This article prepares Moderators for their role during a course, including what is expected of them, why their role is essential to the success of any course or program, and how to use platform features to help learners get the most out of the experience.
The role of a Moderator
During course delivery, the Moderator guide learners throughout their learning experience, deepening their learning and knowledge by responding to discussions, communicating key course details, and creating opportunities for collaboration. Moderators have a key impact on:
- Fostering an excellent learner experience
- Driving engagement with learners and the group as a whole
- Coaching learners to think differently, share, try & apply new skills and methods
- Summarizing important participant themes for the project team and course sponsors.
Primary duties of a Moderator
- Support and communicate with learners
- Receive and respond to incoming emails from learners needing help, including technical and non-technical questions.
- Check your email about three times per day, spread out to be responsive to learners in all time zones in the cohort
- Keep the learning leader informed of issues regarding learner engagement so they can send nudge communications as needed.
- Alert the learning leader of any red flags from the discussions.
- Engage in discussions and guide learners
- Read all discussion posts and respond to as many as possible (within reason), looking for opportunities to push learners further and applaud great contributions. Tip: “Feature” or “Star” the most significant and those with most responses from other cohort members. Learn how to view course discussions, including new posts, popular posts, and popular posters using the course discussions widget.
- Use the @ mention feature to connect learners with similar or opposing views and ideas and bring other learners and/or the course Sponsor(s) into discussions. Learn more about course notifications related to discussions.
- In replies, use virtual coaching techniques to take learners beyond consumption to collaboration, ideation, application, and adoption.
- If the course contains a Live Event activity, determine if there are specific learners you would like to contribute on the live event and communicate with them ahead of time.
- Prepare and execute the capstone:
- Courses often will end with a capstone, typically a Live Event activity or a Cohort Update activity.
- If the course has a live event capstone, it is often facilitated by the Moderator and may feature the course Sponsor, a SME from the organization, or another guest. Though each event can be customized for the audience and course, the goal is to unpack the learnings from the course, discuss key themes from the discussions amongst the cohort and featured guest(s), and explore possible next steps to application of the new insights. It is not meant to be a lecture-style re-teaching of the course. The event should be interactive in nature and dynamic.
- Moderators typically share their screen during a live event and have a slide deck prepared to manage the agenda and event flow.
- Cohort Update activities are a way for the Moderator (or sometimes the Sponsor) to unpack the module or course learnings. Learn more about best practices when creating a Cohort Update activity video, as well as how to upload a Cohort Update activity video.
Locating the course
Your courses can be found from the home page after logging in by clicking Courses in the header, choosing Supporting, choosing Current Courses for a live course, and clicking on the course name.
- Learn more about navigating to a course as an admin.