Botswana Open University (BOU) Facilitating Online Learning

Student on campus uploading assignments on the Learning Management System (LMS) and downloading course content for reading at home.

Image courtesy of Iwaria (CCO)

The Botswana Open University (BOU) wanted to give its lecturers and tutors an opportunity to gain skills for facilitating online learning. To support this objective, OER Africa adapted the OER Africa online tutorial for Facilitating Online Learning (FOL).

When students arrive in a face to face class, when a lecturer or tutor arrives to teach them, there is an immediate connection, a presence. Online, we can lose the connections that allow us to learn with and from each other. The art of online facilitation helps to re-create those connections, to create a presence.

(Section 2, Arriving, FOL OER Africa online tutorial)

The course was structured around principles of online facilitation used by Carr, Jaffer and Smuts in their guide Facilitating online: A course leader’s guide (Carr, T., Jaffer, S. and Smuts, J. 2009). It models the facilitation of three types of presence (Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. (eds.) 2004 cited in Mhlanga, E. 2009):

a social presence, creating connections between students,
a teacher presence, creating connections between lecturers, tutors, and students, and
a cognitive presence, creating connections between students and what they are learning.

The course covered 18 hours of synchronous and asynchronous, self- and peer study over three weeks from 9 to 23 April 2024. Students were asked to read, reflect, engage in chat forums, and apply what they learned through ‘practice and assessment’ sessions in their own courses or tutorials.

Each week started with a virtual, synchronous session. After 30 minutes of orientation, review, and feedback, students were given time for self-study on the BOU Moodle platform. The virtual room (Zoom or Teams) remained open for the duration of the 2-hour synchronous self-study time. Students were encouraged to return to the virtual room as and when they needed support. At the end of the virtual session, all students returned to share and reflect on what they had learned.

For the remainder of the week, students were engaged in further guided independent study, practice in their courses, and peer- and self-assessment. They were encouraged to work in pairs to facilitate, observe and give each other feedback, applying their learning for that week.

The facilitator posted a summary in each of the Forums every Friday. This was intended as a way of modelling what the course was teaching, creating a teacher presence and cognitive presence, providing feedback and encouraging and motivating students to engage with the course and with each other.

At the end of the third week, students were invited to upload their partner’s feedback on their facilitation practice, as self- and peer-‘Practice and Assessment’, in order to obtain a participation certificate. These were not marked by the facilitator. In the first cohort, 21 of the 109 registered participants submitted their feedback to receive their certificates. Judging from the majority of the ‘Practice and Assessment’ submissions, participants were able to encourage the three presences in their own facilitation. More importantly, although the submissions were not marked, we noted insightful and constructive feedback between participants which pointed to valuable peer-learning.

Subsequently many participants who had registered expressed a wish for the course to run again, as they had struggled to access the course first time around. In a post-course survey, various reasons were given for non-completion, including the time of day of the virtual session, difficulties in accessing the platform, and workload.

There is now a plan to mentor one of the BOU course participants into a facilitating role, to run a second iteration of the course. This will put BOU in a position to offer the FOL course independently, as and when staff need or request it in the future.

This model of continuous professional development (CPD) highlighted for us that CPD can take many forms. The virtual synchronous session at the beginning of each week is a model that worked well, providing support and flexibility for participants. The self- and peer-‘Practice and Assessment’ model gives participants an opportunity to practice what they learn and to learn from and with each other.

You can access the Facilitating Online Learning (FOL) tutorial on the OER Africa website, and contact us at infooerafrica [dot] org (info[at]oerafrica[dot]org) if you need assistance to think through how the tutorial and the model can be adapted and implemented at your institution.