As an experienced online teacher, I have long felt that synchronous pedagogy can be as effective, fulfilling and exciting in a technology-mediated environment as it can be in a face-to-face classroom setting. However, full disclosure, my experience with the asynchronous components has been a bit more challenging. I’ve set out this semester trying to understand a bit better some of the theoretical considerations in an effort to design better asynchronous experiences for my students.
This isn’t a literature I know well, and I’ve enjoyed reading more about the type of research being done in this area.
One concept that I’ve come across in a number of settings, and that I think is worth sharing, is social presence. As with many constructs, the definition here is a bit ambiguous and there seems to be no shortage of interpretations, both generally and within the context of higher education and online learning. A reasonable approximation uses the notion of “reality” in the sense that social presence captures the extent to which one sees herself as a “real person” in a learning context (Garrison and Anderson 2003). One immediate potential implication of this idea is that “interaction” or “feedback” are critical to positive outcomes in an online setting. After all, if I’m being responded to, I must be real. However, in practice, instructor and/or peer feedback are helpful but not sufficient in generating a sense of social presence. As Cathy Barnes argues in this fascinating chapter on the role of online instructors:
A strong community is imperative in higher education learning and helps reduce feelings of isolation in online learning. Characteristics of a learning community include students’ sense of trust, belonging and mutual interdependence, and shared educational goals through interaction with other course participants (Rovai, 2002). Students establish their own social presence through sharing of personal experiences related to the course subject matter within a section or an entire course (Kilgore & Lowenthal, 2015).
I think these ideas around trust and, especially, sharing of personal course-related experiences are particularly important. The standard approach of asking students to respond to a specific instructor-generated prompt and to then respond to some fixed number of other students’ posts seems to me to be a bit too structured to foster the development of the types of connections (inter-student, student-faculty, student material) we see in face-to-face settings and are hoping to replicate in some magnitude online.
My plan this year is to try to remove some of this structure, to allow students to have more say in the content of these online discussions. One idea that I plan to try out comes from a chapter I came across, by chapter by Joanna Dunlap and Patrick Lowenthal. They propose allowing students to define their own discussion threads based on what they find interesting/important over a given week, or module. I suspect they’re right and that the agency with which this endows the students may help, again, enhance the sense of social presence they each experience by making tangible their connection to, and responsibility for, the learning of others in the community. I’m excited to see how it works!
Please share any innovative approaches you’ve tried in an effort to generate deeper and more-meaningful online discussions. I’d love to hear them.