Building Community

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Building Community in your classroom can increase student engagement, increase their willingness to participate, and develop trust between peers.

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Learning communities are built through “a social community of learners who share knowledge and goals, possess shared expectations, and believe that they matter to each other” (Pilcher, 2016). To help us build this online community, we look at the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework.

The CoI framework provides a structure of the interactions students have in an educational experience that reflect dynamic thinking and collaborative learning. This process of designing and developing meaningful learning experiences occurs through three elements – social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence (Garrison, 2017).

Social Presence

Cognitive Presence

Teaching Presence

Community of Inquiry (CoI) and Online Teaching

When students are learning online, they feel want to feel an increased sense of belonging. The face-to-face environment allows for discussions to occur at the spur of the moment. However, when working online students have opportunities in their discussion boards, group projects, or synchronous sessions to continue conversations, which will increase their social and cognitive presence in the learning community. As the teacher in the course, you have the opportunity to jump in to provide feedback and ask questions to encourage discussion. Each type of interaction a student has in the class will increase their connections to their peers and the teacher.

Why Building Community in Online Learning Matters!

To learn more about CoI and why building online community matters, watch the video below.

Video Transcript

Slide 1 – Intro!

Welcome to the training on Why Building Community in Online Learning Matters!

 

Slide 2 – You are here!

I want to bring your attention to the Online Course Elements slide. This is a high-level map of all the elements you need to think about when you’re designing a course.  During the overall training we’ll be discussing a few of the elements on the map from conceptualization to practical application.  So, where are you on the map? You’re HERE – where the focus of this training is on Building Community in online learning!

 

Slide 3 – Challenges

Online courses require deliberate attention to all three potential relationships in the course; the one you have with your students, the one your students have with you, and the one the students have with each other. In the online classroom, where students are likely completing coursework in isolation, alone with their computer, they can easily forget that there are other people in the class who can help. This is vastly different than what is experienced in a face-to-face class, where the other people in the room are clearly visible. The existence of others gets obscured online.

 

Slide 4 – Building Community

Interacting with others is a key component of our ability to learn new things. This can happen naturally in the classroom, but it doesn’t always happen so easily in an online class. Online students experience little, if any, real-time exchanges or collaboration with other people, whether students or instructor. With that, it’s important to make small changes to our teaching that can foster the robust dialogue and engagement we enjoy in the physical classroom.

Creating a sense of community in an online course involves both effort and intention, but it should form an essential part of your thinking, So, let’s find out what we know about building community in online courses and what that takes.

 

Slide 5 – Community of Inquiry Framework

First, we’re going to look at building community within the context of the Community of Inquiry Framework through the lens of each element: teaching presence; social presence; and cognitive presence. We’ll also look at other ways to build community in online courses.

 

Slide 6 – Building Community: Teaching Presence

Teaching presences is defined as “supporting and enhancing social and cognitive presence for the purpose of realizing educational outcomes.” Practically speaking this can occur through both the design of the educational experience and facilitation of learning within a course.

 

Slide 7: Building Community: Communication

Instructor presence and communication with students in an online course is surprisingly important. The instructor presence online has been shown to:

• Provide valuable, expert guidance of the learning process
• Help keep students on track with the course
• Increase student persistence in the course
• Increase student’s perceived learning
• Improve overall student satisfaction

Key Ideas for Instructor Communication:

Online instructors are called upon to communicate a variety of different types of information to their students. It is important to select the right communication mode for the information being conveyed. At the beginning of the course, it is important to set clear expectations for how students can expect to interact with you. Students benefit from regular communication and timely feedback on their progress throughout a course.

 

Slide 8 – Example: Instructor Introduction Video

Here’s an example of how you can communicate with your students and at the same time, help them get to know you! You can create an Instructor Introduction Video. In the video you can talk about:

• the content and why you decided to go into teaching
• why you think your content is relevant for today’s learners
• what you hope to accomplish in the course
• And, share information about yourself and who you are as a person and a professional

This approach helps to create a welcoming environment in which students can learn. The key is to help your students put a face to a name and to get to know you just a bit.

 

Slide 9 – Example: Text or Video Announcements

Another example of communicating with your students and make your presence known is by posting frequent text or video announcements. This serves two purposes; frequent communication and accomplishing important teaching goals. Frequent communication helps to keep your students focused and progressing. You can use announcements to accomplish important teaching goals such as clarifying misunderstandings, summarizing the week’s highlights, and helping students to prepare for an upcoming exam.

 

Slide 10 – Example: Online Discussion Boards

It is also important for you, as the instructor, to engage with your students in the online discussion forums. Establish a regular routine. Maybe you will post comments, questions, and additional guidance in the online discussion board on Tuesdays, Thursdays or Fridays. It only takes a few minutes to read student contributions and add your own thoughts. It’s highly motivating for students when you are in the discussion with them. Many students are demotivated when their instructor never joins the conversation.

 

Slide 11 – Example: Feedback GAINS Model

In addition to interacting with students in discussions, it’s important to make yourself known to your students by giving timely feedback. A model that has been adopted at Adler is called the G.A.I.N.S Model.

• The ‘G’ stands for Gratitude – thanking students for their work
• The ‘A’ stands for Appreciation -noting the positive aspects of the student’s work.
• The ‘I’ stands for Improvement – identify areas where students can improve
• The ‘N’ stands for Next Steps – offering resources for students to review
• The ‘S’ stands for Supporting Information – providing additional support to students

Please review the 5-minute video explaining the GAINS model and how to use it.

 

Slide 12 – Building Community: Social Presence

Community is also built through Social presence. Social presence is defined as “the ability of participants in the Community of Inquiry to project their personal characteristics into the community, thereby presenting themselves to other participants as ‘real people.’ Social presence can be established or indicated in a community through such factors as emotional expression, open communication, and group cohesion so you want to think about how you might design activities for student-to-student interactions.

Establishing social presence also allows us to think about and create ways to humanize online learning!

 

Slide 13 – Example: Collaborative Activities

For example, in an online course, the instructor might design group a or partner activities where students can collaborate on a project together.

 

Slide 14 – Example: Student Introductions

Effective strategies that you can use to create community from the beginning is to have students post an introduction in the first week of class. These introductions can be in the form of text or video. Be sure to incentivize students’ replies to each other as well. Perhaps students can ask a follow-up question of at least one peer, to help them get to know each other.

Other ideas include:

• Guiding students to engage with class content right away by having them share two or three goals or expectations for the class
• Having students identify metacognitive strategies they plan to employ to be successful in the course
• Having students describe what they may already know about the subject

Slide 15 – Cultural Inclusion

An often overlooked yet increasingly important issue in online education is the lack of provision for the need of culturally diverse learners. Differences in ethnicity, sexual orientation, political affiliation, gender identity, faith backgrounds, and many other nuanced and multifaceted forms of culture exist in the online classroom, but these differences are rarely planned for or accommodated in the design and teaching of online classes. In order to build community and support all of our learners, we must begin to increase our awareness of the ways that cultural contexts influence online student behaviors and levels of engagement.

 

Slide 16 – Example: Name Stories

One recommended way to address the idea of cultural inclusion is to include the activity, “Name Stories” as a part of the discussion introduction activities. You and your students can share stories about how you got your names, meaning, nicknames, what you prefer to be called, even pronunciation tips. As others reply in the discussion board, perhaps with compliments and questions, a natural opportunity emerges to discuss cultural values and elements that are important to our unique backgrounds and heritages. 

 

Slide 17 – Example: Instructor & Student Profiles

A simple strategy to humanizing online learning is to create an “Instructor Profile or Meet Your Instructor” section of your online class. Post a photo of yourself, whether it be a professional headshot or of an image of you camping with your family, or both. Write a brief biography that summarizes your academic background, your research interests, and also your personal hobbies and pursuits. You can also have students do something similar the first week of the course.

 

Slide 18 – Example: Synchronous Session

Use synchronous session as a check-in by having students discuss how the class or their semester is going. This simple action indicates that you care about them as individuals, and students appreciate and respond well to that

 

Slide 19 – Building Community: Cognitive Presence

Community is also built through Cognitive presence…and that’s defined as “the extent to which the participants in any particular configuration of a community of inquiry are able to construct meaning through sustained communication. Such construction of meaning depends on whether learners engage in activities like reflecting deeply on course content, drawing new and creative connections with course material, or opening themselves to new ideas and ways of understanding.

 

Slide 20 – Example: Mini-Lecture Videos

An example of this is to create short, 3-5-minute mini-lecture videos. Narrate over a slideshow or record yourself talking to the camera on your computer monitor or smartphone.  This is a great way to introduce new content or provide direct instruction to your students.

 

Slide 21 – Community of Inquiry Framework

Teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence work most effectively when they work in concert. The instructor begins by establishing his/her presence in the design of a learning experience through taking into account the actual learners who will be in the course and builds into the structure of the course plenty of opportunities to engage with those learners through direct instruction and feedback. But a well-designed course will also provide opportunities for learners to interact with one another, both to help each other learn and to build that sense of community. When these two forms of presence have been established, the learners in the course are more likely to engage in the kinds of active, collaborative processes that help them construct new knowledge through their cognitive process. You can better understand how to create social presence in your online courses if you contextualize it within the other two forms of presence, which both provide the rationale for doing so and clarify your role in the course – in other words, more actively engaged and thinking. And you can help create a social presence through your presence as a teacher, which you establish initially through thoughtful design and then continuously through your interactions with learners.

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References

Garrison, D. R. (2017). E-Learning in the 21st Century : a Community of Inquiry Framework for Research and Practice. Third edition. New York: Routledge.

Pilcher, A. J. (2016). Establishing Community in Online Courses: A Literature Review. College Student Affairs Leadership, 3(1). https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/csal/vol3/iss1/6/?utm_source=scholarworks.gvsu.edu%2Fcsal%2Fvol3%2Fiss1%2F6&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages