It’s's easy to say that leading a course online is different from leading a face-to-face class. It's harder to explain exactly what's different and how to make the shift in order to meet tried-and-true instructional goals. One can fail miserably applying the typical approach to the virtual classroom. As more experience with online teaching accumulates, effective, alternative strategies that meet the intended goals are emerging. Here are a couple of strategies applied to two classical instructional goals: getting a discussion going and summarizing an activity.

Getting a Discussion Going
How many times have you seen a course or workshop leader throw out a few pertinent questions to get a discussion going, perhaps as a follow-up to a brief presentation? If the first few queries are met with silence, most instructors reword the question or add another question to spur response. This is a time-worn face-to-face strategy because it can be quite effective. Someone eventually poses a response, then another hand goes up, and the discussion is off and rolling. Here and there as a point is made or dialogue wanes, the leader chimes in with a few more queries to pick up the pace once again. But what happens when the same leader tries this online?

 

We call it the "Question Mill." With the intention of focusing discussion on the salient content, the online discussion leader jumps into the dialogue and poses three or four potential avenues of further exploration. The result? There are two. The first is silence. Reading the list of questions, the participant gets lost after the second or third query and quickly clicks to the next posting. The second result is avoidance. Five or six responses appear, but they are unrelated to one another. The participant choses a different query for comment. The dialogue remains unfocused and confusing for other readers. Both results quell rather than enhance the discussion.

When a discussion leader in front of a room lists four or five possible pathways of exploration, listeners tune in to what interests them and tune out the rest. But when listed on a page, all the questions confronting the reader demand equal attention. What once faded in and out now becomes a cacophony of choices for the online participant, and the reader just turns off.

What's the alternative? For starters, the assignment must be purposefully vague. This increases the potential of eliciting a participant's real thinking on a subject. As a few postings are made to the discussion, the instructor culls from the comments a theme or thread worthy of careful focus or deeper digging and holds it up for the group to consider. Such an intervention might include three or four short quotes or paraphrases from earlier comments followed by a bit of explanation or clarification and then a single question to elicit more focused dialogue.

Summary vs. Landscape
Summarizing is another strategy that can curtail rather than enhance dialogue. When it works, summarizing can clarify and give participants a sense of direction. It can also close doors and block paths to alternative approaches. Summaries abstract ideas and place them in a hierarchy of meaning that the moderator determines. Positions can appear to harden when the moderator tries to capture them in a summary. Often, the important nuances of reasoning disappear as the moderator highlights the contentions or assumptions reflected in the comments.

If a moderator wants to help participants build meaning from their discussions, a more useful intervention would be to summarize by portraying a "landscape," which may include multiple perspectives on the issues discussed. Maintaining a suspension of judgment is critical.