Dual Perspectives on the Contribution of On-Site Facilitators to Teaching Presence in a Blended Learning Environment

Claire de la Varre, Julie Keane and Matthew J. Irvin

VOL. 25, No. 3

Abstract

This study examines on-site facilitator practices and activities that support rural high school students taking online courses. We compare online instructors’ perspectives of facilitator practices with facilitators’ own reports of their practices and activities. A qualitative analysis of end-of-course interview data from instructors and facilitators was undertaken. The resulting codes were mapped onto and used to expand the teaching presence element of the Community of Inquiry framework. Online instructors perceived that facilitating discourse was the core activity in which most facilitators engaged, with setting the climate for learning being a primary responsibility of the facilitator. However, facilitators themselves reported that as well as facilitating discourse, they engaged in direct instruction and instructional design. Additional findings, implications, limitations, and research directions are discussed.

Résumé

La présente étude se penche sur les pratiques et activités des facilitateurs sur place qui soutiennent les étudiants du niveau secondaire, provenant de milieux ruraux et qui suivent des cours en ligne. Nous comparons les commentaires des enseignants en ligne au sujet des pratiques de facilitateur avec ceux formulés par les facilitateurs au sujet de leurs propres pratiques et activités. Une analyse qualitative des données issues des entrevues de fin de cours menées auprès des enseignants et des facilitateurs a été réalisée. Les codes qui en découlent ont été appliqués à la composante présence enseignante du cadre de référence sur le Community of Inquiry et utilisés pour l’élargir. Les perceptions des formateurs en ligne étaient à l’effet que l’activité centrale réalisée par la plupart des facilitateurs était le dialogue facilitant, alors que leur responsabilité première est de créer un climat propice à l’apprentissage. Toutefois, les facilitateurs ont indiqué qu’ils réalisaient des activités de formation directe et de conception pédagogique, en plus de celles liées au dialogue facilitant. L’article discute également des autres résultats, implications, limitations et avenues de recherche.

Introduction

The uptake of online distance education (ODE) in U.S. high schools is increasing rapidly. Three quarters of all U.S. public school districts reported students in online or blended courses in the 2007-2008 academic year (Picciano & Seaman, 2009) and the majority of U.S. states now have their own virtual schools (Barbour & Reeves 2009; Hannum & McCombs 2008). The most successful online students are independent, intrinsically motivated, self-regulating learners, with effective time-management, reading, writing, and information searching skills (Haughey & Muirhead, 1999; Land, et al., 2003; Parker, 1999). In high school, however, many students are still learning such skills and require support to be successful.

While virtual high schools offer the convenience of self-paced learning, the majority of online courses are implemented during the school day, with peers, during a scheduled class period (Watson, Murin et al., 2010). Some states require that certain activities, e.g., tests and labs, are completed during a regularly scheduled class period (Watson et al., 2010). Providers of K-12 online courses often rely on the teacher-facilitator model, assigning a local staff member as on-site facilitator or mentor to support students. Typically, the facilitator is present or checks in with students during the class period, operates and troubleshoots equipment, distributes instructional materials, answers students’ questions, and communicates with the online instructor (Keane et al., 2010). Facilitators may also communicate with parents, address plagiarism, cheating, and student inactivity (U.S. Department of Education, 2007), help students develop organization and study skills (Harms et al., 2006), and facilitate in-class activities (Barbour & Mulcahy, 2004; O’Dwyer, Carey, & Kleiman, 2007).

Rural schools increasingly turn to ODE to address challenges of declining populations and the inability to attract qualified teachers to rural areas (Keane et al, 2008; Barbour & Mulcahy, 2009). Online learning and ODE in Canada has grown at a similar pace but represents a smaller percentage of the K-12 student population than in the U.S. (Barbour, 2010; Haughey & Muirhead, 2005; Plante and Beattie, 2004, cited in Barbour, 2009). Canadian rural school districts are more likely to use ODE than their urban counterparts (Barbour, 2010). Consequently, students in rural schools looking for advanced courses may have no choice other than to enroll in ODE, even if they lack the characteristics of successful online learners (Barbour & Mulcahy, 2009; Simonson et al., 2006). Since rural schools make up 30% of all schools in the U.S. and educate approximately 10 million children (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007), it is important to focus on ways to support rural online learners and improve outcomes in ODE for these students.

Importance of On-Site Facilitator

Research has only recently begun to address the complexity of online learning as implemented in K-12 schools and less is known about the effectiveness of ODE in high schools (Means et al., 2009). As this research tends to focus on the online teacher, less is known about local factors, such as the level of support from on-site staff whose roles are less central than that of the online teacher (Cavanaugh, Barbour, & Clark, 2009).

In an evaluation of program intended to improve student achievement through distance education—the Alabama ACCESS Initiative—Roblyer, Freeman, Stabler and Schneidmiller (2007) found “the role of the facilitator is critical. Students at remote sites are less independent than first thought and a facilitator should be available… to offer support and guidance” (p. 11). Other researchers found that the facilitator had a key role in reducing dropout (Charania et al., 2008; Roblyer, 2006). However, in these studies, the facilitator role is seen as primarily administrative and technical and, as such, is insufficient to help high-school students acquire the skills they need for success in ODE. Some studies report that facilitators do provide additional types of support, in spite of the parameters of their role description. Barbour and Mulcahy (2009) observed that facilitators in rural areas of Canada greatly contribute to the success of distance education, often going beyond what is contractually expected of staff, and incorporating content-based support. Harms et al. (2006) recognized that when facilitators have multiple students in the local classroom they could help build community and also “serve an important role by providing an immediate, personal, face-to-face communication option who can act as problem-solver, mentor and friend.”

Some researchers have suggested training all teachers or pre-service teachers to be competent in the role of online teachers or on-site facilitators (Charania et al., 2008; Davis & Niederhauser, 2007). While this is certainly desirable and may be realized in the future, the current situation in rural schools demands the flexibility to assign whoever is available and willing to assume the role of facilitator. Rural school staff members tend to have multiple duties and facilitators would not be expected or required to be trained online teachers or even to be teachers at all. In our study non-teacher facilitators included principals, administrators, secretaries, librarians, guidance counselors, and a football coach. A similar range of facilitator roles has been described by other researchers (Zucker & Kozma, 2003, cited in Charania et al., 2008; Barbour & Mulcahy, 2009).

Context and Purpose of the Current Study

On-site facilitators in rural schools typically know their students very well, and can help students prepare for and persist in ODE courses, and develop the attributes needed for success (Harms et al., 2006). The purpose of this study therefore is to focus on the activities and practices that school-based facilitators’ employ that can help rural ODE students be more successful. Using end-of-course interviews with both instructors and facilitators, we compare instructors’ perspectives on facilitator practices with facilitators’ reports of their own practices in the local classrooms.

There have been recent calls for research that moves beyond the technology and “seeks to understand the complexity of blended settings and processes as a whole system” (Stacey & Gerbic, 2008, p. 967). In the current study, we build on a definition of blended learning as “the organic integration of thoughtfully selected and complementary face to-face and online approaches and technologies” (Garrison and Vaughan, 2008, p. 148). From the learner’s perspective, the student is situated in a blended learning environment even when a course is delivered completely online, because the local setting influences the student’s online experience. Therefore, the influence of the facilitator is an important consideration for students’ in a blended ODE environment. The facilitators’ strategies in the face-to-face classroom constitute a form of teaching presence and thus the facilitator contributes to the overall teaching presence in the ODE course. The construct of teaching presence is one element of the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000), a useful explanatory model for understanding the educational experience of ODE (Akyol, 2009; Shea et al., 2010).

Community of Inquiry (COI) Framework

Figure 1: COI Framework [by author permission]

The COI framework (Figure 1) is grounded in the higher education literature and was developed for analyzing online discourse in computer conferencing (Garrison, 2007; Kupczynski et al., 2010; Swan et al., 2008). The COI framework is comprised of three core elements—social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. Social presence refers to the online social interactions that include affective expression, interactivity, and group cohesion. Cognitive presence is a “cycle of practical inquiry” through which learners construct meaning via a process of self-reflection and shared discourse over time. Teaching presence refers to course design, content expertise, and scaffolding of learners through the “direction of cognitive and social processes” (Anderson, Rourke et al., 2001, p. 5). The interaction of these core elements contributes to the total education experience in both face-to-face and online environments (Akyol et al., 2009; Garrison et al., 2000; Garrison, & Kanuka, 2004; Shea et al., 2010). Research indicates that the multiple roles, behaviors and activities associated with teaching presence in online learning environments affect students’ perceptions and learning outcomes (Morgan, 2011). Consequently, a more thorough discussion of teaching presence follows.

Teaching Presence and its Components

Teaching presence is a significant factor in promoting student engagement and interaction and consists of three components: instructional design and organization, direct instruction, and facilitating discourse (Anderson et al., 2001; Kupczynski, 2010). Most studies that utilize the COI framework do not specifically address the overlapping areas of the model, but instead concentrate on a single element or how the elements support each other (Shea et al., 2010). The COI graphic (Figure 1) indicates that the climate for learning is set where teaching presence and social presence overlap (Anderson et al., 2001). This overlap is most obvious in the facilitating discourse component of teaching presence, comprised of six codes (Anderson, 2001):

• identifying areas of agreement/disagreement
  
• seeking to reach consensus/understanding
  
• encouraging, acknowledging, or reinforcing student contributions
  
• setting the climate for learning
  
• drawing in participants, prompting discussion
  
• assessing the efficacy of the process.
  

The facilitators in our study had no part in the online interactions within the course, although our analyses clearly revealed that facilitators’ activities in the local schools contributed to teaching presence. It became evident from the instructors’ perspectives that the majority of facilitator behaviors could be described in the context of the setting the climate for learning code within the facilitating discourse component. Not surprisingly, the facilitator interview data provided a more comprehensive view of their behaviors in the local schools. As well as facilitating discourse, facilitators’ activities fell into the two other teaching presence components: direct instruction and instructional design.

Extending Teaching Presence to Non-Online Areas of ODE Courses

Recently, research has directed the COI framework at blended learning environments (Akyol, 2009; Garrison & Vaughn, 2008) although, regardless of setting, the COI has generally been used only to analyze the online component of these courses (Archer, 2010). The context of the face-to-face learning climate in online learning has been largely ignored in studies of online learners in K-12 and higher education. Morgan (2011) states: “Although the community of inquiry framework has been developed based on distance education contexts, it currently does not consider the complexities of the community’s global and local contexts…” (p. 2). Archer (2010) discusses extending the scope of the COI framework to non-online course components. In our view, the COI framework is robust enough to be applied to the analysis of data beyond the online components of blended learning environments. We use the lens of teaching presence to explore facilitator activities and strategies in the local schools, through the analysis of interview data. These data offer dual perspectives on an important non-online area of the broader learning environment associated with an ODE course: the on-site facilitator.

The facilitator is clearly important in helping students succeed in ODE and research points to the need for engaged on-site facilitators. However, there is little reference to the relationship between the instructor and the facilitator, although one study on best practices of K-12 online instructors did find that instructors “strongly agreed” with the survey statement that “relationships with [on-site] mentors are important” (Black et al., 2009). Our research suggests that the effectiveness of this relationship is critical to the success of ODE students. The instructor-facilitator relationship links the virtual and local environments, and helps set the climate for learning, as seen in the overlap between social and teaching presence (Figure 1, above).

Methods

The data in the current study were gathered as part of a research project that conducted a randomized controlled trial with over 600 students, in 93 small rural high schools, over two cohorts. Students took a year-long online Advanced Placement (AP) English Literature and Composition course. Each school had an on-site facilitator who was randomly assigned to receive standard or expanded facilitator training. Delivered online, this included a learner-centered, scenario-based approach to promote student support, engagement, and success in ODE (see de la Varre et al., 2009). In the expanded teacher-facilitator model, responsibility for student success was distributed between the instructor and facilitator.

Participants

There were five online instructors and 58 facilitators in cohort 2 of our study. The majority of facilitators had a teaching background, with half having English content expertise, while other facilitators held a non-teaching role.

Facilitator Interviews

The interview included questions designed to elicit a detailed picture of facilitator practices, the instructor-facilitator relationship, students’ experience in the course, and information about the local context. Facilitators used a diverse range of strategies to support students. This revealed that teaching presence was distributed across both the online and face-to-face learning environment, and also how the instructor-facilitator was influential in contributing to the learning climate in the online course.

Instructor Interviews

The five instructors in our project had taught ODE courses and AP English Literature and Composition for several years, and were highly experienced and knowledgeable about what students need to succeed in this particular ODE course. Communication between facilitator and online instructor was largely private and conducted via email and phone. Therefore, in order to understand the instructors’ views of facilitators’ practices and activities that may help high school students taking ODE courses, we interviewed all instructors about their experiences with the facilitators. The interviews were completed at the end of the academic year and were recorded and transcribed. The process was largely open-ended, although some general questions asked whether the instructors thought facilitators were important to students’ success, and, if so, in what way, e.g., Who were the more and less effective facilitators. What did facilitators do that made them more or less effective? Instructors were free to determine what “effectiveness” meant to them and remained blind to the assignment of facilitators to the intervention or control group. Due to the open-ended nature of the interviews, we received a range of responses related to facilitator effectiveness that illustrates the complexity of this role and how it can influence students’ experience in the online course.

Data Analysis

Transcripts from both sets of interviews were imported into the qualitative data analysis program MAXQDA. The facilitator and instructor interviews were coded separately from each other, in two main steps:

1. For each interview set we derived a detailed coding scheme by allowing themes and subcategories to emerge through multiple readings of the transcripts. Each theme contained several individual codes that enabled us to capture the nuances of the blended learning environment from the perspectives of the instructors and facilitators. The comments from instructors clustered into three major areas: a) facilitator attitudes, behaviors and strategies, b) references to students and their attitudes and behaviors, and c) course structure, content, and suggested improvements. Since the focus of this study is facilitators’ activities and practices, we focus, in this paper, on only the first. Facilitators’ comments clustered into four major areas: a) students, b) instructors, c) descriptions of the local context, and d) their own strategies and behaviors.
   
2. Upon recognizing that facilitators’ activities and practices could be described in terms of teaching presence, we mapped our coding scheme to the main elements of the teaching presence component of the COI framework. Table 1 shows how our themes corresponded to the teaching presence codes. We found that our codes mapped to all three components of the teaching presence element of the COI framework: facilitating discourse, instructional design, and direct instruction. Although the COI framework and related research do not further expound upon the setting the climate for learning code, we expanded this code by adding three sub-codes to more closely capture the specific activities and practices facilitators used that may have helped students. Our sub-codes are: 1) engagement in the facilitator role, 2) communication with the online instructor, and 3) classroom management.

Table 1: Themes that emerged from the end-of-course interviews

Findings

This section presents findings relating to facilitator activity in this blended learning environment from the perspective of both instructors and facilitators. They are organized using the core components of teaching presence: facilitating discourse, instructional design, and direct instruction. The findings suggest that teaching presence was not confined to the instructor and the virtual environment, and facilitators contributed to the educational environment in a variety of ways. This was acknowledged by instructors: “The facilitator creates the whole atmosphere in which the class functions [and] can say what is allowed and not allowed.” Thus it became clear that the facilitators, through their classroom strategies, contributed to teaching presence.

Facilitating Discourse

The primary responsibility of facilitators was student support. The small rural school context contributed to facilitators taking a central role in establishing and maintaining close relationships with the students, many of whom they had known, and in some cases taught, for years. In our analysis of interview data, the activities and strategies that facilitators and instructors described revealed the themes that correspond to the facilitating discourse component.

Encouraging, acknowledging, or reinforcing student contributions.

The forms of student support most often mentioned were encouragement, acknowledgement and reinforcement. These were necessary to guide students through two simultaneous and challenging learning experiences: academic rigor and online learning. One facilitator reported that the online course was the first college preparation her students had received in high school. She stated “the biggest challenge was that the course load was much heavier than expected. That was also one of their favorite things about the class: it prepared them for college.”

For facilitators supporting students who were struggling with the online format and lack of immediate feedback, their presence in the classroom helped maintain student engagement and motivation. As one facilitator said, “Students were frustrated with lack of human contact – some of the assignments did not have timely feedback. I was acting as the connection”. Another facilitator agreed, adding “my job was to encourage, motivate, and give the students a pep talk when they felt they were not successful.”

Another facilitator described enlisting the principal to support a student and keep her enrolled:

She fell behind and got frustrated but the principal wouldn’t let her drop. She met with the guidance counselor who pulled her out of a class that wasn’t essential and gave her extra study hall. She learned a valuable lesson for college… that she needs to speak to the professor and come up with a plan.

Preparing students for college extends beyond encouragement. This level of student support suggests these facilitators were engaged and invested in their role, directly contributed to overall learning climate of the course, and were primary actors in ensuring students’ success.

Student support.

Facilitators described specific support strategies: “One thing I believe helps most is maintaining a good relationship with the students. I listen, very carefully, and try to remain calm, cool, collected, and offer a sense of humor.” She continued, “When time allows, I pull out my “college war stories” as an anecdotal learning experience. That helps them get into a positive frame of mind.” Another facilitator said she would “listen, be supportive and accessible, but not stand in the way of what the instructor does.”

Tensions arose when student support by facilitators was seen by instructors as undermining their authority while facilitators believed they were protecting their students from excessive work, unfair grading, or ineffective teaching practices. One instructor complained:

He was worse than an absentee facilitator – he crippled the class with his attitude and made it difficult to have any kind of a bond with any of these students. It was an adversarial relationship so it became that way with the students as well.

Instructors knew that effective facilitators developed close relationships with students and were aware of these because of ongoing communication. One instructor characterized an effective facilitator-student relationship: “She knew where her kids were; what they were doing, what their home lives were like, what they needed for graduation; she knew their parents… she was fantastic.”

In some cases, facilitators advocated for their students, particularly those who were struggling. A few became over-concerned with the welfare of their students, even interfering with the online discussion, course timetable or curriculum, or undermining the authority of the instructors. This led to misunderstandings, incomplete work, contested grades, unscheduled breaks, and priority given to extracurricular activities. Over-involvement did not go unnoticed by the instructors, who said: “he was too attached to the kids… he was mystified and thought the kids were mystified too and deserved a break. He tried to cut them some slack…” and “those kids were very busy with extracurricular and she could have convinced them that the course needed to take priority over some of this other stuff.”

Climate for learning (expanded): communication.

One important responsibility for the facilitator was to be “the eyes and ears” of the instructor in the classroom. Whether assigned to the intervention or control group, facilitators were expected to keep current with students’ assignments, be knowledgeable about the course schedule and content, and communicate regularly with the instructor. Effective communication between the instructor and onsite facilitator supported students by preventing local events from interrupting the online academic calendar. One facilitator described the critical nature of her communication with the instructor:

We had a hurricane and major ice storm! We were off school for a week. During that time it was frustrating, power was out, and students didn’t take all their books home, they got behind. But it was not insurmountable, the [instructor] and I worked together, had a plan, and the students did more work to get caught up.

An effective instructor-facilitator relationship also helped students avoid misinterpreting written communication, for example,

Kids were a little intimidated to contact the instructor and tell her things – you can misunderstand the tone of email. I would tell them they didn’t know what tone it was written in and not to take things to heart.

Another facilitator said she supported her students’ participation online, and her own communication with the instructor focused on increasing that activity. This is potentially an important piece of evidence when trying to reveal and understand the co-influence of the local context on online learning environment. She noted, “[The instructor] wanted to hear from students, I encouraged them to contact her directly.

All instructors agreed that the best facilitators were “on top of things” saying: “she was absolutely the best… in communication, in organization, in her concern for the students; she knew when they didn’t turn work in, when they needed extra help.” The most effective strategies involved non-superfluous communication about students and assignments and helped both instructors and facilitators understand the support students needed in the online environment and physical classroom. Instructors mentioned a range of helpful communication strategies: “I got daily emails about who was present, who was absent. That class had some problems but at least I was being kept informed.” While each instructor agreed that ongoing communication was important, there were differences in opinion as to what this meant. Some instructors wanted daily updates while others were satisfied with minimal interaction as long as students were not struggling. These instructor preferences were worked out through their relationship-building as the school year progressed. Online instructors had specific ideas about what information they needed from the physical classroom. While a lack of facilitator communication was sometimes due to capable and motivated students, this was not always the case: “He needed to be more involved than he was. His kids were not self-sufficient. He would respond within a day or two but didn’t go to any great lengths to help kids who weren’t doing well.”

Communication was the foundation of the instructor-facilitator relationship. When this broke down it affected the ability of the instructor to effectively teach the course and undermined their authority with the students:

His students had discussion board assignments that they did not do and I gave them zeros. He said “I specifically remember that day they tried to post to the discussion board and it wouldn’t accept it.” So I said, “Well, as per my instructions to you they should have sent me their post in a message and I would post it for them.” He said “That’s not fair!” and undermined me in front of the students.

The expanded climate for learning codes engagement and classroom management were developed only to code the interview data from the instructors. These themes did not arise during the analysis of facilitator exit interview and can be understood as important from the instructors’ perspective – but these were not necessarily areas that facilitators reflected on similarly or were trained to address.

Climate for learning: engagement.

The instructors had some differences of opinion regarding the salient elements of effective facilitation. For instance, some instructors welcomed facilitators who organized or participated in content-related activities. Other instructors felt that facilitators who involved themselves in content were overstepping their boundaries. However, there were certain elements of highly effective facilitation upon which all instructors agreed: facilitators should be actively engaged in their role. “They need to know what we’re doing, what the assignments are. They can’t just be babysitters.” Facilitators considered less effective tended to undermine the instructor, prioritize local school events, and minimize the importance of the online class. One instructor said, “She tried… but I don’t think she liked the curriculum and she let the students know. She was babying them.” Facilitators often had multiple obligations in the school, and these were perceived by the instructors to interfere with their ability to effectively support students: “If [she] hadn’t had all these other obligations the students might have been more successful, but she was just overwhelmed.”

Climate for learning: classroom management.

The ability of the facilitator to effectively manage the classroom influenced the classroom climate:

[One facilitator] had her professionalism challenged by her students. She was great communication wise; her issue was more a lack of experience as an educator, a class management issue. She had some serious challenges.

Online instructors saw the facilitators as an extension of their teaching authority:

If the facilitators didn’t establish themselves as a presence in the classroom it became borderline anarchy and they’d walk away. The way I saw it was in the class they are speaking for me and you need to respect them.

Direct Instruction

While facilitators agreed that communication was important, their reports of their classroom-based activities suggested that other factors were also relevant. Specifically, they were involved in direct instruction more often than the instructor was aware. Their behaviors corresponded to the direct instruction codes in the teaching presence construct: inject knowledge from diverse sources, include pointers, diagnose misconceptions and confirm understandings through assessment and feedback. Several facilitators engaged students in content-related activities: “I got to know them and their different learning styles; engaged them in peer editing. I also got them to read other kids’ essays” and “we would talk about the different passages and how they [students] could better understand what they were reading.”

Other facilitators utilized resources from the school to address misconceptions or lack of understanding. Some experienced teachers had concerns and engaged their students in direct instructional activities to compensate for perceived inferior pedagogy. One facilitator described her students’ learning experience this way:

I talked to them about not worrying so much about grades when they were freaking out, stressing that this is a learning experience and they will be fine. My English background was an advantage in this course. Some of the novels I had read and some I had not; either way we discussed some of the ideas. If they didn’t understand the quiz answers, I could explain.

Facilitators without an English background or unfamiliar with the books, expressed frustration: “It was a disadvantage not having an English background. I tried to read along and start discussions but it was difficult.”

While instructors did not always have a detailed picture of facilitator in-class strategies, some welcomed facilitators as co-teachers, stating, “A major factor is that they actually have some connection to the content. Those that didn’t… their classes fall through early on.” This did not necessarily mean that the facilitator had to have expertise in the AP curriculum. However, it was useful to have a facilitator who could provide feedback on writing, or engage students in group discussions: “Some students had low writing skills. To have someone there who is a teacher and is able to guide them and say what a paragraph should look like is a great help.”

Instructors commented several times that working with other English teachers could be problematic, feeling that boundaries were crossed or blurred. In some cases the instructor felt undermined by facilitators that were also English teachers, saying: “I think she would have much rather been teaching the course than us teaching it” or “You’d think English teachers would make better facilitators, but if they don’t like the assignments they will tell the kids ‘if I were teaching this course…’”

Instructional Design

The course curriculum was authored by two of the instructors and, as an AP course, had to be approved by the College Board. Although facilitators were not involved in any direct decisions related to the instructional design of the course, their professional judgments about the structure of the course sometimes influenced how they supported students academically, changing the curriculum as it was implemented in the face-to-face class.

The majority of facilitators felt that this course was an excellent preparation for college-bound students who had not been exposed to the online format or academic rigor of an advanced course. In addition, some were impressed by the curriculum:

One of the best things was the pace. ‘I don’t understand, I don’t get this’ wasn’t acceptable and could not slow down the teacher. They are having some problems with our face-to-face AP classes in the school as the kids can’t be bothered to read – so this was great.

Facilitators who were critical of the pedagogical approach extended their critique to the overall instructional design and use of the medium. Several felt that more interactivity was needed and that the course could have been more engaging, student- centered, and better designed to elicit deeper engagement with the content. A typical comment was, “It would have been nice if they had had more of a visual component in communicating with the teacher – they missed the face-to-face contact, and didn’t do well with just being given an assignment to work on.” One facilitator concerned with the lack of student generated discussion, said “This class was only prompt driven which defeats the point of discussion.”

To address this lack of interactivity online and engage the students more critically in the material they were reading, facilitators used in-class discussion, a strategy mentioned frequently while describing overall student support. One facilitator said, “I was there for them and had read all the material already. I was an English major in college. We talked to each other and the students talked with each other.” One facilitator added an additional unit onto the class to prepare her students, “Before the course started we had three weeks in school, so during that time the kids worked on writing projects.”

According to instructors, the most effective facilitators developed a routine: being aware of absences, and knowing due dates for assignments, and checking in with students. As one instructor said, “Students still need to have that physical accountability; that sense of self-agency isn’t fully developed at that age.”

These qualitative findings provide substantial evidence of teaching presence by facilitators in the local context. Expanding the investigative lens to the learning environment where students are physically embedded is essential for understanding how that environment influences students’ experiences as online learners.

Discussion

The data analysis clarified the overlap between social presence and teaching presence where learning climate is set, and the centrality of the facilitating discourse subcomponent helped reveal that interaction. If the strength of the COI framework is about process and interaction in teaching and learning, then the shaded parts of the COI model where the main components overlap are where this interaction occurs. For the COI framework to be comprehensively applied in online learning it needs explanatory strength in the expanded definition of a blended learning environment, one that takes into account the influence of the local, physical, and cultural context in which the student is embedded. From the student’s perspective, being situated in a classroom with an on-site facilitator means that online learning occurs in a blended environment. That facilitator may be a teacher and may also have subject knowledge and the classroom may contain peers who are also taking the online course. Any model that fails to incorporate the influences of the local context(s) along with the virtual environment will fall short of comprehensively describing the blended learning environment.

Effective facilitation strategies and narratives from the local schools that emerged from the interviews all mapped onto the core elements of teaching presence: facilitation of discourse, instructional design, and direct instruction. However, facilitating discourse is the core activity in which most facilitators engaged, with a sub-element of this component – setting the climate for learning – being the primary responsibility of facilitators as they support students. Facilitating discourse, and its sub-codes, provides a useful schema for understanding teaching presence and its intersection with social presence, and our coding scheme expanded the concept of climate for learning by providing the codes to capture the details of the environment in which the students are embedded at a more granular level.

Students in an online course are constantly traversing the space between the virtual and the local learning context and teaching presence cannot be isolated to the virtual domain. The assumption is often made that when a student takes an online course it is entirely the responsibility of instructor and the overall course structure to create a viable learning community. However, K-12 students take virtual courses in other learning contexts, i.e., the school classroom, library, or home-school environment. As one instructor noted, “People forget these are high school kids. You can’t just say ‘there’s your computer; now I’m going to sit here and ignore you.’” An engaged facilitator has access to those cues that are out of reach for the instructor – facial expressions, body language, and spoken comments or questions. The facilitator can pass on relevant information from the local classroom, rounding out the instructor’s experience of the course. In supporting their students, effective and proactive facilitators involve other adults in the local environment if necessary – counselors, teachers, principals, and parents. Student engagement, to some extent, is under the influence of the facilitator, as evidenced by instructor descriptions of ineffective facilitators who either interfered with the course, or neglected their responsibilities.

Recommendations for Training and Practice

In this study, teaching presence was established by both the instructor of record and a facilitator who was not officially responsible for content learning. Understanding how facilitators contributed to the learning climate, not only through their own classroom practices but also via their working relationship with the instructor, provided us with a nuanced understanding of a teaching presence in this blended environment. Research has substantiated the importance of the facilitator for student support (Cavanaugh et al., 2009) but the literature does not reference these other crucial components in training programs or findings (Charania et al., 2008; Roblyer et al., 2007). In fact, our own training addressed student social and emotional support in depth but did not focus on the instructor-facilitator relationship beyond the requirement for on-going communication. Based on our findings, the complexity of the relationship has to be acknowledged. Our research substantiates the view of Harms et al. (2006) that a facilitator can act as “problem-solver, mentor and friend,” and the findings of other researchers (Barbour & Mulcahy, 2009; O'Dwyer et al., 2007) that facilitators can and do offer content-related support. However our findings show that these types of social, emotional, and content-based support can blur the boundaries between the facilitator and instructor. While we argue that learner support must include social and emotional support and facilitator training should specifically target these areas, we also suggest that training include guidelines for instructors and facilitators to share their expectations about communication and content-based activities, and decide on mutual strategies. There should be an in-depth instructor-facilitator conversation at the outset of the course regarding communication preferences, the extent of content support by the facilitator, and local school factors that potentially conflict with the course timetable.

If the instructor sets the culture and climate of the virtual classroom, the facilitator is the primary influence on the local classroom climate. When we asked the instructor what exactly facilitators should be told before the course begins, one said:

Facilitators need to understand this is an actual job, not a duty period – they need to take it seriously. You can’t teach a face to face class and facilitate an online course at the same time. A clear job description is important, and a clear description of responsibility. There may be hurt feelings and anger if a teacher is made to facilitate something that they really want to do themselves; the principal needs to be aware of that. It should not be just someone who had a hole in their schedule, or some computers in the back of the room.

Another added:

I would say “Please don’t undermine me as teacher. Don’t tell the students ‘I think your teacher gave you the wrong grade.’” It all depends how you define their role.

Recommendations for Theoretical Framework

If the COI is to be a fully explanatory model, the climate for learning code in the facilitating discourse category needs to be expanded when applied to K-12 ODE settings involving the teacher-facilitator model. The instructor and facilitator each contribute to teaching presence individually, while their relationship contributes to the climate for learning by linking the local context to the virtual environment. The strength of the COI framework is its focus on interaction and the process of teaching and learning in ODE, reflected in the overlap of the three main elements (Garrison et al., 2004). Setting the climate occurs in the overlap between teaching presence and social presence, and this should be recognized as a key aspect of the model given the blended nature of online learning. In a blended learning environment, there is rarely just one teacher or just one classroom. Instead students in an online course may be embedded in multiple educational contexts, simultaneously separated by distance from some, while face-to-face with others. Exploring how teaching presence is distributed across both the instructor and facilitator has allowed us to address the complexity of online learning while extending the facilitating discourse sub-component to describe the contributions of the local, physical climate as well as the virtual environment. This study contributes to other research that seeks to extend the COI framework to an entire course, not simply the online discussion (Archer, 2010).

Limitations of the Study and Directions for Future Research

This study was conducted in small, rural high schools in the U.S. and may not be generalizable to other settings. It involved a single content area and recent research has shown that there may be subject matter effects in online learning (Arbaugh, Bangert, & Cleveland-Innes, 2010).

The concept of teaching presence recognizes that students contribute to knowledge construction along with their instructors and facilitators. Although this study was focused on facilitators, we have no observational data that directly captured the facilitator-student interactions. A future aim, therefore, is to develop a theoretical model through a study design that includes research in the local schools to help reveal how the physical and online environments, including the people situated in those environments, co-influence each other, and how those interconnections affect students’ online learning experiences.

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Claire de la Varre is a doctoral student in educational psychology in the School of Education, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and a researcher at the Center for Developmental Science. She formerly worked as an educational technologist and e-learning developer at the University of Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland. E-mail: claire_delavarre@unc.edu

Julie Keane is a researcher at the Center for Developmental Science, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and was Associate Project Director, Center for Children and Technology, EDC, Inc., New York. She has conducted national research examining technology in school reform, including policy analysis, professional development, curriculum reform, and the social impact of technology. E-mail: jkeane@email.unc.edu

Matthew J. Irvin received his Ph.D. in education with a specialization in educational psychology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His research interests include student risk and resilience and distance education for student learning and professional development for educators. E-mail: mirvin@email.unc.edu