BACKGROUND

The Centre for Labour Market Studies is a research and teaching institution based at the University of Leicester, UK. Since 1991, the Centre has provided a number of courses via distance learning in fields related to training and Human Resource (HR) Management. It has approximately one thousand course members at any one time, the majority of whom reside in Southeast Asia and the UK, it also has concentrations of students in North America, Canada, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and some other European countries. Participants in the program come from a wide range of backgrounds, but typically they are Human Resource directors, senior managers or trainers in large commercial organizations. The courses can be undertaken in their entirety by the distance learning mode: the program is designed for individuals who wish to arrange studies around their domestic and occupational commitments. The bulk of course materials are in a paper-based format. However, the Centre has been looking to utilize ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) to enhance the support and learning experience of course members. The intention was to develop a solution that would address the following concerns:
 

In addressing these issues, the Centre’s aim was to make more optimal use of existing ICT resources rather than to undertake substantial investment in entirely new resources (for example, by investing in video-conferencing centers). A central guiding principle in developing the solution was accessibility. The intention was that the Centre could develop a forum that was accessible in the following respects:
 

With these concerns in mind, it was decided to experiment with a piece of software called Hotline Connect.²  The software was chosen because it fulfilled many of the accessibility requirements as outlined above, and was available for both Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows based platforms. The remainder of this article describes how this software was used to provide a range of online services for course members: the focus is centrally upon the practical issues related to facilitating learning via text-based conferencing.

DEVELOPING A SOLUTION

After setting up a dedicated server at the Centre, course members were e-mailed instructions on how to download the software needed to participate (freely available via the Internet), and on how to connect to the Centre’s server. Once users had followed these instructions and successfully logged on, they would be presented with a series of windows.

The main window – the ‘Chat’ window – allows for synchronous text based discussion. The user types in the bottom segment of the window and presses [Return] to send the text to the Chat window (at which point all other users concurrently online can read the text). The text entry is then automatically prefixed with the user’s name. Using this facility it is possible for course members to conference in real time with staff members (and with one another) irrespective of location globally.

In addition, the user has access to an asynchronous ‘News’ facility. This is very similar to a standard bulletin board. It allows for multithreaded discussions – discussions organized by theme and issue that can be read in chronological sequence. Users’ posts to the news remain on the server until the server administrator removes them. In other words, the news provides a facility for course members to conference with one another without being concurrently online.

The Centre’s earliest experiments focused on the use of the synchronous ‘Chat’ facility. Conferences were typically organized at 12:00 GMT – a less than satisfactory compromise between all of the time zones of potential conference participants: for course members in Los Angeles, this would mean 4:00 AM, for those in Singapore, 8:00 PM, for those in Sydney, 11:00 PM. During the early stages of experimentation, the Centre organized parallel conferences at different times of the day (to suit different time zones), but found that this was impractical since it involved considerable duplication of effort, and it inhibited interaction between course members from different geographical locales. Later experiments found 3:00 or 4:00 GMT to be a better compromise (since course members furthest from GMT were more willing to participate very late at night in favor of conferences very early in the morning – shifting the range from 8:00 AM to 3:00 AM).

ONLINE CONFERENCES

The earliest conferences were chaotic. The very first online discussions had little or no coherence or structure. Typically, they became hijacked by personal agendas.  Course members would interrupt the main flow of discussion with unrelated comments or queries and informal messages and many participants were not clear about the format of the conference – about the rules of participation, etc. While course members responded very positively to the earliest conferences, the amount of learning that had taken place appeared to have been limited by the confused and disjointed character of the interaction. In the absence of accepted protocols for the order of ‘who types first,’ coupled with the fact that the end user is unable to tell whether another user is typing a response or is just awaiting further input into the chat window, there emerged a definite need for a very clear center to the discussion, and for a clear structure to be imposed (at least for formal conferences). At the same time, academic staff did not want to discount the informal networking that was occurring, nor the possibility for course members to pursue personal issues. It was evident simply that it would not be possible to provide all of these functions at one time. The forum thus became streamed into three largely distinct services: Formal Conferences, Online Tutorials, and Informal Discussions. These are discussed in more detail below.

FORMAL CONFERENCES
Various formats were tried during the early stages of the Centre’s experimentation. These included:
 

The most successful methods proved to be those which involved course members preparing beforehand by reading a specific article or listening to an online talk so that informed and focused interactive discussion could be maximized during conference timings.

A key issue to emerge from the early stages of experimentation was that it required a considerable amount of effort to ensure good attendance at conferences. Another major problem was conference timings – day, date and time were all critical. It also proved necessary to provide a good deal of advanced notification and planning; for example, asking course members to test their connection to the server some time before the conferences began in order to ensure that any technical issues could be resolved. Even more important was the need to establish a clear format to the conference, one that was understood both by course members and participating academic staff based at the Centre. Over time, there developed a number of distinct online teaching roles which can be categorized as follows:

Chair: This person is the central ‘management’ figure in the team: someone who controls the flow and direction of the discussion. More specifically, the role involves asking course members to wait while others arrive at the beginning of the conference; organizing discussion streaming (for example, when facilitating online group work); organizing who takes the lead of the discussion; announcing when the conference time is nearly finished, etc. The chair is not normally expected to contribute to the substance of the conference in any major way other than by summing up the discussion as a whole at the very end of the conference.

Welcomer: This member of the team is expected to welcome course members when they first arrive, explain the format of the conference, and help them with any initial operational queries or difficulties that they might have. For course members joining late, the welcomer would normally summarize the discussion so far (via private messaging) in order to allow informed participation.

Online Facilitator: This role (usually performed by two or more people) involves responsibility for facilitating the content of the conference. The role varies considerably according to how any particular conference is designed. It could include anything from providing an online ‘lecture’ in short ‘chunks’ followed by questions to prompt discussion, to asking probing questions directed at specific individuals or the group as a whole to get course members debating a particular issue or set of concerns. Since the typing and concentration demands involved can be very tiring after extended periods, Online Facilitators will normally alternate in leading the discussion. The facilitator also has the central task of establishing coherence and clarity to the discussion. Often, contributions from course members do not take account of preceding points (this is, in part, due to practical limitations discussed later), and easily lead away from central conference themes. While such tangential changes of direction can sometimes be fruitful, it is periodically necessary to summarize the main themes discussed and to steer the discussion back to a core set of issues.

Technical Support: This member of the team is responsible for dealing with all technical queries. For example, dealing with: course members who telephone the Centre because they are unable to connect; users who are having trouble maintaining a connection because of Internet congestion; participants who need to upgrade their software, etc.

As is evident from the above, it has proven necessary to impose a great deal of structure and organization on to formal conferences in order to avoid a collapse into disjointed, chaotic, and incoherent exchanges! In addition to the internal team roles outlined above, a standardized conference format developed through experimentation.

Teaching via text-based discussion therefore demands a different set of skills from the standard academic lecturer role. It requires a great deal of formalization in order to work as a coherent whole. Similarly, it demands different skills from participants. It was most interesting to observe how experienced conference participants were able to follow the non-linear character of the discussion, and to negotiate the flow of interaction with greater ease than first-time participants. Also of interest were comparisons with face-to-face group dynamics.  Individuals who were particularly ‘vocal’ and dominant online were not always the same individuals who were vocal and dominant in face-to-face teaching situations. Some course members reported that they felt more comfortable, less threatened, and more able to engage in discussion in an online forum than in a standard classroom situation.

The online conferencing format proved to be most effective when the subject discussed was contentious. Indeed, the online facilitation methods that proved to be most effective were those that employed techniques such as “devil’s advocate” – challenging lines of questioning intended to stimulate debate. The forum proved to be much less useful when discussing anaemic topics such as referencing in written assignments, dissertation structure, etc. Most interesting is the ‘team’ approach to online teaching. The forum makes it possible to switch seamlessly between facilitators, according to areas of specialism and interest, as and when these are required throughout the course of the conference.

A major advantage of text-based conferencing is that it provides a ready-made transcript of any particular discussion. These transcripts can be used as teaching resources in and of themselves. Course members who were unable to attend a conference can still obtain access to the transcript (from the same server) and contribute via the asynchronous news facility (this is discussed in more detail shortly). Course members have begun to make increasing use of conference transcripts – quoting extracts in their written work, using the transcripts as resources for research, etc. Similarly, academic staff at the Centre have been able to use conference transcripts in face-to-face teaching situations to stimulate debate.

ONLINE TUTORIALS
As has been mentioned above, in early conferences there was a tendency for discussions to be ‘hijacked’ by personal agendas. Typically, a course member would ask to discuss a specific assignment question, or, for example, would want to discuss arranging an assignment extension with the Centre. It rapidly became evident that it would not be possible to deal with individual requests of this character within formal conferences. In order to address such demands, the Centre established a ‘drop-in hour’ at a fixed time every day for course members who wished to have individual tutorials in relation to specific academic or administrative concerns. Internally, this meant organizing a team of academics who were willing to work in rotation to provide the necessary support.

The software used allows for online chats to be made private: restricted only to those who are invited to join. In this way, it is possible to safely discuss sensitive or confidential issues via the forum. Tutorials can also be arranged (via e-mail), for example between dissertation supervisors and supervisees at mutually convenient times.

For one-to-one communication, the forum works very well indeed. It is considerably easier to keep track of the discussion, and, once again, has the advantage of providing a ready-made transcript of exchanges between academic staff and course members for records and Quality Assurance systems.

The ‘drop-in hour’ also has the added advantage of bringing course members from different parts of the world together during a one-hour time slot. This provides greater opportunities for informal networking and conferencing – perhaps the most important role of the forum.

INFORMAL DISCUSSIONS
As has previously been stated, one of the central objectives of establishing the online forum was to reduce feelings of isolation among the Centre’s distance learning students. From a very early stage the intention was to encourage course members to use the conferencing forum to meet with one another, simply to socialize, network, and exchange ideas. However, this has not happened automatically. Firstly, because course members tend to log on at different times throughout the day and night, and secondly, because many course members are quite directed in their use of the facility: characteristically they will log on to the server in order to obtain a particular resource, ask a specific question, meet a specific person, etc. Only more recently have course members begun to network and conference informally in the ways initially hoped for by the Centre. Once again, it has become evident that informal conferencing requires facilitation. Simply broadcasting a date and time for course members to meet, with or without academic staff online, can help to facilitate greater course member interaction. Constantly updating the site, providing new resources, and answering queries posted to the news facility helps to ensure that course members check back more frequently, and, in turn, helps to increase the number of concurrent meetings between course members.

LIMITATIONS

Perhaps the single largest limitation is the fact that all interaction is text-based. This means that a user’s capacity to participate in conferences is very much related to manual typing speed, the ability to write in English at speed (often a second language for our course members), the ability to follow a non-linear text-based discussion (again, problems can be compounded by language differences), etc. At the same time, the fact that interaction is text-based is a great advantage: everyone, at least potentially, has the opportunity to have their say (even though this may make the discussion incoherent), as previously mentioned, transcripts of all exchanges are automatically generated; and text has very low bandwidth requirements. Ultimately, with the global communications infrastructure at its current stage of development, there is an inevitable trade-off between the richness of communication (higher bandwidth alternatives such as live audio-visual streams might provide the basis for a richer form of communication) and the accessibility and reliability of any particular forum. We have more recently introduced the facility of recorded academic talks accessible as audio streams from the server. However, again we have tried to optimize these for access via modem connection.

A major limitation with the heavy dependence on typing speed is that, from a participant’s perspective, it may take too long to formulate a contribution to the discussion in enough time for it still to be relevant. In other words, it may be that by the time the user has prepared a contribution ready to send to the main chat window, the discussion may have already moved on to another set of issues. This also means that if contributions are sent later than originally planned, the discussion may lose coherence, become stuck on a particular theme, etc. In part, it is the responsibility of the chair and facilitators to help overcome some of these problems: once again demonstrating the crucial role these play in online teaching. However, it is not always possible to forge enough influence over the discussion to ensure a smooth coherent flow.

In addressing this problem, staff at the Centre have begun to rethink the relationship between synchronous and asynchronous text-based discussion via the server. The synchronous real time conferences are beginning to take on a specific role: this is where ideas are ‘stormed,’ where viewpoints are expressed and issues unpacked. However, by using the asynchronous news facility, it is possible to continue the discussion and explore central themes and tangents in much greater depth after the synchronous part of the conference has finished. Indeed, this also allows much greater freedom for participants from different time zones to interact. The advantage of the asynchronous part of the forum is that it allows participants much more time to develop carefully formulated comments and responses to key questions and issues, and that its format specifically lends itself graphically to tracing the sequential threads of a discussion and contributing accordingly. Again, this is a relationship and a mode of communication that has to be learned both by course members and by academic staff.

Another possible limitation is that it is necessary to install new software to participate in the forum (instead of using existing software such as a web browser). Course members do, indeed, experience a number of problems when installing the software (which we now provide on CD-ROM) and operating it from behind a firewall (for some of those connecting from the workplace). However, the advantage of a dedicated piece of software is that it works more efficiently and quickly than web-based alternatives (particularly on low-end/bandwidth systems) and is not limited in function to the capabilities and performance of html and Java.

CONCLUSION

The experimentation with the online forum has produced some very positive results. Many course members have explicitly stated that it has helped to overcome some of the barriers of distance learning, and that it has encouraged a sense of belonging – of having a ‘place to go.’  Academics at the Centre have had to learn a new range of skills and techniques in order to teach effectively via the forum. The forum has attracted considerable attention from other departments within Leicester University. Perhaps its strongest attribute is that it makes use of existing technology rather than involving considerable expenditure on new equipment – particularly useful for those who wish to experiment with an online forum. In terms of the technological infrastructure required, a forum can be established relatively quickly. However, what might take considerably longer is organizing academic teams and developing teaching practices to deal with a very different and potentially powerful medium of communication.