Here is a reflection on the experience organising and facilitating a voluntary online professional development activity, which in many ways resembles the LearnScope Online event of August 2003.

Journal of Distance Education/Revue de l'enseignement à distance (2000)
ISSN: 0830-0445
Baring Professional Souls:
Reflections On Web Life 

The article is by Elizabeth Burge, Professor of Adult Education at University of New Brunswick and her colleagues, Daniel Laroque and Cathy Boak. 

I recommend the article to anyone involved in planning and facilitating online learning.

The abstract says that "In addition to reviewing their knowledge of generic adult learning facilitation principles and online moderation issues, the authors show how they examined their experience and developed-not without some cognitive and affective difficulties-some insights into better managing the dynamic tensions of online discussions and reframing their expectations of participants' behaviors."

The process that the authors used to write this article could be useful to online facilitators wanting to reflect and build on their online practice.

Some excerpts from the article:

"We did not undertake this activity of planning and moderating an online conference in order to develop stories of our reflection-in-action and commentaries on our stories. In the heat of the online action, we were fully engaged in knowing-in-action and reflection-in-action in order to make the best judgments. Afterward, during post hoc reflections we decided to capture what events we could most easily recall (in itself revealing), at first using a separate voice for each of us. Even that process produced surprises: we learned things about each others’ reactions to our behaviors that we did not expect, and we helped each other explain thoughts and feelings that at the time of the action were felt only as vague background murmurings. The narratives below foreground those murmurings. To create this record we exchanged multiple written drafts and used mostly e-mail, with few telephone discussions to clarify some of the recollections. Ultimately, we used a single reporting voice for each of the four stories and then multiple voices for the commentary on our learnings. We can cheerfully testify that the whole process was as challenging as the literature indicates!"

The authors raised a number of questions for noncredit professional development activity online, including:

"If we know which generic conditions are needed for lively and sustained higher-order thinking and task completion activities, how might these be generated for a voluntary, online professional development exercise that allows for reduced levels of group responsibility and many read-and-print levels of participation?"

"Should expectations of sustained and outcomes-based group activity be severely reduced when working online for voluntary professional development activity? For example, is it possible to really come up with the determinants of good learning services in three weeks with over 200 individuals coming in and out at various times? A broad-brush approach may still be worth it, but we should be realistic as to the results it can produce. Moreover, perhaps the facilitator must better balance proactive and reactive stances. At times it may be best to present a question or a puzzle and let the participants deal with it for 48 hours; at other times the moderator needs to link various comments, bring people together, reenergize the discussion, bring closure to a given argument, and so forth. In addition to the balancing act, we perhaps also need to revise the “rules of the game.” For example, in dealing with the “read-only participants,” we could be explicit and say to all participants at the beginning, 'You can take time off during the conference, but not all the time. Don’t be surprised if I mention you by name as I would in a synchronous context if someone was silent.'"

Their concluding comment is:

"If a PD activity is to be memorable in a positive sense for practitioners who are usually time- and energy-stressed, then we would assess what outcomes are realistic given the context of these conferences and assess what techno-mix and time-type combinations (e.g., real and delayed) are appropriate for a given outcome and given users...In short, we will focus on the people and their tasks and time, and we will be willing to question and reconfigure the processes of professional development."