Telephonic support
The telephone is a good tool for one-to-one support of learners, and gives you the opportunity to find out more about the strengths of each individual learner, as well as the challenges that the learners are facing.
If you plan to offer telephonic support, it is a good idea to give learners specific times that you are available for this, and to communicate with learners via e-mail before the session to find out what in particular they would like your assistance with. This way, both you and the learner will be prepared for the discussion.
Telephonic support can be a very helpful means of providing a 'human touch' to the learning process, especially if some learners are feeling isolated or have been slow to get involved in the online discussions.
The same principles of effective participation apply in telephonic discussions as in face-to-face meetings. It is even more important to listen actively and to regularly check with your learner that you both understand each other when speaking on the phone, however, as you will not have the visual clues of facial expressions, or gestures to help you.
Using instant messaging (IM) to support learning
Instant messaging (also referred to as ‘chat’) is now a common feature of most Learning Management Systems, and is readily available in the public domain. (For example, Yahoo, Windows Live/ Hotmail, Skype and gmail all offer free versions of chat.)
Instant messaging enables people to have a written conversation in real time. This form of communication relies heavily on participants’ speed and confidence in writing, and some learners may feel shy or excluded if they cannot write fast.
Instant messaging also tends to become chaotic when done in large groups, as everybody may be posting comments simultaneously, and by the time someone has written an answer to a question posed by someone else in the group, the subject may have changed.
For these reasons, running a group session using instant messaging is not for the faint-hearted tutor, although it can work fairly well in small groups of participants who all feel confident about their writing skills.
Facilitating a discussion in instant messaging involves the same principles as facilitating a face-to-face discussion, paying extra attention to the tasks of summarising and paraphrasing/ clarifying information. You also need to be very flexible and very tolerant of ambiguity, as it is much harder to control a discussion using IM.
Reflection
If you have never done this before, it is a good idea to try it out with a group of colleagues before doing it with your learners. Try to get at least six colleagues involved, and if possible, make sure everyone is in a different room so that you are not tempted to actually talk to one another while you are trying it out. Give the group a real question to discuss, such as one you might give to your students, and allocate at least 20 minutes to the activity.
Afterwards, ask your colleagues (and yourself, as the facilitator) the following questions:
1. How did you feel about participating in this online, live, written conversation?
2. What was easy and what was difficult about it?
3. Can you summarise the main points that were made in the online discussion?
4. What do you think might be the benefits and barriers of using IM with your students?