The seminar facilitation week was an awesome learning experience, both for the opportunity to really dig in to two models of online learning: Salmon's Five Stage Model (Salmon, 2003), and Garrison, Anderson and Archer's Community of Inquiry (COI) Model, and for the facilitation experiences itself, where my teammates and I were able to put some of the theory we had been learning about into practice. Learning about both of these models during our preparation for our facilitation week provided me with the “aha” moment that I had been hoping for as they provide concrete, yet flexible, frameworks to reference when planning for and teaching online courses. My group wanted to apply some of what we had learned about the COI model within our own facilitation process, as well some strategies that we hoped would help to reduce cognitive overload, as this had been to focus of the previous week. We chose to present our seminar content about building virtual communities using a Weebly site, something that we felt was familiar to the cohort members and would be easy to navigate. We also chose to use other technology tools that had already introduced, such as a Coggle mind map and a discussion thread, as well as providing our learners with the option to select tools that they had already experimented with. Starting our seminar week with a synchronous Zoom session made sense given the focus on building social presence within a community of learners as we felt that the ability to actually see and interact with one another couldn’t be as well replicated asynchronously or without video and audio. I was lucky enough to have two amazing teammates for this facilitation process, and I think Wendy’s ability to connect with each one of the learners who attended the meeting really set us up for a successful week in which our cohort members felt comfortable contacting us for support as needed. My main role during the week was to create some instructional content around the COI model to share with our cohort, and creation and facilitation of the icebreakers collaborative mind map and G+ conversations activity as well as the philosophy for building online community activity. Throughout the week I really enjoyed viewing the ideas and work shared by members of the learning cohort, and interacting with the learners through written means as well as video and audio recordings. Maintaining an ongoing presence throughout the week did take a significant amount of time, and I found myself wondering what was enough teacher presence versus what may be too much teacher presence. There were three people working together to facilitate this week, and Thai took on the role on facilitating the debate threads as a whole. I can definitely see how it would be a challenge to manage more posts and activities independently. I think this is where the social presence aspect can begin to take on a life of its own and greatly support the instructor as the students themselves take on a portion of the teaching presence role, providing feedback and support to one another. Overall I really enjoyed this experience and look forward to implementing some more of the strategies practiced within my current teaching role.
References: Garrison, D.R., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2000). Critical Inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Salmon,G.(2003). The Five Stage Model. Retrieved from https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html
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