Collaboration and Community Building

Collaboration and Community Building

Module 7- Collaboration and Community Building

Here's How - Building Community – page 4

Podcast with Drs. Palloff and Prattwho discuss the importance of creating an online persona and how integral it is to building a learning community.

Rena Palloff: In your discussion just now, that’s really important, which is, the whole piece about creating a persona or establishing social presence as we like to talk about it and in the face to face classroom, clearly when you are standing up in front of a group you can tell jokes, you can be entertaining, you can engage students in a variety of ways but when you are online, that becomes a lot more difficult, you have to work at establishing who you are in that online environment, so that students will get to know you as a person and then also get to know each other because it’s very difficult to logon and look at text on a screen and realize that there are real people attached to that and so you really have to work at establishing who those real people are and that doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people. So, using things like ice breaker activities in the beginning of a course, in the intros and bios, is one way to sort of humanize the environment so that people can make connections with the people behind the text and that really helps to sort of warm up that environment and engage people and make that social connection that is so critical to the learning process.

Keith Pratt: Yeah you mentioned bios and intros and I just had a discussion with some faculty about that and how important it is and some of the faculty mentioned to me that they didn’t think that was really an important concept within an online course. I said no, it is critical because it does two things, it gives you an idea of who your students are, and it lets you a little into their personal lives and lets you know who they are and where they are coming from and that they are doing. But secondly, it gives you an idea, essentially, of what their learning style is. They start talking about it and you can pick up from those intros and bios how they learn and how they work with other students. And thirdly, it starts to create a community which is very important when you start doing online classes. Whether you do it intentionally or unintentionally, creating communities is an important piece of an online class.

Rena Palloff: I would take what you just said a step further, it’s not only an important component of an online class-it’s a critical component. What we believe and have experienced over the years is that that is the vehicle through which the course is delivered. That if you don’t create that community, if you don’t work to create that community in the beginning and sustain it throughout the course, the learning process suffers.

Here's How - Building Community – page 6

Podcast with Dr. Tony Bates who is the current Chair of the International Experts Panel for the Open University of Portugal and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Advisory Council on Technology and Education.

If you were teaching say, English literature or creative writing or history, geography, you want students to express opinions, you want them to do analysis, and you want them to provide their own thoughts. I think it’s really important to make a lot of use of the discussion forums. In fact, I taught on a few courses where there was actually no online posted content from the teacher. One of the most successful courses when I was teaching at UBC was a woman’s study course where it was based on five novels, different experiences of women in different countries and so on and the whole course was an online discussion. That worked very well because of the nature of the course and you know, there is no right or wrong answers here. People would have different opinions but what you want is to direct them as a teacher towards the kinds of things and concepts and methods of analysis you want them to do. In this kind of constructivist way students work their way to those things and concepts without the teacher sort of directly didactically telling them what those things and concepts were and sometimes the students would come up with interesting things and concepts that the instructor hadn’t thought of. So, in that kind of course it is nearly all discussion. Many of our math and physics courses online are almost entirely content and hardly any discussion, content and test and that is the nature of the subject and the way the teacher wants to teach the subject matter. The more interesting areas are where you are actually trying to teach students problem solving skills in engineering, or math. Where you take a more problem based approach and again, this has to be fairly well structured you have to set the problem, you have to give them guidance on the steps they need to take to solve the problem like what information do they need to solve this problem, where can they find that information, but then to get the students to work in a group and come back and post their answers. I like students working in groups off-line very much because it gets, it’s something they are use to doing, social networking, they work very easily with the tools usually, as a group and then get them to post their group work up for discussion and analysis by the other students in the other groups, so this continuous discussion with groups and within groups and that’s a very good way to building a community.

From the Field - Building Community – page 8

Video with Dr. Dennis Longmire, Director of the Survey Research Program in Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX explains how he implements synchronous discussionsin his online classes.

I am a huge proponent of synchronous discussion sessions. I use synchronous discussions in all the classes that I teach in an online format in addition to threaded discussions. Threaded discussion sessions are fairly common and students are able to use those fairly effectively because they are not time bound and one of the advantages that draw many people to an online, as opposed to a conventional learning environment, is that online environments are by and large asynchronous, they are not bound by time. I don’t think that is a necessary aspect of an online class. In advance, of all of my classes, I post a copy of a syllabus, it may not be the syllabus that is going to be used this semester, but it is a syllabus that was previously used so that students thinking about taking the class look and see what kind of a assignments and what kind of assessments they are going to be required to engage in and I always include synchronous discussion sessions depending upon which course delivery model that you are using, most of them have the ability to create chat rooms if you will or to create platforms where students can come together at a specific time and either use audio mechanisms to talk with one another, or more frequently, to be able to use a text base platform so they can type in conversations with one another. And of course, that requires that you allow the students to be able to identify times during the week when they are or are not available. And then create synchronous discussion assignments, and break the students into however many groups is necessary to be able to accommodate the available time frame for all students and then post reflection questions in advance, have the students come to these synchronous discussion sessions ready to discuss those reflection questions and require that they do so. Turn the recorder on for the synchronous session so that everything that happens in that environment is captured so that you can then go back and monitor it and review it. It’s not necessary for the professor to be present at all synchronous discussion sessions. I usually attend the first synchronous discussion session of every group and kind of give them an example of the way I want them to proceed through the material and then often I don’t return to a particular session, sometimes I will come back in and tell the students in advance, I’m simply here as an observer, don’t ask me for answers but I’m here to see how things are going and requiring students to engage in real time discussions about the material, demonstrates their ability very, very markedly. It is also important that in your syllabus you create a very clear rubric concerning the evaluation of those synchronous discussion sessions so that the students know in advance exactly how many points they are going to get for various kinds of contributions or silence they may be providing in that environment.

From the Field - Group Projects – page 13

Podcast with Jason Ford, Professor of Computer Information of Technology at Lone Star College-Kingwood, Kingwood, TX discusses the importance of including social networking tools in online instruction.

I don’t know that the social networking has so much impacted today’s student as much as students have impacted social networking. The bulk of today’s students have grown up digitally, you know, immersed in media from birth. It use to be you stayed connected to loved ones and friends thru physical proximity, letters or the phone but now with the internet, the world’s smallest computer, the cell phone, they are really connected thru voice, text, video , audio, and the internet. At all times, they are plugged into this virtual social world of communication much like the movie, The Matrix. You know, through MySpace, face book, book forums, blogs and even through videos games like World of War Craft; this is really a generation who has connections all over the world. And they are not afraid of forming new relationships either. As teachers, I think we have a tendency to want to isolate the student from such social activity in our classrooms as though it’s an impediment to learning. And I think this fails to take into consideration, people truly learn through social groups. And where one’s closest social groups in thus influences on their learning use to be through the family or tribe or village. You know what we are seeing now through technology is the expansion of access our students have today to other social groups globally; you know similar interest and greater expertise.

From the Field - Group Projects – page 17

Podcast with Jason Ford who uses Second Life, an online virtual world, with great success.He discusses how he implements group projects with it in his online classroom.

One of my favorite moments using virtual worlds with students, I would probably have to say was most recently. I teach traditional class but I also have an internet student who cannot attend class due to a disability. So what we do is we run a live voice chat session through second life of our lectures, so he can still participate. And after the lecture, the bulk of our work that our students do is team oriented and so he communicates through second life with his peers. I think that having a virtual student live during a normal class has prompted others students to want to try it out. And so sometimes they’ll login and interact with the student while he is there. I think it has been a very neat experience for those in the class as well as for the student who cannot attend because of his disability. I also found it real amazing that the social connections that are formed by students within second life, we have a student who is a programmer and he has met with other programmers online through second life. You know we are working on a couple of projects in second life, I’m pretty useless when it comes to programming, but anytime that a question comes up on how to do something, this student just logs right in, he’s got a lot of friends lists, and if he doesn’t, he can navigate right to someone who can help him from anywhere inside of the world on a programming issue whether it’s the UK, we’ve met some folks in Hong Kong, Australia and so forth. It’s been kind of a real neat experience. We talked about social networking; our social network has grown beyond just our little college getting expertise from others from all over. He has even found a school through second life; he visited their island, RIT. He met with an advisor who had a virtual presence right there. Loved the school, wanted to go up and visit it and that’s where he will be headed for in the fall. I think it has been really an interesting time for us in second life; we’ve had probably a lot more peak interest in it. Now we are starting to get teachers who now begin to see what students have done as well as some other things and want to jump into it as well.

Translation of THECB Grant Module videos and podcasts into text formatPage 1

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