Facilitating Online Learning : Effective Strategies for Moderators

Bonnie Elbaum works with the Virtual High School (VHS), a collaborative of high schools from around the United States that, in exchange for contributing a small amount of teaching time, can offer their students a choice of 200+ netcourses – ranging from advanced academic courses to technical and specialized courses – to augment local curriculum offerings.

Sarah Haavind designs and teaches online courses for the Consortium, including the INTEC netcourses and a sequence of courses that support learning the moderating techniques presented in this book.

Robert Tinker, PhD, is internationally recognized as a pioneer in constructivist uses of educational technologies. He developed the idea of using probes, such as the ultrasonic motion detector, for student learning based on real-time measurements. He also was the first person to use electronic networking to permit students to collaborate on dispersed environment investigations. The initial result of this work was the NGS Kids Network, the first curriculum making extensive use of student collaboration and data sharing. This early success led to the Global Lab and GLOBE projects as well as the development of LabNet, an early use of networking to support teachers’ professional development. Six years ago, Dr. Tinker founded The Concord Consortium.