I just received this email from two new online tutors:
Could you please give us some best practice. We start today and maybe we should take care of something specially.
My response:
I am starting a second iteration of a well-established course on training online moderators in the role of tutor later this week so these sorts of issues are fresh in my mind as I get the course ready for my learners. I have a few general observations.
1. Learning should be a conversation (with yourself as you work through tasks, with your teacher, with your course peers or with other external experts/colleagues) rather than a display (through posting homework)
2. Online learning is not very different to offline learning. The same rules of politeness apply online as they do offline. eg when someone says something, acknowledge them
3. Tasks that are placed in forums should lead to some interaction (if they don’t you should consider moving them to another format in the next course iteration)
4. The first person to post in a forum should be congratulated “pour encourager les autres“.
5. Those who don’t post should be sent a personal private message offering help and support
6. Those who post but don’t meet expectations should be coached to make a correct response by posing an extending question in the forum. Corollary: Those who post outstanding contributions should be publicly acknowledged in the forum.
7. There should be a plan beforehand about which tasks will result in personalised feedback to every post. These will tend to be the longer, more reflective tasks.
8. A weekly message, as well as looking forward, should make reference to some good work that has been done in the past week by publicly calling out one or two exemplary contributions
If you just wait then very little will happen.
There are of course other factors to consider. If the task is a simple intro exercise to start the group thinking about the topic then maybe no responses are needed. Also, as you get further into the course and the group knows each other better and has trust in one another, then it helps for the facilitator to stand back and let the learners comment and support each other.
Hope that helps.
There is much more on carrying out online learning in my (for the moment) free book on online learning.
Illustration: Pixabay