Gilberto Teixeira ,Prof.Doutor (FEA/USP)
A trained facilitator is an important component of an online program. Often, the facilitator is also the designer and monitor of the online course, and thus has a powerful influence on the success or failure of the program. The facilitator’s training, personality, and attitude all impact the online environment. A successful facilitator must know how to integrate life experience, communication, professionalism, and content into the learning environment. The personality of the facilitator is an important component as well, and sets the tone of the Virtual Classroom . If the facilitator is encouraging and positive, students will quickly develop a level of comfort in the online environment.
Facilitators have two responsibilities to their Virtual Students: appropriate curriculum design and facilitation. Online instruction is not "onground gone digital, audio or video." Interaction among students, between facilitator and students, and between the students and the learning materials, (including the larger community on the WWW) as managed by the instructor makes or breaks the class. When a facilitator makes the transition from traditional to online, he/she does not retain the role of "distributor of information" in a teacher-centered classroom. Rather an instructor’s energy should be channeled to become the medium whereby the discovery of learning is facilitated in a student-centered environment. No longer a "sage on the stage, " the online instructor becomes a "guide on the side," helping others to discover and synthesize the learning material. To this end, the facilitator must believe in the effectiveness of the online paradigm and the value of critical thinking. Hence, traditional teaching methods simply do not succeed given the changes in the learning environment. This brings new pressures on instructors, both to deal with a different way of teaching, interacting and managing a 24-hour-a-day classroom populated by adults who demand relevance and may require extra support due to their already busy lives.
Some of the responsibilities of an online facilitator include:
- Course planning and organization.
- Ability to create an atmosphere of collaborative teamwork. Students will depend on one another for a large portion of their learning. The facilitator needs to know how to work as part of this team as well as help the students work with each other.
- Construct questions that will have a variety of intellectual levels, varied in their instructional purpose and be open-ended.
- Set the agenda and provide leadership and direction without controlling the class. Find a balance between leading the group and creating an environment where students themselves meet the learning objectives. The leadership model becomes one of dynamic facilitation, which is a shift away from an authoritarian style toward a more democratic style.
- Develop methods for learner feedback and reinforcement.
- Sequence the presentation of content and pace the material so as to avoid content overload.
· Personalize instruction to be relevant to the needs of individual participants.