When people are reading messages in an online discussion forum, but not posting their own messages, they are sometimes referred to as "lurkers". They are people who are on the outside of the group, looking in.

In many ways, students who don't post messages can still be engaged in learning. They can be reading the messages that other people post, and be thinking about the ideas and language in them, without showing their involvement directly. As the article linked below called "Learning or Lurking?" points out, different students have different online learning styles. Students may feel that they learn just as much from reading as from participating.

Still, since ours is a language classroom, actively practicing the language is important. It is also problematic that it is hard to track the progress of people who lurk. It is hard to keep track of how much they read and how deeply they think about the issues.

There is another article linked below about eight ways to get students more engaged in discussions. Some of these we do currently, and some are planned for the future. The question for this week is how we can encourage people who might be more reluctant to participate.

Your tasks for this week are:

• Continue encouraging and evaluating to build on what we have done in previous weeks (1 point for responses and 1 point for evaluations);
• Try to come up with a topic for this week that will appeal to people that might not have participated as much - post this topic in the reflection forum for this week ahead of time (by Saturday - one point), and then in the forum for the group you are moderating on Sunday (a further point);
• Think about strategies for encouraging people to participate

For your reflection this week, you should post about ways to encourage participation from everyone in online discussions. For example, are the eight ways in the article below useful? Do they cover anything or is anything missing? What would be different in our own learning context? This way you can gain 2 points for an initial post and further two possible points for responses to others.