You may consider having 2 different chat times for the students to attend, so that everyone has a chance to participate. Or just have an 6-7pm time for west coast, and 8:30 - 9pm for east coast. I was able to successfully work this out with my east coast students. For those that can not attend, you can have the chat available in the discussion forum it needed.
Jennie:
The only solution I can think of is to schedule more than one Chat session to accommodate students in the different time zones. One disadvantage in taking this approach is that students may not be able to share the inputs of other students in the other groups. You may be able to compensate for this shortcoming if the Learning Management System you are using to deliver the course allows you to capture the content of all the chat sessions so that you can make them available to all of your students.
I do not encourage the use of Chat sessions to teach course content; especially when students will be tested on the content covered during these Chat sessions.
Scheduling across different time zones, the current problem you are facing is one of the reasons why I discourage the use of chats for teaching critical course content.
Other reasons are:
The fast typists will dominate the Chat session.
Chat sessions are difficult to manage as some students have a tendency to open up new topics for discussion before the existing Discussion Thread has been exhausted.
Evaluating students' contributions to Chat sessions can be a challenge unless your Learning Management System allows you to group together individual student's responses to the discussion forum.
Satrohan
Hi Jennie
The more I learn about on line classes, I believe the answer lies in the quality of the discussion, instead of the format of meeting at a specific time. This may allow individual discussion to take place around the same team issue, along with elongated times for responses.
Georgette
