Week 5 Overview

Site:	SCoPE - BCcampus Learning + Teaching
Group:	Facilitating Learning Online - Fundamentals 2019 OER
Book:	Week 5 Overview

Printed by:	Guest user
Date:	Monday, 6 May 2024, 4:12 AM

Description

Week 5 Overview

Overview
Weekly Activity
Reflective Practice
Online Presence
Workload Management
Optional Reading and Viewing

Overview

During this final week, we'll be reflecting back on our course experience and what it means to our teaching practices, revisiting key topics and themes with some experience behind us, and a mind to the future and applying what we've learned.

This includes:

considering the assessment of online participation and the role of rubrics (through lightly self-assessing our own participation in this course and thinking about how we might apply these concepts to working with our own students)
engaging in reflective practice - what that looks like, what tools we might use to be reflective practitioners, what we can learn and change from engaging in reflective practice
re-visiting some key themes of the course from our (now) more informed and experienced perspective: facilitation strategies, online presence and participation, workload management, and giving and receiving feedback

Weekly Activity

During this week, you'll be guided through an online learning activity by a team of your peers in FLO. The facilitation team will provide further details in a Instructions and Schedule document that will be posted above the week's activity forum.

A launch message will be sent out late Sunday evening or first thing Monday morning.

Focus for the Activity

The Reflective Practice Team will present an example of a reflective practice activity to stimulate participants to explore different metaphors for their teaching practices. The team facilitators will support you to review key ideas from weekly journal share posts across the duration of the course, related to the themes of online participation, workload management, giving and receiving feedback, and facilitation skills and strategies. You and the facilitators will share your reflections and ideas for applying what you've learned to your future facilitation and teaching practices.

Goals

The goal of this activity is to help you engage in and share your reflective practice by taking stock of your learning in FLO and making concrete plans for next steps.

Reflective Practice

reflection

One goal of this unit to explore the notion of being a reflective practitioner. This will have different meanings to everyone; our ways of accessing self-awareness and conducting self-study will be very individualized. You may also find formal or informal processes at your workplace that invites or supports reflection (e.g., course evaluations, quarterly meetings, workshops, retreats, annual performance reviews, corridor chats, or working with an instructional designer on a course re-design.)

In a way, this whole course has been an exercise in reflective practice. All along, we have:

reflected on and discussed our teaching practices
participated in activities, reflected on them, and given/received feedback on facilitation
reflected on our own facilitation/mini-session, and submitted a reflection piece (FLIF) about it

In the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook Senge et al. (1996) describe reflecting as:

…becoming an observer of your own thinking and acting. This phase might start with a postmortem about a previous action: How well did it go? What were we thinking and feeling during the process? What underlying beliefs (what "theories in use") seemed to affect the way we handled it? Do we see our goals differently now? (p. 60)

These kinds of questions help develop a deeper understanding of experiences and identify situations and/or aspects of themselves that can be improved.

Reflective practitioners reflect on the "what, why, how and when" of their experiences. The crucial element is the individual's willingness to honestly examine an experience, his or her part in it, and what decisions need to be made as a result.

Goloboy's (2003) article on the “Top Ten Secrets of Successful Online Educators” serves as a summary of some of the key points we've covered in this course. As well, it is a helpful article that can be used to stimulate reflecting thinking.

How do (or will) you build in time for reflective practice?

Video: Doug Hamilton (1:37)

Video: Jen Walinga (1:39)

Video: Alicia Wilkes (1:11)

Online Presence

Maintaining appropriate online presence is a very important skill in online facilitation. Looking back on your experiences in FLO as a participant and facilitator, and watching others facilitate, do you have any new ideas for establishing and maintaining your online presence? What seemed to work well? What didn't?

Successful online facilitators will tell you they have devised strategies for being there, without always having to be there (online, 24/7). Much of this has to do with understanding, anticipating and responding - in advance - to the needs of adult online learners.

Facilitators can establish and maintain presence in a number of ways, including:

posting regular updates and notices to the class. Often, instructors post a weekly update on a Sunday evening, perhaps commenting on high points from the last week and setting up expectations and reminders for the coming week. Even though this information (the schedule, the list of tasks and readings) is in the course, it's good to demonstrate that you're moving through the course with them.
noting particularly interesting developments in the forums
asking provocative questions
sending individual emails
making references in assignment feedback or forums to notable postings a student has made
making all instructions very, very clear (i.e., anticipate needs)
using synchronous technologies at strategic points in the course, e.g., holding a Collaborate session, and recording it for those who can't attend. Some good times are:

at the beginning, to introduce yourself and establish expectations
at mid-point, to check in and see how students are doing (in many courses there is a mid-point survey too, which gives formative feedback while there is time to adjust strategies before the end of the course
before a complex or challenging team or individual assignment
as a way to prepare and review for the final exam

using audio, video, and images to show and tell things to the students, including your course introduction
and last but never least, making it personal to the extent that works for you (e.g., using humour, sharing relevant anecdotes/stories from your professional experience, etc)

Making regular contributions to the course in a variety of ways assures students that you are present and attentive.

If you didn't already watch the "instructor presence" videos that we featured in the beginning of this course, now might be a good time to go back and view them (or view them again!).