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Successful E-moderators:
- Visualise success for individuals and their online groups, and engage with them in achieving the vision;
- Turn apparent threats into challenges to be tackled as worthwhile tasks in themselves;
- Create focus for the group by offering short term goals and give a lot of constructive feedback;
- Give very close attention to group processes, but avoid constant interventions and redirections;
- From stage 4 onwards, promote the experience of 'going with the flow'. Most people have some sense of what this might mean;
- Encourage participants to articulate feelings of engagement with the online opportunities to take part (e-tivities).
E-moderators have the added task of balancing time:
- The better structured the interaction is, the more time the e-moderator will have for giving feedback and offering weaving & summaries.
- Do not respond to each message yourself. Let students know you will read them and give feedback and when.
- Estimate a minute to read simple messages, twice as long for longer ones.
- Doing an effective summary from 30 or more messages takes an hour.
Time Estimates
E-moderators
- Think out the e-tivity, explore it with others and plan it well in advance. Estimate: 3 hours for the 1st time, 1 hour 2nd and subsequent times.
- If you plan to issue resources that are copyrighted, leave time to get permission. Avoid needing time on this if you can.
- Write, quality check and put instructional messages in place online. Estimate: 2 hours 1st time, 1 hour 2nd and subsequent times. Pilot by asking others to read instructions and respond 1 hour.
- Set up the bulletin board and resources: 1 hour 1st time, half an hour after that
- Respond to any emails and questions from participants or groups: 0.5 hour.
- Brief any team leaders if necessary: 0.5 hour
- E-moderate the e-tivity- 2-3 hours per week
- Summarise & plenarise: extra 1-2 hours to close off
- Evaluation & feed forward to next time: 1 hour
Technical Support:
- Depends on platform and e-moderators' experience but may need 1-2 hours per e-tivity especially for the first time
- Provide technical support and help to participants as necessary, 2 hours if participants are inexperienced, much less at stages 3-5.
Very discursive e-tivities such as those sometimes used in social sciences or humanities courses may need longer for e-moderators and e-tivities. Slow bulletin boards and forums may add to operational times.
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