Unit 2 | Facilitation Weeks (4 weeks)

Overview

In this unit, teams will deliver and facilitate their learning experiences. For the duration of this unit, you will either be in the “facilitator” role and facilitating a learning experience, or in the “learner” role and participating as a learner. You will design & facilitate one experience as part of a facilitation team, and participate as a learner in three other experiences.

While facilitators are delivering their topic, learners will not only be learning content, but they will also be engaging in observation, reflection, and critical examination of facilitators’ delivery methods and approaches.

Readings and activities will be assigned by facilitating teams.

For the week you are facilitating

  • Do not overburden your learners. I cannot stress this enough. The biggest reason teams falter on this assignment is because they plan too many activities, create activities that have multiple steps within in them, or are very prescriptive with the schedule for the week (ie do this on Monday by x time, then do this on Tuesday by x time, and then do this on Thursday by x time – you get the idea). Each learner should expect to be engaged in discussions, readings, and activities for about 5-7 hours over the 7-day facilitation period. Remember what you value as a working professional and try to design for your colleagues’ busy lives. It is very easy to over-plan the week with lots of readings & activities. The goal is to provoke discussion and/or the collaborative creation of learning artifacts that help learners engage with the topic, not to provide a comprehensive overview of the topic.
  • Avoid creating team activities that require synchronous coordination among team members. One week is a challenge to coordinate a team activity. If you do decide to do a team activity, create the teams ahead of time and structure your activities so that the team does not have to do much coordination to participate in the team.
  • Your week must include one synchronous session that is between 30 and 60 minutes in length.
  • Your “course” opens Sunday at midnight (Pacific) and closes Saturday at 11:59 pm (Pacific). While good facilitation practice would have you reach out to learners prior to facilitation beginning in order to establish your own presence, please refrain from connecting with your learners prior to the start of your week in consideration of the previous week’s facilitation team.
  • Track the participation of your learners. Keep notes on who is actively participating and who is not and if you are noticing someone missing from your facilitation team, please contact me.
  • Be sure to submit your team assessment of your team members immediately following your facilitation week.
  • By the Wednesday of the week following your facilitation week i will send to you an anonymized list of the learner feedback your team received from the learners. This is an opportunity for you to hear directly from the learners about your facilitation week. In all aspects of the learning experience, creating opportunities for our learners to have a voice and speak to us directly about their experiences provides a pathway to gain a greater understanding of the teaching & learning process and how it directly impacts our learners. This learner feedback will become an important aspect of your final reflective paper as I will be looking for you to incorporate these observations from the learners into your final paper.

For the weeks you are in the “learner” role – Learner feedback activity

As part of this course, you not only will design and facilitate one learning experience for your cohort, but you will also participate in three learning experiences designed and facilitated by others.

  • In addition to participating as directed by the facilitation teams, your role is also to observe, reflect and analyze what and why the facilitation team is doing what they are doing. This is in order for you to a) provide peer feedback to the facilitation team at the end of each week, and b) to help you further develop your own facilitation skills through observing your peers. This is your opportunity as a learner and a peer to provide constructive and meaningful feedback to your facilitators on their facilitation week.
  • Each week you will submit your own evaluation of the week connecting what you saw the facilitation teams do with the best practices we have discussed in Unit 1.
    • The peer assessment is due on Tuesday after the facilitation week.
    • You will use this same Google form to assess all the weeks you are a learner in so you might want to bookmark it for future reference.
    • The form should take you no more than 10 minutes to complete.
    • While I will know who submitted what evaluation, I will anonymize the collated results for the facilitation team. They will not know who submitted what evaluation.
    • After I have received all the learner feedback, I will collate all the learner responses and forward them to the facilitation team. While this is not a separately graded activity, your weekly submissions to the facilitation team will determine a large part of your course participation mark.
  • For some tips on giving good feedback, check out the resource Giving Good Feedback from the RRU Centre of Teaching and Educational Technologies.

Questions you will find on the Google Learner Evaluation Form

Before you begin filling out the Learner Evaluation Form for the first time, here are the questions you will find on the form to give you an opportunity to think about them prior to filling out the form.

    1. Your Name (known only to me. It will not be sent to the facilitation team so that your feedback is anonymous).
    2. What facilitation week are you assessing?
    3. One thing that you thought worked very well this week and why.
    4. One thing that you thought could have been improved this week and why
    5. What specifically did you see from the facilitation team that clearly demonstrated at least one of the three CoI presences (Social, Teaching, Cognitive)?
    6. Was there something you found confusing this week? (y/n) If yes, what was it?
    7. The choice of technology was appropriate for the activities (Likert)
      • Why did you answer the way you did?
    8. I found the level of effort in this class was (multiple choice):  Too little/Just right/Too much/Overwhelming
      • Why did you answer the way you did?
    9. Any other comments for the facilitation team?

Learning Activities and Assignments

Required readings & resources will be assigned by the facilitation teams.