E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online

It is clear that teaching and learning online will become a major strategy for teacher professional development. Gilly Salmon who has been teaching and learning on line for 10 years has produced a book which provides a rationale for the process, but more importantly, because the proposals are soundly research based, has produced a book which might provide a clearer understanding of the possibilities for adults teaching and learning online. The National College for School Leadership is strongly committed to this way of learning, in particular for the National Professional Qualification for Headship, and this is being extended to most of its programmes. This is a well-written book, clear and coherent and easily accessible. The structure of the book is straightforward, as are the models which provide a framework for her analysis. The first part of the book explores what e-moderating is, and presents a hierarchical model for skills development for Computer-Mediated Conferencing (CMC) in education and training. This leads on to the qualities and roles required in e-moderating. It is important to understand the differences between online and face to face professional development. Particularly significant is the chapter on training e-moderators, which ideally should be done online, and which links the five levels of training to the five stages of development in increasingly higher level skills. Gilly Salmon has considerable access to participants’ experience of e-learning and effectively demonstrates how skilled emoderating is the key to the future of online teaching and learning. The second part of the book provides resources for practitioners and offers guidance on over 20 very practical elements which have been found to be significant, including conference housekeeping, supporting and developing CMC novices, boosting CMC participation and understanding lurkers—the three main kinds are: those still trying to find out how to use the system; the sponge, who is coming to terms with the environments, norms and ways of communicating online; and the silent thief/ free loader, someone happy to use other people’s contributions rather than feeling the need to contribute. These people need a reason, even a requirement, it is suggested, to take part. A moderator is a person who presides over a meeting; an e-moderator presides over an electronic online conference but requires a rather wider and distinctive range of expertise. E-moderators need to recognise that students need online goals since online education and training needs to be very purposeful. They also need the capacity to design structured learning experiences for their students which can only be achieved if they are committed to exploring the potential of the process. The distinctive nature of computer mediated conferencing needs to be recognised. It feels more permanent than face to face training and the capacity for reworking allows the giving of individual praise and support using new constructive techniques. The asynchronous nature of CMC relates to many of its special characteristics, in particular the convenience of choice of when to participate but also because it is a hybrid of familiar forms of communication, writing and the associated thinking, with some of the permanence of publishing but also with some resemblance to the more fleeting verbal discussion. What this book achieves is the successful communication of enthusiasm for e-learning, a strong commitment to ensuring that those for whom it is prepared, essentially the new e-moderators or those who will be using and developing the new e-moderators, have an understanding of how they can become effective in the new role because they recognise its essential focus. The model, which from my experience is crucial in the professional development of e-moderators, skilled online tutors, is accessible at http://oubs.open. ac.uk/gilly. Exploration of the site is recommended. This book, which will present soundly researchbased guidance on what the issues are and how to learn the skills, is actually also very well written.