A Sample Researcher Blog

Facilitating effective communication online contingent on different online learning environments

A considerable amount has been written about strategies and approaches for practitioners designing and teaching online courses (Hilts 1998; Palloff & Pratt 1999; Collison et al. 2000; Salmon 2000, 2002; Moore & Brooks 2000). These have provided valuable guidance and insight into how online learning technologies such as discussion boards, synchronous chat environments, email and other online applications such as instant messaging can be used. It is wholly appropriate that these publications should address these issues as the nature of asynchronous and synchronous mostly text based communication, especially if blended with traditional modes (such as tutorials or lectures), has challenged educators to reconsider their teaching approaches within these new contexts. For example, while a seminar previously would last for two or three hours on campus and not exist at all for distance learners, many are now "always on" and educators expected to facilitate discussion. However, the focus of much of this literature has been on the instructional design and facilitation strategies for teachers engaged in the development and provision of courses within these technologies and little has approached the pedagogical impacts of the systems and tools within which this design and facilitation must take place.

This is particularly important as tools and systems reflect and shape communication. Derek Powazek in Design for Community (2002) describes how different tools promote different forms of interaction on the Web and in particular how these tools are situated (for example, behind administratively controlled authentication systems or controlled through karma points) impacts dramatically on the kind of interactions that take place within them. Also, as noted by Crystal (2001) the style and kind of interaction found in email, instant messaging, SMS and traditional mail vary dramatically and this has much to do with the nature of the technology. Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that as with certain physical spaces and consequent social dynamics (for example, talking alone in a small office with someone or presenting to a large group in a lecture theatre), the spaces and arrangements of technology will, dependent on context and use, impact on the kind of communication that takes place.

However, as previously stated, the focus has tended to be on what can be achieved through particular technologies rather than what it is that these technologies themselves can facilitate. One possible reason for this is the burden that the past has laid on our current approaches to technology and to illustrate this Liber (2004) cites Antonio Dias de Figuereido in his presidential address to the European Commission's PROMETEUS initiative:

Most current developments in the use of modern technologies in education and training are ... little more than relatively na•ve transpositions to new environments of the much criticised educational paradigms of the past. Driven by an invisible force that calls us to the past, we seem to keep putting emphasis mainly on the delivery of information, that is, of content, almost completely disregarding interaction and activity - the context, the completely renewed social and cultural contexts that the new technologies are pleading to offer us. (de Figuereido 1998)

There are also, of course, other significant reasons, besides the development or otherwise of educational paradigms. These include a lack of experience with the technology, a possible lack of understanding of the communication dynamics of OLEs, the dominance of the discussion board model as the key tool in many OLEs, the limited availability of alternative OLEs in which experimentation can occur (Paulsen, 2002) and institutional pressures to adhere to and take up new corporate funded applications.

Arguably, with the innovation and development of information and communications technologies over the last decade, educators have, in many cases, been left with fewer choices of teaching and learning environment than our predecessors had when desks were often welded into rows. Indeed, as online learning has now long been acknowledged to be widespread (Stephenson, 2001) and with one or more courseware management systems employed as OLEs in all of Australia's 34 Universities (Paulsen 2002) a degree of critical reflection on not only the pedagogy that we can use with these but also the pedagogy able to be effectively facilitated through the technology which has been employed would seem appropriate and necessary.