Spicing Up Student-led Discussion: Analysis of The Moderator Chat

This paper deals with collaborative learning in asynchronous web discussions with special focus on how student-led pair moderating can benefit from synchronous communication. We study this in connection with a course of 33 students who used a conferencing system with special tools to support the moderating task. We provide quantitative and qualitative analysis of the tools, which include both a synchronous chat facility and an asynchronous note-taking too]. Although not all of our students adopted these facilities, we found out that the availability of several support facilities seems necessary to encompass the styles and habits of various learners. Having a moderator chat facility within the conferencing system and restricting it only between two persons seemed to guide the students to be more task-oriented than in typical chat sessions.