80:20 for e-moderators

Abstract

Around the Millennium, I published my book, E-Moderating [1]. Soon after, with a colleague, David Shepherd, we started to offer online courses for any teacher, tutor, facilitator or group leader who wished to experience and explore the skills needed in the virtual environment for him or herself (see www.atimod.com). Then I wrote about designing for online groupwork [2], aimed at a similar audience, and we began a short online ‘E-tivities course’. The 2nd edition of E-Moderating [1] was then updated, as e-moderators everywhere tried out the ideas and let me know how it was going. To my astonishment, by 2006 more than one thousand people had taken part in online e-moderating courses and more than 20,000 have bought and apparently read and used the books. Many people used the medium itself to give feedback and comments to David and me on how they’ve adapted and applied the ideas on designing for participation and intervening for learning in low cost, online and asynchronous group environment and their special contexts. At every e-learning conference, I found commentary and exploration reported. On review and reflection from all the feedback, I realised that the 80:20 rule applies to e-moderating. The 80:20 principle suggests that there may be an inherent imbalance between cause and effect, effort and reward, inputs and outputs and that imbalance tends to the ratio of 80:20. The 80:20 principle is a very simple approximation of the value of work, but it seems to hold true pretty often for us. So, I began to ask my correspondents and visitors: 'do you know which 20% of our e-moderating work produces 80% of the results?' What follows is a summary of many ideas based on those years of feedback.