Facilitation Strategies for Focusing and Deepening Online Learning  

Do you have the e-moderator skills and tools to facilitate learner collaboration and move online dialogue from mere brainstorming to deeper learning? What are your challenges? Perhaps you wonder how an e-moderator might sharpen the focus of dialogues when postings about new content are widely divergent. Or possibly you struggle with what course of action an online instructor might take if discussants do not engage directly with content or begin to wander off-topic. We will begin with your questions and the specific challenges you face and then introduce tools, examples and strategies to address your challenges with facilitating effective online collaboration. This interactive session will model experimental,  learner-centered usage of elluminate. We'll decide together, at the end, how it worked. Come prepared with your most challenging online teaching dilemmas! We'll bring the kleenex...<just KIDDING!!>

    

About Dr. Sarah Haavind
Dr. Sarah Haavind, co-author of Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Practices for Moderators (2000, Atwood) and Assistant Professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, is an instructor for the TERC/Lesley partnership Online Masters Science in Education Program  ( http://www.lesley.edu/soe/science/index.html).  For the past decade  she has supported higher education and secondary instructors to move their content online and take advantage of asynchronous, collaborative internet tools to deepen learning.Her recent study on Virtual High School courses (www.govhs.org),  An Interpretative Model of Key Heuristics that Promote Collaborative Dialogue Among Online Learners , will be published later this year in the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks at Sloan-C.

• Teacher: Sarah Haavind
• Teacher: Marsha West