Introduction:

The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20010602115505/http://www.tmn.com:80/~lisa/dist-fac.htm

What does the concept of "wait time" mean for faculty teaching students at a distance? How do you pull virtual chairs into a circle for creative dialogue?

Although the technology of distance learning gets most of the attention, it's really teaching strategies and style which have the most impact on the quality of learning in distance programs. Facilitating learning communities at a distance requires some new approaches to the practice of managing the teaching and learning process. Effective faculty start with a completely new mind set about where technology fits into the equation. Rather than struggling to make up for qualities distance programs are perceived to lack when compared to traditional classrooms, faculty members who are most successful with distance technologies see them as actually providing some qualitative advantages.

Many institutions introducing distance learning spend a large amount of their resources (both time and money) on training faculty to manage the new technical and administrative aspects of distance courses. Instead, faculty need to learn to manage critical dimensions of the new environment in which their courses are taking place, dimensins like metaphor, meaning, culture, roles, time, awareness, and collaboration.

Distance learning can involve many different technologies used alone or in combination. Although a lot of the decisions you need to make are about which of the many possible technologies and media will work best for specific purposes, the focus of this chapter is on the role of the facilitator as distinct from the delivery system.

In some ways, distance learning is like the canary in the mine which detects life-threatening problems before anyone else realizes they are in danger. The issues raised for instructors about designing and managing learning programs at a distance are really the issues which need to be raised about all learning experience including; How do you achieve the right balance between presentation and experiential activity? Between individual and collaborative learning? Between teacher-driven and learner-driven assignments?

New technology requires us to rethink these dynamics because we don't have the option to use familiar approaches. It gives us an opening to change the way we manage the teaching and learning process in general. The critical part of the question, "How can we engage learners via distance learning technology?" is really "How do we engage learners in more meaningful learning activities?" Facilitating distance learning is not about taking our old lesson plans and transposing them for delivery using new media. Rather, it's about expanding our available tools to create new learning dynamics aligned with the best thinking about adult learning.

There are some critical aspects of a learning manager's mindset which must shift in order to take full advantage of new opportunities created by distance learning technology. [1]

From	To
Face-to-face is the best environment for learning and anything else is a compromise.	Different kinds of environments can support high quality learning. What matters is how you use them.
Learning is what happens when teachers interact with students at a fixed time and space.	Learning happens in an ongoing, boundaryless way and includes what learners do independently of teachers.
Being people-oriented is incompatible with using technology.	Using distance learning technology in a people-oriented way is possible and desirable.
When the learning process breaks down, blame the technology.	When the learning process breaks down, evaluate our teaching strategies, not just the technical tool.
Learning to manage distance learning is about learning how to use the technology.	Learning to manage distance learning is about understanding more about the learning process.

A new style of management

In the old model, learning design proceeded in a linear fashion from defining objectives to lesson planning to course delivery. Educators first engaged in a comprehensive learning needs analysis process, often based on assessments done by others about competencies and learning objectives. Comprehensive course syllabi were developed. Finally, the course was delivered as planned.

Associated with this linear approach were a set of teaching strategies which matched its linear qualities. These strategies were characterized by being predominantly one-way, centralized, and broadcast oriented. When students appeared bored and unengaged in this type of program the solution was to find ways to use new media to make the one-way broadcast more entertaining. Much early distance learning was nothing more than a way to generate a broadcast of an expert and his multi-media slides with good production values.

Distance learning was praised because of its ability to scale up to reach larger numbers of students at standardized levels of quality. But an expert lecturing to a group of passive students is engaging in didactic one-way teaching whether that lecture is delivered from a stage in an auditorium or via broadcast television to students sitting in their living rooms.

A new mindset for teaching has emerged. Teaching and learning is seen as an ongoing process rather than a program with a fixed starting and ending point and the importance of widespread participation by learners in the design of their own learning has been recognized.

Distance learning technologies are particularly well suited to a more dynamic approach to managing learning. Good teachers have always been open to changing their lesson plans based on student input. New media makes it easier. For example, it's easy to provide additional reading materials based on student interest instead of having to rely on a text book ordered weeks or months before the course began. Online environments can provide space for continuing conversation among students about what's working and what's not working in the course.

The same technology can also contribute to more participatory course design. In a masters level business course, the professor contacted most of the course members via e-mail during the summer to find out about their interests, expectations, concerns, and skills so that he could take those into consideration when designing a course offered in the fall semester. He was able to use that information to create preliminary project teams and develop initial assignments which reflected the specific needs of course participants.

One of the first things it's important to think about is the kind of ambience you need to create in order to have the kind of learning experience you intend. In distance learning settings, language and metaphor are primary tools to use to create the ambience because you need to help participants evoke images to put them in a mind space conducive to learning even though they are doing it at different times from different places. Many distance learning environments borrow language from traditional school settings to provide cues to learners about what to expect such as classroom, lecture hall, and library. This can be a good strategy to help learners navigate through unfamiliar environments. However, there's a danger in using language which matches the distance learning environment to the traditional environment because it may hardwire old models into the new medium. If you want to take advantage of the new media's ability to support more self-directed learning it's important to signal to participants that they are not entering a traditional classroom where they would expect to wait for the instructor to tell them what to do.

One way to start is to think about the kinds of interactions and experiences you need to support in terms of the feelings you want to evoke. Do you want participants to have intimate self-disclosing conversations like they might have late at night in a café? Or do you want to have teams of learners engage in lively brainstorming exchanges like might happen around a conference table? Putting the group in a virtual "classroom" doesn't help you evoke either of these dynamics.

The Institute for Educational Studies (TIES) [2] at Norwich University is a one year intensive masters degree program in transforming education. The design is based around communities of teachers from around the world forming a learning community which meets in a virtual campus using asynchronous web-conferencing. In order to help participants "feel" a sense of being part of a virtual campus components include lectures, seminars, discussions, study groups, and guest faculty. Course participants come together in a variety of virtual lecture halls, seminar rooms, and discussions. But the most important aspect of the program is to create a peer-to-peer learning community where participants share their deepest thoughts and feelings about their own personal growth and its relationship to their role as educators.

In order to support this core part of the program within the distance learning framework, TIES made use of a metaphor from the participants' experience at a face-to-face meeting which was held to kick off the program. The meeting took place in the Vermont countryside at a house which had a big front porch. Participants spent a lot of time between sessions and in the evenings sitting on the porch sharing stories about themselves. TIES created a space online called "The Porch" where that same quality of conversation could continue throughout the year. Although the online environment was new and strange for most participants, they had no trouble understanding what to do in The Porch and immediately began sharing stories and reflections there.

At a large high tech company, there was a thing called a "woods meeting" which at first actually did take place at the company founder's cabin in the woods of New England. Everyone knew that when you went to a woods meeting it meant that you would be brainstorming about the future of the company rather than doing day-to-day stuff. So, people started having "woods meetings" in conference rooms on site at the company. Just naming it put people in a different mind-frame about what would happen. So a "woods meeting" title for an online conference could convey something similar about what needs to happen there.

In groups which don't come with a common experience to draw from you can achieve a similar shared repertoire of metaphors by taking time to elicit ideas from the participants. Have participants tell stories about previous learning experiences and engage them in dialogue about different learning dynamics and the environments where they took place. Get the group to create metaphors and names for different components of your program and use the stories yourself to provide cues, "This part of our environment is where we'll have the kind of peer coaching Ted described in his story about the marketing team's white-water rafting retreat. Let's call this chat space The Raft."

Whenever possible, engage participants in choosing metaphors. Have a dialogue early in the course to talk explicitly about ambience like "what kind of interactions do we want to have in here?" Even within the larger framework of the course environment, you can use metaphors to define spaces for different kinds of interactions. For example, many groups benefit from having at least one place in the environment which uses metaphors like water cooler or break time to serve the same social lubrication purpose as a coffee break serves in a traditional course.

Remember, there is a big difference between facsimile and metaphor. Facsimiles can trap participants into default ways of behaving. Metaphor can be evocative and help participants create a richer mental construct about what they're doing.

Distance learners can have a harder time than those in a traditional course integrating all the different course components into a focused whole. Course managers can help by providing regular summaries of where we are and where we're going next. Weaving the multiple threads of conversation together gives all members a chance to start fresh or take off in a new direction. It can help keep the group from spinning its wheels. Sometimes, you can give people a better sense of what the virtual group is all about by simply copying the topic index or a list of all the conference messages and posting it. This may remind participants of items they want to go back to or it may reveal a gap in the conversation that can be filled by starting a new item.

It's also important to integrate the study of communication and media itself into the curriculum. Developing the learners ability to question the process of learning will make them a more effective learner.

One of the things many distance learning programs get hung up on is the tension between delivering content resources which are essentially one-way communications (articles, books, videos, expert lectures) and providing the two-way interaction around that material which makes it meaningful to learners. It's often true that the same media environment is not optimal for both needs. An environment which does a great job of storing and organizing materials of various kinds isn't necessarily a good place to hold the discussion stimulated by that material. It's very hard to conduct a role-playing exercise in a file cabinet. There's more to developing a relationship among a collaborative learning group than sharing access to a file folder.

PBS Mathline [3] is a professional development program delivered at a distance to classroom teachers. The content of the program consists of videos showing teachers in classrooms using the new ideas about teaching math and the lesson plans and associated materials being used by the teachers in the videos. Some participating teachers tape the videos which are broadcast on private channels by local educational television. But for most it's more convenient to receive copies of the videos on cassettes. There are also other resource materials provided in print and online such as copies of articles written about the theory and practice.

But all that material is not "the program." The heart of the program is in the learning communities of 25-30 teachers grouped by age level (elementary, middle school, and high school) with a peer facilitator who log into private online conferences to talk about the ideas and their experiences using and thinking about the materials. In geographic locations where it's possible, these learning communities get together during the year for f-t-f interaction. The key is that different parts of the program are delivered using different media. The online discussion provides a common room for the long term, peer-to-peer facilitated interaction which makes the program meaningful for participants.

Heavy handed guidelines and rules about behavior make for a boring experience, but it never hurts to state explicitly the kind of atmosphere you hope to create. Do you hope your virtual group will be supportive, deep, amusing, fast-moving, reflective, cutting-edge, information-intensive, risky, silly, focused, unfocused? What styles and behaviors would help or hinder the atmosphere you want?

Are the participants peer learners? Team members? Neighbors in a learning community? Is the moderator expected to provide expert knowledge? Support and encouragement? A guide to other resources? If you aren't sure about these roles ahead of time, the group should discuss it. Different images of roles and relationships will provide cues to different ways of participating.

A community of distance learners is like any community in that its culture is a product of shared stories, shared rituals, and shared experiences. Designing opportunities for these aspects of a program is just as important as figuring out the order of topics to be covered.

The manager of a government agency training program for high potential managers from around the country wanted to establish a collaborative culture which she hoped would help the group form a community of practice. She established a joining ritual for the program where each entering participant created a special web page with personal as well as career related information and photographs of the participants in non-work settings. During the first week of the course, she paired up participants and replicated a familiar ice-breaking exercise of having them interview each other via e-mail and then introduce their partner to the rest of the group by writing up a response for their online bulletin board. Participants reported that they felt that this process really made a difference in how quickly they felt like members of the community - a very different feeling from simply being among those accessing a common body of information.

There are many names for the facilitator role; teacher, instructor, manager, leader, facilitator, moderator. Learners are called student, participant, learner, member. Obviously, the choice of term can connote a lot about roles and expectations and it's an important choice to make as part of your learning design.

In the old paradigm classroom, the roles were simple. The teacher taught and the students followed directions. In the new classroom, teacher facilitators need to help all the members of the learning community - including students and other adults who may be involved - identify roles. Virtual learning communities need to define some additional roles related to their communication strategy. They may need technical support, knowledge archivists, and specialists in using different media. For all roles, virtual learning communities need to spend more time being explicit about mutual expectations (for example, how quickly they can expect responses to their online postings) for participants because the patterns of behavior and dynamics of interaction are unfamiliar and it's easy to fall into misunderstandings and become frustrated with each other.

Distance learning provides some new ways to use people in the role of "expert" resources. Participants in the advanced management program at George Mason University invited a well-known author to join them online to discuss and answer questions about his forthcoming book. He didn't want to travel in order to appear in a 3-hour class so he suggested that they meet online. They were able to interact with him over time rather than for a single-shot guest lecture and so could explore his ideas in greater depth. One of the "unintended" benefits of this was that students for whom English was not their first language felt better able to think and write in contrast to face-to-face when the conversation goes too fast.

Other members of the community can also serve in the role of teachers in a distance learning program. Bank Street College of Education created a program focused on supporting girls so that they would continue studying science in high school. Research had shown that girls did just as well as boys in science classes in the early high school grades, but they tended to drop out before the advanced courses. This was a big problem because these courses are often prerequisites for certain college majors and are factored into college admissions. Bank Street College created a distance learning program to link students with women mentors who have successfully entered careers in science and technology.

The program created small online groups made up of the student, her teacher, her parents, and a mentor. The student was also able to communicate one-on-one with her mentor. Students reported that they really appreciated the support of being able to ask their mentors questions about how to handle situations. For example, one student complained that the boys in her lab group made put-down type remarks to her which made her feel like quitting the course. Her mentor shared how she had had similar experiences but encouraged the student to continue with the course anyway. By expanding the notion of who could play a teaching role, the College was able to bring new resources into the program.

Distance learning also supports peer-to-peer learning by providing ways for learners to become facilitators for other learners. Creative Writers on the Net, [4] is an advanced placement English program for high school students in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The essence of the course is to learn how to give and receive constructive feedback about all different kinds of writing. One of the advantages of the distance learning model is the ease with which it's possible to post and interact with multiple drafts of writing. Although there is a team of teachers with responsibility for the course, much of the learning happens as a result of students' interaction with each other. Posting writing online make it easy to read each others' work.

Union Institute is an accredited degree-granting program which is designed to support individual learning plans. Learners design programs with advisors which include combinations of traditional coursework, courses delivered at a distance, and individual study. One of the key components of this program is the requirement of Peer Days. Learners find a small group of fellow learners who share a need to explore a particular subject and pull together some kind of learning event (a guest speaker, group reading and discussion of a book, a workshop) collaboratively. Many of these Peer Days are held at a distance using online technologies which make it possible for geographically isolated learners to engage with each other. The students themselves thus take responsibility for managing a significant part of their own learning program.

In face-to-face and synchronous environments the challenge for the facilitator is to manage the respective air time for different class members so the extroverts don't dominate. The same issue arises in asynchronous learning where very active participants can create information overload for others. In an asynchronous environment some group members will check in four times a day and others will check in once a week. If you have several members who sign on very frequently they can make it difficult for the rest to engage with the virtual group because it feels to them like the conversation has run away form them. The rolling present refers to differences in participants' perception of what is current. People experience everything that has been entered since the last time they checked in as current. You need manage the pace of the group and create norms for how much time will be included in the rolling present of the community as a whole.

The fact that participants can access a distance learning any time can be a great advantage. However, the lack of familiar time-frames such as a class which meets on a certain day every week can make it hard for participants to manage the experience. One way facilitators can help participants is to create opportunities for explicit conversation about strategies for managing their time. For example, one moderator of an asynchronous course suggested to participants that they schedule a specific time to access the course, put it in their calendar just like any meeting rather than leaving it to chance (in which case it often got squeezed out by other priorities).

Facilitators can also help by providing time-based guideposts to help give a learning group the feeling of making progress and moving forward. For example, in a distance version of Stanford University's Creativity in Business [5] course for delivery in-house to corporate groups the course begins with a ½ day off-site meeting followed by ten weeks of exercises, journal-keeping, and reflection. It involves materials which are provided via CDROM which participants access via their corporate intranet and asynchronous web-conferencing led by the course facilitator. Although the participants can engage in course activities at any time, the facilitator provides the group with a pulse created by weekly "Live With" reflections where participants share their experience applying each course module to their daily experience. Participants know on which day the new conference item will be posted online indicating time to shift from the focus on one module to the next. In this way, even though learners are participating at their own time and pace, the group has a whole shares a sense of progressing through the course together.

Both facilitators and learners need to be aware of how they're doing. Distance learning students need some different kinds of feedback to help them calibrate their participation with expectations.. Teacher facilitators need to provide a lot more "work in progress" feedback than feedback on a final product because so much of this new type of project is process-oriented. Since using technology as a primary means to communicate will be new to most participants they need to spend more time than usual talking about the quality of their communication. The teacher can provide some feedback but it's even better if the teacher can help participants develop a norm of providing feedback to each other about communication style, quantity, frequency, clarity, etc. Teachers can help team participants access more of their own feelings and reactions to messages in different media. This kind of savvy about new media is an important new skill.

In a face-to-face class, teachers watch body language and facial expression and lots of other signals to develop a sense of what's going on. Participants in virtual learning community convey this same information in different ways. And, a lot of what students will be doing will be done on their own - out of sight of the teacher. Some teachers are experimenting with using the Internet as a place to store electronic portfolios of student work so that it can be accessed at any time.

Facilitation is paying attention to what is happening in your group as distinct from what you wanted or expected would happen. It is not unlike facilitating any group: if participants aren't participating as much as you'd hoped, don't admonish them. Instead, notice what kinds of issues they are engaged in and find ways to weave those issues into your group activity. You must detect where members are now and work with that energy to move in the direction you need to go.

While most people agree that collaborative learning is desirable and important, it has been difficult logistically in the past. Unless students are full time in a residential setting, it's unrealistic to expect them to be able to find the time and space to work together. Distance learning provides an opportunity to support collaborative learning in ways we haven't been able to do before. But just putting participants together in a some kind of common electronic space won't turn them into a collaborative group automatically. The key is to design a framework for group work which requires the team to grapple with roles, protocols for working interdependently and mutual accountability.

For example in the George Mason University Program on Social and Organizational Learning (PSOL), [6] participants in a graduate level course on The Virtual Organization used a wide variety of media including asynchronous web-conferences, telephone conferences, shared white board, and e-mail to support collaborative learning. The class was divided into teams tasked with mastering sets of specific learning objectives and finding ways to transfer that learning to the class as a whole.

The distance learning cohorts within the California Institute of Integral Studies are required to present a Group Demonstration of Mastery to faculty and peers as a significant part of their doctoral program. This requires the cohort to select and commit to a common theme for learning over the course of a year or more and to integrate their distributed efforts into a shared whole.

It can be very difficult and time-consuming to self-organize into teams or small groups in an asynchronous environment. In face-to-face situations, people can quickly form small groups by making eye contact and moving physically near each other. Therefore, it is usually more effective to use synchronous media for initial group formation or for the instructor/facilitator to create teams to get a group started. You can achieve the goal of self-selection of topics by letting groups define their mission or letting people switch groups after a while.

How can we help faculty make the shifts in thinking required to be effective in distance learning courses? What's the best way to learn to manage these new aspects of the learning process? The most effective strategy is to provide access to experienced faculty who can serve as coaches. Team teaching with a more experienced teacher is also a good approach.

The PBS Mathline program required more than 100 new facilitators to manage the virtual learning communities. It wasn't possible to bring all those people in for face-to-face training. Since audio tapes are cheap and easy to distribute, tapes were made of a panel of experienced facilitators and sent to the new group. 4-5 experienced practitioners called in on a call-me audio call which was taped. In order to make the conversation feel spontaneous it wasn't scripted. However, it was planned and moderated. 3-4 key theme questions were chosen ahead of time along with who would be first to respond to each question. After that it was a free flowing discussion. All the facilitators on the tape were also online so the new group of facilitators were able to ask them questions after listening to the taped discussion.

To harvest the knowledge and experience of people and make it available to the organization as a whole, distance learning technologies need to be managed differently to support dialogue rather than just data bases.

In the information age, education and training in organizations consisted of large amounts of explicit knowledge available to them through huge archival databases. Quantifiable facts, formulas, and procedures were, and still are, available to anyone in these organizations. In contrast, today's knowledge or learning organizations create environments where experiential knowledge is learned through dialogue and interaction day-to-day. Communication technologies are needed which support this interaction. Previously tacit knowledge based on extremely valuable experience now supplements the quantifiable data.

The environment should stimulate and nurture the complex network of interpersonal relationships and interactions which are part of an effective management communications and decision-making process. People must be allowed to make choices about who they need to communicate and learn with without regard to traditional organizational boundaries, distance and time. In other words, they need to manage their own learning, to form new groups and teams as requirements develop and change.

The new framework for managing distance learning should be about managing the learning process rather than managing courses. The kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves are not about how to plug one kind of technology into another or how faculty can be more effective on video. The more important questions are about how to use technology to leverage resources and group dynamics in new ways to make fundamental changes in every part of the learning process.

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