In an accelerated online program, weeks fly by quickly. For adult learners who balance work, family, and school, the pace can feel especially intense. In this environment, course design matters, but it’s course facilitation that makes the difference between a learning experience that feels transactional and one that feels meaningful and transformative.
Key Aspects of Course Facilitation
Below are five key areas of focus that can make you a stronger facilitator in accelerated online teaching, plus a consideration for today’s AI-enabled world.
Students in accelerated courses can quickly feel isolated if they don’t sense their instructor’s involvement. Instructor presence means showing up regularly and visibly through announcements, check-ins, and quick responses to student posts or questions. Even short, informal messages remind students that a real person is paying attention and invested in their progress. Presence reassures students that they’re not alone!
Accelerated learning can compress opportunities for relationship-building, so instructors play a critical role in helping students connect with one another. Community building can be as simple as encouraging introductions, creating space for informal conversation, or modeling respectful dialogue in discussions. Research tells us that stronger peer connections increase motivation and persistence, so these community supports are critically important for busy adults who might otherwise withdraw when life gets hectic.
Because time is short, feedback in accelerated courses needs to be both prompt and purposeful. Feedback is not just about grading. Feedback that fuels learning is about giving clear, actionable comments that help students improve over time. Timely feedback shows students you care about their growth, helps them feel seen, and can prevent small misunderstandings from snowballing into bigger issues in an accelerated term.
Adult learners bring unique strengths and challenges. They may be managing demanding jobs, raising families, or returning to school after many years. Flexible support means offering clarity, empathy, and reasonable options when possible. That looks different for every course and facilitator, but it may mean being available for quick check-ins, clarifying expectations, or helping students navigate unexpected barriers. Flexibility, within reason, signals respect for students’ realities and builds trust.
Great facilitators guide students and reflect on their own teaching practice! Reflective practice means noticing what worked, where students struggled, and what you might try differently next time. In accelerated teaching, reflection can happen in small moments like jotting down notes after a tricky week, revisiting your announcements for clarity, or adjusting your approach to group work. Over time, this habit builds confidence and adaptability.
AI tools are rapidly reshaping how students learn, work, and communicate. In accelerated online courses, where time is compressed and flexibility is essential, being AI-responsive helps facilitators guide students through both the opportunities and challenges these tools present. Responsiveness isn’t about having all the answers when it comes to AI. Instead practice setting clear expectations, model appropriate use, and help students develop AI literacy.
Self-Assessment
This self-assessment is designed to help you take a closer look at how you facilitate online, accelerated courses. This is a chance to identify your strengths, uncover opportunities for growth, and gather resources to support you. Your results will give you a clear snapshot of where you are now and where you can focus next to make the biggest impact on your students.
AI Follow-Up Prompts
Completing your self-scoring course facilitation rubric is just the first step. You now have valuable insights into your strengths as an online instructor and opportunities to grow even further.
To help you put those insights into action, we’ve created a set of AI prompts you can use after your initial improvement plan. Each prompt is optional! You can try one, a few, or all of them depending on what feels most useful. Think of them as conversation starters with AI that will help you reflect, plan, and experiment in new ways as you continue to develop as an online facilitator.
Using your complete self-assessment results, create a targeted improvement plan you can implement right away!
I’ve just completed a self-scoring course facilitation rubric for my online teaching.
Please create a short, coaching-style improvement plan for me to use in my next accelerated online course. The plan should include:
– **One higher-level growth goal** based on patterns in my results.
– **Two specific, practical actions** I can take to strengthen my online teaching, each paired with a relevant resource or tool drawn from the feedback.
– A simple **milestone plan** that may include what to do *before the course begins, early in the course, mid-course, and at the end*. (Please don’t use specific week numbers, since my course length may vary.)
– An encouraging tone that recognizes my strengths and motivates me to improve.
– A reminder that I can always reference my full self-assessment results for more detail.
Here are my rubric results (each item includes the question, my rating, and the customized feedback/resources):
[PASTE RESULTS HERE]
Review what you want to fix and how to leverage what you do well.
Based on my rubric results, identify two teaching strengths that stand out and suggest how I can build on them to positively impact my students in the next course. Provide concrete examples of how I can extend these strengths.
Connect your rubric feedback to your students’ experience.
Using my rubric results, describe how students might experience my teaching right now. Then suggest two changes I could make to improve their sense of connection, support, or engagement.
Prevent overwhelm and keep your scope narrow.
From my rubric results, which improvement area should I prioritize first for the biggest impact? Create a simple action plan that helps me focus on that one area without trying to do too much at once.
Deepen use of the feedback’s built-in tools/resources.
Looking at my rubric results, choose one recommended resource or tool. Suggest specific ways I can use that resource effectively in preparing for or facilitating my next course.
Apply feedback to realistic teaching moments.
Based on my rubric results, give me two practical teaching scenarios (for example: a student stops participating, or students don’t understand instructions). Show me how I could handle those situations more effectively, using my rubric feedback as a guide.
Adopt a longer-term improvement mindset.
Looking at my rubric results, suggest one short-term improvement I can make in my next course, and one longer-term habit I can develop over multiple courses to become a stronger online teacher.
