Computer Support of a Facilitator

With respect to the computer support for the tasks of a facilitator, so far only a few approaches exist. Prominent examples concerning asynchronous settings are the facilitation of online forums or electronic mailing lists.

In these approaches, all communicative contributions are sent to the facilitator, which filters them and distributes them to others. For collaborative learning scenarios, these approaches seem to be too restrictive to support an open discussion of the learners because the facilitator is more seen as an editor than as a guide; discussions where the learners are the decision makers and lead their own discussion are repressed. Concerning the domain of asynchronous learning only, requirements for the support of a facilitator are published.

Figure 4 gives an overview of the proposed technical functionalities for asynchronous facilitation support realized in KOLUMBUS 2. In contrast to the abovedescribed approaches, the users can contribute unfiltered to the different discussions.

Figure 4. The support of a facilitator

In the discussion threads, moderator contributions are highlightedwith bold type, directing attention of the discussion’s participants to the facilitator’s inputs. This bold type of the facilitator’s statements does also visually structure the discussion and reduce the necessity to reconstruct the course of a debate when working asynchronously. By this structuring, the initiation, resp. leading over to the next phase, as well as the summarization are supported.

Students confirmed that emphasizing a facilitator’s statements by using bold fonts proved to be helpful in following the course of a discussion. Since the contributions of a facilitator often brought up a new topic and thus resulted in a new discussion thread, emphasizing them pointed out the structure of an extensive discussion more clearly. For instance, if two facilitator statements were displayed one below the other, topics thus far not discussed became rapidly apparent.

To promote contributions to an ongoing discussion, two functionalities are offered. Emphasis can be placed on single contributions to a discussion by using a highlighting functionality. To label an element of a discussion thread, the facilitator can choose from a variety of background colors. Marking contributions in this way can be used, for example, to group similar contributions or to accentuate important arguments or to stress (intermediary) the results of a discussion.

There is no predefined meaning to the usage of different colors. It was intended that a user group develops the corresponding conventions without a predefined meaning. The discussion of the meaning assigned to the applied colors fosters the development of shared understanding of the applied functionalities.

Although it would have been useful to label similar or agreeing proposals when students were collecting ideas on outline and content of the documentation they had to compose, in the case study, the facilitator did not apply the highlighter functionality to draw attention to single contributions. Investigating possible reasons for this behavior, it turned out that she considered the design of the highlighting mechanism as too coarse-grained as only the entire contribution could be highlighted.

In this context, the facilitator referred to a technique known from the facilitation of face-to-face meetings whereby crucial points are committed in writing to cards that can be arranged on a pin board. In these situations, one does not put down complete statements but confines oneself to recording only the most important keywords.

According to this, calling attention to a whole contribution in a discussion thread by highlighting it proves to be an inappropriate means if one only intends to underscore essential propositions. An initial suggestion for improvement can be derived from these findings. Instead of being restricted to the level of items, subsequent versions of the highlighter mechanism described here should be applicable in a more fine-grained manner (i.e., facilitating the selection of single words) in order to allow for a precise accentuation.

Furthermore, system-internal linkscan be established if contributions that are semantically related to each other have to be interconnected. Establishing a relation between elements in such a way is especially reasonable if they deal with similar aspects of a topic but are distributed over several discussion threads and not directly connected to each other.

Since there was no situation where similar aspects of a topic were addressed in various discussion threads, there was no necessity to connect semantically related contributions using links between different discussion threads. Thus, the corresponding functionality remained unused. I assume that this is a consequence of the carefully planned interventions of the facilitator.

The discussion was well guided—the participants added their contributions to the appropriate contribution of the facilitator. Because these well-prepared interventions from the facilitator cannot be expected in every case, I still propose that system-internal links may be a benefit when facilitating asynchronous discussions of group of learners.

During the study, the facilitator made proposals for additional functionalities aimed at improved support for activities typical to the facilitation of both face-to-face and computer-supported discussions. First, a facilitator should be able to ‘‘assign questions and work orders individually’’ by means of a collaboratively shared task list.

Supporting the assignment and handling of tasks is closely related to functionalities fostering the participant’s awareness of the current state of the collaborative process in which they are involved. Furthermore, the facilitator asked for a means to support synchronous voting in order to speed up the process by which participants reach a group decision.

To achieve results for asynchronous facilitation, synchronous communication was not offered. However, it confirms the need for synchronous facilitation as described in the following section as well as a fluent integration of both synchronous and asynchronous modes.