Moderated e-learning environments
Attributes of good conferencing systems
There is no single perfect solution for all people and for all purposes.
Separate conferences for broad subject areas
Called conferences, forums, or newsgroups, these provide a basic level
of organization. Besides enabling a focus on different subjects, different
conferences allow you to establish small discrete communities who are
enthusiastic about particular subjects. These communities grow to cement
their interests and relationships after communicating online for some
time.
Threaded discussions within conferences
Posting of messages in response to other messages, such that a line of
reactions can be traced to the original comment, is called threading.
It takes the form of a tree structure, in which the topic is the starting
point for a branching of responses that follow. Most conferencing systems
offer this capability for up to three or four responses to an original
thought. Threads can get lost after that which is one of the reasons
why it is very important for participants keep their comments focused
on the topic.
Informative topic list
A good moderator guides a online discussion with astute use of topics
and leading questions. A conference participant should be able to easily
see the list of the topics in a conference and the questions or issues
that need a response, with each topic¹s title and some indication of
the amount of activity in the topic. Topics should be able to be sorted
both by start dates and by last response dates. Participants should
always be able to go back to the beginning of a topic and follow it
all the way through to the most recent responses. In a newsgroup type
conference, moderators may decide to occasionally delete obsolete material
to avoid clutter.
Support for both frequent readers and casual browsers
A computer conference should support both, frequent reading and casual
browsing. Those who wish to browse should be able to choose a conference
manually and scroll through the list of topics, dipping in here and
there, moving backward or forward sequentially through topics, returning
repeatedly to the topic list. A frequent reader, on the other hand,
should be able to cycle automatically through a customized list of
conferences, skipping topic lists entirely and getting immediately
to the new, unread messages. Moreover, readers should be able to search
messages by date, author, or keyword. Frequent readers should also
have tools for controlling what they see; for example, a way to 'forget'
topics so that any subsequent responses on past topics are skipped
automatically.
Access control
Both public and private conferences are useful in different situations.
A conference host or moderator should have flexible control over who
can access the conference and what level of access each participant
has, e.g. it should be possible to give some participants read and
write permission, and others read only access. The host of a conference
should have good tools for managing a conference discussion, for the
purposes of weeding out obsolete topics, archiving those that are worth
saving but no longer active, and moving a divergent thread of a topic
to a new topic of its own.