When students involved in a course come together, it can seem easy to create a dynamic community of inquiry around the subject matter of the course. There are many opportunities (around 40 hours of them, in most courses) where students can be encouraged to make real social contact with others in the course. In an online course, such social presence has analogues in terms of forums and chats, as well as synchronous sessions where students can interact (at least in text) with each other and “build community.”
Now, in a course that is continuous-intake and students are rarely, if ever, at the same point in their learning, the one’s first reaction to the notion of community is a bit of a horse-laugh. Imagine a library where patrons must be absolutely silent, where they are reading entirely individually, and you have a picture of the asynchronous course dynamic.
Of course, in a library, it is always possible for patrons to interact, just as it is possible for any two students to interact with each other in a course, even when they are not at the same place in the curriculum. But the point of the illustration is not just to consider whether they would interact, but to further examine what benefit would come from their interaction.
- They could interact in the library/course:
- Excuse me, do you know how the fiction books are shelved?
- Do you know how many books can be checked out?
- And so on.
- But what would motivate the more experienced patrons/students to help newbies? Why would they take time?
In this blog post, I hope to consider some of these questions. However, in view of my own limited experience in teaching continuous intake courses (that is, none!), I will need to probe the minds of some others.
Adding to the difficulty of my geographic isolation (Interior BC, Canada) and the relative isolation of the season (summer 2020), I also have the complications of CoVid-19, wherein we are somewhat cloistered and unable to roam freely from interview to interview.
As a result, I have emailed a couple of colleagues at TRU, as well as close associates in some online organizations I have worked for over the years. In a few days, I hope to update this blog post with their insights. The particular questions I am interested in are as follows:
- How do you promote social engagement among participants who are not at the same point with each other in the course you are teaching?
- How do you provide summaries and integrate understanding in a way that does not privilege later students over previous ones?
- What is the hardest thing to achieve in building a community of inquiry?
- What are the most difficult situations you have dealt with in online teaching?
If possible, I hope to keep the previous part of this post as close to the form it presently has, and just add the results of my informal interviews below, following the outline above (or adding/modifying as seems most relevant to the responses I get). Stay tuned . . .
My first respondent said,
Hi Randy, I am on hold with [company], so have some time to respond. The students in my self paced course are solitary travellers with no community. I don’t even try and I don’t think it is necessary to have a community for the topic which is [name of course]. Every student creates their own unique [work] so it is a self contained activity. I think this encourages independent thought and self reliance. The student can enter a dialogue with me though via email and I find that works really well. The students seem happy with that. I answer them promptly and in depth. I don’t think community is essential in all courses and honestly, many of my OL students were also attending face to face classes at TRU when we had them, so weren’t lacking community. They just wanted to take a few more credits on their own time.
To the question about difficulty with student success, the respondent said,
I haven’t had difficult online situations other than academic integrity questions. (ugh!)
So to check academic integrity, I always check the author of the document under Word’s document properties. Occasionally the author of the document was a different name than the student’s name. If this is the case, I will ask the student why that is. Sometimes they are using a roommate’s computer. Or their computer has a nickname which shows up as the document author. I’ve had students voluntarily send me a photo of their laptop with the sign in name page, with their TRU ID card held alongside it. I didn’t ask them to do this but it is a good solution if you are suspicious about authorship.
But I think the difficult part in getting the student to succeed is to ensure they actually read the lessons and do the activities the lessons provide. I often have to remind them to do this, and can tell by the quality of the assignment if they are actually reading the lessons. They often don’t read the comments I provide in Track Changes. I make sure to convert their Word assignment into a pdf file which shows my track changes comments better than Word does. I think many students just do the assignments without doing the course material, which is really discouraging for the course developer (me).
Another “interviewee” writes:
[I am h]appy to share whatever knowledge I have, but I have never taught an online course with a continuous intake. I think building a community of inquiry with students all at different points of completion will be very challenging. You might get some inspiration from my research website at: http://elearnopen.info/ and/or my Technology Toolbox for Educators website – https://sites.google.com/site/technologytoolboxforeducators/home.
Promoting social engagement even when all students are working through the course with the same start/end dates is a challenge…but if they are all at different points the engagement can only be asynchronous, not in real-time. I suggest you try to use tools that will enable students to see or hear previous students ideas/contributions and have them comment or respond to points raised by others. [Check out] collaborative tools such as; Flipgrid (videos), Q & A style forums, Google Docs, audio podcasts etc. If you have students “create an end product” that can be stored online, then you can use these as resources for future students. [For example], they could create videos, audio podcasts, digital storybooks etc. about the topics they are studying (will depend [on] your course objectives & content). TT4Ed “Creating” page has a few ideas for technologies https://sites.google.com/site/technologytoolboxforeducators/pedagogies/creating-articulating)
[In terms of specifically] Moodle [tools] has a Q & A type forum – you can pose a question(s) for students and they can ONLY see others responses AFTER they have posted their response. You can add your own summaries, or get your students to summarise their understanding of previous students’ posts. [Using Moodle’s conditional access,] You can put information online somewhere and only give students access to it when they reach a specific point in the course – e.g. Google doc & give them the URL when they complete a specific activity.
The hardest thing to achieve in building a community of inquiry [is] student interaction in various forms – with each other, the teacher & the content… [I have curated] lots of links to information and resources for inquiry-based learning – https://sites.google.com/site/technologytoolboxforeducators/about-learning/real-world-learning/inquiry-based-learning & information for communicating & collaborating online – https://sites.google.com/site/technologytoolboxforeducators/pedagogies/collaborating
The most difficult situation I have dealt with in online teaching [is the] lack of student participation…you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink…. however, you can try 🙂
Obviously, both respondents provided helpful feedback to the questions presented. They have very different views regarding education and learning. However, both of them challenge the idea that collaborative effort is easy in a continuous-intake course.
It seems to me that a crucial factor in the notion that past students would want to revisit their work and interact with later students is mentioned in the epigram to the reading for lesson three of this course: curiosity. When assignments push students’ curiosity and help them answer questions they believe are important ones, they will want to see how the answers change over time. Thus, assignments that provoke students’ curiosity are more likely to encourage post-completion interaction.
Another crucial factor goes by the buzzword, authentic. When assignments are authentic, they provide tools and resources that remain valuable to people outside the particular learning environment where they are developed. Because authentic assignments require learners to produce professional practice, and not merely student practice of professional tasks, the product of such assignments have certain essential features that lead to a longer “shelf-life.”
- Since they deal with “real-world” problems, authentic assignments can lead even “newbies” to insights not already known by more experienced professionals. In effect, their naivete may afford students creativity that professionals lack.
- Since such assignments reflect the overall purpose that can draw people into professional practice, more experienced people can be encouraged to lend a hand to students where “textbook” assignments would lack challenge or application in the real world.