Building an Online Learning Community

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In this section, we explore the “classroom climate” of an online course, specifically, how instructors create an online learning environment that encourages the formation of a community of learners. Many instructors new to the online environment express concern about the geographical distance from/between students. How do we leverage student diversity in knowledge, skills, strengths and perspective in a manner that builds a collective knowledge and leads to growth?

What Is An Online Learning Community?

The student-to-student interaction that we have encouraged since the beginning of this seminar is key to creating an online learning community. “Community” denotes that feeling of trust and collegiality that comes when students feel comfortable enough to share their ideas, when they believe the instructor cares about them and what/how they are learning, and when the learning is engaging enough for students to actually learn something. Other types of online communities exist but the distinction with an online learning community is that participants are coming together online for the specific purpose (and usually, a specific time frame) to learn.

Why Build a Community?

Boettcher and Conrad (2004) contend that creating community in an online course can:

Increase participation
Decrease student isolation
Increase the likelihood of introducing different perspectives
Support quick and easy communication
Support the use of interactive instructional strategies
Help with classroom management
Encourage students to be more self directed
Promote student responsibility for facilitating discussion, ensuring access to content resources, and providing technical support.

For Your Consideration

Some educators define an online learning community through the Community of Inquiry model, a theoretical framework introduced by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer in 2000. The use of inquiry refers to the idea that community members are gathering for the express purpose of learning something. This material will be covered in some detail in the eCampus Teaching Online Seminar.

Notice how the three types of interaction involving online students with each other (S-S), the content (S-C), and the teacher (S-T) are inherent in the model:

Social Presence – The instructor establishes a trusting environment where participants identify with a community of learners, develop interpersonal relationships, and communicate purposefully while projecting their individual personalities. You might think of this in terms of the Student-to-Student interaction.

Cognitive Presence – Developing an environment where learners participate in sustained reflection and discourse in order to construct and confirm meaning. This is similar to the Student-to-Content interaction concept.

Teaching Presence – Designing, facilitating, and directing cognitive and social processes in order to realize meaningful and worthwhile learning outcomes. This correlates to the idea of Student-to-Instructor interaction.

Proponents of the CoI model use a Venn diagram to show how these three types of presence intersect to create a sense of community (we have added some color, arrows, and labeling to help illustrate the diagram):

The instructor’s teaching presence helps to set a climate for the building of social presence.

By selecting appropriate content, the instructor’s teaching presence contributes to the building of the cognitive environment.

And a course that promotes social presence can lead to supporting discourse between and among students as they interact with the cognitive elements.

How Do I Build Community Online?

The way an online course is designed is just as important for building community as how the course is taught. Much of the community-building in an online course must take place during the teaching of the course, as you interact with students via announcements, email, and discussion boards, provide feedback on their assignments, and so on. However, a good deal of community building can be built into your online course up-front, during the development phase. For example, if you intend to have students discuss specific concepts or work together on a group project, having all the details figured out and entered into Blackboard before your online course starts will reduce logistical barriers and promote student success. The design of your course is just half of a two-step process to build a community of learners; the second half requires you to foster the creation of community as you teach your course.

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Content-Focused Community-Building Activities

Including appropriate Student-to-Student and Student-to-Instructor activities will help your course meet Quality Matters Standard 5.2: Learning activities provide opportunities for interaction that support active learning. Think about the learning activities you have planned for your course so far and consider

Do you have a sufficient number of Student-to-Student and Student-to-Instructor activities?
Do those activities directly align with your module objectives?
Are those activities are the most appropriate for the goals you want students to accomplish?

Here are some of the more common activities instructors select when planning interaction that supports active learning.

1. Discussions

Use a discussion board when you want to assess or monitor how well students are understanding specific concepts, and to get students to process the material and/or explore concepts more deeply from multiple angles. Effective discussions can be viewed as a three-stage activity:

Pre-discussion – Content and activities to prepare for the discussion like readings, videos, or external activites
Discussion prompt – Designing the discussion question so it is open-ended, with room for multiple perspectives
Post-discussion – Activity after the discussion for students to reflect and/or apply what they learned from the discussion.

You can set up a discussion activity in many ways:

You lead the discussion – Most similar to face-to-face discussions. To get the most out of this basic option, you’ll need to log in frequently to encourage, challenge, restate, draw out quiet students, etc.
Students take turns leading the discussion – Useful for encouraging students to take personal responsibility for mastering material to be discussed in “their” discussion; also useful for teaching the skills of facilitation.
Discussion is set up for specific interchange (role play, present/ defend, thesis/ antithesis/ synthesis, etc.) – Useful for modeling and for encouraging students to apply what they’re learning to novel situations and to practice thinking like a practitioner in the field.
Students post assignments to a discussion board and peer review each other’s work – Peer review is useful for encouraging the formation of learning community and for encouraging students to look at their own work, ideally against a set of criteria and/or a rubric.
Students “buddy up” (in pairs or groups), interact with each other via email or Collaborate, and a representative from each pair/group posts to the discussion board and responds to others’ posts. This option helps students work together and synthesize (and present, and defend) a single position.
Students post questions to an Ask the Professor forum following instructional materials.
Students participate in an ungraded discussion, then submit a graded discussion synthesis composed of key takeaways from the discussion.
Student post video recordings in response to a discussion prompt. Video recordings are uploaded to free, private student YouTube or TechSmith Relay library sites. Students post a shared video link in the discussion forum.
Group discussions – This a good option when dealing with larger class sizes where the volume of discussion posts can become overwhelming, or there is a finite variety in responses. The ideal group size for discussion is 5-7 students, although 8-10 is not uncommon.

2. Peer Review or Study Group

When a threaded discussion is not necessary for helping students to meet objectives, you may find a blog assignment fits the bill. A blog is interactive in the sense that a student can post his/her work to a blog, and other students weigh in using the blog comment feature. Note: The blogging tool does not collect comment posts during grading. If you plan to evaluate both initial posts and collaborative feedback, use the discussion tool in Blackboard to host the peer review.

Alternately, students might meet with other members of their group and simply discuss their ideas and perspectives, prepare for an exam, or review one another’s work before submitting a single assignment or project. The method students use to hold and/or record group activity (i.e.: synchronous or asynchronous) will vary by class and an instructor’s wish to monitor the activity.

3. Group projects

The purpose of group projects is to get students to work together on a significant deliverable — often one that requires them to apply theory to a real-life problem. The only limit set on online group projects is the form in which the project deliverables can be submitted to you. Again, the method students use to hold and/or record group activity (i.e.: synchronous or asynchronous) will vary by class and an instructor’s wish to monitor the activity.

Group-written documents – A wiki is a collaborative document: all students in a course (or in a group within a course) can contribute to — and edit — the same wiki. For example, students can generate a study guide for the entire class (or group) to use, or co-write a short response paper.
Group presentations – Students can collaborate on presentations and deliver them to the class by posting a link their audio/visual recordings to a discussion board or a third-party site such as VoiceThread, or by presenting them live via Zoom or Google Meet (formerly Google Hangouts).

Coordination of Group Projects– Group projects often go more smoothly when students have clear guidelines regarding the objectives, communication, organization, timing, behaviors, and level of personal responsibility required for project success. Guidelines may include group roles, tasks, deliverables, communication tools, file formats, etc.

Examples of Content-Based, Student-to-Student Activities

In the next design task, you will focus on designing one content-based student-to-student activity—for example, a specific discussion strategy/prompt, peer review activity, or group project—that you think would work for your online course.

As you design your activity, make sure to include:

What you expect the activity to accomplish.
How you’ll describe the activity to students.

Below are some examples you may find useful in preparation for the task.

Example 1: Peer review activity.

A nursing instructor wants to accomplish two things:

She wants to assess how well her students understand the medical conditions covered in the text each week.
She wants to assess how well her students can communicate the highly technical jargon associated with those conditions in a way that patients (laymen) can understand.

The instructor breaks her course into groups of four students each and, for each group, sets up a blog. (Blogs are a good choice for informal peer review activities.) Each week, students choose one of four medical conditions and create a blog posting describing that condition (for example, what it is and how it can be managed) in layman terms. Later in the week, students read their groupmates’ blog posts and provide feedback using specific criteria. Link to real-life example similar to the one we’re hoping you can create.

Example 2: Group project activity.

A social work instructor wants to accomplish three things:

He wants to assess how well his students understand the mental conditions covered in the text each week—to what extent they can identify and describe each.
He wants to assess how well his students can apply the theory they’re learning to a novel case study.
He wants to give his students practice working together collaboratively to apply professional criteria to create specific documents (something they will be required to do after graduation, as professionals).

The instructor breaks his course into groups of two each and, for each group, sets up a Blackboard wiki. (Blackboard wikis and Google Docs are both good options for collaborative document creation and submission.) Students work together—either via email, phone, Google Hangouts, or any other option they agree on—to discuss the case study. Then they contribute to their group’s Blackboard wiki. When they’re finished, each student attaches a comment to his or her own group wiki signifying acceptance with the collaborative work. Link to real-life example similar to the one we’re hoping you create.

Example 3: Informal peer review activity.

A communications instructor wants students to accomplish two things:

Create an “elevator speech” based on criteria she provides.
Practice giving their short speech and to get feedback. She could ask students to post the text of their elevator speeches to a discussion board, but because this type of speech is usually delivered inperson—and is practiced in-person in her face-to-face courses—she would like a more authentic delivery approach.

The instructor decides to create a free VoiceThread that gives students instructions and examples. (VoiceThread is a good choice for performance assessments and informal peer reviews). Students record themselves giving their elevator speech (via webcam or microphone) and are encouraged to (but not required to) listen to each other’s work. The instructor listens to the recordings and manually grades each student’s effort in the Blackboard gradebook. Link to real-life screenshot of VoiceThread.

Example 4: Discussion activity.

A nursing instructor wants to her students to accomplish four things:

Find and present currently published articles that apply to topics covered in each week’s textbook readings.
Discuss the connections between the current articles and textbook theory.
Exercise Internet literacy (i.e., she wants students to practice searching for and vetting online articles and realize they must post links instead of copying and pasting copyrighted articles).
Practice discussion facilitation skills (something they’ll need to be familiar with in their field).

The instructor decides to break her course into groups and sets up a Blackboard discussion board for each group. Blackboard discussion boards are a good choice for basic class and group discussions. She creates a discussion board prompt that presents expectations for participation, including the facilitation role.

Example 5: Content review (study guide) activity.

A physics instructor wants to accomplish the following things:

1. He wants students to review the concepts introduced in the course materials.

2. He wants to assess how well his students can apply the principles they are learning to problems that vary slightly from the examples presented.

3. He wants to provide a venue where students work together to construct a shared understanding of astronomical concepts.

The instructor decides to reuse the study guide questions he provided to students in his on-campus course for a group activity. Here is a link to the Astronomy and Astrophysics – content review questions

Social Community-Building Activities

Much of the establishment of an online learning community happens at the beginning of the course, but, like a garden, community needs to be tended. The following table provides some ideas for building community before and during an online course. Note that many of these elements will help you fulfill Quality Matters standards.