ocTEL provides several channels for discussion among participants.

• The Forums are used for peer support and work within smaller groups as part of the course activities (requires login to post).
• The Course Reader aggregates participants’ blog posts related to the course, as well as shared bookmarks (requires login to favourite).
• The JISCMail email list is for general course discussion (especially for participants without their own blogs).
• A view of ocTEL-related questions on Twitter and an experimental visualisation of all tweets.

Our volunteer tutors aim to track and support as many of these conversations as possible.

We use the hashtag #octel to track discussions on social media platforms that support hashtags.

The Course Reader is innovative approach to aggregating and managing distributed conversations across the web (developed by our team member, Martin Hawksey, and in use for the first time in ocTEL). Here Martin gives an overview of how it works.

For more details, please see our guide to discussion and collaboration spaces.