A growing number of countries are focussing their capacities in investing in their human capital as a critical feature of their economic growth . Generation and transmission of knowledge is transforming through the availability of large-scale freely available information and online interaction. The role of the management teacher and developer is gradually altering from one of ensuring the accurate transmission of known information to one of enabling critical exploration and of generating new and relevant knowledge for the use of individuals, groups businesses and not-for-profit organisations.

Computers and telecommunications are having a huge impact on organisations and hence their managers. Managers are discovering new ways of collaborating with others, exploring new communities, inventing businesses, seeking resources, finding information and learning through interacting electronically on a huge scale. Changes in management learning and development therefore need to derive from these drivers. Challenges to traditional approaches to learning are rife . We know that new modes of teaching and learning for managing at work are emerging, together with the need for rapid updating of skills and knowledge . Indeed, we could argue that the skills needed for managing and for learning are converging. They include the willingness to support others, to work in multi-skilled and remotely located teams, to handle information (rather than know everything) and become critical thinkers.

Most of us would agree that the advent of fourth generation learning delivery tools for use both on campus and at a distance, offer the potential for enhancing business and management education. There are increased opportunities for student: student interaction, student-centredness, and collaboration. Some argue that "the real learning "space" among students is closer" (whether on or off campus) .

The challenge for all management and business educators is to explore and translate the opportunity into worthwhile learning processes. Engaging in reflective and interactive activities, especially those leading to explaining, justifying and evaluating problem solutions, is a very important part of the management learning process. The critical issue is, that no matter how amazing the online technological platform, managers most appreciate learning from others, with the support of a credible facilitator.

But a word of caution! Online teaching and learning, changes the scope and the skills we require of academics and lecturers. It changes what we actually do with students. Currently most of the online teachers (the people I call the e-moderators) do not themselves have enough training to make this truly successful and productive for learners. Where training is provided it often concentrates on the use of the technology rather than the role of the online teacher. People get exhausted and worry about the use of their time. Hence online teaching gets a bad name

Look under "Reclaiming the Territory for the Natives".

And the Australia presentations in May 2000.

Also the paper at:

Look under Salmon & Giles, 1998.

E-moderating is not a set of skills any of us is born with, nor ones that we have learned vicariously through observing teachers whilst we ourselves were learning. As yet there are few online mentors to guide us through step by step. Maybe in the future, managers will draw on their childhood e-learning experiences and try to emulate the examples of good e-moderators who changed the direction of their lives! But, meanwhile, e-moderators must be trained.

Exploring these ideas has led me to focus on the role of the e-moderator in management and business education. The e-moderator is the person responding to and building on the contributions to an online conference. E-moderators need to be able to engage in reflective practice themselves , and be very democratic and open about their roles . The challenge is to enable managers to recognise the narrowness of their own experience and be open to other evidence. The e-moderator should to prompt, encourage and enable such openness, whilst acknowledging the personal experience. Sensitivity and courage may be needed to explore an experience with well-established well-focussed managers, expert in their own industries!

Adding value to the online networking by managers comes in various ways. Firstly, the contributor needs to be acknowledged, i.e. "heard". Secondly, online, the contribution will be recorded and available for others to read and so becomes a form of inventory. The e-moderator’s role is to enable it to be surfaced and used by others. In a collective conference, personal "reflections" may be responded to in various ways. One person may need more time to explore issues, and another may reach conclusions quickly and may become impatient with those who are still thinking. It is important that the e-moderator avoids the temptation to discount the experience in any way or to counter it and enter into argument. Instead s/he can draw on the evidences that are presented to try and explore overall conclusions. Thirdly, the e-moderator should comment, at an appropriate moment, on the sufficiency of the data being presented and fourthly to the quality of the argument around it. These ways ensure that the experiences, whilst valued, are not necessarily considered complete on their own. And the e-moderator is thereby modelling ways of exploring and developing arguments. And all this for inviting contributions through networked technological opportunities!

In 1991, the Open University Business School (OUBS) started exploring CMC in MBA courses. During the early 1990s general interest conferences were provided covering topics of the students’ choosing. They were available to those MBA students and tutors who wanted to use them and could – typically 20-30 percent of students or 100-200 individuals per course. These first online discussions were seldom e-moderated except to start and stop conferences and to ensure that nothing obscene or inappropriate occurred (this was extremely rare). I used these early voluntary conferences in the MBA to build simple working models of CMC use in the Business School. I developed a framework for action research, which allowed for pathways, ideas and feedback to be explored . My action research was aimed at solving problems rather than establishing theory. However, the models I created and developed provided a set of constructs for testing as well as basis for later online induction and training programmes. See Salmon 2000 for more details about the methods used.

Individual access and the ability of participants to use online learning tools are essential prerequisites for participation in online learning (stage one, at the base of the flights of steps). Stage two involves individual participants establishing their online identities and then finding others with whom to interact. At stage three, participants give information relevant to the course to each other. Up to and including stage three, a form of co-operation occurs, i.e. support for each person’s goals. At stage four, course-related group discussions occur and the interaction becomes more collaborative. The communication depends on the establishment of common understandings. At stage five, participants look for more benefits from the system to help them achieve personal goals, explore how to integrate CMC into other forms of learning and reflect on the learning processes.

Each stage requires participants to master certain technical skills. Each stage calls for different e-moderating skills (shown on the right top of each step). The "interactivity bar" running along the right of the flight of steps suggests the intensity of interactivity that you can expect between the participants at each stage. From stage two onwards, it is important to provide online activities that encourage participants to engage in active learning and with each other in meaningful and authentic learning tasks.

Of course this shows what can happen – our experience in large scale online conferences in the Open University Business School (OUBS) is that individuals or groups demonstrating the gradual progression through the 5 stages are by no means inevitable. Although the model traces a highly productive and potentially happy route to learning, e-moderators need to enable this to occur.

Scaffolding suggests a way of structuring this interaction and collaboration, starting with "recruitment" of interest, establishing and maintaining an orientation towards task relevant goals, highlighting critical features that might be overlooked, demonstrating how to achieve those goals and helping to control frustration . The notion of scaffolding provides an overall framework for training and learning online.

Online student "engagement"

I use the concept of mobilisation to describe the ways in which e-moderators attempt to generate and maintain attention and participation from their students online. The concept draws on work by , albeit in the very different setting of compulsory schooling. Hammersley regards the teaching techniques (which he calls 'teaching technologies') employed by the teachers he observed as

'collectively produced and sustained rather than idiosyncratic. Furthermore, they are also adapted, in one way or another, and to one degree or another, to the constraints operating on schools and teachers.' p. 104)

Most management facilitators are very interested in the techniques and strategies by which e-moderators achieve the generation and mobilisation of attention and participation of business and management within the constraints and opportunities of a very different setting from that of schools.

Another useful concept can be drawn from the literature on engagement theory. Engaged learning means that

" all student activities involve cognitive processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making and evaluation. In addition, students are intrinsically motivated to learn due to the meaningful nature of the learning environment and activities" p. 20

Principles associated with engagement theory are:

• Group activities
• Project based
• Authenticity (i.e. focussed outside the immediate learning context).

I’m sure you’d agree these are just the ones we try and use for management teaching - the challenge therefore is to apply them to the online learning context.

I have recently coined the term "e-tivities" to bring together the practical aspects of mobilising, engaging and effectively e-moderating in technology mediated teaching and learning environments. My suggestion is that e-moderators create e-tivities with attention to content, process and outcomes. They will then be much more satisfied with their students’ attention and engagement!

E-tivities need to be linked with the 5-stage model, with the model providing a clear scaffold to the engagement. Scaffolding suggests a way of structuring this interaction and collaboration, starting with "recruitment" of interest, establishing and maintaining an orientation towards task relevant goals, highlighting critical features that might be overlooked, demonstrating how to achieve those goals and helping to control frustration .

As the delivery of courses becomes more interactive, a role for intensive, real-time discussions has been identified . The 5-step model can be applied to both synchronous and asynchronous support for learning.

In 1999 the OUBS began its first presentation of an MBA elective course, B823, entitled "Managing Knowledge". To deliver the course existing electronic support through bulletin board system (FirstClass) was supplemented with Lyceum, a synchronous internet-based tool developed by the Knowledge Media Institute (KMI) at the Open University. This delivers audio communication and a shared graphic workspace via a single connection. Lyceum represents the new technologies available for the support of knowledge-based organisations and provides students with experiential learning opportunities.

An account of the development of Lyceum in the context of other Computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) applications is available as a set of PowerPoint slides at

There is an overlap between the synchronous Lyceum mode and the asynchronous CMC (FirstClass) mode, in that both applications include a synchronous text-chat option. The use of both FirstClass conferencing and Lyceum discussion has revealed a need to capture interaction in both media as a resource to be shared by successive cohorts of learners. FirstClass conferences are archived during course presentations, but a more accessible means of creating a shared resource is being assessed at present.

BIO