Developing Community in Online Distance Learning

Describes how a sense of community was developed among a group of learners participating in a course in teaching and training online conducted primarily online at a distance via FirstClass computer conferencing software. Drawing on the literature of online communities and their experience of running virtual team projects, the authors developed a method for creating a sense of community among course participants. This method included establishment of an email list prior to course commencement, a two-day face-to-face meeting which concentrated on developing knowledge and skills for participation as well as community building, and inclusion of community building activities among the initial online course exercises. Students responded positively to this combination of activities. Tutors spent less time assisting students with socialisation and adjustment to the online environment, increasing the time available for content-related tutoring. The authors confirm the importance of sense of community among online learners, and recommend closer attention be paid to factors associated with early development of community, including functional factors such as familiarity with the online environment. They conclude with recommendations for more structured research on how antecedent factors and events are associated with the development of online community

Towards a systematic understanding of community in online learning

Distance education has become an integrated part of higher education, and online learning communities (OLCs) show promises to promote learning in distance education. However, many issues regarding OLCs remain unclear in literature: OLC is not well defined, its key elements are not identified, and its relationship with learning has not been fully explored. In order to build a systematic understanding of OLCs for supporting distance learning, this dissertation reviewed the existing literature to develop a conceptual model of OLCs that identified OLC\u27s key elements and the interactions among these elements. After identification of such elements, the study tested this model by developing and validating an instrument to measure community, an OLC element. The validation process of the instrument revealed community to have four factors: student-student interaction, student-instructor interaction, perceived benevolence of others, and relationships. With the instrument, the dissertation then explored the relationships between community and learning in online courses of different interaction patterns, which serves as an early step to understand how communities and OLCs affect learning in different online learning contexts

Developing Online Sense of Community: Graduate Students\u27 Experiences and Perceptions

Building a sense of community (SoC) is an important process in the success of distance education and students’ retention. However, developing a community in online learning environments is not an easy task. The purpose of this research study is to explore perceptions of graduate students on SoC and learning after using different collaborative activities with diverse forms of interaction (text, audio, and video) in an online educational research course. Quantitative data from two surveys and qualitative data from individual interviews were collected. Findings indicate that multimodal and scaffolding interactive activities help to support connectedness and learning, and therefore foster online graduate students’ sense of community. The results of this study add to the literature with regard to instructional strategies used to support the development of online sense of community

Strategies for Effective Online Course Development

Old Dominion University\u27s Civil Engineering Technology (CET) program has a successful history of distance education, with more than half of the student population comprised of distance learners. Distance learning delivery has traditionally been via satellite and videostreaming with students having the choice of asynchronous or synchronous options. The university is in the process of updating their distance learning technologies and has encouraged programs to migrate to an online modality of distance learning. Developing and delivering online courses requires different competencies and facilitation skills than video streamed synchronous delivery or face to face instruction. A course delivered online changes the teaching and learning dynamics. Courses must be learner-centered with a learning environment that addresses the new roles of the student and instructor. The instructor needs to get to know the students, and empower students to manage their learning experience while creating an online community among the students. The instructor takes on the role of a facilitator of learning, and students must take a more active role in the learning process. Students must be self-motivated, self-disciplined and willing to take ownership of their learning. The course content and layout are critical to successful student engagement and interaction with the instructor, the material, and with other students. Online courses must be developed for longevity, separated from a text that can be revised soon after the online course is launched. Course modules, focused on course topics, should use multiple resources, readings, mini-lectures, assignments, online quizzes, discussion boards, web links, and others, to achieve learning outcomes. As more programs move to online courses, understanding effective strategies for planning, designing and facilitating these courses becomes critical to success

Developing an online learning community through an open reflective assessment

The concepts of learning communities, open educational practices and co-created teaching and learning are topics of current debate, particularly since the switch to online learning in 2020/21 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This case study uses student feedback to evaluate a new assessment method introduced within an online distance learning Master of Public Health programme. The assessment required students to blog about their motivations for studying public health, submitting their reflections to an open online platform, resulting in the co-creation of a shared, open-learning resource for current and future students. The assessment design was informed by the benefits of open educational practices and co-created teaching and learning, with the overall aim of developing an online learning community that will continue to grow and develop beyond the initial assessment and cohort. Feedback suggests that the open, reflective nature of the assessment had a positive impact on the student learning experience and contributed towards a sense of learning community through enhanced social cohesion within the group

Humanizing advanced communication online writing instruction: developing social presence to communicate, collaborate, and connect

Online writing instruction comes with its own peculiar set of affordances and constraints. One affordance is the flexible nature of learning “anytime, anywhere” while an important constraint (that affects both instructors and students) is transactional distance—the geographical, psychological and emotional distance that occurs when students learn in online environments (Garrison, Anderson, Archer, 1999; Moore, 2013). Prior researchers have responded to transactional distance and its influence on student learning and satisfaction by developing the Community of Inquiry Framework (Garrison, Anderson, Archer, 1999; Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007). This instructional design model addresses the non-geographical distances that affect the communication of both instructors and students by establishing three “presences” in the online learning environment (OLE): cognitive presence, teaching presence, and social presence. This research project looks at just one of these—social presence—in the advanced communication online writing course to determine how it influences instructors’ and students’ abilities to construct knowledge and to connect within the advanced communication course, and as Johnson-Eilola (1998, 2005) alludes, to a larger network beyond the course itself. In the context of this project, social presence is defined as the “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g. the course of study), and communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop interpersonal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities” (Garrison 2010). Social presence is most closely connected to an individual’s ability to form and maintain effective individual and team relationships, both of which are necessary components to learning in a collaborative environment focused on solving real-world communication problems. Because online writing instruction occurs online and is mediated in virtual spaces, instructors often do not consider the social nature of learning perhaps in the same way that they do in face-to-face classrooms. This research study aims to examine the social nature of learning within the advanced communication online writing course (AC-OWC) to determine how instructors and students create, promote, and maintain social presence within the confines of the course and the community of inquiry found therein

The Role Of Community In Online Learning

This project examined learners’ perceptions of the learning community construct, whether learners’ online and face-to-face interactions led to the development of learning communities and whether the process of building community was different in face-to-face and web-based courses. Courses requiring learners to interact on a personal level early in the course were more likely to develop into learning communities. The degree of distance within the course did not make a difference in whether these learning communities developed. Rather, a sense of trust and of shared hardship as they worked through the course assignments were seen as more important by these learners. In situations where communications were considered inappropriate, developing communities were derailed or development never began. A definition of community emerged from the data that identified characteristics of shared learning goals, exchanging ideas, assisting each other, and an element of trust among the learners within the community

Exploring the virtual classroom: What students need to know (and teachers should consider)

Technological improvements in many countries have meant that institutions offering distance education programmes now have more options available to them to communicate and interact with their students, and increasingly, attention is being turned to the potential of Web2 technologies to facilitate synchronous interaction. This study explores the affordances and limitations of an online virtual classroom, Adobe Connect Pro, when used in the learning programmes of two groups of undergraduate and postgraduate education students. Results indicate that while both groups gained value from using the classroom, they also found it a completely new environment, and one to which many had trouble transferring the interaction and communication skills developed in other contexts. The reasons for this related to three specific areas of knowledge – technical, procedural and operational, that were identified as being critical to student performance in this environment. The study suggests that educators and course designers need to embed strategies into their online offerings to enable students to develop these, if they are to gain substantial benefit from the availability of virtual classrooms. Additionally, the study identified that when making design decisions about online learning environments, it is very much a matter of horses for courses when selecting tools for specific purposes. While the virtual classroom proved useful for developing social connection and a sense of community, it may not be so beneficial for supporting deeper learning

A case study in online formal/informal learning: was it collaborative or cooperative learning?

Developing skills in communication and collaboration is essential in modern design education, in order to prepare students for the realities of design practice, where projects involve multidisciplinary teams, often working remotely. This paper presents a learning activity that focusses on developing communication and collaboration skills of undergraduate design students working remotely and vocational learners based in a community makerspace. Participants were drawn from these formal and informal educational settings and engaged in a design-make project framed in the context of distributed manufacturing. They were given designer or maker roles and worked at distance from each other, communicating using asynchronous online tools. Analysis of the collected data has identified a diversity of working practice across the participants, and highlighted the difficulties that result from getting students to work collaboratively, when not collocated. This paper presents and analysis of participants’ communications, with a view to identify whether they were learning collaboratively, or cooperatively. It was found that engaging participants in joint problem solving is not enough to facilitate collaboration. Instead effective collaboration depends on symmetry within the roles of participants and willingness to share expertise through dialogue. Designing learning activities to overcome the challenges that these factors raise is a difficult task, and the research reported here provides some valuable insight

Lessons for Staff Development: Lecturers’ Transition from Face-to-Face to Online Teaching for Masters Courses in Higher Education

During the COVID-19 pandemic there has been an almost universal pivot to emergency online teaching in higher education, requiring staff development as online teaching differs from teaching face-to-face. The transition has been at short notice, with rapidly created training and little time to engage. Past research into the transition to teach online is scarce. The study described here, carried out in the year before COVID-19, aimed to investigate the how previous experiences of learning and training affected transition, and how staff made sense of the experience, adding to knowledge on successful transition to teaching online distance learning courses. Interpretive phenomenological analysis was carried out after interviewing five experienced online teaching staff in a Graduate School, using semi-structured interviews and open-ended questioning. The overarching themes found were connections to online learning and teaching communities, and developing membership of, and activities in, these communities themselves. Staff with good connections to the online teaching community via other experienced staff, training, and prior experience as online students were able to make the transition to teach online with comparative ease, compared to those who did not. With little connection to the online teaching community, transition was slow and staff retained a greater connection to face-to-face teaching and its community. Post-pandemic, the study suggests that designs for staff development, relational agency (working for short periods with online teaching experts) and situated learning within an online environment are beneficial if elements of online learning and teaching are to be retained for the future