Each input must be as valuable as any other.
To be truly fluent, the virtual facilitator must be able to manage these different communication streams, often at the same time. One of the great innovations in the virtual classroom is the ability for learners to communicate in multiple ways: voice, chat, whiteboard, video, and other feedback tools.
In the virtual classroom, cues may come from unexpected sources, and can be uncovered by paying attention to response time, response quality, side conversation, and learner’s mastery of the technology. But online, they need to seek out subtle signals that indicate the level of participant engagement and knowledge transfer. In the traditional classroom, facilitators know to watch for participants falling asleep, fidgeting, or not coming back from the break. How do facilitators communicate in this new environment and keep learners engaged? The answer is to speak a new language – one that is totally dependent on voice and cues from the technology being used. Virtual Classroom Fluency: The ability to gauge the success of a virtual activity or conversation by reading digital cues and managing simultaneous conversations. When facilitators are digitally fluent, they understand what the learner is experiencing and what they are seeing, and they are able to put them at ease by explaining that these things can and do happen and there is a resolution.Ģ. If participants are experiencing problems, the first step is to minimize their anxiety. Technology will fail, and the facilitator must be ready to deal with whatever happens. The facilitator must also learn to be able to manage digital disasters. They must continuously investigate and learn new technologies and experiment with how they might be incorporated into a digital conversation. To be digitally literate, virtual facilitators must do much more than master the virtual classroom tool set.
Unfortunately, when the facilitator is seen as being less digitally literate than the learner, there is the potential to lose credibility. It also means that there are likely to be training situations where a facilitator and a learner are at two different ends of the spectrum – it may be that the learner is familiar with the technologies the facilitator has never seen, and vice versa. This idea of technical literacy is gaining momentum, in particular because the trend of blended learning brings a lot of technologies and, along with them, the requirement to be able to use them effectively. The definition of a classroom has expanded to potentially include all of the content available on the Internet. In addition to more traditional facilitation skills, the virtual facilitator must demonstrate competence in a variety of digital skills. Digital Literacy: The ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet. Provide training that ensures these individuals become competent in the following areas:ġ. It can be done, if you provide trainers the opportunities to become competent as virtual classroom facilitators. Then, task your trainers with the following goal: facilitate virtual classroom learning experiences that meet or exceed the learning outcomes expected in a traditional face-to-face experience. This critical oversight can be the difference between a successful virtual classroom rollout and a failed initiative.Īs you move your programs to the virtual classroom, start by making sure your instructional designers are virtually competent.
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A skilled trainer understands how to facilitate a conversation or activity, and make adjustments to course direction when necessary.īecause these professionals show such competence in the classroom, it is often assumed that their skills will easily transfer to the virtual environment with little training. Management of group dynamics, deliberate use of voice techniques to manage the message (including tone, pace, volume, etc), and the ability to “read” the body language of a group or individual help to ensure that learning is taking place and program objectives are being met. Traditional classroom trainers have skills that make training sessions successful. It takes practice and training to ensure that facilitators are virtually competent. Moving from the role of traditional trainer to virtual facilitator isn’t easy.
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