Computer-Mediated Conferencing: Grounded Guidelines

Voices of Experience

..think with the practice issues we could have actually used it, I can see how wonderfully it could be supervised into the course in the sense that on Monday and Tuesday you have your lectures on something, and you could actually ... be given a question or statement or something to talk about on the email for the rest of the week. [student interview] It was just said "Use it - please" you know. And I think maybe if it could have been more guided I think you could have had a discussion forum for each subject, or branches off, you know, or even like have a topic for each subject... so that you could go to where - if you wanted to talk about whatever, you could go to the right bit and talk about it. [male student; text conferencing] Two weeks into the assignments and we were still discussing the name of the company and we only had four weeks. It was quite hard, it was hard to get agreeing on things and making decisions.
[student interview]

Because of the marking people would be more likely to rehash it and try and put a different edge on it. It's a strong thing, if you have an opinion about something it takes place quite a long time before it manifests. Say you had a view about cruelty to animals you don't know where that started. With this it's like "there's a topic email - sit down and write about it!" in that space of time it doesn't give you enough time to develop an opinion about it.
[student interview]

More people talk in First Class than they do in the face to face tutorials; in the tutorials you are with an almost teacher figure and there are people who come straight from school and sit quiet and don't argue and don't discuss.
[student interview]

It does sort of keep the course flowing. With other subjects, you go to the tutorial and lecture and that's it.
[student interview]

First of all, it's an incestuous course within the course; the whole MA is on IT in Education; this particular bit is on devising on-line courses within education, and therefore it is actually run as an online course. Within the MA as a whole we've sort of conceptualised the technological sides in the past as being what we've called hypermedia on the one hand, by which we mean resources one interacts with - CD ROMs, Web sites and so on in which it's the computer you are interacting with - modelling, where you are building systems, and the CMC, which is kind of organising the learning through discussion - collaborative discussion. So that's the kind of distinction from the other modules, and it is taught therefore using this technology simply because that is what it is talking about. It's just an appropriate method of teaching what we are talking about, and actually shows to the students the kind of advantages and disadvantages of that system through doing so.
[lecturer]

For me it was a great experience, because I did not use this kind of media before. But, so it gave me first-hand experience, but, so as an experience it was good, but as far as knowledge is concerned, I don't know if I gained much. For example, when I start - when I write my essay - I don't think that I will look at all those messages. What I gained basically is this experience, this whole idea, for example when I read things in the literature I can compare them to my own experience; this is true, or this is not true, this didn't happen in our case, and so on.
[student interview]

And there are pressures on us to incorporate other technologies - you know, that we should be incorporating video and application sharing and various other activities as well as simply the CMC. But I think we need to take it a little bit slowly. I think that on the other hand there are student who find it quite hard to actually get going even with FirstClass, given that you really don't really have to do much more than download it and say "Run" and you're there. The prospects of them getting some other kind of software going are horrendous. So there are pressures to move on now.
[lecturer]