Facilitation - Bringing it all together

While not part of the IPP, the Circle's facilitation aspect is definitely influenced by Jesuit educational principles. Dickel and Ishii-Jordan (2013) state that “with deliberate action instructors can achieve cura personalis” (p. 390).

Outside Jesuit writings, literature about setting the climate in online courses is plentiful. For instance, the Community of Inquiry Links to an external site., now adapted for online learning, is a widely-cited social constructivist framework by Garrison, Archer and Anderson that identifies three "presences" - cognitive, social, and teaching. Teaching presence includes the difficult tasks for online instructors in design learning, facilitating discourse, and providing direct instruction that is learner-centered, rather than teacher focused.

Lehman and Conceição (2010) summarize facilitation beautifully, "[Presence] looks and feels as if the instructor has placed the learner at the center of the course and created the course for that learner. It also looks and feels as if the instructor is accessible to the learners and that the learners are accessible to the instructor and each other, and that the technology is transparent to the learning process. Each learner is 'there' and 'together' with the instructor and with other learners as well" (p. 3).