3.10 Responding online

The following activity will test your ability to deal with different scenarios.

Activity 9

Timing: (Allow 30 minutes)

  1. Drawing on the elements identified by Cole et al. (1990) in the previous section, think of an encouraging way to respond to each of these scenarios. You may wish to record this in your learning log.

    • Scenario 1: You’ve noticed a couple of posts from Thanda: one ended rather abruptly in the middle of the sentence and the other had some HTML programming code in. You think she might be having some technical issues using the website. What would you say to her?
    • Scenario 2: Your cohort contains two very strong characters, Nyein and Haymar. They both have strong opinions but rarely agree. You notice some messages between them that looks a little heated. Nyein has suggested Haymar reads more before she comments; Haymar has replied that Nyein doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She’s used caps lock and exclamation marks. She’s also encouraged other learners to support her. How would you resolve this situation? Write a message to each party and another message to the whole forum.
    • Scenario 3: Soe is the most frequent poster on the course. He posts on every discussion thread and replies to every comment left by others. There are frequently multiple posts from him in the same thread. Other learners aren’t engaging as much because Soe seems to be dominating every conversation. What would you say to him? Write a message to Soe and one to the whole forum.
    • Scenario 4: You’ve only seen one post from Nilar. She replied to an introductory thread, just saying ‘Hi’. What would you say to Nilar?
  2. Look back over your responses. What features, such as the length of the response, use of emoticons, tone of voice, etc., make it a good and appropriate response?

Now continue to Session 4 Encouraging further study [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .

3.9 Encouraging other learners