Online learning, said Lynda Randall, a high school professor at California State University at Fullerton, can be “a lonely endeavor if it’s just an article repository.” .
Yet many traditional online courses, she said, are “based purely on text discussions … It really translates into an anemic learning experience.” “
Randall takes a different approach. She engages her online students in discussions – with each other – about themselves and the lessons via video and videoconferencing with the goal of creating an online community in a classroom whose participants are unlikely to ever meet. in person.
Randall is not alone. As online courses become routine offerings in institutions around the world, more and more professors who teach them embrace the idea that “social presence”, a concept promoted by researchers D. Randy Garrison, Terry Anderson and Walter Archer in the early 2000s, is essential. to the success of the online learner.
Along with cognitive presence and teacher presence, social presence occurs when students can connect on a human and emotional level. This is more likely to happen, the researchers concluded, when students can see and hear each other than when they simply read text messages.
Michelle Pacansky-Brock, innovation manager at California State University’s Channel Islands campus, calls this approach “humanizing learning.” On her website, she explained, “In our digital age of knowledge abundance, the value of an educator is no longer derived from delivering content. Rather, our new goal is to design human-centered learning experiences.
Instructors who aim to create a sense of community in their online courses advise others to:
Let the students get to know you. Humanizing a course, Pacansky-Brock said in an interview with Inside Digital Learning, begins with humanizing the instructor.
“It’s important that instructors present themselves as a real person and also design a course that offers students the opportunity to do the same,” said Pacansky-Brock, author of Best practices for teaching with emerging technologies.
It doesn’t involve a single formula, she said: “Everyone does it differently. Some instructors get really awkward and can be playful and really fun in the videos. She’s more reserved, she says, but still lets students know about her interests and personality.
The same is true of Jody Donovan, an assistant professor in the School of Education at Colorado State University and coordinator of its graduate program in student affairs in higher education.
“I share who I am and all of my identities,” she said. “It’s not just about my credentials as a faculty member. I am a white woman. I have an invisible disability. I talk about the elements of who I am and how that influences how I present myself in class. Then, I ask the students to present themselves in the same frame.
Encourage students to reveal their non-academic life. For a unit on Jean Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development in Randall’s Course on Adolescence, the professor asked her students to create a three to five minute presentation that included a demonstration of one of the stages. A student with two young children at home videotaped them as he tested one of the concepts.
“Very often in a web conference, we’ll have a kid sitting in a parent’s lap and we’ll be able to say ‘hello’, ”Randall said. “We often meet children and pets. We had better get to know each other.
When Donovan’s children were in college, she conducted video interviews with them that followed their development and shares her experience with her classes. Likewise, she encourages her students to observe their children and share these results with their classmates.
Embed video. This wouldn’t happen, of course, if the classmates couldn’t see each other. So Randall offers homework that uses videos and other visuals and incorporates them into his lessons.
She uses PowerPoint presentations for online courses so that students “have the same advantage they would have if they could be in class.” They can also read it, rewind it and read it as many times as they want, ”she said.
In addition, Randall regularly records his comments on student assignments rather than providing written notes.
Meet in real time. This is not always possible, especially if the students have jobs or live abroad, but Randall schedules synchronous meetings with the students so that they can talk to each other in real time. During these sessions, she said, “our students find they have a lot in common.”
Randall runs five synchronous sessions on the same topic, all at different times of the day and week so that everyone can schedule one.
Work in small groups. “It just gets too heavy when the students are in large groups,” Donovan said. So she divides her classes into groups of eight or less for discussions, group projects, peer reviews, and other collaborations.
“They don’t feel the size of the class,” she said. “They are very connected with the students in their group.” In a class of 50, she added, students “just feel like they’re in a class of 10.”
In fact, she said, some of her students – even those who live far from Fort Collins, Colorado – have come together to meet in person. Some took their families to Fort Collins for vacations and stayed with their classmates. When one of them traveled to Colorado to defend her graduate portfolio in person, several classmates came to meet her and hear her defense, Donovan said.
Require constant interaction. Group projects, required participation in discussions, and collaborative writing assignments “force them to engage with each other outside of the classroom as well as in the classroom,” Donovan said.
She remembers three students working on a group project a few years ago. One member was a recruiter for a Japanese university; another was advising students taking courses in Hong Kong; and a third worked at a girls’ boarding school in the United States. “They learned from each other,” Donovan said. “They brought their own contexts and expanded the world for each other.”
Take up the challenge. Building community in an online classroom takes time, Donovan noted, and this drawback can discourage teachers from trying.
On the one hand, she said, many instructors don’t build community in their face-to-face classrooms, so trying this online can be new and require planning and experimentation.
Additionally, depending on the demographic make-up of the class each semester, faculty attempting to create classroom communities face the challenge of resolving disputes resulting from cultural and demographic differences among students.
“If the students are fully engaged, it’s a lot easier,” she said. “But if there are students who come and go and who are quite invisible in the [online classroom] community, it is more difficult to get to know the students. It takes a little longer.
Pacansky-Brock said this type of engagement is what students will remember once the course is over. “When you reflect on your classes in college, the ones you remember the most are the ones that involved relationships,” she said. “They were the ones who made you feel connected in some way to the instructor and you felt like you were part of a group in the classroom.
“This is exactly what is important in an online course. “
