An online environment can help some students to take the right place in the regular face to face classroom. Any students who feel that they are disliked (even though it is not actually true), who are sometimes aggressive and disruptive (teenagers problems), who are unable to sustain close relationships with classmates, and who cannot establish a place for themselves in the peer culture, usually are seriously at risk in any collaborative effort.

Though there are always difficulties in every group collaborative effort (in business as well as education), the online environment in addition to a regular f2f class setting can actually mitigate some of these difficulties because it does not require so much "social comfort" as the face-to-face environment.

Many signs of misbehavior are often attributed to social defenses or reactions to the social environment. The online environment is sometimes a leveler. By not having to deal with body language nuances, sometimes people feel more comfortable and less defensive. By not having too actually look at a person, or have them look back, a shyer individual may feel more able to contribute and an aggressive individual isn't reacting to perceived social cues. Particularly in asynchronous mode (email or threaded discussions) the "aggressive conversationalist" has no more power than the shy conversationalist.

After successful performance on the bulletin board a student certainly feels more comfortable in the f2f classroom. My experience have been that after several meetings in the Cyber Space students became more comfortable with each other and with the collaborative work in their everyday class work.

Students who feels ucomfortable with asynchronous communication are not required to participate in any online activities. However, I can not recall even one situation when a student expressed his/her disapproval of it.

Teachers and interested parents are welcome to listen a presentation about the Asynhronous Online Discussion: