Thanks to the gang at the Illinois Online Network for putting together an amazing list of important “basic criteria for a person to be successful as an online facilitator” as well as “what participants of the online learning experience should expect from the facilitator”
Since I have been facilitating online virtual communities and teaching courses online since 1993, I am so happy to finally see the horse before the cart.
In the 90s, the virtual office and the virtual meeting required the killer app. Now, there is more of an understanding that even the nicest hotel cannot run itself: it needs world-class staff with years of training. So does the online virtual community.
No matter how much a company spends on servers and load-balancing technologies as well as the very dear SAs, that is just the beginning.
After all that, you need to find the best people who have experience in this unique world, where lurkers are 10:1 to participants and the “bozos” rarely if ever represent the health and pulse of the community at large.
