Right at the beginning of Chapter 1 in her book, A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning, Jenny Moon discusses 'focus and boundaries'. She writes on p. 12:
To deal properly with a topic requires focus and boundaries or the discussion will be woolly.
This is a real challenge at the beginning of an online course and also at the beginning of face-to-face courses. The first task on an online course is usually fairly open-ended to allow participants to find their feet and enter the course at a level of their own choosing. This inevitably leads to broad ranging discussion with lots of ideas thrown into the melting point.
From my perspective as a tutor this lack of focus and boundaries and the possible accompanying feelings of 'where are we going?' 'what are the key ideas emerging from discussion?' 'am I missing something?' may be a necessary precursor to the more focussed discussions we will be having later on in the course.
So there is a tension here between needing focus and boundaries for discussion and learning to be effective and ensuring that participants have sufficient autonomy to feel comfortable in the learning environment.
From my experience the range of discussion in the first week of an online course can often seem daunting. As is well known by authors of online courses, this obviously has implications for course design and for the facilitator's role.
Source of Image: Krola Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/charola/318245761/
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