A Blended Approach

One of the striking things about teaching in the project for me was how differently students' approached writing online compared to classroom writing. First, since students can retain a fair amount of anonymity online, they are better able to say things that would be hard to state in a face-to-face setting. This anonymity allows students to take greater risks when participating in online discussions, which is beneficial for their language development.

Second, the communicative pressure of putting ones words and thoughts "out there" created a situation where postings were carefully crafted, revised, and edited. The value of this was that students spent more time making meaning, posted writing that their peers could read with very little misunderstanding, and were more motivated to experiment with writing longer postings.
As the teacher, I needed to create a context for this engagement. Very often this context would be a pre-discussion that led students into the reading. The postings were done after students felt very comfortable with approaching the task. I also tried to draw students' attention to good examples by other students. One helpful strategy was getting students to type in MS word and to edit their work before doing the posting on the discussion board. Students also were encouraged to read and respond to at least two other postings.

Integrating the project into the English for Humanities syllabus meant that students got a much richer learning experience by virtue of a blended approach that infused traditional reading and writing practices with online practices. This blended approach added considerable value to the learning experience and challenged the lecturers to explore new ways of teaching and learning in the virtual classroom.