Reflections on Digital Scholarship

Sparking Online Dialogue: Strategies for facilitators

If you are committed to stimulating online dialogue, your role as online facilitator will require you to create a welcoming virtual environment that encourages diverse viewpoints. (With 'create' I fortunately do not mean you have to become an instructional designer - your mere online presence and personal approach can be just as effective as a sound technical design!) It is worth noting that online forums can become notoriously ‘empty spaces’, and facilitators often find student engagement to be lacking. Although most adult students are comfortable using web-based forums and chat rooms to engage socially, the tendency to limit their online interactions for academic purposes can be attributed to a number of factors, e.g.: · A lack of confidence when communicating in written format, especially if the course language is not the student’s first language · The knowledge that comments are recorded as visible...

Facilitating online learning: A few basics

Even for students who are comfortable communicating online, collaborating and engaging with peers in an academic online environment is a learned skill that needs to be taught – if for no other reason than to explain the specific communicative tools in the context of your course / module. Just as you would create a course overview to orient individual students to the online course environment, the same orientation is required for the collaborative or social spaces (e.g. forums or chat rooms), explaining to students how and when these spaces should be used and providing guidance for engaging in constructive, academic or reflective discussions. It is further important to take time to establish the social environment before embarking on module discussions. Gilly Salmon (2011) places ‘online socialisation’ as the second step of e-moderated learning (after welcoming students to the course) and characterises it as the building of bridges between ‘cultural,...

Unlocking the Power of Multimedia for Learning

Although verbal representations – such as printed or spoken words – hold a privileged place in education, there is growing consensus among educators the concept of literacy should be broadened to include visual representations such as illustrations, photos, animation, and video. Our student receive content through multiple channels, i.e. media, including audio and visual channels (Paivio, 1969) as well as touch, taste and smell. Multimedia is most commonly defined as the use of at least two of these elements : sound (audio), and text / still graphics / motion graphics (visual) (Tannenbaum, 1998). Schnotz and Lowe (2003) define the term multimedia more specifically as the combination of multiple technical resources for the purpose of presenting information represented in multiple formats via multiple sensory modalities. It therefore logically follows that educators will be interested i...

Digital Dialogues

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