Book Review ~ E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online. Author: Gilly Salmon

No one doubts that the Internet has permanently changed the face of higher education. One of the institutions to experiment, foster, and promote computer-conferencing from its inception through to current Web-based forms is the Open University of the United Kingdom (OU UK). From 1988, OU UK’s few online offerings have grown to over 160 Web-based courses in which over 100,000 students participate. Having been a student-participant in one of these early courses back in 1992, I read with intrigue Salmon’s description of this effort. I remember logging on from Syracuse, New York to the text-only online course with four e-moderators and 45 other participants scattered throughout the world – from Israel, Australia, Latin America, the United States, but mainly Great Britain. I recalled the frustration of trying to get connected to the conference at 1:00 a.m. with my 9600 baud modem, relying on a tech-savvy fellow graduate student to figure out the problems. What a thrill it was to upload and download messages to these threaded discussions located on a server hundreds of miles across the ocean, to ruminate throughout the day about the conversations I read there, and to return to the conference the next day to post my thoughts and to find responses to my contributions as our conversations unfolded.