Good Practice Guide and Etiquette Tips: Moodle Chat, Forum, and Blog

Good practice and basic etiquette is often taken for granted. Effectively interacting on the Internet through comments, chats, e-mail messages, and blog posts require skills that are becoming second nature with many learners. Unfortunately, far too often, basic courteous interactions are taken for granted. As a trainer, educator, and facilitator, it is important that you guide your learners in properly using chats, forums, and blogs, and set some boundaries so that using these tools becomes good learning experiences for everyone involved. The sections here provide good practice guidelines and basic etiquette tips you may find useful to discuss with your learners. Note: This list is by no means exhaustive; it's just a start. Find more by searching various education and corporate Web sites that create and publish etiquette tips related to online courses.

Good practice guide for successful Chat sessions

Learners should try to follow these suggested guidelines when engaging in a Chat session:

• Be civil and try not to be judgmental. Do not attack anyone personally. Always try to be courteous, even if you are annoyed with statements or questions. Remember, chats are saved in Moodle; instructors and learners (if Chat history is enabled) will have access to the content from chat sessions. Text can be copied and saved.
• Avoid using all uppercase letters, which usually indicates SHOUTING. Using a combination of upper- and lowercase is sometimes difficult to read, so I suggest using lowercase or uppercase only to be grammatically correct.
• Allow the instructor or chat moderator to ask questions of individual members. The exception of course, is if it's an open chat. Even with an open chat, however, assigning a moderator helps with control and flow of the session.
• Write short, clear, and to-the-point messages.
• Give everyone time to respond. Do not fire one question after another.
• Identify who you are replying to. This is very important if more than two people are using Chat. When I run “office chat hours” and have a number of learners asking questions in the Chat room, I respond to each question starting with the learner's name; for example, “Mary, the reason …”
• Use a basic convention if someone just can't wait to answer questions. There is always one student in every class that jumps up with a raised hand, shouting the answer. The question mark (?) is a good character to use for this purpose.
• Send an exclamation mark (!) to indicate an observation, comment, or message you feel is especially important. Instruct the learner to then wait for the instructor/moderator to acknowledge them.
• Don't judge typing skills or typos. Everyone makes errors, so you don't want to set a protocol where students feel they have to be as careful in a chat as in a forum. This is especially important to convey to shy students or ESL students.
• Use the ‘beep’ infrequently and carefully. Refrain from using the beep unless you feel someone is not paying attention or an answer/question was directed at the specific person. Overuse or misuse of this tool can be annoying for all involved.
• Be careful with humor. As with any online or textual communication, jokes, sarcasm, and irony moves the discussion away from the topic and can be distracting. More importantly, there are many different cultural and personal differences. What a learner may think is funny can be downright offensive or hurtful to someone else or interpreted as terribly rude. You can use smileys to express emotions.
• Review what you've written before submitting the text. It is so easy for discussions to get heated, and things can snowball quickly. Re-reading text before pressing the Enter key can save grief, upset, and a bad experience for learners. Clearly outlining the goals and having a moderator steer the chat session can help minimize some of these problems.

Good practice guide for successful Forum sessions

As an instructor, keep in mind that your learners may not have used forums, and if they have, they may not have been structured forums. As an instructor, you have a responsibility to inform your learners how and why you are using forums in your course and how they are relevant to the learning goals. Setting up guideline or tips will help ensure everyone has a good learning experience.

Encourage your learners to follow these suggested guidelines when engaging in Forum sessions:

• Stay on topic. The Moodle Forum can be used for any number of different collaborative activities, and it is very easy for hot topical issues to overtake the purpose of the exercise.

  If you find this happening, set up a general discussion forum where students can take their personal interests.

• Use titles that describe or list the topic. Most learners will read the discussion and replies based on their titles, so descriptive titles (which also help with search engine results) are useful.
• If categories are used, post your topic in the correct category. If you don't, you will frustrate or annoy your readers, and even more the topic moderator that may have to spend time rearranging the threads.
• Use a forum monitor. A monitor can keep an eye on students and prevent the forums from being used for negative purposes.
• Don't use all uppercase letters. As with Chat, all uppercase letters designate SHOUTING.
• Be courteous and non-judgemental to all posts and replies. If something angers you, take it up with the student via messages or e-mail. Personal attacks in a forum are not to be tolerated. All forum posts are saved on the server, and students' behavior should be aligned to school policy.
• Don't copy and paste from other forum discussions, or post the same topic/issue that is being discussed somewhere else. If it comes up, again, point learners to the forum where the topic is being discussed.
• Use the forum search if you are not sure something may have already been discussed. For example, specific questions related to assignments may have a forum discussion started, with the instructor having to explain, and clarify issues that have come up. No need to post the questions again.
• Be welcoming and polite to new members of the forum. Often, new members may ask the wrong questions or post discussions that are not related to the topic. Patiently guide them to where they need to be by explaining that they can use the Forum search. They may be a valuable addition to the forum discussion once they catch on.
• Refrain from re-starting a topic that has been inactive. This is especially important if the topic in question was a hot-button issue that had students' blood boiling and white flags had to be used to cool tempers. Let it go.
• Remember that forum discussions are different from tweeting and sending text messages on your cell phone. Messages such as LOL, Agree, Good Luck, Damn, or even Thank you for the info. These tweets do not constitute a reply! This type of message can be sent to individual forum members through e-mail or messaging or twitter.
• Personal issues are not appropriate issues for forum discussions! They can be taken somewhere else.
• Ask to clarify a post or a reply before sending a negative statement (which is a form of attack). You will be more respected if you ask first if you think something is irrelevant, very negative, or venomous before you send your own poison. Misinterpreting the printed word is so easy. You will be respected by members if you hold back and ask for clarification/explanation.
• Copying and pasting a relevant post from somewhere else is okay but don't include all the replies. Copying and pasting like this should be done only if the content is found to be absolutely important and related to the topic discussion at hand. If the replies are related and important, post a link to the original string (rather than copying over all the replies) and explain why readers should follow the link.

Good practice guide for successful Moodle Blogging

Blogs are different from chats and forum discussions, in that blogs express learners' personal opinions, experience, or knowledge. However, just as in the realm of chats and forums, your learners will find it helpful and useful to have some guidelines of what is expected, what is viewed as socially unacceptable, and what is not to be take for granted in the realm of blogs. Often, lack of information and inexperience can lead to learners expressing and posting blogs that can cause problems or be unrelated to learning goals as required by the instructor. To help learners focus on the task and goals they are trying to achieve, provide guidelines for participating in blogs.

This list of suggested guidelines for blogging etiquette is not exhaustive, and you may want to add to it or remove some suggestions (if you find any irrelevant to how you will use the Moodle blog with your learners):

• Advise your learners to start their first blog by telling readers briefly about themselves. It may also be useful to state the purpose of starting a blog, specifically, if related to a project, or other type of assignment.
• When your students are posting comments to blogs, suggest that they start with positive comments. Even something as simple as “I really enjoyed reading your blog” can set a positive tone. Blogs are like personal journals, and no one likes to be told what they are writing about is absolute rubbish.
• Advise your learners to use correct spelling, punctuation, and spelling.
• Avoid using all uppercase letters.
• Tell your students to engage in a civil dialogue if they read a blog that they disagree with. Comments should be nice, but if your learners disagree with a blog entry, they should let the blogger know and engage in a discussion. This can be done in a polite manner, respecting each other. Disagreeing with a statement and welcoming further comments can turn into a very useful and informative learning experience for everyone.
• Tell your students to give the writer/artist credit if they find information they want to add to their blog. A link to the information should also be provided. If they want to add it right into their blog, they need to seek permission first.
• Encourage your students to follow up on comments. Even a simple “Thank you” acknowledges the reader for taking time to read the blog and to think about what was written. Acknowledged blog readers are likely to continue coming back.
• Encourage readers to use permalinks. Permalinks are very useful to link to a specific blog entry. Using permalinks is viewed as a good blog practice.