During my week as the online facilitator, I shared the
responsibilities with my co-facilitator, David Corbin. Using
a wiki, Dave and I worked together on building a story board and power point
for our synchronous session. We met
online a couple of times to discuss the process and split up
responsibilities. We then met the morning
of our facilitation to run through the presentation and time it to make sure we
were ready and on track.
I do online facilitation of power point presentations for my
full time job so I had no real fears about presenting to the class. I don’t feel as comfortable teaching my peers
as I do a class of learners but I have also become accustomed to that at work.
For our synchronous session, attendance was low and that put
a lot of pressure on the participants to participate. It took awhile for them to warm up but they
did step and begin participating with the icebreaker, discussions and final
activity. I think Dave and I did and
good job of facilitating our section and were well received by the class. We met our learning objectives for the
session and people seemed to enjoy themselves.
I enjoyed having a co-facilitator as it divided the work and we had
plans to cover each other as needed if the class failed to participate.
Dave and I also met and decided to split up the
responsibilities for the asynchronous sessions.
We each planned on taking half the class and responding to their
discussion threads. As it was we both
decided to comment on everyone’s discussion threads. It was not as time consuming as we believed
it might be.
My comfort level with managing the asynchronous session was
not as high. I was unsure of what type
of responses that I should me making and believe that I irritated one of my
classmates by my response to her post.
This is an area that I need to build and will begin taking more notice
of the types of responses my instructors make to my discussions.
To date I have not been surprised by anything that occurred
but that my change as my peer feedback begins to roll in.
Although this experience has not changed my thoughts on
facilitation, this class has greatly changed the way I facilitate on my
job. I am thankful that this is what I
do for a living so I have opportunities to practice skills and tools as we
learn them.
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