A supervisory adult that assists students in the physical classroom; common in distance education courses offered to students in high school. The facilitator operates equipment; distributes instructional materials, answers students’ questions, and communicates with online instructor.
Published in Chapter:
Social Support for Online Learning
Claire de la Varre (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA), Julie Keane (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA), Matthew J. Irvin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA), and Wallace Hannum (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-264-0.ch038
Abstract
This chapter describes the design of a sociotechnical system to support rural high school students in an online distance education (ODE) course. The design is based on the American Psychological Association’s Learner- Centered Psychological Principles (LCPs). The system includes a Web-based module to train school-based facilitators to create a socially-supportive local environment for students and encourage community building among facilitators. The system also includes an online instrument for collecting data on learner-centered practices in the classroom and student perceptions of these. ODE typically has high attrition rates, in part because participants’ social needs are often neglected, leading to perceptions of isolation. Additionally, success in online courses depends on students’ abilities to engage in self-regulated learning, effective timemanagement and self-reflection, skills that many students in high school are still learning and may need help with as they engage in ODE. This system is an attempt to address these issues.