To assess myself as a facilitator of online learning, I used the Online Facilitation Checklist (City University, 2016) to identify strengths and areas of development:

• Check that all resources, activities and links work and are accessible by students.This is certainly an area of improvement. Especially when I copy a course from a previous semester I need to make sure that everything is functional, instead of relying on students to alert me if something is not functioning.
• Provide contact details for technical support and queries.I believe I do.
• Make everyone feel welcome and heard; setting the initial mood or climate of the environment.I think I am pretty good at this. Although all the instructions are available in writing in, I always record short videos welcoming students to the course and to its different modules, giving an overview and a short summary of the content and activities.
• Establish clear goals and expectations at the outset by providing for example, learning outcomes for each topic/week, a schedule of activity deadlines, timetable of your availability.Yes, this is also something I believe I am good at. I divide each course in to modules. Each module is set within a time frame and given a set of learning objectives and activities. In my experience it is important to decide on a basic structure and stick to it. This way students now what to expect and can focus their energy on learning instead of being frustrated about trying to understand what to do and why.
• Develop the widest possible range of learning resources and activities online that address a variety of learning styles.What I like best about online learning is that it allows you to explore and make us of all the open learning resources out there: web-sites, videos, pod-casts, blogs. I believe I can improve in encouraging students to do more of the exploration themselves, instead of me providing them my selection of resources.
• Provide behind-the-scenes support, for example via email.I believe being available via e-mail and phone is very important to make students feel that I am present.
• Foster communication between participants, encourage reflection.I am quite good at building in asynchronous written communication and reflection in courses (see examples earlier in this post). This also include an initial written presentation. To encourage students to be somewhat personal in their presentations I start by posting my own presentation to set an example. I also like to prioritize having time for lots of online face-to-face interaction and reflection with smaller groups of students.  One takeaway from this course is that I should like to develop more possibilities for students to interact face-to-face online without a teacher present.
• Build motivation into online activities.As mentioned earlier in this post, I believe that it is important to make content meaningful and to design activities that challenge students to relate content to their own experiences and contexts. But I also think there are other means of motivation. A simple feature that lot of students value and find satisfying is the possibility to mark an activity as ”done” after completion. This is one reason that I like to specify each activity (watch this, read this, participate in this, submit this) and arrange them in a chronological order in the online course room.
• Keep discussions live, revive activity when postings are flagging.I have not really experienced this as a problem, but that might be because I usually set quite low expectations for student participation, e.g. ”you must comment on two other posts”. This might be an area of improvement, in that I could encourage lengthier discussions that enables student to develop their thinking more.
• Be a participant learner, express views and provide feedback as a member of the group.
• This is probably an area of improvement, although my approach to seminars is usually that they are a possibility for learning (not only assessment) that also involves me.

Overall, I am quite confident that I have the basic skills necessary to be able to design online learning. There is however an obvious risk of becoming contempt and stop challenging myself to further develop and explore new possibilities. I think this course has given me what I hoped for – some insight into what I don’t know that I don’t know, involving both theoretical concepts for thinking about online learning, and practical tools to use. The theoretical concepts include the visitor-resident framework (White & Le Cornu 2011), networked learning (Dron & Anderson 2014), blended learning and community of inquiry (Vaughan et al. 2013). Tools include Mentimeter, Padlet, Mindmeister, and Flipgrid. It has also been very valuable to get the insider perspective on online networked learning, and to experience how fun and creative it can be.

Taking part in ONL201 has been an intense and rewarding experience. I will of course use make use of my new insights, theoretical concepts and tools in developing the courses I am involved in as a teacher and program director. Hopefully, I will also find the time to make a systematic evaluation of the online program I am involved in, and apply knowledge from this course in the analysis and discussion of the findings.

References

City University London. (2016). Online Facilitation Techniques.

Cleveland-Innes, M. (2019). Emotion and learning – emotional presence in the Community of Inquiry framework (CoI)?

Dron, J. & Anderson, T. (2014). Teaching crowds: Learning and social media. Athabasca University Press.

Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Edmonton: AU Press.

White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).