Week 3 of Online Facilitation

As I have not yet experienced what it is to be an online facilitator, I can only speculate as to what would be the most difficult challenge of this profession.  If I had to wager an educated guess; I would say getting used to interacting with my students in a different form would be most difficult.  It is certainly not impossible to interact with students in an online setting; but I imagine that it has more to deal with emailing, once a week conversations, and digital participation.  This would be challenging for me considering that I am used to interacting with students by talking with them on a daily basis, or reading their non-verbal cues.

However, since I am going to be facilitating both a synchronous and asynchronous discussion there are some things that I need to consider.  As far as my synchronous discussion is concerned, I feel it is of the utmost importance to be prepared.  Preparation can help calm anxiety, anticipate previously unforeseen problems, and make the flow of discussion run smoothly.  I think having access to an Elluminate classroom will help tremendously with my preparation.  In terms of the asynchronous discussion, I think the best way to ensure that the conversation runs well is to establish very clear parameters.  By taking away the guess work of what I am expecting, the students can easily meet any established criteria while simultaneously creating a discussion worthy of participation.

My topic for consideration for the asynchronous/synchronous discussions is the Authenticity of Submitting Online Assignments.  I chose this particular topic because it was very interesting.  I feel there is much gray area with this topic, making for a great conversation starter.

Finally, when constructing my rubrics for both the synchronous and asynchronous plans, I truly tried my best to make rubrics that lacked ambiguity.  I figured that when I do an assignment, I like the directions to be as straight-forward and objective as possible.  Now, I understand that there is typically a degree of subjectivity when it comes to any assessment, but keeping that to a minimum (I believe), allows students to know exactly how to preform the task at hand.