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.
2.4 Competencies for facilitation