Nine Recommendations for Enhancing e-Moderation Skills by Utilisation of Videoconferencing within an e-Tutoring Curriculum

As commonly known, a tutor’s role changes when teachers appoint her/him as an etutor. A requirements analysis carried out at our university shows that more and more teachers believe that e-tutors have to be soft skilled particularly in e-moderation and online communication skills. To account for such requirements, existing university e-tutoring curriculums have to be adopted. This paper describes a curriculum design and investigates the utilisation of videoconferencing within e-tutoring. Videoconferencing’s simultaneousness, multimodality and real-time characteristic suit ideally to training of e-moderation skills. So far, most publications about e-moderation only describe basic aspects of moderating within online learning or teaching, while hardly any publication considers using videoconferencing in e-tutoring in particular. With nine recommendations we thus try to close this gap. These recommendations are given for teachers as a reference on how to apply videoconferencing effectively in training of moderationskills within the limits of university’s e-tutoring curriculum.