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Session 2 Preparing to be a facilitator
2 Preparing to be a facilitator
In this section you will consider the skills and competencies needed by an online facilitator, how the role works and how to set expectations for the learners.
2.1 Understanding the skills required of an online facilitator
The roles and responsibilities of an online facilitator will vary from relatively simple tasks, such as encouraging participation in the online conversation, right through to supporting learners’ reflection on their learning. The nature of these roles will also vary as the course develops or as new people join. They can be summarised as involving six key stages, drawn from research into e-moderating (Salmon, 2000).
| Skills | Facilitator role |
|---|---|
| Motivating | Welcoming learners |
| Socialising | Helping learners get to know each other, develop mutual respect and establish a community |
| Exchanging information | Helping learners to focus on the task, summarise discussion and bring in relevant information |
| Constructing knowledge | Facilitating learners’ exploration and discussion of issues |
| Developing learning | Encouraging learners’ critical thinking and reflection about their learning |
| Encouraging further study | Suggesting additional study available to learners |
2.2 Setting out facilitation skills
You will now look at the skills required for an online facilitator.
Activity 2
Looking at the summaries of the facilitator role in Table 2, and drawing on your own experience of online conversations, decide what skills a facilitator needs. Some of these skills have already been listed in the table.
It might be helpful to think of these in terms of:
- technical skills, such as posting comments
- social and communication skills, such as encouraging participation and respect
- mentoring skills, such as summarising, commenting on and checking ideas and issues raised.
| Technical skills | Communication and social skills | Mentoring skills |
|---|---|---|
| Posting comments and receiving replies | Encouraging participation | Summarising discussions Checking issues raised Encouraging further study |
- You may wish to make a record of these in your learning log.
Discussion
The list of skills you have come up with will be things that you do, such as posting and summarising comments, while others will be about how you interact with people. These ‘doing’ skills, that reflect mastery and proficiency in something you have learned to do, are often referred to as hard skills. Whereas, the skills associated with communication, relationships and getting on with people are called soft skills. Although it can sometimes be difficult to decide which skills are hard and soft, remember that hard skills tend to produce something concrete, such as a message or a summary of a discussion.
It is also likely that these skills may change over time, with technical and communication skills required at the start of the conversation or when new people join, and the mentoring skills required more as learners become involved.
If you need some more information on what type of skills count as ‘soft skills’, an online careers advice service, The Balance Careers, has some useful guidance on this.
Hard skills that you are good at might include managing the technical side of the forum, such as posting messages and being able to write effectively. Soft skills that you are good at might include encouraging other learners and being positive about their contributions. In terms of skills you need to improve, it could be that you are less good at knowing how to summarise discussions.
You may also feel that you need help in dealing with conflict and how to diffuse difficult situations when they develop.
2.3 Understanding the learners
Learners who register for an online course have a huge variety of reasons for studying. Some may be using it as a ‘taster’ to find out about a subject, and decide whether they want to embark on further study. Others may use the online course to supplement other study they are engaged in. Some will have an academic background, whilst others have may have no experience of higher education. In Myanmar, an online course could be part of a blended learning course where some learning is delivered face to face and some is delivered online. Some learners are new to online learning forums or might be shy. In almost every case English will not be the first language of the learner, and learners may be based in very diverse parts of the country. These points need to be considered when you engage with your learners.
As well as being spaces for learning, online forums can provide the opportunity for social discussions and interaction not specific to the course – we can consider this type of online forum as providing a ‘social space’ for interaction, replicating in some ways what can happen on a campus where learners can get to know each other socially. The learners enrolled on a course will often be from a diverse background both culturally and educationally. This diverse mix adds to the wealth of experience and discussion that will take place during the conversation and in the presentation of their work.
You need to be aware that assumptions and misinterpretations can be a particular issue in an online environment due to a lack of visual and non-verbal clues, such as approving smiles and nods. Such misinterpretations can be made as much about the people posting messages as they can about the messages they post. As such, it is important not to jump to conclusions about what people mean or understand, or about the type of person they are. This does not mean that you will not make judgements about people or what they write.
In your role as an online facilitator, you will need to assess whether the messages being posted are appropriate to the nature and population of the audience. In order to do this you need to understand how such assumptions and misinterpretations might be avoided. Work in the field of anthropology (Hogan-Garcia, 2003) suggests that there are a number of competencies or skills that are helpful in overcoming perceived assumptions based on racial, cultural, educational or social background.
These cultural competencies are:
- Be non-judgemental/withhold judgement
- Be flexible
- Be resourceful
- Personalise observations
- Pay attention to thoughts and feelings
- Listen carefully
- Observe attentively
- Assume complexity
- Tolerate the stress of uncertainty
- Have patience
- Manage personal bias and stereotypes
- Keep a sense of humour
- Show respect
- Show empathy.
2.4 Competencies for facilitation
In the following activity you will look further at your skills.
Activity 3
Look again at the list of skills you identified in Activity 2 for the role of the facilitator. How much of an overlap is there between your list and this list of cultural competencies above?
You may wish to update your reflections from Activity 2 in your learning log.
Discussion
A number of the competencies identified by Hogan-Garcia are described in somewhat academic terms, so you may have had to consider what they mean in terms of your own experience of online conversations. However, there is still likely to be a high degree of overlap between the lists.
All these skills or competencies fall under social and communication skills, and emphasise the importance of appropriate social interaction online.
How to overcome assumptions and misinterpretations when they occur is dealt with in a later section.
2.5 Managing the role
When preparing for the role of an online facilitator, you need to consider what that might mean in terms of your time commitment and also your relationship with other learners.
Time commitment
Many of the online conversations you will be facilitating will be in an asynchronous environment where learners use an online forum. This means that learners will hardly ever be communicating with each other at the same time. By contrast an example of a synchronous conversation would be a video conference or live online meeting using tools such as Google Hangouts or Zoom.
Asynchronous conversations can sometimes have less energy than either synchronous or face-to-face settings but they do allow a high degree of flexibility as learners are able to join or leave discussions.
A drawback for the facilitator, however, is that your role can seem never ending as you will need to respond to similar questions and initiate new topics regularly. It is important, therefore, that you are realistic about the amount of time you spend online and also that you manage the expectations of learners. You should, for example, let the learners know roughly how often and at what times they can expect a response from you. There may also be an opportunities in larger conversations to work together with another facilitator to manage the workload. Depending on the course you are facilitating, you may also have the support of someone else who is helping to guide the conversations or a subject expert who can give specialist input or response on a particular question that a learner may have raised.
Relationship with learners
As the online facilitator, your relationship with learners is not about you being in charge, but about listening and responding to their needs. The facilitation role involves supporting and guiding, rather than teaching. There may be other people involved in the course. There could for example be an instructor present from time to time; this will most likely be an academic who was involved in the creation of the course or a presenter of any video lectures. The instructor may be present for a feature session as part of the learners’ activities. You may also work with other facilitators
In some cases, a facilitator may also be a subject expert involved in some tutoring, but in this course it is the facilitation skills we are focusing on.
It is important that you set yourself realistic boundaries abour your role and make sure that the learners are aware of this at the start.
2.6 Defining the facilitator role
In this section you will look at what is involved in being a facilitator.
Activity 4
Using the skills and competencies required of a facilitator as a starting point, draw up a table of five tasks the role involves and five tasks that it does not involve.
Table 3 shows some examples to get you started.
| What the facilitator role does involve | What the facilitator role does not involve |
|---|---|
| Finding information online that might be helpful to other learners | Teaching difficult concepts |
| Encouraging contributions | Policing any disputes that arise |
- Create a message to learners to explain the nature of your role and setting boundaries about what that role does and does not involve.
- You may wish to update your learning log with reflections on what you need to tell learners about the role and how you will manage your time.
Now continue to Session 3 Moderating an online conversation.