This course is deliberately 'asynchronous' because we want to maximise interaction on topics between the most possible students. Students don't work through the content on a scheduled basis - some don't start at the same time and some even complete it across two periods. This is exactly what we would expect from busy people working in a variety of settings and, indeed, time zones. We rarely have more that four or five students working on the site at the same time, let alone looking at the same content.

So while we agree that 'live is best' it really wouldn't include more than a couple of students and we couldn't justify asking a moderator to run sessions in their own time for such limited benefit. If OpenLearn ever adds a chatroom or similar for students to use themselves we'd be happy to consider adding one to perform a similar function to the Course Forum though.