Facilitation Matters: A Rapid Review of Teachers’ Roles in Online Education

Background The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated higher education’s move online and renewed a central question in educational technology research: what roles do teachers need to assume to support learning effectively in digital environments? Although online teaching has been widely studied, the literature has not produced a stable or unified account of teachers’ pedagogical roles. Purpose This rapid review synthesizes literature published between 2000 and January 2022 to identify and analyse the pedagogical roles online instructors assume in facilitating student learning. It argues that facilitation is not separate from teaching but the central mode through which pedagogy is enacted online. Method Using established rapid review procedures, the review searched ERIC and Education Research Complete and complemented database screening with manual reference-list searches. Twenty-three studies met the inclusion criteria. Data were extracted into a structured matrix and analysed inductively. Results Seven interconnected themes were identified: pedagogical role, social facilitation, managerial role, technical role, instructional design, facilitation strategies, and role ambiguity with related professional development needs. Across the studies, the pedagogical role was consistently treated as the most important and was enacted through design, questioning, feedback, scaffolding, and interaction. Conclusions The pedagogical role is the overarching construct within which other online teaching roles operate. Facilitation is its most visible expression in online environments. The review also offers a useful pre-generative-AI baseline for examining how emerging AI may reshape teachers’ work in online education.