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to materials pageAt the top of the Contents page and every other page on the website you will find a 'click-on' called 'Chat Café'. This is the Lancaster-based online 'domino' discussion site for Lancaster students and staff to use for the purposes of discussion and debate during the course (see below for more on the organisation of the Chat Café discussion site).
It is important for collaborators to realise that for technical reasons this Chat Café is only accessible to Lancaster students taking the course (you need a relevant Lancaster personal username and password to access it). We recommend that where possible collaborators (a) tell their students that this click-on will not work for them and (b) provide an alternative local Chat Café which students can use to talk to one another and their course tutors.
Our experience suggests that, although discussion sites are useful for students, they have to be encouraged quite a lot to use them in the first instance, particularly if they are first year students, still getting used to university education. So they need to have quite a lot of 'goodies' given to them to encourage them to visit the site, and quite a lot of discussion prompts at different points in the course. Tutors also need to log on to the site on a regular basis to answer questions and give their views in order to increase the 'social feel'. In Lancaster we have used the Chat Café discussion site to post:
notices as the course unfolds;
a copy of the student handbook and other useful documents;
questions and comments to encourage debates among students and staff;
jokes and interesting examples we had recently seen which were relevant to particular discussions or parts of the course;
examples of (anonymised) good essays written by previous students;
copies of recent (sometimes unpublished) articles by local staff that were relevant to the course.
In our experience, if 10% of students contribute to the discussion site you
will be doing well. However, there is informal evidence to suggest that a large
proportion of students read the items posted on the discussion site, even though
they do not contribute themselves. Explaining to students how they can contribute
anonymously, without declaring their name, helps a bit. The other important
thing psychologically seems to be to make the site as jokey and light-hearted
as possible. If students can use the site for fun and gossipy chat they are
more likely to be drawn in to using it for academic discussion.