6 Text-based counselling
One of the biggest challenges for practitioners who start working online is to feel comfortable and develop competence in communicating through the chosen online medium. Practice makes perfect, so take advantage of the opportunity in this section to practise your skills in text-based online counselling. However, before you do that, it is useful the learn a bit more about the specifics of online counselling provided through text only.
A big part of all technology-based counselling is still provided in a text-based format – that is, without any audio or visual cues – in chat rooms or emails/messages exchanged between the counsellor and the client. Generally, it can be distinguished between synchronous (real-time) services and asynchronous (time-delayed) text-based services.
Activity 16: Synchronous and asynchronous text-based counselling
Drag and drop these text-based online counselling forms into the correct category in the table.