The five-step model introduced here is an adaptation of the model described by Gilly Salmon in her book "E-Moderating, The Key to Teaching and Learning Online", Kogan Page, London, 2000.

The author is a teacher at England’s Open University, one of the world’s largest distance universities with 200 000 students, of whom 100 000 attend multiple pedagogical chat rooms within their Internet courses. The author herself has animated several discussion chat rooms. She produced this model following the analyses of chat room content, student focus groups and exchanges with several tutors. This is therefore a proven model to follow to successfully carry out a pedagogical activity in a chat room.

The model is a sequence of five steps that must be applied to most of the activities that are planned for an Internet course (data gathering, problem solving, preparation for assignments, and so on). Clearly, if one of the first steps is skipped, the participation and interest of students may suffer.