A Teacher’s Guide to Moderating Online Discussion Forums:

From Theory to Practice

 

Andrew Feenberg

Cindy Xin

 

 

Introduction

 

This manual is designed to provide insight into the “virtual classroom” and techniques for effective online teaching. We begin with a comparison of online discussion forums to face-to-face social interaction. We then introduce an approach to moderating forums, and provide some practical advice for managing them with the TextWeaver program.

 

To avoid possible misunderstandings regarding the scope and purpose of this manual, let us state a few preliminary caveats. These remarks do not pretend to be the last word. This analysis of online communication is informal, based more on experience than research. No doubt other observers of cyberspace would contest some of the points made here. Readers already familiar with these issues may wish to skip to the second part of this text. The pedagogy suggested there is not the only valid approach to teaching online, but it is a widely recognized approach and TextWeaver has been designed specifically to facilitate it.

 

TextWeaver can be used in other pedagogical contexts, as well as in online business or community groups. We are hopeful that those with other approaches and applications will discover uses for TextWeaver we have not imagined.

 

A last word on two other limitations of this manual. We do not address technical difficulties with equipment and software, nor do we attempt to cover all the ways in which knowledge can be transmitted online. This manual concerns online discussion forums alone, and within that field specific communication requirements of successful forum management. Many educationally significant issues are not addressed here, such as technical support, course conversion, building community, and techniques for explaining concepts and evaluating students’ work. Despite these limitations, there is much to be learned. The online discussion forum is a truly alien environment; study of that environment can aid in achieving competence as a discussion leader.

 

 

I. Communicating in the Online Forum

 

Before beginning to work in an online discussion forum, it is useful to consider just how different it is from our familiar experiences with face-to-face communication. The main differences are due to the narrow bandwidth of computer mediated communication (CMC), the use of writing rather than speech, and the asynchronous flow of messages between participants. Here is a brief account of some of the conclusions reached by experienced users and communication theorists who have studied these aspects of online discussion.

 

Communication Anxiety

 

Face-to-face, we communicate through a number of independent channels. In addition to the spoken language itself, there are also what are called “paralinguistic features,” tacit cues, including pitch, tone, gaze, gestures, facial expressions and the like. Metacommunicative features — communication about communication — include tacit rules that are signaled by aspects of the setting and situation.  Finally, there are status and role distinctions that are clearly signified (for example by clothing, hair styles, etc.) which form the background to the discussion.

 

In CMC there is only written language and sparse background knowledge about the nature of the situation.  There are no paralinguistic features to provide interpretative cues to intended meanings, except for the occasional and idiosyncratic use of certain textual conventions such as parenthetical explanations or symbols including "ha ha," "grin,":> ".)" (for a happy face) and ":<" (for a frown). The lack of a tacit dimension in the online environment can be compensated to some extent by explicit written communication. However, in one especially important area, compensations are typically lacking. Engaging in face-to-face conversation involves complex forms of behavior called 'phatic' functions by semiologists. When we say "Hi, how are you?" we signify our availability for communication. We usually close the conversation with another set of rituals, such as, "I've gotta go. See you later." Throughout our talk, we are continually sending phatic signs back and forth to keep the line open and to make sure messages are getting through. For example, we say such things as, "How about that!" or reply, "Yes, go on." Looks and facial expressions tacitly reassure interlocutors that they are still in touch, or on the contrary carry a warning if the communication link is threatened by technical difficulties or improprieties. Looks and facial expressions are particularly important in group communication, such as a classroom situation, where explicit phatic utterances are distracting.

 

Like any social act, communicating on-line involves a minor but real personal risk. In the peculiar online world, a response - any response - is generally interpreted as a success while silence means failure. Additionally, the sender of a message needs to know not only that it was received, but how it was received. But nearly all phatic signs are missing in CMC. Even standard codes for opening and closing conversations are discarded. This frustrates our normal expectation of continuous attention and reassurance as we communicate. It is disturbing to do without nods of the head, smiles, glances, tacit signs which in everyday conversation often take the place of words.

 

The paucity of phatic expression in CMC amplifies certain social insecurities that no doubt were always there, but which now come to the fore as what we call "communication anxiety."  The problem is aggravated by the asynchronous character of the medium which works against feeling the full force of the other and weakens the informal, tacit social controls of everyday face-to-face conversation.  As a result, messages are frequently left unanswered without the embarrassment we would certainly feel if, for example, we were greeted by an acquaintance on the street and failed to respond.  Thus, corresponding to the anxiety we feel about the reception of our own communications, there is an unprecedented casualness about responding to the communications of others.

 

This situation poses a special problem for teaching since student motivation to participate must be maintained through recognition of contributions to the discussion despite the lack of the tacit signs of attention and appreciation that play such an important role in the face-to-face classroom. We will discuss this problem in more detail in the section on moderating which follows this one.

 

Turn Taking

 

All face-to-face interaction is structured by a turn taking system of some sort. Turn order is important and its timing critical. We all know the feeling of missing the moment when our comments might have been relevant and remaining silent as a result. In asynchronous CMC turn order is more or less random. Individuals contribute at times of their own choosing without much regard for the flow of the conversation. This often results in several different topics being discussed at once, or the same topic being discussed simultaneously at different stages in its development. The term “multi-threaded discussion” has been introduced to describe this situation. Multi-threading has its advantages, as we will show, but it also leads to difficulties in knowing when decisions are reached, since they are always open to re-discussion. Procedural matters generally pose greater challenges online than in face-to-face settings. Hence the usefulness of strong leadership in many types of online discussion forums, including educational ones.

 

On the other hand, the asynchronous nature of online discussion favors thoughtfulness and careful composition. When face-to-face, we standardize the allowed time between turns at talk. Waiting too long or answering too quickly have specific meanings and may be discouraged.  This is dramatically different in online forums. A comment may be read by some participants immediately after it is made and by others several hours or even days  later.  In contrast to face-to-face conversation, participants in online discussion do not have to pay attention to what they are hearing while thinking of what to say next in order to avoid uncomfortable silences or to demonstrate attentiveness. Instead, they can concentrate on capturing the ideas, take time to reflect, consider a variety of answers, do research if necessary and then respond at the time of their own choosing. This strongly enhances the quality of the exchange of ideas.

 

Asynchronous discussion in online forums is also especially effective in bringing out the best in participants who in other environments may be introverted or shy.  Several studies have shown that the medium is helpful for members of minority groups, and this seems to be true for all people who regard themselves as marginal for whatever reason. What they have to say in an online discussion forum is not an imposition on the time of others, and does not have to be sandwiched in between the remarks of other seemingly more powerful participants.  The ability to think before entering a comment makes it possible for everyone to contribute without the stress of the face-to-face environment.  Again the lack of tacit cues plays a role. Because they communicate in writing alone, participants do not feel evaluated according to physical appearance, accents, or gender.  Ideas are much more likely to be appreciated on their own merit rather than the status of the author. Consequently, a relatively low status person who has interesting ideas and writes well can have equal influence with high status members, particularly if the latter write clumsily or carelessly. 

The Imperatives of Explicitness and Brevity

We mentioned above that explicit communication helps compensate for the lack of tacit signs in the online environment. This is particularly important where questions of understanding arise. In ordinary conversation, when we do not understand what is being said, we are likely to communicate that fact tacitly by facial expression.  The speaker will usually pick up our distress immediately and, by adding a sentence or two on the apparent subject of confusion, resolve the problem before explicit and possibly embarrassing notice of it need be taken.  Complete withdrawal in the face of minor communication problems is thus relatively unusual because it is perceived as far more rude than bringing into play corrective measures that generally suffice to straighten out misunderstandings.

 

Because these tacit correctives are unavailable, online discussion places a higher premium on clarity and explicitness than does everyday face-to-face conversation.  It is embarrassing to concede confusion in writing, and the delay between message and response compounds communication problems.  As a result, one commonplace way of dealing with unclear and ambiguous messages is to keep quiet.  When a message succeeds only in reducing the interlocutors to silence, it has clearly failed in its purpose, but it may be some time before the writer becomes aware of the problem and can take corrective action.  The tenuousness of online discussion thus imposes a degree of clarity and willingness to discuss communication problems that is rarely experienced with any other medium.

 

Participants frequently respond to this situation by adopting literary techniques such as the use of redundancy which reduce ambiguity by narrowing the range of meanings and connotations of terms.  The multiplication of slightly different ways of presenting the same ideas, using synonyms and different encoding schemes, increases the likelihood of the message getting through.  But these techniques have the disadvantage of violating another important rule of CMC, the imperative of brevity, which responds to the constant danger of "information overload."  A clear message that is so long no one bothers to read to its end may be even more demoralizing than a short, ambiguous message that can be ignored.

 

While it is obvious as a general rule that in all communication length must be matched to complexity, it is not always easy to find the right trade-offs between brevity and clarity.  Two models of effective on-line communication obey each of these two imperatives.  They are the telegram and the memo, each of which corresponds to different types of on-line situations.

 

Many discussion forums work well with brief messages of half a dozen to a dozen lines. Telegraphic messages represent an extreme trade-off of clarity against brevity.  They are inherently more ambiguous than other forms of communication because they completely eliminate redundancy.  Some forums achieve quasi-telegraphic solutions to the clarity/brevity dilemma through using technical language to discuss a very sharply defined theme.  Technical languages are designed to restrict the semantic range of terms, thereby reducing the need for redundancy.

 

The popular item/reply architecture of most newsgroup and web based bulletin board software supports the telegraphic style by enabling users to attach messages to others that serve as their context and help to disambiguate condensed expressions. However, the item/reply architecture has disadvantages for online education. In theory it serves not only to contextualize comments as they are made, but also to classify information in the archive of the conference for retrieval at a later date, for example when it is time to review for the test. In practice, it is often quite difficult to recover information from an archive constructed in this way because users classify their messages under headings that are not intuitively obvious to each other. The TextWeaver software discussed in part three of this manual offers a solution to this dilemma.

 

The memo suggests an alternative model that is better suited to educational conferences. A message structured like a memo supplies its own clear context for the ideas it presents and uses an outline format to organize points, helpful techniques of communication.  The memo model yields comment lengths in the hundreds of words rather than short bursts of a few lines. This is particularly appropriate in forums that have a fairly fluid context and participants with very different backgrounds as is typical in education.  In these forums one cannot assume a shared technical language but must use ordinary language to introduce and explain any technical content.  Here somewhat longer messages tend to be the rule for the teacher at least and, where the participants are interested, for them as well. The exercise of writing such comments is unparalleled as a way of disciplining thought and expression while learning to reflect on ideas and experiences. Teachers should model and encourage the writing of such comments in preference to the brief interjections that students find easier to compose.

Absorption

Online discussion is frequently said to build community, but the idea of community implies bonds of sentiment that are not always necessary to effective on-line communication. A group of interested individuals may produce a successful conference whether they form a community or just a functional gathering. In any case, the mere existence of community cannot explain the excitement of a good conference. Rather than focusing exclusively on the concept of community, it would make sense to study the dynamics of online discussion on its own terms. This may open a way to understanding the sociology of the online group, its specific 'sociability'.

 

Online discussion dynamics involve the management of time, both the personal time of the participants and the overall time of the forum. Sometimes these dynamics are determined by extrinsic factors, such as job deadlines, tests, or the urgent need to accomplish a mission. Forums are surprisingly fragile, however, and no amount of external time pressure saves hopelessly mismanaged on-line groups. To a lesser extent, we see something similar in face-to-face meetings, which require not only an extrinsic raison d'etre but also skillful leadership to keep on the agenda and insure a hearing for all those with something to say.

 

The social cohesion of the forum therefore depends not only upon the extrinsic motives participants bring from their off-line lives, but also the intrinsic motives that emerge in the course of the on-line interaction. To understand these intrinsic motives, we must discover how the forum empowers its members to speak up and provokes them to reply. Several metaphors help to explain this.

 

The sociability of online discussion forums resembles that of sports or games where we are drawn along by interest in the next step in the action. Suspense and surprise keep us alert and interested. Every message has a double goal: to communicate something and to evoke the (passive or active) participation of interlocutors. “Playing” at online discussion consists in making moves that keep others playing. The goal is to prolong the game and to avoid making the last move. This is why online discussion favors open-ended comments which invite a response, as opposed to closed and final pronouncements.

 

Erving Goffman introduced the terms 'absorption' and 'engrossment' to describe the force that draws us into an encounter such as a game. The concept of absorption refers to the sharing of purpose among people who do not necessarily form a community but have accepted a common work or play as the context for an intense, temporary relationship. The term nicely describes participants' feelings about an exciting online discussion. They are 'absorbed' in the activity as one might be in a game of poker or tennis.

Collaborative Writing

The  comparison of online discussion with a game is suggestive but it omits the strangest aspect of the activity, the fact that the "game" consists in writing and reading texts.  Online discussion is in fact a new form of collaborative writing.  From this point of view, a completed online conference forms a single text with several authors rather than a collection of singly authored texts.  Naturally, there are conferences which have no real unity, and which are in fact anthologies of texts by individual authors but these "monologic" conferences do not employ the medium to its fullest capacity. One of the most exciting things about online discussion is its power to achieve something more than this, a real "meeting" of the minds, if not necessarily agreement between them.

 

How does a conference acquire the kind of coherence we associate with a text?  Normally, when several authors collaborate they revise each others' contributions, and it is this which makes a collective product of the result.  In this usual case, the order of production bears no necessary relation to the order of the final result.  But participants in online forums generally lack a commonly agreed on plan or outline and cannot modify each other's contributions.  The order in which messages are deposited in the forum is fixed and no final revision brings the ideas of each to bear on the others' actual formulations.  A large measure of contingency and unpredictability is intrinsic to this process, far more than to ordinary collaborative writing.

 

The work of giving coherence to an online discussion might be called "textual management" to signify the kind of collaborative relationship characteristic of this medium.  The various moderating functions discussed in the next section are the means of textual management available online.  These functions include requesting comments from participants, setting an agenda for the conference, and pulling it together periodically around a common theme. 

 

This list suggests yet another metaphor for online discussion since these means might be better compared with those at the disposal of the leader of a jam session rather than with those employed by the editor of an article or book.  Each participant takes his or her turn at "improvising" a contribution to the group's performance under the direction of the moderator.  The result is a new kind of text.

 

Games, collaborative writing and jazz improvisation each supply a piece of the puzzle that is online discussion.  These pieces come together in the idea of the online discussion as an improvisational game played with text.  From the world of writing, online discussion borrows the unique property by which texts propel us forward from the first to the last line through deploying suspense and surprise to generate intrinsic motivations for continuing to read.  These motivations are transformed in the course of "play" into the cement of a continuing social interaction that consists in the exchange of "improvised" texts.

 

Such texts are sometimes reread later just as recorded jazz improvisations may be played again. In an educational context, where the teacher uses the discussion to introduce and explain the main themes of the course, the forum text can be an essential resource for the students. They can find material in it useful for preparing for tests or writing papers. But just how useful the archive of the forum will be depends largely on the skill of the teacher in leading the discussion.

 

 

II. The Moderating Functions

 

Online discussion forums promote collaborative work and learning. Indeed, communication in a forum is by its very nature collaborative. Lectures are not appropriate to the medium. Instead, teachers must adopt a dialogic style  involving students actively in the electronic classroom. Collaborative learning theory finds its most compelling realization in this setting. Online teachers must exploit this potential of the medium to create an educational experience comparable in quality to the conventional classroom. Properly performed, the moderating role in the online discussion forum can serve as a basis for this new type of collaborative learning.

 

The Moderator

 

Like many other small groups, educational forums are most successful when skillfully led. The technical conditions for this are usually defined in the forum software as a 'moderating function', i.e. setting up groups of participants as forum members, establishing and naming a file in the central computer in which to store discussions, and deletion of irrelevant messages from the file.

 

These technical powers represent, however, only a small part of the moderating groupware, which Hiltz and Turoff describe as follows:

 

In order for a computerized conference to be successful the moderator has to work very hard at both the 'social host' and the 'meeting chairperson' roles. As social host she/he has to issue warm invitations to people; send encouraging private messages to people complimenting them or at least commenting on their entries, or suggesting what they may be uniquely qualified to contribute. As meeting chairperson, she/he must prepare an enticing-sounding initial agenda; frequently summarize or clarify what has been going on; try to express the emerging consensus or call for a formal vote; sense and announce when it is time to move on to a new topic. Without this kind of active moderator role, a conference is not apt to get off the ground.

 

These are certainly important moderating functions, but perhaps the most important of all is missing. The moderator's first and most basic task is to construct the social reality of the electronic meeting room by choosing a "communication model" for the group.  The basic human relationships of communication differ in characteristic ways from one communication model to another, for example, in meetings, courses, informal conversations, parties, doctor's visits, and so on. As soon as we enter a room, we orient ourselves more or less consciously in function of tacit cues we notice in the context of  the communication process we are about to join. These contextual cues establish a shared communication model from which flows norms, roles and expectations. Since no tacit signs visible in the environment can establish a communication model for participants in on-line discussions, moderators typically must make an explicit choice for the group they lead, reducing the strangeness of the medium by defining a familiar context with a familiar system of roles and rules imitated from everyday life.

 

This contextualizing function has the unusual property of proceeding largely through the use of "performative  utterances."  These are statements which bring about the very reality they describe. An example would be the principal's statement to the assembled students to the effect that "school is now open for the new term.” Such an utterance effectively "opens" the school, and so is called a "performative."

 

In most face-to-face interaction, performatives play a minor role because so much tacit contextualizing information is available to establish the communication model. In online discussion forums, on the contrary, explicit contextualization is required to define it. Unless someone opens the conference by saying "This is a meeting," "This is a class," or "This is a support group," the participants have no way of being sure what kinds of contributions are appropriate to the essentially imaginary "situation" in which they find themselves. The moderator's contextualizing functions are all-important in relieving some of the anxiety participants experience in a communication setting that is not defined in advance by tacit cues. Once a communication model has been  chosen, the moderator must play the specific leadership role it implies, such as chairperson, host, teacher, facilitator, entertainer, and so on.  In part, this role will consist in monitoring conformity with the communication model and reassuring participants that their contributions to the discussion are indeed pertinent, or where they are not, gently guiding them toward a better understanding of the model. 

 

Thus contextualization and monitoring are two basic moderating functions. The teacher defines the communication model, makes the basic procedural decisions that enable the group to form with some confidence that it has a common mission, and checks for conformity with the model and the mission in the course of the discussion.

 

In an educational context, these moderating functions combine with the pedagogical responsibilities of the teacher. The social duties of the moderator are not entirely separate from the communication of educational content. On the contrary, it is in the course of performing the one that the other is best performed. For example, setting an agenda for the discussion is also an opportunity to introduce basic concepts in the field; granting students explicit recognition for their contributions can often be combined with substantive comments on those contributions; raising topics and summarizing discussions both keep the conversation flowing (a social function) and communicate ideas (a pedagogical function.)

 

More often than not, when forums fail it is because the person in charge is unable to overcome the initial difficulty of transposing leadership skills acquired in face-to-face settings to the on-line setting. The usual way in which we learn to play dominant roles is through our experience in dominated roles. Thus the ability to chair a meeting is widespread among people who have attended meetings; and the ability to teach is readily cultivated by many who have been taught.  It is in the course of these experiences that participants acquire an understanding of the implicit codes on the basis of which a specific type of group communicates.  But since so few people have participated in online forums, it is often difficult to find an experienced leader who knows the on-line equivalents of the codes operative in face-to-face groups.  Furthermore, the codes of on-line activity are still very much in formation and to some extent each forum contributes to inventing them.  These are transitional problems, but for the moment they are very real and suggest the need for specialized forums where moderators can exchange experiences and pass down lore. In the remainder of this section, We will briefly sketch some of this lore as it relates to the various moderating functions.

 

Opening Discussions