I believe that all this angst has come about because \”a teacher\” decided some way back that he or she would replace the word \”teach online\” with \”facilitate online\”. It means the same!

Because we have all been encouraged to step back a bit and stop pushing information at students and encourage them to do more thinking for themselves and more self-directed learning, teaching is now facilitating. But is it?

Learner-centred is the new buzz word along with facilitated learning – it is still about teaching. The teachers, you and I, leigh, are still seen as the experts in the discipline we are teaching otherwise we would not be asked to \”teach\” the course.

So why have we been asked to teach the course and not the local butcher who is equally able to facilitate a jolly good discussion?

Because we have some expertise – like it or not, we have to teach our class something so they can teach themselves. Teach or model, facilitate or model – otherwise they will not just be feeling frustrated or confused – too much to learn – they will be really, really angry and p…ed off. Why didn\’t we just send out the handbook with the instructions for the course and the assessments with a few readings and tell them to get on with it?

Because we have to teach them something. that involves not just facilitating a good ole discussion, it involves giving information, brokering information, helping/facilitating them to find information, setting up systems and facilitating ways for them to develop as a community, directing them towards the things they need to complete to pass the course or not. Is that not teaching in one sense?

Making it interesting and challenging and scary enough to make them come back for more – fear as in the kind you get on a rollercoaster. Fear can be a great stimulant!

In my mind, good teaching is about good facilitating and treating the learners as individuals and as competent intelligent people who can think for themselves and who are encouraged to think critically.

In response to some of leigh\’s questions –

• Why is this course called facilitate online learning communities and not teach online learning communities? To be absolutely pedantic here it is Facilitating eLearning communities. So just as Leigh has replaced eLearning with online – have we not replaced teaching with facilitating?
• Is teaching and facilitation really interchangeable?
• Yes mostly it is because good teaching should strike a balance and the teacher should step back when necessary and step forward and teach when needed – sometimes we need to be more proactive to facilitate scaffolded learning and not just assume people will enjoy struggling to find out everything themselves. The level of support needed, I believe, depends on each person\’s zone of proximal development(Wikipedia, 2007), for each situation and each topic. As you will see a person can be assisted to develop not only by the teacher but also by their peers – so does the peer then become a teacher too?
• Is facilitation simply one of many techniques that a teacher employs in their work? Or is teaching just one of many 3rd party services that a facilitator might call on in their work?
• Is it possible to be both a teacher and a facilitator within the same group of people?
• In response to these questions, I believe the answer is yes in both cases. Why? Because firstly, I see the terms as interchangeable where someone really knows how to support learners albeit called teacher or facilitator. Secondly, a balance is crucial in contemporary society .
• What are the differences in the roles and what are the social dynamics in play when they function?
• It depends on our definitions for teacher and facilitator and these depend on our philosophies as this discussion is demonstrating.

Examples: If facilitating a meeting – we might approach it in different ways. We can talk and dominate the session for the bulk of the time and answer questions, or present a slide show and demonstrate what we have been doing and/or would like to see being done and answer Qs. we can set an agenda and call for contributions, and chair the meeting to keep discussion on track and comments relevant. we can dominate the meeting by always bringing up points of discussion. a meeting can be facilitated by all members and all members contribute equally thus teaching others by telling them new things or bringing up points they may not have thought of.

I guess it depends on whether you believe that learning occurs all the time and whether when we learn we have taught ourselves or learned from others. Does that then make them teachers?

Oh boy – is it not all about letting others speak, and about people having an equal chance to contribute, and valuing each person\’s contribution and unique style?

To me that is much more important than debating the difference between teaching and facilitating. even someone standing up in front of a class and delivering a lecture for an hour, has facilitated learning in some way. what they may not have done is facilitated group discussion or critical thinking but they could have and I always tried to operate this way in large lectures.

So lecture is not synonymous with monologue or transfer of information – it depends on the style of the lecturer – just as tutorial or discussion is not synonymous with interaction. as we know people can just sit there and wait to be told and not contribute no matter how excellent the facilitator might be. Intrinsic motivation can play a huge part in how actively people engage and contribute.
You facilitate an exam perhaps not teach in it. That is the only example I can think of where there might be a difference BUT you actually supervise an exam or invigilate not really facilitate it. You facilitate a discussion or a meeting but you may not do it well just as you may not teach well. And for me good teaching is about being a good facilitator of knowledge, of interaction, of information, of learning and of people. Are there other examples you can think of where you facilitate not teach?

When writing to the email group to thank them for participating in the course, I realised that the community was really only beginning. Although the course is now officially finished, we will be keeping the email group open so the community can share ideas, tips and stories about their experiences facilitating online. I also invited everyone to help develop the online communities pages on WikiEducator. I hope some will continue to engage in the group.

As a first time facilitator and co-facilitator in the course I found the experience a very challenging and rewarding experience. It has not been easy and it was never boring. Overall, it was extremely interesting to interact online with such a diverse and highly skilled group of educators; everyone in the group had very different needs and expectations. Sometimes I found it frustrating and sometimes I found it confusing – the reactions of the group were not always logical and rarely predictable.

For example, I believed the instructions for the first part of the course were clear and straightforward but that relied on people working systematically through the Blackboard activities and resources. People did not seem to get it. Then we confused people by throwing other technologies into the mix – email group, blog, wiki – as problems came up we offered a range of solutions. There was choice introduced, not just step-by-step and work through the activities and resources on Blackboard….post a discussion in Blackboard. The options threw a lot of people into the pirana pool. People\’s preference for options other than Blackboard meant the platform became redundant as we thought it would in a networked community.

Was it too much too soon?

For the next class, I feel that the Blackboard option will not be an option. Sure we could have shown people a couple of nice to know web 2.0 technologies and left them safely sitting in the learning Management System AND that could have been a community of sorts. Perhaps a subsistence community and a community with very limited means but a gated community – safe but how I hate the idea.

Instead we took the class out into the scary cyber world of uncertainty and unpredictability. Choice was the flavour of the day – ask a question and there were several options to choose from. Good or bad! We took people on a constructionist, constructivist and scaffolded/facilitated pathway with many forks and turns. People were not comfortable and they complained or disappeared from view. The true blue online facilitators did reappear though and they were stronger than when they started and more innovative – yes there were a few bruises and damaged egos – but they made the effort to ride the bull.

I learned a great deal from the experience and am impressed by the tenacity of the community to try out new challenges and experiences. Facilitating the class with Leigh opened new communities I had hitherto tried but avoided eg Second Life, gaming, FaceBook. I really liked the 10 minute lecture series – how fortunate we were to have so many people willing to contribute their know how to the community. My only regret is not having enough time to reflect on my blog about all the events. I can still do this of course because they are all recorded.

I asked the class to forgive us for discombobulating them. I was impressed with the high level of critical thinking and there was significant diversification of the communities\’ online facilitation abilities as we moved through the course. It is clear there is no one magic bullet for success. Each group will be different. Hopefully the group has established some guidelines for themselves and the groups they will go on to facilitate. I hope they can now recognise the need to allow their students room to evolve as a community. I firmly believe that only by providing loosely-structured problems will students be assisted to think critically and really learn how to learn.

I have never forgotten the words of a visiting lecturer years ago who ran a workshop on critical thinking. \”If you want to get your students to think critically, you have to put them in a place where they do not feel comfortable and where they feel challenged, they will not go there on their own.\”

I particularly like the explanation on the uses of critical thinking on Wikipedia. To get this class to think critically about good and bad methods for facilitating online communities it was necessary to present them with experiential real world problems in an online community and not just one or two but a wide range. Just transmitting information to them abut how to facilitate online would not have cut it; they had to experience it warts and all. What was bad to some was good to others and vice versa. Each experience would have beenunique although the community was exposed to the same things.

\”Critical thinking is also critical inquiry, so such critical thinkers investigate problems, ask questions, pose new answers that challenge the status quo, discover new information that can be used for good or ill, question authorities and traditional beliefs, challenge received dogmas and doctrines, and often end up possessing power in society greater than their numbers.\” \”The intellectual skills of critical thinking–analysis, synthesis, reflection, etc.–must be learned by actually performing them.\” (AN INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THINKING by Steven D. Schafersman, 1991).
Facilitating this course has helped me to become better at critical thinking. It is not an easy thing to get the balance right in a course like this and my big question is – should we cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of skill and comfort or should we make the challenge higher and hope for the best. I believe for this class we did the right thing going with the latter – uncomfortable as it was at times for all of us.