As a result of the literacy and information literacy project I undertook last year, I started playing around with the idea of how emotions were expressed in an online environment. A couple of conversations I had with colleagues suggested Blackboard was pretty limited in allowing students to express their emotions and much of the literature I had read suggested that the lean, text-based medium of the e-classroom was devoid of emotions. Not so.

I have always been attracted to journalling, so I started a journal to record my thoughts and reflections of the reading I was doing and how this related to my experiences as a teacher. I came up with doing an action research project based on this reflections, but which also brought my attention to the emotions that students expressed and how they did so in this text-based environment. I set up a virtual lounge, and did say it was okay for students to say how they were feeling – especially in those early days of being unfamiliar with online learning and university in general.

The results indicated that Blackboard was anything but devoid of emotion. Students may not have always been eloquent in being able to express their emotions in words, by they more than compensated for this through emoticons – limited to mostly :)  - and punctuation symbols – quite a lot of !!!. They expressed anxiety, joy, anger, frustration and compassion for each other. I’m not sure if I was just more attuned to this or if it was because I had given them permission to include emotion in their messages.

What I also became more aware of throughout this period was my own emotion response to teaching in an online environment. The disadvantages were that I couldn’t use humour in the same way as I do in a f2f classroom, which is probably not always the sort of thing one should put in writing (aside from the fact that something is lost in the telling this way) so building a rapport with students was made more difficult. I tried instead to tell the students a little more about myself than I have normally done in an online classroom, although upon reflection I have always done this over time within the f2f environment. The advantages of the online classroom in regards to emotional expression is that I can take my time and carefully word my sentences when responding to the negative emotions being expressed by the students. I don’t have this luxury in a f2f situation, although then I normally take these students aside and deal with the situation privately. What is interesting is that by responding to the students’ angst in a more public forum, students saw this as positive role modeling. As health professionals, these students (well at least some) recognised the importance of needing to learn to deal with their own emotions in their interactions with others.

I have written up my experiences and sent off the paper for review. I’m still waiting to see how this was received, but it is something I will continue to ponder in my teaching and is certainly informing my preparation for next year as I learn to use a new LMS.

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