Imagine you are a teacher and the year is 1440. In the middle of the semester one of your students brings something new to class. A book! You have two choices. Plan for early retirement or start rethinking some of the things that you do. Today's educators face a similar dilemma. After many centuries of face-to-face instruction, most of us have few clues and fewer skills in e-moderation. No matter how effective we are in the training room, faced with the prospect of taking our classroom skills to the Web isn't always straightforward. Yesterday we thought we had e-moderation sussed, today the field has miraculously shifted. Could it be time for a rethink?

We assume that you have used online discussion conferences before. Did you come through the experience feeling slightly dissatisfied? Even better. We're not going to talk about obvious elements of e-moderation such as keeping your postings short and simple in tone, or summarising topics frequently. Nor will we look at well-known ideas such as facilitating active discourse through encouragement and cues. There are plenty of resources that address such issues. Instead, these tips are an attempt to push beyond the walls of established technologies and social approaches that are currently being applied in e-moderation.

Tip 1: Software and Platforms Matter
Today's educational institutions crave standardisation. Most of us have experienced such standard online discussion platforms in our early online delivery projects. We may have grumbled about the interface and even accepted their limitations. But here's the good news. Web technologies are evolving at the rate of knots. While approved e-discussion platforms go out of date by the time the standard is committed to paper, obsessive hackers and creative e-moderators collaborate to inherit the Web. Newer, less cumbersome and far more feature-rich discussion software is constantly being written. If you're serious about moderating online don't be afraid to try and implement them. Here are just some examples:

http://www.snitz.com

http://www.dcscripts.com

http://www.scriptmate.com


Tip 2: Humanise Your Virtual Classroom
Successful online discussion environments have an open, human interface. Before you begin, introductions are in order. Your students want to see your face and know something about you. Anonymity is out! The same is true for your students. Faceless and hidden behind an alias, there is little chance that you'll be able to facilitate learning or assess student performance with any accuracy. Personal projection and guesswork based solely on some text messages will muddy your judgment. Make it mandatory that you and the entire class submits a digital photo and user profile that provides some basic information about geographical location, personal and educational aspirations, hobbies and so on. User profiles are a standard part of all good conferencing packages.

Tip 3: Online Socialisation
Going through the process of filling out enrolment forms, entering a strange place of study and being presented with learning outcomes, study schedules and the like is daunting enough. What a relief that there are other students to talk to! Our goal must be to provide an environment that facilitates online socialisation. Provide an umoderated (anything goes) social chat area where students can 'hang out' during recess. You may find that this area will be busier than your actual classroom - but don't worry! It's normal for humans to interact socially. Besides, students will teach themselves how to use the discussion interface and reduce any self-consciousness they may have in regard to the Web.

Tip 4: Dazzle
It's likely that your online students will be baby boomers. Favourite medium? Television. Even more likely would be that you're dealing with a generation that is used to being dazzled by Nintendo and the cutting-edge Web. Are your postings responsive to this aspect of your customer group? Are you as an e-moderator compelling? Do you dazzle your students with the occasional challenging puzzle, the witty contextual joke, that graphic overhead that says it all?

Being teachers worth our salt, we all do this in F2F class! And here? Do it all by using text messages? Time to rethink! Time to develop the equivalent digital resources that we use in our brick and mortar classroom. In a few minutes anyone can learn to use an HTML editor and create colourful Web documents. But more importantly, features such as online databases and scripting require programming skills. These features are now mainstream (e.g. animation, audio) and programming has become very important. It means that you may either have to learn to program yourself or form alliances with a teaching resource programmer. You will also need to have a basic understanding of server technology and what is possible in order to be able to describe what you want to your programmer to create. If you're a "pre-Nintendo scholar" and think you can keep your students interested through your text-based discussion postings alone, think again.

Tip 5: Interaction, Interaction, Interaction
We are told that the three most important factors in buying a house are location, location and location. The three most important factors in e-moderation are interaction, interaction and interaction. Don't assume this means that you merely need to keep a handle on the postings in your discussion environment. That's a given. This is about increasing interaction choices and enabling the inbuilt functionalities of your forum software. Are your students automatically being notified by email each time there is a new posting in your forum? If not, don't be surprised if they don't come and participate very often. Remember - there is an almost limitless choice of interesting places to visit on the Net. Is your class able to send you and each other private messages via the Web browser? Is the real-time chat button available on every page? Does chat work behind firewalls or is it - as is so often the case - a useless appendage? Finally, is there a facility whereby your online class can check which members are currently online in your forum? If your answer as an e-moderator to any of these is no, then you are not offering optimal interaction. Rethink by revisiting Tip 1 again.