BOOK: AOD Foundations
12. Facilitating an AOD
Instructors and AOD
To begin this chapter, consider viewing the following video [9 min] in which Dr. Curt Bonk from Indiana University describes characteristics and practices of educators who create effective online environments.
A commonly held myth is that technology could replace the instructor, or that online learning does not need an instructor. In reality, the instructor is as much of a requirement in online learning as in face-to-face (f2f) learning, just in different ways. The role of the instructor changes from a learning guide to a learning facilitator, and the presence of the instructor to support learning in the online delivery mode is essential to student satisfaction.
Instructor Presence
Instructor presence refers to the various ways an instructor makes themselves perceptibly available and engaged with their learners. This encompasses a range of activities from initiating discussions, responding to student queries, providing timely and constructive feedback, to sharing relevant resources and insights that enrich the learning experience. It's about creating a supportive, interactive environment where students feel seen, heard, and guided through their learning journey. Instructor presence is crucial for fostering a sense of community and belonging among students, enhancing their motivation, and promoting deeper learning by making the online educational experience feel more personal and connected, despite the physical distance.How Often to Use AOD
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to when an instructor should use online discussions, how often, and how much they should interact within the discussions. The instructor should evaluate their students’ needs on a case-by-case basis. For example, how often the instructor ought to reply in the online discussion forums can vary based on a great many factors, such as:
- Level of the students: New students and beginners may require more interaction than higher level or graduate students, who may prefer to lead the discussion themselves and to learn from each other as much as from the instructor.
- Topic: Some topics might require more management and guidance by the instructor than others.
- Discussion type: You will learn of different kinds of discussions that can be utilized, and different ones would require different levels of interaction by the instructor.
What the Research Says
Research supports two interesting results that could conflict with
each other in practice: 1) That instructor presence is key to student
satisfaction, and 2) That too much interaction and posting by the instructor
in discussions can lead to reduced posting by the students (Wang and
Liang, 2011).
Students claim higher satisfaction in courses that have higher instructor presence and availability (Picciano, 2002; Richardson & Swan, 2003; Shea, Li, & Pickett, 2006; Blau, 2009). On the other hand, because the instructor is considered an authoritarian figure (Rourke & Anderson, 2002), studies have found that the sooner, and more often, an instructor posted in the discussion forums, then the less frequent and shorter were the posts by the students (Dennen, 2005, Massolini & Maddison, 2003). Learners require some time to start and to feel confident in expressing their views with each other before the instructor begins to interact with them, otherwise they will just reply to the instructor, and not to each other (Wang and Liang, 2011).
Directed Tactics
Wang and Liang (2011) outlined several methods specifically focused on dealing with this dilemma:
- Regulating: The course designer can help regulate student interactions by creating and implementing clear rules and policies related to the discussion board posts and replies. This includes quantitative rules about how often to post, by when, and to whom. It also includes qualitative rules about the content and quality of the posts and replies.
- Inviting: The instructor makes it clear to the student how to contact them for help, guidance, questions, and support on the discussion topics. This can be a separate online forum for building discussions between the instructor and students, which is away from the course topic discussions in which the instructor hopes the students will teach each other. This is often called the ’Virtual Office.’
- Summarizing: The instructor is integral in summarizing the student discussions and going over main points and important conclusions. Putting in direct examples from the discussion is very useful and gives credit to high quality interactions. This helps the students in summarizing their own learning, as well as lets them know clearly that they were being monitored throughout the process.
- Assessing: Formative assessments and feedback help students to improve their performance during the course. Offering feedback on the quality of the posts with examples of expectations helps students to meet the instructor’s expectations and to improve on the quality of their interactions with their peers.
- Counseling: The instructor should let learners know they are there to support them, and be in frequent contact with the student through means other than just the discussion forums. They can send out updates by email and give students many ways to contact them, through a special instructor-student Virtual Office discussion forum (as outlined in #2) in the course, by email, phone, chat, in person-to-person office hours, and any other means of communication the instructor is able to offer students.
Facilitator Posts and Strategies
Questioning Strategies: There are a variety of
questioning strategies, such as Socratic questioning, that allow the
instructor to help push student learning. The idea is
that through asking the learner specific questions about what they say,
they will eventually lead themselves to the right answer. The Center
for Teaching Excellence at the University of Connecticut has put
together a quick guide, with sample questions, to help guide a discussion using Socartic methods.
Lead the Horse to Water: You will quickly note that some students have missed the point, missed a needed conclusion, have a misconception, or just do not know their facts. This could be due to prior learning that is a barrier to them learning new information, due to them just reading an erroneous source online, or because they did not prepare for for the discussion. It is important to catch these discussion errors and moderate them early so that other learners in the same course are not also erroneously led along the same logical fallacies. The problem, though, always rests in that people do not like to be told they are wrong. If you reply “that is wrong” the learner is likely to feel publicly attacked in front of their peers and will either become defensive, or close up and not post anything more. Therefore, there are more subtle and indirect ways of leading the student to the right information without directly telling them.
Example: John writes “Climate change is just a hoax propagated by crazy environmentalists that want to prohibit the smooth running of our economy.”
Problems with the post: Hearsay. Unfounded. Jargon. Not academic. Claims without support. False information contrary to what experts in the field and the textbook say. The issue, though, is that climate change is a sensitive and heated subject. The instructor would need to find an innovative indirect way of getting the learner to consult from the right material on their own because telling them is probably going to make them angry or defensive.
Ways the instructor might reply:
- Hello John. Thank you for your post. You made some claims but did not offer support or facts to back them up. Can you reply to me here with some specific facts and resources to support your points? What does our book say on the topic?
- Hello John. Thank you for your post. I would like to direct you to pg XX in our textbook. Read that page. What does the author say on this topic? What do you think?
- Hello John. Thank you for your post. I think that NASA has some very interesting data concerning climate change. Take a look at this link and tell me what you think? http://climate.nasa.gov/
Create Connections: Reply to learner posts with useful resources, information, and relevant topics that help them connect their learning.
- You wrote about X, and at this link/online-resource they say X, what do you think?
- This reminds me of. . .
- Did you see that X wrote on this, what did you think of his/her conclusions?
- Go view this X thread, as it relates to what you say here on X. . .
- I see you talked about X, how does that relate to X on pg X of our book?
- See this X thread/link/news as it is relevant to what you say about X. . .
Avoiding Burnout
In the f2f classroom, the instructor manages 20+ students in a discussion at the same time, in one hour, and then is done. In the online discussions the conversations can go on longer, expand and break up into multiple conversation lines, and the instructor may begin to feel overwhelmed by the number of replies they need to manage. Here are some tips and tricks to managing online discussions that avoid work overload:
- Save save save! If you write up a thoughtful, well supported and referenced reply on a given topic, chances are you will use it again the next time you teach that same topic and course. Save it in a file to be reused. Save anything you might reuse, and save yourself time in the future.
- Reply to multiple students at the same time. Do
not reply to each learner with the same information.
Instead, try to get them onto the same thread and reply to them all
there. If you wait a day or two and reply to a thread between 2-4 students, then you make one reply to four students at the same time.
- Example 1: Hello John, Jane, Mary and Susan. You have some interesting points about XX, and also about XX. Have you considered XX? What do you think?
- Example 2: Hello John. I see you are discussing the same topic as I replied to Mary with some interesting facts and sources. Check that out, and reply to let us know what you think.
- Set Work Hours. Online discussions are always there. It can invade the rest of your life until you find you are logging into the course far too often. Set specific hours when you will login into your online course and check the discussions, and stick to that schedule. Try to not login outside those set hours to avoid burnout.
- Quality vs. Quantity: Replying to all students in the course with fluff and low quality replies is far less advantageous to their learning than making a few directed, specific, and high quality replies. Make it clear to students that a reply to one student is always open to discussion by the entire class.
- Pick Your Battles. Don’t spend hours writing up a thoughtful, in-depth tutorial, post, or help guide unless you can reuse it with other students in the future; try to find the same thing online already written and give them that link instead. Finally, don’t spend hours on thoughtful feedback for a student’s post where the student very clearly did not spend even five minutes writing it.
Reflection
Review the directed tactics in this section. Which do you think would be hardest to implement and why? Which do you feel would be most essential?
References
Massolini, M., & Maddison, S. (2007). When to jump in: The role of the instructor in online discussion forums. Computers Education, 49(2), 193-213.
Additional Resources
Hungry for more? Consider the following resources.