Keeping Things Simple

One of the hardest parts of facilitating and taking these online courses is the fact that all parties are working other jobs as well as facilitating and participating. So, time is of the essence for all of us. Through the two years that I have facilitated I have found ways to save time that may or may not always coincide with popular philosophy. But, they work for me, so, I’ll share anyway.

Grading and Monitoring Discussions

Early in my facilitating, I found myself, during the summer, checking the site 4 or 5 times a day and sometimes an hour or two would elapse with my muddling around in the discussion forum or toying with content materials. I realized that when I went back to work in the fall, that wasting that time would have to stop. So, I began to have a set time each day that I would check in on the discussions, a set time to check emails and respond to them, and a set time to have grading updated.

For my own sanity, I set the time of day for checking in so that I would not be interrupting my day with constant checking to see if someone had emailed, or someone had posted a reply to a prompt, or uploaded a revision to the dropbox. Early mornings are a good time for me to check. Others might find very late at night. I noticed one participant was posting at 4:30 a.m. one session.

Then, for the sanity of the participants, as well as myself, I set a date for finalizing grades for each session. I set Friday after the close of each session to have grades posted because I was getting messages on Wednesday mornings asking about “Why don’t I have a grade yet, I did all my work.” I quickly learned to make clear in my welcome messages and on the news pages when I would be posting grades. Then, when an early bird asked about grades, I could redirect them to their email so they could calm down. If I wasn’t able to get the grades in by Friday I would send a group email explaining the delay to keep them at bay. Teachers are very interested in grades, it seems.

Separating Topics in the Discussion Forum

A timesaver for the participants benefit that I evolved to in my facilitating was setting up a Help forum and a forum for them to post additional materials such as handouts or rubrics to go along with any strategies they were talking about in the discussion area. To have someone request more info on how to implement a reading strategy or ask for a handout makes the discussion area heavy and cumbersone for the readers to navigate. So, when a participant began to describe a strategy, I would steer them to the added forum to supply details for everyone by posting a reply to their topic so others would know to look there for it. One session, so many folks were suggesting websites they had used successfully, that I set up a forum specifically to catch those websites all in one place.

By separating these topics, reading the forum became less time consuming and more focused for everyone. Then, the participants had a collection of strategies or websites all in one place to save time re-looking through all the discussion topics to find something they wanted to know more about.

Session Summaries

My first experience with session summaries was when I took the first facilitation course with Kirsten as facilitator. She would create the summaries by copying and pasting best practice comments of the participants. That seemed easy enough, so I borrowed that idea when I began facilitating. I would create a Word document and copy and paste ideas during the week as postings appeared. Then I would save it as Session Summary in Progress. By the end of the session, I would copy and paste my word document into the session summary posting area. That was a real time saver, in the beginning. But, as time passed and the online courses became fuller, copying and pasting from 30 participants over 6 sessions could also be a bit cumbersome.

So I began to streamline a bit. I began to notice that some of the later session topics for the Helping Struggling Readers course caused the participants to respond with key words that kept cropping up throughout the discussion. As I monitored the discussions, I took notes of the key words that kept coming up and listed them with an introduction of how they related to the topic. A sample of one of those summaries about vocabulary instruction follows:

"A list of key words that kept coming up in your significant understandings follows to pull all ideas together.

Motivation
Flexible Instruction
Multiple Strategies
Vocabulary Instruction
Think Aloud
Schema

But, the following quote reminds us that we need to involve students themselves in their instruction by letting them make their own choices as to what helps them the most:

"I will keep all of those 'fix-up' strategies posted in my classroom so students are constantly reminded of them and I will stress the use of them. I will model, model, model all of them and gradually have students work at using them independently."

Responding to the Discussions

Another facilitation strategy that I observed of Kirsten was replying to every single main posting. I thought that was a good way acknowledging that person’s response, so I adopted that same tactic. But, again, as class size grew, it became increasingly harder to respond to that many original postings without sounding repetitive or trite. So, I began to consider how I might revise. I began to still respond to every single person’s post in the orientation session to welcome them to the course and/or ease fears about online learning. Then, I would monitor the sessions by responding with cognitive coaching questions prodding the responder to elaborate or inviting others to add on their personal experiences. I would, also, notice patterns that arose from the discussions and post a related question that seemed to be flowing just beneath the surface. To one discussion about collaborative learning prompts that seemed to be focusing on the negatives of collaboration, I posted:

“Remember to consider the solutions to these very valid obstacles to collaborative learning. By the end of this session let's have a substantial list of ideas for meeting those challenges. Be careful that we don't get caught up in all of the things that can go wrong that we forget to discuss how to overcome them so that students have an opportunity to learn the skill of collaboration that is so important to their future.”

The following response to a participants description of her use of blogging in class opened a lengthy discussion of who or who does not have computer access and how we can deal with that in our classrooms:

“I love your blogging idea. Do you have good luck with students having access to the internet at home? Our teachers seem to think not enough students do have access so they shy away from activities like this. How do you accommodate those who don't have ready access?”

These types of responses kept the conversation going, yet, did not intrude into the collegiality of the participants themselves. They could see and sense my presence as I found logical places to encourage and prod them along. That decreased number of prompts streamlined the facilitation of the course as well as allowed the discussion forum to be more authentically theirs. They did not try to “respond with what the teacher wants” as much as truly share their experiences.

These tips for streamlining the facilitating process can and, I am sure, will be tweaked as I continue to facilitate courses. As you read the examples, feel free to offer some suggestions that will help me finesse the facilitation process.