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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.

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?

Three common activities for interaction are:

1. Discussions
2. Peer Review or Study Group
3. Group Projects

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:

1. Pre-discussion – Content and activities to prepare for the discussion like readings, videos, or external activites
2. Discussion prompt – Designing the discussion question so it is open-ended, with room for multiple perspectives
3. 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.

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.

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 using online videoconferencing live via Google Meet (formerly Google Hangouts) or Zoom.
• 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.

In the next section we’ll look at some examples of content-based student-to-student activities.

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.

Supplemental resources that discuss or showcase online community-building strategies

Community Building – Putting It All Together – Web 2.0 (5:26 min.)  Examples using VoiceThread, Facebook, Glogster, and other social media to encourage student interaction.  Start at 0:35.

Establishing Social Presence in Online Learning Environments (slideshare and transcript) – On this self-paced slide presentation used by Patrick Lowenthal of Boise State at the 2012 Northwest eLearning Conference, pay special attention to Slide 23 and following, which outline specific strategies to boost your social presence in your online course. You may also want to watch the presentation video (43:45 min.; Installing a plug-in may be required).

Is Online Video Really Worth the Work? Perceptions of online asynchronous video and social presence (slideshare and transcript) – Presented at AECT 2014 by Patrick Lowenthal of Boise State, this study compares student perceptions of video announcements, instructional video and video feedback on social presence.

Interaction in E-Learning: From Theory to Practice (4:33 minutes) Celeste Scholz, from the University of Oregon, describes ways to build onlinelearning community. If video does not appear, you may use this direct link: http://youtu.be/1fAn-Un3Lys :

(Optional) More collaborative activities are suggested in the following eBooks at Boise State Albertsons library, by nationally recognized authors Palloff and Pratt (login to Boise State may be required).

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2004).  Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Palloff, R. M., Pratt, K., & Palloff, R. M. (2007). Building online learning communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

References

Boettcher, J., & Conrad, R. (2004). Faculty guide for moving teaching and learning to the web (2nd ed.). Phoenix, AZ:  League for innovation in the Community College.

Bond, T. (Producer). (2011, August 17). Community building – Putting it all together – Web 2.0. [Video File] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxoH0n875BM

Community of Inquiry. (2011). CoI model. Retrieved from https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/

Dunlap, J. & Lowenthal, P (2012). Establishing social presence in online learning environments. [Slide Presentation] Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/plowenthal/northwest-elearn

McElrath, E., & McDowell, K. (2008). Pedagogical strategies for building community in graduate level distance education course. MERLOT Journal of OnlineLearning and Teaching, 4(1). Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no1/mcelrath0308.htm

Murdock, J. L., & Williams, A. M. (2011). Creating an online learning community: Is it possible?Innovative Higher Education, 36(5), pp. 305-315. Retrieved from http://libproxy.boisestate.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=66903908&site=ehost-live

Palloff, R. M., Pratt, K., & Palloff, R. M. (2007).  Building online learning communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2004).  Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Wilcoxon, K. (2011, October 3). Building an online learning community. Learning Solutions Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/761/building-an-online-learning-community