In my continued quest to critique online learning, I wanted to comment today about my experiences of using online "chat" software as a student in an online course for weekly tutorials. I had my first online chat with my classmates yesterday and it was an interesting and very fulfilling experience. It involved six students discussing pre-set reading assignments. The advantages were immediacy of discussions (as opposed to the discussion boards) and the ability to work across multiple different jurisdictions provided a time could be found that worked for prople in different time zones. The disadvantages/concerns/queries raised by my first experience were: (a) How well does this mechanism 'scale up'? It worked really well for six people, but I have my doubts that a class of more than a dozen or so could have a meaningful discussion in this kind of forum. (b) It benefits 'fast typers' ie unless you can do a video/audio chat, the reliance on text based communications means that people who are good typists get more discussion, and the discussion seemed to move on before the slower typists could catch up. This may not be a problem in courses with young folks who are used to texting and typing, but we have a few 'grannies' and other older folks in my course who may not be the fastest typists in the world. (c) As a corollary, text based communications in general have disadvantages over face-to-face discussion because of the lack of body language and tone. This can cause misunderstanding and ambiguity and is perhaps more of a concern in text-based chatting than on discussion boards where people have more time to think about how they are going to express what they want to say ie there is no concern that the discussion will have moved on by the time they get their thoughts on the screen.
Anyone else experienced text based chat in online teaching? Good or bad experiences? Used as an adjunct to in-class sessions or for 100% online learning?
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