Learning community engagement: Differentiating between lecturing, facilitating, and teaching

  Differentiating between lecturing, facilitating, and teaching

Teaching and Facilitating 

"Online facilitation is described as to be present, available, to share expertise online and model for the students what it means to participate in an online course (Martin, Budhrani, Kumar & Ritzhaupt, 2019)."

Facilitating involves more than the ordinary elements of teaching; it needs the "extra" elements to be extraordinary teaching, such as:

• Being present, 
• Providing feedback,
• Making connections to real-life scenarios, 
• Timely responding to questions, 
• Being organized and presenting high-quality material. 
• Implementing facilitation strategies can contribute to the success of students. 

Takeaways

    Every day there is an increase in the number of online students. People in today's world look for more opportunities to manage and adjust their lives to improve and have a better future. Therefore, facilitating is fundamental and must include mindfulness to interact and treat others as humans. Rather than delivering scores, facilitators must include real feedback that is enhancing and includes real-life scenarios and authentic material to allow learners to be culturally connected. 

    Video-based course introductions can also be used as a strategy to improve facilitation. Learners want and need to connect to real people who are willing to understand their needs and help them reach their goals. Therefore, building a structure between feedback and real-life connections such as video or audio can make teaching more meaningful and engaging to support and motivate online classes. 

    Facilitators must have  "Explicit  awareness and  ability to account  for motives behind  actions" (Martin, Wang, & Sadaf, 2020)

Facilitation Strategies

 

The strategy I would like to learn more:

I would like to be able to balance my lessons and teaching, including elements from the four strategies (social, pedagogical, managerial, and technical.) They all should be connected and work like gears to help the needs of all learners. For example, providing an introductory video could engage and connect students from different backgrounds. Additionally, Iy could also motivate students to participate and present their work. I also want to be able to answer questions as soon as possible.

References

Martin, F., Wang, C., & Sadaf, A. (2020). Facilitation matters: Instructor perception of helpfulness of facilitation strategies in online courses. Online Learning (Newburyport, Mass.), 24(1), 28-49.