Setting a Positive Tone in an Online Course
Strategies for Facilitators
As an online course facilitator, your online communications must be polite, friendly,
supportive, and inviting. When facilitating online discussions, it is important that you
select the tone that is appropriate to best facilitate the discussion. While you would only
tend to assume one voice or use one main critical thinking strategy to guide a particular
discussion, you could use different tones in your postings to engage participants in
extending the discussion (Collison, Elbaum, Haavind, and Tinker, 2000).
A facilitator’s invitational discussion postings should be described as the following:
 Receptive
 Thoughtful
 Attractive
 Comfortable
 Reflective
 Respectful
 Engaging
As the discussion continues, your role as a facilitator is to employ an empathetic tone,
which means your tone could be any of the following:
 Nurturing: an effective tone to use when the dialogue represents a lot of hard work
without too much progress (or lots more work to do)
 Humorous: a purposeful intervention that adds interest to the discussion
 Imaginative or Whimsical: tones that represents that the instructor is inspired
 Neutral: a baseline intervention for instructors, but can get boring if used too
frequently
 Curious: a way of questioning the participants without “grilling”
 Analytical: an analysis by the facilitator with a neutral tone
 Informal: a tone that lightens the delivery, resulting in the likeliness that the
participants will notice the query
(Collison et al., 2000)
Strategies for setting a positive tone throughout your facilitation:
 Use a variety of appropriate tones when facilitating discussions to meet your needs
 Use personal language when communicating online
 Use friendly language and humor, when appropriate
 Offer congratulatory comments for performance that meets your criteria for success
 Utilize a welcoming positive note in the Announcements
 Encourage courtesy and interaction between students
 Let students get to know you
How to Teach Online– Johns Hopkins University Center for Technology in Education ©2003
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Give quick and positive feedback to students, especially in the first week of the
course
Give feedback using a supportive tone
Praise and model the behavior you seek
When critiquing work:
 Deal with negative comments personally
 It is okay to critique and challenge students, but remember it is a person you are
“talking” to
Dealing with inappropriate behavior:
 Don’t ignore inappropriate behavior-- take action
 Deal with inappropriate behavior privately
 Point out the pitfalls of online learning that cause people to misunderstand each
other (lack of audio and visual cues)
Reference:
Collison, G., Elbaum, B., Haavind, S., Tinker, R (2000). Facilitating Online Learning:
Effective Strategies for Moderators. Madison, WI: Atwood Publishing.
Document Title – Johns Hopkins University Center for Technology in Education ©2002