Are there any special aspects of communicating in a VLE?

• responding to e-mails and postings from students is a crucially important process. A discussion forum or chat facility can be vibrant and a valuable learning experience for all – or it can fall flat on its face. Inappropriate responses to students who are wrestling with the intricacies of the discipline can be seriously demotivating. They can even cause the flow of responses from students to dry up altogether, and the practitioner may have great difficulty in repairing the damage that has been done.
• if you ‘seed’ starter questions then make them interesting enough, even controversial enough, to prompt responses. Be prepared to ‘re-seed’ with some fresh perspective.
• respond to forum postings strategically by choosing the timing of your interventions carefully. Generally, it is a good idea to give the students some space first before entering the discussion. We are trying to get students to be responsible for their own learning.
• encourage good responses by acknowledging them as such
• only give ‘bits’ of additional help where this is necessary, ie enough for the student or group to make some further progress
• never give the student or group the answer
• discourage ‘off-task’ discussion by using prompters like “Can we return to the question”; “Let me summarise what we have so far – and then move you on to…” etc
• referring students back to earlier work can be helpful to them
• a key practice is to use the power and resources of the group to move things on, for example: “Why don’t you all discuss this issue privately and then post the results?” or “Can the group discuss this then come back to the forum?”
• never say in replying to a posting by a student or group that “you are wrong” (the student is the world expert on what they know at that time and negative feedback generally discourages). Use postings like ‘“Perhaps you need to examine this from another aspect” (angle, perspective, standpoint etc); “Good try, but you now need to consider…” (think about, reconsider, look at etc).
• consider throwing in the occasional ‘spanner’ to promote deeper understanding, for example: “How do you know that this is the case? What evidence do you have for this?”
• know when the discussion has run its course and move on to another question
• there will be ‘lurkers’, ie students who will follow the discussion but make no contribution. However, it is likely that they are still learning and may, at some future point, get more directly involved.

Last Modified: 14 July 2010