As this is a part-time program, learners do not attend every day. But since we only had access on one computer at each center, learning groups were crowded around one terminal and not everyone had hands-on time. Typically a tutor would take over the typing duties and read aloud whatever was coming up on the screen from the outside. This discouraged people from becoming hands-on chat participants. These old opportunities were nonetheless very rich.
Students can help one another more readily, and there's just far less down time.
We will certainly use the shared Chat experience we're gaining to broaden our community outside our learning center very soon.