedule, you may need to leave the main channel (usually channel 1) unscheduled. Then people who are unsure of where to go will come to channel 1 and a facilitator can watch for them and direct them without having this distract a productive conversation that is already in progress.

Once the chat has started, I won't need to do much to facilitate. Ideally, once the participants understand the goals and product for the chat, they will be able to take the ball and run with it (direct their own learning). However, the faciltator's input will still be needed for responding to questions, noticing if something has been misunderstood and providing clarification, posing questions to get the conversation going if it has slowed or to get the conversation back on task if it has wandered, and encouraging lurkers to participate.

The course should be easy to teach because the participants are anxious to learn engaged learning.
Participants are eager to learn engaged learning, but people are resistive to change. They are even resistive to the changes that they want (remember your last diet!). Engaged learning is hard to learn because it is radically different and requires a great deal of risk taking. Help the participants to work on projects of a reasonable size. Remind them that if they try to do engaged learning lessons along with everything they always did before, something is not going to fit.

In addition, sometimes feelings can become bruised through the process of revising projects. It is so important that you establish a rapport with the participants. The best way to build rapport is through frequent contacts. Respond to their work. Always lead and end with a positive comment. Be extremely tactful; think twice about how your wording of criticisms. Do be clear and up front; if something needs to be changed, it is best to let them know early. Try to get them to self-evaluate using rubrics or other tool. They often will find their own areas of weakness. Let them know that they are not alone, that revisions are expected and is in fact, the process we want them to experience.

This is an online course so I will never see or talk to participants. Use whatever works and is feasible. Use the phone liberally. An introductory call from a team's primary facilitator is a good idea as well as a call during the middle of the course. Make help by phone available to participants who are having trouble getting their chat software working. If class members can manage to obtain the hardware and software requirements, try videoconferencing. If a group of participants is having difficulties and is within a reasonable drive, plan a face-to-face meeting with them. An initial orientation meeting before the class starts can also be worthwhile.

This is an online course so I won't need to meet with my co-facilitators. Any class which is team-taught needs regularly scheduled meetings (face-to-face or online) between facilitators to coordinate, plan, and adjust the course as needed by the course participants. This is true of online courses as well.

The online course will take less time than teaching a traditional college course.
This has not been our experience! The class time and class preparation time are at least the same as the traditional course. The rapport that you establish informally in a traditional face-to-face course requires a concerted effort online.

In a traditional class you meet with participants once or twice a week. Online they interact with you daily though the use of e-mail or the CMC.

Since it is a 4.5 graduate credit course, it will certainly require more than the two hours per week contact time in the chat. Remember that if you were teaching in the face-to-face format, you would be spending 4.5 contact hours face-to-face with the participants in addition to the usual time for class preparation and grading their work. Teaching the online course will take a similar amount of time.

You must contact the participants regularly. Once- a-week contact at the chat will not be enough. Complement them on their work or participation in the chat. React to what they have done on the project or what has not gotten done. Just keep the messages coming; this is how you communicate you care.

After reading the reality of running an online course, we hope you are not running for the door. It really is no different from what you all ready know. Good instruction is work and takes time. In addition, online courses do offer many opportunities, and they can be very rewarding.

As you offer your course remember the following:

Even though the materials are online, the course still needs the skills of a good facilitator.
Don't trust that materials are being read. Remind, prompt and encourage participants to use the materials they need.
If you have a message for the participants, e-mail it, post it on the CMC, and remind them in the chat.
Work at developing rapport. Participants are new to online communication and need some TLC.
You must contact each participant at least twice per week, via e-mail or chat.

We know that the nature of online course work is still evolving but we hope the above information will help you to have a more successful online course.

Read the How to Moderate a Chat page to see suggestions on how online chats should be facilitated.

The Myth	The Reality
The convenience of an online course is that it takes only one evening a week.	True, the course chat is scheduled once a week, but you'll also need to allocate time outside of this for e-mailing participants, responding to questions, reviewing project work, and preparing for class meetings. In addition, you'll need to schedule office hours once or twice a week, especially towards the end of the course.
I can read all my e-mail and CMC postings once during the week when I have some "flex time."	Wrong. The secret to running effective online courses has to do with contact. You need to respond to e-mail in a timely fashion, (within 48 hours). It is easy for online participants to fade into the great Internet abyss or to decide you just don't care. If you are to be their mentor, they need to have frequent and timely communication.
I can use the assignment sheet and chat schedule from the last course.	Engaged learning is about the needs of the learner. This course needs to model what we want participants to do in their classrooms. Depending on the skills of the participants, the scheduled assignments and chat schedule will most certainly need some modifications during the course as you see how participants are progressing.
Thanks to the application, I know all of my participants meet or exceed the prerequisites for the course.	This has simply not been our experience. Most participants are more than capable, but there usually are several who find it difficult to master the engaged learning concepts because they are either not comfortable with the technology or with letting students direct their own learning.
The participants will buy needed software at the start of the course because it is listed as a requirement.	They may be busy and forget to do this. You need to send out several reminders and caution them that they need to order it as soon as possible because it may take some time to arrive. You should remind them in the first, third, and fifth week of the class at a minimum.
Since this is a course about engaged learning and integrating technology, participants can use any web editor they want.	Technically, this is true. What has to be considered is support load for instructors. The course requires a lot of instructor time in general. The technical question load on instructors was reduced when the animations for web editors were created. Also the tutorial Web pages with screen pictures are available. If these resources are not available for the editor you choose, you will spend much more time helping participants through technical questions. If you are offering an online or partial-online course, you must know your Web editor so well that you can help people with your eyes closed because basically you are helping people with your "eyes closed" in a chat. If you offer a choice of Web editors, you will need more technical breakout sessions for the different editors, you will need to know the Web editors very well, and you will also need to purchase the Web editors for all the instructors. Keep in mind, it would be better to provide participants with excellent help and resources with one Web editor rather than average help with more than one Web editor.
The participants will understand engaged learning by reading the materials.	Many participants will be able to talk the talk and identify engaged learning indicators in other projects, but will have a difficult time walking the walk. They won't be able to recreate the indicators of engaged learning in their own projects.
The best thing about teaching adults is that they are enthusiastic learners. They wouldn't be here if they didn't want to!	Participants take the course for many different reasons. Sometimes their agenda does not match yours. LInC is about engaged learning. It is a curriculum course. Sometimes participants think LInC is a technology course. Sometimes they come because an administrator has "encouraged" them. Some participants think it will be less work than a traditional college course.
It will be nice to concentrate on the content. There's little administrivia to distract me.	There is little administrivia, but there is some and it needs to be addressed. You need to make sure the chat schedule is current as well as the assignment page. The assignment status page needs to be updated as soon as possible. Participants check it often. It is a great tool to reinforce the expectations for the participants. Make sure that the CMC is updated regularly with the current week's new discussion/reflection prompts and that people are using it. The course home page may need to be updated periodically to show "What's new?" information. You are the contact participants have and they will depend on you to help them out in a wide variety of ways.
Adults are independent learners, and since the material is all posted, there will not be much I have to do.	Online learning is still new to most people. They are still waiting for you to tell them what to do and when to do it. You will need to help them learn how to be an online learner. People Won't Read - You need to bring the participants to the pages you want them to see and get them started reading. Once they see the huge amount of information at their fingertips they will become more independent. However you will need to do this several times. It is not enough to send an e-mail message telling them to read. You need to be much more directive than that. Send the e-mail, post it in the assignment page and show them the pages briefly during the chat sessions or during office hours. The amount of information available can seem overwhelming to participants at the beginning, so your directing them to the materials they need for the task at hand can be very helpful.
If I provide the information in one way or one place, the participants will find it and use it.	Just as in your classrooms at school, you need to address multiple learning styles as far as possible. Many participants miss information if it is not given in several ways. It is best to say/post things in three to five ways such as in: Assignment sheet. Chat schedule. Course home page. E-mail message(s) to team from primary facilitator. E-mail message(s) to class from lead facilitator. U.S. mailed hard copy. Tutorial with screen pictures on a Web page. Animation with video and audio. Electronic bulletin board. Chat discussion.
Participants will know how to find what they want in the online materials.	This does not happen by itself for most participants. An orientation and tour from you in the beginning can go a long way towards empowering them to help themselves to needed information throughout the course. During this orientation and tour, be sure to mention the navigation aids such as: Annotated home page for each main topic listing what resource pages are available. Search. Table of contents organized by topic which links to all the resource pages. End products page which links to descriptions of all end products and rubrics. Navigation bar at the top of every page which links to all of the above. Assignment sheet which links directly to resource pages needed for each assignment. The participants' guide is a print out of the Web site (some folks do not realize this). It is not enough to ask participants if they understand the organization of the pages. Many will say yes because they don't realize how much is there. A guided tour or scavenger hunt is needed during the first or second session to ensure they can find what they need later in the course.
The chat topics are already selected; what could be easier?	The chat topics have been listed, but your group may have special needs. Ideally, participants will be selecting the topics they want and they may request topics that you hadn't expected. We have covered the major topics you need to address. But that doesn't mean you won't want to prepare some additional questions or set time goals for your conversations. If more than one person is facilitating, try to get together to plan out the chats. We have found it especially helpful when facilitators chat from the same location.
As a facilitator, I can just show up at the chat to do my job without thinking about it ahead of time.	The chat IS your class time. You'll need to prepare for it in the same way you would prepare to teach a face-to-face college class session. If anything, even more planning is needed for an online meeting.
Participants will go to the right chat channel because the schedule is posted.	Especially in the first few weeks of the course, you'll need to have a facilitator responsible for helping people check the schedule and get to the right channel. We call this role the "traffic director." If after time the participants are still not checking the schedule, you may need to leave the main channel (usually channel 1) unscheduled. Then people who are unsure of where to go will come to channel 1 and a facilitator can watch for them and direct them without having this distract a productive conversation that is already in progress.
Once the chat has started, I won't need to do much to facilitate.	Ideally, once the participants understand the goals and product for the chat, they will be able to take the ball and run with it (direct their own learning). However, the faciltator's input will still be needed for responding to questions, noticing if something has been misunderstood and providing clarification, posing questions to get the conversation going if it has slowed or to get the conversation back on task if it has wandered, and encouraging lurkers to participate.
The course should be easy to teach because the participants are anxious to learn engaged learning.	Participants are eager to learn engaged learning, but people are resistive to change. They are even resistive to the changes that they want (remember your last diet!). Engaged learning is hard to learn because it is radically different and requires a great deal of risk taking. Help the participants to work on projects of a reasonable size. Remind them that if they try to do engaged learning lessons along with everything they always did before, something is not going to fit. In addition, sometimes feelings can become bruised through the process of revising projects. It is so important that you establish a rapport with the participants. The best way to build rapport is through frequent contacts. Respond to their work. Always lead and end with a positive comment. Be extremely tactful; think twice about how your wording of criticisms. Do be clear and up front; if something needs to be changed, it is best to let them know early. Try to get them to self-evaluate using rubrics or other tool. They often will find their own areas of weakness. Let them know that they are not alone, that revisions are expected and is in fact, the process we want them to experience.
This is an online course so I will never see or talk to participants.	Use whatever works and is feasible. Use the phone liberally. An introductory call from a team's primary facilitator is a good idea as well as a call during the middle of the course. Make help by phone available to participants who are having trouble getting their chat software working. If class members can manage to obtain the hardware and software requirements, try videoconferencing. If a group of participants is having difficulties and is within a reasonable drive, plan a face-to-face meeting with them. An initial orientation meeting before the class starts can also be worthwhile.
This is an online course so I won't need to meet with my co-facilitators.	Any class which is team-taught needs regularly scheduled meetings (face-to-face or online) between facilitators to coordinate, plan, and adjust the course as needed by the course participants. This is true of online courses as well.
The online course will take less time than teaching a traditional college course.	This has not been our experience! The class time and class preparation time are at least the same as the traditional course. The rapport that you establish informally in a traditional face-to-face course requires a concerted effort online. In a traditional class you meet with participants once or twice a week. Online they interact with you daily though the use of e-mail or the CMC. Since it is a 4.5 graduate credit course, it will certainly require more than the two hours per week contact time in the chat. Remember that if you were teaching in the face-to-face format, you would be spending 4.5 contact hours face-to-face with the participants in addition to the usual time for class preparation and grading their work. Teaching the online course will take a similar amount of time. You must contact the participants regularly. Once- a-week contact at the chat will not be enough. Complement them on their work or participation in the chat. React to what they have done on the project or what has not gotten done. Just keep the messages coming; this is how you communicate you care.