Gilly Salmon's Five Step Model vs. Ikarus

Criteria	Notes
Gilly Salmon's 5-step model vs. Ikarus ( http://www.e-tivities.com/5stage.asp) The E-tivities book is aimed at "academics, teachers, course managers, teaching assistants, instructors, trainers or one of the increasing band of e-moderators from many disciplines, from any level of education, within any teaching tradition and in any country. You will be online or wish to ‘move online’"( from http://www.e-tivities.com/about.asp )
Access and Motivation	Yes, there was time to do this and tutors/peers were motivating each other (for example I joined a week late but blended in easily and got support from tutors.   Support forum available (I used it once or twice to read and to ask).   Chat and café available for informal communication.   A lot of email communication for those still not used to Ikarus.  Guided tour available.
Online Socialization	Profiles ask you to talk about hobbies, leave your email and ICQ.   Café available, and chat.   Overall disciplinary forums available for general discussions among those of same discipline (partly social, mostly personal interests in the discipline).   All of this helped me to socialize and get to know others  At beginning of interdisciplinary group work we had a short amount of time to get to know each other (but not long enough). Also, second group work was with the same group which saved socialization time
Information exchange	This was mainly through the first activity to post reflections on articles
Knowledge construction	This was mainly through the second activity to discuss each others' reactions to articles.    Also in the research and interdisciplinary phases
Development	Collaboration in the group work   The disciplinary discussions where each person could open a topic of personal interest   In the café and quiz forums where we could informally learn from each other   The contact and networking allowed many of us to interact with each other beyond the course  The course tutors created an "alumni" forum for us to use after the course had ended.