by Angela Smith
One of the most obvious benefits of going to a face-to-face session is that you get to interact with your peers. This allows you to better place yourself in the context of your contemporaries and share valuable experience.
People often cite peer contact as an area where face-to-face training can deliver and online learning cannot. Of course, these days, people are becoming more and more able to gain the same benefits online – partly due to advances in web technology and provision and partly due to their web abilities.
There are a few ways we can enable people to interact online, all quite different and suited to different personalities and learning styles. Here are a couple of examples that quite closely mirror the face-to-face experience:
• We can allow freeform discussions on a discussion forum where people can start conversations, ask questions and take things in whatever direction they want.
An added benefit here is that we can potentially preserve discussions, questions and answers for future learners to draw on. This is something face-to-face trainers can do by using what they’ve heard to inform the content of future sessions. However, being involved in an ongoing discussion or even reading a closed discussion can lead to a deeper understanding of the sorts of difficult issues that tend to prompt questions.
• We can use the numerous social networking tools available online to allow those who want to make more lasting professional connections, or have “private word in the corner” discussions to do so.
At a face-to-face session that I recently attended as an observer, although the attendees were interacting here and there over coffee and lunch, I noticed that they largely stayed in the groups they had arrived in. Of course this may have been a little different were there more individuals attending, rather than groups, but it made me consider the value of facilitated sharing. Facilitated sharing happened during the face-to-face session in the form of interaction between the speaker and the attendees and the interesting discussions which followed. This is another thing that we can facilitate online.
• We can facilitate sharing by designing activities where learners share their answers anonymously. This allows them to test out their ideas and learn from what the body of their peers are saying without exposing themselves to scrutiny.
• We can also use a moderated discussion forum in a similar way to pose relevant questions and even combine the two, getting people excited about an idea or topic through an activity and then channelling that enthusiasm to the discussion forum to encourage the discussion to grow.
So we have a few alternative ways of offering online “social” benefits that mirror those of a face-to-face session. This means that we can cater not just to the person who is holding up the coffee queue by talking to everyone, but also the timid soul who is sitting in the corner and would rather jump out of the window than engage with another human being face-to-face.
by Hamish Long
by Victoria Clarke
