Assignment #4: Reflections on Learning:Team Facilitation Activities:Post #1

Propmpt #1:
- To what extent did the team faciliation activities you and your team developed promote engagement? Promote higher order thinking? How do you know?

Answer:

- Purpose of the Team facilitation activities is to make learning experience richer by moving away from didactic forms of teaching. Online technologies and community engagement strategies help to promote higher order thinking, and therefore help to promote learning.
The team facilitation activity is a strategy that helped us to be engaged in course content through activity design. Designing this activity encouraged our team to brainstorm ideas, collect information, research and analyze available resources, assess and create solutions.

This activity taught me a valuable lesson:
- If I would design the Team Facilitation Activity in the future, I will be carefully choosing moderating techniques that provide comfortable environment for students’ participation in online communications and activities.
“ Students will not engage fully unless the environment is non-threatening and they feel it is safe to do so” (Ambrose 2001).

Resources:
- Effective Online Facilitation Guide, available at
http://pre2005.flexiblelearning.net.au/guides/facilitation.html;

- What is Facilitation? by James Neill (2004), available at http://wilderdom.com/facilitation/FacilitationWhatIs.html;

- Priest & Gass' (1997) Six Generations of Facilitation, available at http://wilderdom.com/facilitation/PriestGass1997SixGenerationsFacilitation.html