Kendrick McQueen

Joyce, I agree with you. It is essential that the teacher takes the lead in controlling the online environment and set a presence. Otherwise, effective learning cannot occur. I usually email out policies and procedures to my students at the start of every class so as to provide those specific guidelines and rules that you talked about in your post.

Nashid Madyun

Joyce, I have this to be incredibly critical to the retention and participation. Students can be intimidated by the course and the added pressure of poor behavior from classmates can escalate attrition.

When working within groups, how aggressive can a teacher when dealing with the dynamics of the group?

I have found that allowing the students to make critical path deadlines for submission -- pushed procrastinators.

Craig Peterson

I agree with your post. I also find that being alert is a key point to all of this, particularly with discussion boards. It seems much easier to keep control in a chat session but, because of the time delay, a discussion board can get out of hand if not monitored. The climate in a discussion board can be controlled by a single student if not caught and addressed quickly.

I had an instance when a student started providing critics of the work of other students. Even though the critics of the work were spot on, it was offensive to other students. I had to catch that very quickly and deal with it. I had to discuss it with the student providing the critics and sooth the students who had their feelings hurt. It was challenging to explain to the student who had their feelings hurt that the other student was not in the position to provide criticism and also explain that they needed to correct the issues in their messages at the same time.

Had I been the first to provide the critic, it would have been much better as students tend to take critic, if done right, from the instructor much easier than from another student.