Community, Conversation and Collaboration: Experiences gained through Working on Postgraduate Online Distance Education Programmes

This paper takes the position that community, collaboration and conversation are essential elements of the success of the MA ICT and Education at Leeds. We feel that successful design and delivery of an e-learning programme not only requires subject matter expertise and/or technical skills, but that pedagogical, information and communication skills to manage and facilitate online learning are also needed. The discussion is largely focussed on the merits of synchronous for the MA ICT in Education programme offered by the University of Leeds and this is compared to previous experiences of providing asynchronous communication tools for postgraduate distance education students.