“The most difficult hurtle in teaching the online sections was convincing online students that was it acceptable to challenge me and to critique other students’ work as long as it was done in a professional manner. For the face-to-face students, this was a non-issue. Online students, however, who met their classmates and me only though our online homepages, seemed more reserved. Not until I modeled open discussion and critique in the weekly discussion boards did they begin to warm up. For example, if an online student made a particularly good point, I could re-title my reply with a ‘heads up’ for the whole class to read that dialog. And, if someone really missed the point or leapt to the wrong conclusion I could explain (in a supportive way) how and why their comment missed the mark.
When a teachable moment occurred, I reiterated the point in the announcements section of the course site. Likewise, if a student or I found a good new web resource, I mentioned that link in announcements. Although the traditional approach is to reserve announcements for course management issues, I have found that area to be an extremely effective place to deliver newly found instructional content. I think of announcements as the beginning of my class meeting since it is the first thing students see when they log in….
It was interesting to see friendships develop among the face-to-face and online students, and they developed at about the same pace. Students often shared training-design examples from their professional lives, and those conversations occasionally drifted into personal chat. If it became too chatty, I posted a reminder note that when we wanted to share a comment with everyone, we used the reply button but if it was a personal (out of class) comment, we could use the personal email link. I made the decision for both course sites not to allow anonymous postings with the exception of a feedback section about the course itself. Perhaps because all postings were identified, or perhaps because we had built a good learning community, no students were ever rude or inappropriate in their online comments.”
More at http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=case_studies&article=34-1