Do you remember how you felt on your first day at school? Be it primary, high school or University. Maybe you felt excited, eager to learn new things, perhaps a bit uncomfortable, wondering if you will make new friends, hoping you could make sense of the new environment and demands of your teachers.

You might imagine that participants in an online environment experience the same feelings and concerns. For example when they enter their first online course. Since we know from research that learning can occur when students are challenged, invited to be open, and comfortable, the trick is to arrange such an ideal learning environment at the very start of a course.

At Elevate, we welcome participants with different cultural and social backgrounds in our online courses in a range of course subjects. Social learning is the core of our online learning philosophy. It emphasizes the importance of social interaction (e.g. group discussions, group assignments) and giving/receiving peer feedback. With this type of learning, creating a trusting (online) learning environment where students feel comfortable and confident enough to speak up and share their opinions is of the utmost importance. So how do we do this? How do we make sure students feel comfortable and valued?

That is where the e-moderator comes into play. Each of our courses is guided by a so-called ‘e-moderator’. Gilly Salmon introduced this term and described the role of an e-moderator as follows: “The essential role of the e-moderator is promoting human interaction and communication through the modelling, conveying and building of knowledge and skills. An e-moderator undertakes this feat through using the mediation of online environments designed for interaction and collaboration”.

From a participant point of view I have experienced myself that an e-moderator plays a crucial role in aiding the social learning process. Although I and each of my instructional design colleagues at Elevate own a university degree in Educational sciences (or a comparable degree), the ‘How to moderate your online course’ is part of the training process when you start your career at Elevate. In this course we discuss key qualities an e-moderator should possess, such as empathy, effective online communication- and technical skills. In addition, we practiced with fictional cases of issues that might arise when moderating a course, as in, what would you do? An example of an issue that arose:

One of your participants (John) does not want to work together with his team. You have tried to understand his point of view, but are experiencing difficulties due to a language barrier. Lisa, one of his team members shared her frustration in a personal email to you. The feelings she describes match your feelings exactly. How will you respond?

You might imagine that this was not just a normal online course for me, but also a chance to express my educational knowledge on the topic and demonstrate my skills to my new colleagues. So, in a sense it made me feel vulnerable. The colleague moderating the course at the time was very open about her own experiences and occasional inevitable failures. This open attitude in turn, inspired me to open up and share experiences and opinions freely. Consequently, also helping other participants in the course and reflect on experiences together. To experience the participant perspective in an online course myself, helped me to be a better e-moderator. For me, being a good e-moderator means to get to know the students personally by reading their introductions and their discussions, be (literally) present by logging in several times a day, compliment participants for contributions and help them if they are experiencing issues.

In the H2020 Integrity project, Elevate is a partner in designing and creating innovative tools on research integrity. We will develop three online interactive courses for early career researchers in which motivating participants to follow the course and to feel involved is one of the first official learning objectives. We will use our expertise on how to make participants feel ‘at home’ in their new online environment. ‘What would you do’ activities will also be part of these courses, as will activities in which we invite participants to share their experiences by adding relevant case studies to help them with that.

With that in mind, how do we get to a solid and appealing course in collaboration with the partners and content experts in the consortium? Where does the instructional designer come into play? We are looking forward to share this with you in our next blog.