I have been reading Gilly Salmon's (2011) eModerating: the key to teaching and learning online. I am hoping through this book to pick up on key ideas which I could include in training staff to become effective 'eModerators' especially in the use of online discussions.
One of the chapters that I have started on looks at the key issues for eModerators. I will summarise the important things I have noted from this section of the book below.
Group Size
It is important to ensure that you have the right group size. The group size largely depends upon the purpose of the discussion. For a discussion where members have to produce a collaborative output you will want a small group (e.g. 6). A slightly larger group (e.g. 20) works well for sharing views especially where the moderator uses effective summarising, weaving and feedback. Large groups (e.g. up to 1000) work for questioning experts where questions are posed to an expert and answers given. For the student this is not so much about asking questions but also reading the responses. In my experience as a student within the OU a course usually provides a mixture of these group sizes. There are discussions that are open to all the students enrolled on the course, tutor group based discussions where we discuss questions posed within the course materials providing us with activities and then these tutor groups are also divided into smaller groups for work which requires us to collaborate on a piece of work and produce a document at the end.
Asynchronicity
This feature of online discussion provides advantages (24 hour access, flexibility of participation) but can also provide frustrations (keeping everyone together, waiting for others to contribute, students feeling overwhelmed if they come late). It is important that the discussions have clear goals, appropriate challenges and provide a positive group experience, excitement, rhythm and engagement. All of this depends not only on the design of the course and how the discussion links to the key themes but also on the actions of the moderator. By ensuring that you provide welcoming messages and use an encouraging tone you can help to manage the discussion through the use of summarising, weaving, archiving and feedback. It is also important to ensure that you put thought into every reply and consider how others might interpret the message. Often we reply without thinking and this can result in misunderstanding or offence.
Time
Lack of time seems to be an issue with everything that we do but it seems that time as the time that you are online is not limited by place or time of day it can be harder to manage than other activities. The key thing is to be flexible about the way that you work and consider how you can change your patterns to incorporate the fact that online could be any time. Communicating online seems so instant that expectations of an immediate response are increased, posting your online office hours can help students to understand that you do not sit at your computer ready to respond 24/7.
for your students it is important to indicate what you expect from them. What should they do and by when should they have done it? It is often the case that some students will come to the discussion early and yet some will come late. It is also important to remember that often students are fitting their contributions around other commitments and that these change from week to week, day to day.
To help you and your students manage your time online you could consider scheduling regular events, like a summary of the discussion so far being posted on a Thursday. It is best not to leave things open ended as they can loose there usefulness and leave things left incomplete.
Consider how long your messages are, long messages take tome to read, process and respond to but can often contain deeper and more complex ideas which are valuable. This is where summarizing, weaving and achieving by the moderator become more important helping to highlight key points and ideas saving the student time.
Remember if you are new to emoderating it will take more of your time as you get used to working in this way. This will be the same for your students and you will need to reduce offline activities to take into account the time they are spending online.
It seems that the items mentioned here are important for activity design as well as eModeration and need to be taken into account whilst the activity is being created and embedded within a course as well as during the training of the course tutors.
Salmon, G. (2011) eModerating:
the key to teaching and learning online, Routledge, Abingdon.
