One thing we've found important in our open courses is the hosting of regular meetings online. Even if only a small percentage of people join the meetings, they provide continuity, presence, and a personal touch. But when you get into the hundreds or thousands of participants, the online meeting becomes unwieldy (and the technology gets pretty expensive). It's better to allow the larger group to break into smaller group meetings. In this post, Stian Haklev discusses a zero-cost way for people to enjoy the best of a hosted online meeting environment - Skype plus Etherpad. It's certainly an approach worth investigating (the main thing I want to add is to create some way to record and share at least the audio, if not video, of the breakouts).
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