Conflicts often arise in online professional communication class discussions as students discuss sensitive ethical issues relating to the workplace. When conflicts arise in an online class, the activity system of the class has to be kept in balance for the course to continue functioning effectively. Activity theory and distributed learning theory are useful for studying this process of conflict resolution and online communication. Several strategies can be used to facilitate conflict resolution in online courses, based on these theories: complimenting, generalizing, and agreeing. These normalizing strategies can improve conflict resolution in online professional communication courses as well as in various online communication contexts.
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