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Lastly, keep the flowers fresh.

A sense of time is created in discussion boards because they have only that week to complete the work and there is an understanding that the conversations happen in time. But often asynchronous discussions have wide gaps of time between student interactions. One way to bring time closer to the students is to allow them to subscribe to forum threads they are involved in. You can do this in most LMS solutions. Students get an email alerting them to activity in the thread they are active in and it brings them closer “in real time” to the events happening in the class. While this can be overwhelming in larger courses, in a class of 20 or 30 students it usually does not amount to an unreasonable amount of email notifications. One of the most effective ways to bring timeliness to an online course is do a quick recap of previous week, as well as provide a preview of what is expected for the current week. Using screen capture software to go through the course and set expectations is a great way to not only share a bit of yourself with students, but it is a pre-emptive way to answer questions students commonly ask.

Talkwheel’s design makes class conversations easier to follow, more interactive, and more effectively organized. It eliminates the problem of navigating multithreaded conversations, enables real-time group conversation, and makes referencing asynchronous conversations much easier. Talkwheel’s dashboard organization allows teachers to organize all their classes and projects in one centralized location, while Talkwheel's analytics helps teachers and administrators quantitatively monitor their students’ progress throughout the year.

Quora is a Q&A site nicely integrated with Facebook that has done a good job providing a means to ask questions and get answers.

Quora has been able to form quite an elite network of VCs, entrepreneurs, and other experts to answer questions.  They've also created topic pages such as: Learning Management System. 

Finally, Namesake, is a tool for real-time and asynchronous conversations.  It's a bit like Quora but more focused on conversation as compared to Q&A and it allows real-time conversation a bit like twitter.  You can see an example of a conversation around phones below.

All of these point to new types of conversation models that are emerging in tools.

This mixed methods study explored the dynamics of interaction within a self-paced online learning environment. It used rich media and a mix of traditional and emerging asynchronous computer-mediated communication tools to determine what forms of interaction learners in a self-paced online course value most and what impact they perceive interaction to have on their overall learning experience. This study demonstrated that depending on the specific circumstance, not all forms of interaction may be either equally valued by learners or effective. Participants differentiated among the various learning interactions available and indicated that informal interactions were as important as formal interactions in determining the quality of the online learning experience. Participants also reported the activity of blogging as being equally valued and in some ways superior to instructor-directed asynchronous discussion via the discussion board in a learning management system.