Session 2: Facilitation Skills for E-Trainers

This was a session dedicated to classroom trainers who are beginning to facilitate online training. The speaker, Jean Barbazette, gave some great tips and suggestions. I’ll go over the jist of the talk here, and for those of you that are interested will give you a copy of the speaker notes that have much more information.

First Barbazette gave us a self-evaluation that split us into a trainer “type” as follows:
Instructors = people who feel comfortable giving directions and taking charge
Explorers = people who are good listeners and create an open environment for free expression
Thinkers = people most comfortable helping the learner generalize conepts from the reactions to a learning experience
Guides = people how help learners apply how to use new learning to in their own situations

Then the speaker tied these trainer types to five steps of adult learning (these apply to more than on-line facilitation). There’s much more about these steps in the handouts.

1. SET UP: The instructor sets up the learning activity. Explain the purpose, what particpants are going to do and give the “why” (w/o giving away what is to be discovered)
2. DO: Learners participate in a learning activity eg discussions, demos, simulations and lectures.
3. SHARE/DISCUSS: Learners share and interpret their reactions to the activity
4. REFLECT: Learners identify concepts from their reactions. This is the “so what did I learn” step.
5. APPLY: Learners apply concepts to their situation. The “so what now” step.

The idea is that you need to have an element of each of the trainer types to accomplish all of the five steps listed above. For those of you that are interested, I have a copy of the assessment, so you can take it yourself and identify your strengths and weaknesses.

She emphasized that you must get to the REFLECT step that “thinking” type trainers do well. Otherwise, the users never learn the content on a conceptual level. They can only apply what they learned to the specific situation that was presented to them – they can’t extrapolate to new situations.

The speaker gave several different techniques we can use to facilitate e-learning that are all in the handout I can give you.

One last tidbit, she said that the user needs to interact at least once very four minutes. This may be a poll or a whiteboard brainstorming session or a puzzle. But there needs to be something to keep the learners engaged.