33 Facilitating the course
Open course facilitation involves interacting with learners to encourage their engagement with the course. By default, educators can respond to comments and posts, but you may also want to involve additional people to act as mentors who, as non-subject-matter experts, can perform a similar role.
Facilitators can support learners by encouraging participation and discussion, for example, by highlighting valuable contributions or offering support if learners are unclear what a task requires. In addition, if responses to detailed, technical questions are required, mentors can flag to an academic who is able to provide a response.
You may consider recruiting students to act as mentors. As Open courses aren’t limited to your institution’s students, you may also want to think about inviting students and educators from other institutions to act as facilitators.
If you decide to facilitate your course, you should agree the roles that each person will play and how mentors might escalate questions or issues that they can’t address. Think about how you can make the best use of the facilitation team. For example, if your course is scheduled to run for four weeks, you might encourage them to facilitate during its first four weeks after launch.
Consider how you’ll reward the student facilitators that you engage and how much time you would like them to provide support. One approach might be to plan time-limited facilitation ‘windows’ when they will be available to support learning, and to communicate that to learners.
You can use the table on the next page to help plan facilitation of your course.
| Consideration | Your response |
|---|---|
| What are the facilitation requirements? | |
| Who will the facilitators be? | |
| Who will the educators be? | |
| How will you support your facilitators in preparation for the course launch? | |
| What resources would help? Could you use adapt the resources that are already available? Could these become OERs for sharing more widely? |
|
| Would a workshop or a series of workshops be useful, and how long should they be? Can you reuse materials from previous workshops? |
|
| How will you engage facilitators in the process and build relationships? | |
| How will you support facilitators during the running of the course? | |
| How will you evaluate the facilitator experience? |
|
| Will you provide a certificate for facilitator training? | |
| How will you work with the facilitators in the future? |
*Refer to Appendix 7: Facilitation for examples of resources created for the Leeds Open pilot course: ‘Climate Action: Tackling the Climate Crisis for a Better World’. You could adapt these for your course.
