As an instructor, have you ever created an online discussion area, encouraged discussion amongst the class, yet find that almost no one participates?
Whether it’s a distance education or an on-campus course, more and more instructors at UBC are using online components like WebCT CE and WebCT Vista to supplement their teaching. Currently, UBC is the midst of migrating WebCT CE to WebCT Vista (a transition which began in January 2007). Once the transition is complete, WebCT Vista will be the Learning Management System used at UBC to deliver mixed mode and fully online courses. Its tools allow instructors to present a wide variety of teaching materials (text, audio, video, etc.), facilitate student interaction, and manage grades, all within a secure environment. Instructors may post readings, projects, or assignments online, and often make use of the discussion area to engage students and build an online community. This incorporation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into learning and teaching practices has been noted to foster community development through the facilitation of social interactions. Using ICT can engage students in online conversations, which can lead to a sense of community, but as the heading alludes to, not all attempts at fostering online interaction and cohesive communities are effective.
Dr. Shane Dawson, Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Learning Innovation at Queensland University of Technology, Australia (and as of August 2007, the first postdoctoral fellow with UBC’s Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) has explored the application of ICT usage data as indicators of student community and engagement, and shared his research at a recent Teaching and Learning with Technology session entitled “Evaluating behind closed doors: The application of student online user behaviour to inform and guide teaching practice.”
Fostering an Online Community
Through his research Dr. Dawson has found that Information and Communication Technologies have been used to foster online communities. However, not all attempts at fostering online communities are effective. Dr. Dawson notes that communication is an essential part of a community, and his research data has shown that increased communication is highly correlated to a stronger sense of community. When students are communicating amongst one another, they feel that they are a part of a community. Seems pretty simple right? All you have to do is open up the WebCT CE or WebCT Vista discussion area for students to communicate with one another, and you’ll be well on your way to developing a strong online community. Not so fast. Dr. Dawson’s research also shows that there is no significant relation between forum posts and a stronger sense of community. You can’t simply post a message and hope to foster a community!
Isolated forum contributions (posts that do not generate further discussion, or posts that are not replied to) are a negative indicator of a sense of community. This makes sense, as students are often frustrated when they post questions that go unanswered. On the other hand, high student-to-student interaction is a strong indicator of a high sense of community. Why? It’s because this type of interaction is a dynamic interaction which encourages further postings and responses. High student-to-student interaction connects other students and stimulates more discussion. It’s the old adage “quality over quantity.” A sense of community is dependent on who you talk to and what you say, not how many postings you throw out into the discussion forum.
Why You Should be Interested in Fostering an Online Community
So what does this all mean to you, the instructor? Not all students want to foster a community, and some are perfectly fine going about the coursework on their own. This is true, and perhaps your course pedagogy is not focused on generating large class discussions or community development. However, Dr. Dawson’s research data has shows that increased communication is highly correlated to a stronger sense of community. To go a step further, Dr. Dawson points out that a higher sense of community is linked to higher student satisfaction. If students are more satisfied with your course, they are more likely to engage with the material and are more likely to take more out of the learning experience. A high sense of community = high student satisfaction.
As an instructor, you can use WebCT CE and WebCT Vista to track where students are spending their time when the log-in, how often they log-in, and how often they post messages or replies on the discussion area. This lets you see where most student interaction occurs. If most students spend their time downloading articles and little time in the discussion area, perhaps you might need to rethink the purpose of the discussion area. If you want to have more interaction, you might need to get more involved with the discussion postings, intervening in discussions and trying to encourage more student-to-student interaction on by posing questions of your own on the discussion board and directing students to these questions (rather than opening up the discussion area for students to discuss what they did over the weekend). The beauty of WebCT CE and WebCT Vista, is that it allows you to see in real time what your students are doing online and if they are engaging in many student-to-student discussions – which leads to increased communication, which is correlated to a higher sense of community, which is linked to higher student satisfaction. You don’t have to wait until the end of term evaluation to find out if you are meeting some of your course goals (such as high levels of online discussion).
So how do you create that high sense of community? Simply opening up the discussion forum and encouraging students to talk will not do the trick. Dr. Dawson notes that a common pattern seen in most online class discussion areas is that at the start of term, social interaction is quite high, whereas interaction about the course work is very low and almost non-existent. Around the time of midterms and assignments, this pattern flip-flops. Course work interaction increases while social interaction decreases. At the same time, instructor interaction increases. For the rest of the term, social and course work interaction remain fairly high. What does this all mean? Social interactions may sometimes connect your students, but more often than not, it only connects one or two students together (perhaps with similar interests), and does not generate further discussion for the rest of the class. Social interactions (such as introducing yourself to the class) often do not generate further discussion on their own, and sometimes act as isolated forum contributions. Course work interaction, on the other hand, encourages all students to think and (hopefully) respond with their thoughts. This spawns further discussion, and when instructors intervene and pose new questions to the discussion, it encourages more student-to-student interaction.
Instructors can use this online technology to evaluate the development and progress of student interaction and a sense of community, and can make on-the-fly changes if deemed necessary. More importantly, it gets you, the instructor, to think more about your course and your course delivery. If you don’t see high levels of student interaction until the end of term, perhaps you want to change the order of assignments around a bit. Maybe you want to move up the activity that showed increased levels of student interaction from week 10 to week 3. Maybe you want to try to encourage discussion participation from some students who have not submitted a post yet (with WebCT CE and WebCT Vista, you can see which students are interacting a lot in the discussion area, and which students are not). Students who do not participate might be perfectly fine and might still be engaged in the course work, but what if you could bring in a few of the outlying students, engage them in discussion, and make their learning experience better? You might be able to increase their sense of community, and increase their satisfaction in your course. If you can get students to engage in the course work and actively participate and add new thoughts to discussions, it will make for a better learning experience for everyone.