Teaching online: Do's and Don'ts

1st Facilitator's hat

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• Central to the role of an online facilitator is to ensure participants learn! Let us investigate facilitation methods that are more effective than didactic teaching. What can you do within a forum, for example, that will create a rich learning envionment?

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  Stimulate good debates

• What makes for a good discussion? Watch the video below on what makes for a good online discussion.

• UMA. (2016). Facilitating online discussions URL

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• In your experience, what needs to be in place for online course participants to actively participate in a good argument? How would you do this online? Brainstorm your ideas with your colleagues here. Reply to their posts. (Note: This discussion contributes to the course completion statistics. In order to complete the task you need to post at least once and reply to at least two of your peers' posts.)

• Stimulate a good discussion forum

  View Post replies: 2 Make forum posts: 1
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  Summarise forum discussions

• Unlike a regular discussion, online debates need to be summarized. As facilitator you need to read through the responses and then sum up the main messages and let the participants know what you consider to be the important points. This is usually done at the end of the discussion. The articles below outline effective summarizing strategies.

• White, N. (2003). Harvesting, weaving and creating summaries URL

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• Hockley, N. (2009). Tips for online forum discussion summaries URL

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  Evaluate forum contributions

• While you are synthesizing the responses into a summary you can also evaluate individual posts and allocate marks. 

  1. Investigate the marking template below that provides guidance on how to allocate marks using specific criteria.

• EdTech Leaders. (2012). Evaluation rubric: discussion board expectations URL

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• 2. Identify a post within the forum, 'stimulate a good discussion forum' above, by someone other than yourself and copy their response. 
     
  3. In the forum below, 'Evaluate a discussion forum post', click 'Reply' and paste their response into the post, 
  4. Include a mark their post out of 10.
  5. Write a justification for your mark and identify the 'criteria' you used. You can refer to the matrix in the previous reading for ideas. 
  6. Note: Your facilitator will mark your contribution using these criteria: Is the post well articulated? | Is there a logic/rationale to the justification | Is the mark fair?

• Evaluate a discussion forum post

  Post replies: 2 Make forum posts: 1
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  In summary keep in mind that your evaluation of a discussion contribution should not be arbitrary but based on appropriate criteria and uniformly applied.