Facilitating Online Discussions

Timing, Motivation, Organization, Focus, Patience, Silence...what makes or breaks when it comes to facilitation online?

There was lots of interactive discussion in week's three threaded discussion on the topic of facilitating online discussions. In fact, there were a total of 43 posting! Any novice online participant might feel daunted to join the discussion as if they were being asking to scale a 14,000 foot mountain when out on their first trek. Basically, how can we arouse vibrant discussion that creates a collaborative student-to-student interaction? And, how do we react when there is no response to the discussion?

There were many great suggestions. Dave Beatie suggested to use Keller's ARCS model to stir motivation--ACRS.

• Attention. Gain their attention!
• Relevance. What's in it for me? Let them know the answer to that question
• Confidence. Being able to put newly learned knowledge into action
• Satisfaction. Feeling fulfilled and reward from the learning experience.

Dave Young even chimed into the dialog by responding to posting surrounding the need to time the when to post questions, how to organize the discussion and how have patience.
" I decided to watch this thread play out because the variety of ideas being generated were very interesting! Lack of response is definitely something that can drive you crazy as a facilitator. The "wait time" strategy is important and tough to master in an online environment because of the lack of clues about why there is silence."

My best contribution regarded having a topics agenda. Know what questions to ask and when you are going to ask them. Provide the participants with a time-line for responding to the question to keep them motivated to be involved and to also know when it's time to move on to the next topic. I didn't post this in the discussion, but I also think it is important to let the learners have the option to post in older discussion knowing that the other participants might not check the posting but you as a facilitator will respond.

I offered up some facilitation tips:
"'Asking Questions That Stimulate Discussion
Asking questions in an online discussion is a bit different than in a face-to-face environment. In a face-to-face seminar the facilitator can immediately adjust his or her questioning strategies if the audience doesn’t respond to the first question asked. In an asynchronous conference, the discussion can fizzle quickly if the right question isn’t asked at the beginning. Here are some tips on asking questions to stimulate online discussion early:

• Clarify the outcome objectives for the discussion.The first question(s) should immediately start participants thinking about the important issues in the topic.
  

• Limit the number of questions that are asked at the beginning of a discussion to one or at most two. Participants will lose interest if they are expected to respond to too many issues in one discussion. If there are more than two aspects of the topic that need to be explored to meet the outcome objective for the discussion, give participants permission to respond only to one, or at most two, of the questions you have posed. Even better, ask questions later in the discussion that introduce different aspects of the topic that need to be considered.

• Ask open-ended questions to which there can be more than one “correct” response

• Ask for participant opinions on a controversial aspect of the topic or invite participants to describe their experience relevant to the topic.

• Avoid asking questions that can be answered directly from the readings or which can be answered completely by one keen respondent."

Link to the PDF: http://files.myweb.med.ucalgary.ca/files/132/files/unprotected/FacilitatorGuideSept03.pdf

Richard Stewart added that "asking the student to complete the question" is also a great way to stimulate responses.

Online facilitation is both a science and a mixture of natural human interaction. The magic is how to use what works in natural dialog in online collaboration.