how important is it to build a community in an online higher education course

Establishing community helps a group of learners bond and work well together. Community is particularly important in online courses given the potential for students to feel isolated and alone. When we teach online, community forms and happens differently than when we teach onsite because the connection is mediated by technology.

Full Answer

Why is community important in online courses?

Community is particularly important in online courses given the potential for students to feel isolated and alone. When we teach online, community forms and happens differently than when we teach onsite because the connection is mediated by technology.

Why are online courses so popular in higher education?

This is why they are so popular, especially in higher education. In online learning, community participants create an interactive canvas of diverse reactions and feedback. They find ways to explore, to think, to innovate, to develop skills, and to seek conceptual understanding- things they wouldn’t achieve on their own.

Can you build community in an online classroom?

Building community in an online classroom takes time, noted Donovan, and that downside can discourage professors from trying. For one thing, she said, many instructors do not do community building in their face-to-face classrooms, so trying that online might be new and require planning and experimentation.

What is the ideal online learning community?

The ideal online learning community is a safe space for risk taking, vulnerability, and sharing diverse ideas. Faculty and students share responsibility for creating and maintaining this learning environment. To facilitate students engaging with one another, I created a “coffee shop” for my online courses.

What is the importance of building an online learning community?

A learning community makes a huge and memorable impact on a student's experience with your online educational programs. It facilitates a more effective and enjoyable learning experience by helping students apply what they've learned, retain knowledge, and develop relationships.

What are the most important elements in creating and engage in online learning community?

According to Du et al. (2010) , there are 4 elements of online learning communities: interactivity, collaboration, trusting relationship, and communication media.

How do you build a community in higher education?

A Checklist for Building Community in the College ClassroomMake connections with students. ... Be enthusiastic and passionate about the content. ... Build trust. ... Model empathy, kindness, and compassion. ... Empower students through their strengths. ... Consider how students best learn. ... Expect a growth mindset.More items...•

Why is community building important in college?

Research shows that when students feel that they belong to their academic community, that they matter to one another, and that they can find emotional, social, and cognitive support for one another, they are able to engage in dialogue and reflection more actively and take ownership and responsibility of their own ...

How do you build an online class community?

6 Strategies for Building Community in Online CoursesCreate a Plan for Communication.Establish Social Presence.Meet in Real-Time.Create Opportunities for Information and Expertise Sharing.Use Collaborative Learning Techniques.Develop Sub-Communities.

How do we build an online community of learning?

To make them successful, you need to be engaged every step of the way. Know what your members need; understand how their expectations are changing; be available online frequently, so that members can raise their concerns about the community, discuss ideas about improving it, or simply ask for assistance when needed.

How do you build a community?

How to Build a Meaningful (and Massive) Community, From Someone Who's Done it TwiceFind Ways to Support & Celebrate Your Organic Ambassadors. ... Bring Your Followers Into the Business-Building Process. ... Encourage Connections Within Your Community. ... Stay Guided by Your Why.

Why is it important to prioritize building community with people who have different backgrounds and experiences?

It helps make society better The main purpose of building up a community is to make a better society. People will be able to thrive if they live in a society that supports their endeavors. Therefore, participating in community building will help people find a way to make a better society that everyone can thrive in.

How do you build a sense of community?

Researchers identify 4 essential elements that create a sense of community:Mutual interdependence among members.Connectedness & trust.Interactivity.Shared values and goals.

How do you build a student community?

How to Build Community in the ClassroomCreate human values for learning. ... Co-construct behaviors around these values. ... Build culture and climate with goals. ... Develop a shared conflict-resolution language. ... Establish SEL routines. ... Play around with routines during SEL mini-lessons.

How will I benefit from a college community?

Benefits of Community CollegeLower Tuition & Fees. No matter which college you attend or which major you choose, your first two years will mainly consist of the same set of classes. ... Opportunity to Improve Your Transcript. ... Lower Living Costs. ... Greater Flexibility. ... Easier to Work. ... More Support. ... High-Quality Professors.

How do you build community amongst students?

Mostly, these strategies work for any age group.Hold Weekly Class Meetings. A simple but effective way to build classroom community is to hold meetings with your class once a week. ... Focus on Gratitude. ... Work Together Toward a Shared Goal. ... Give Daily Shout-Outs or Compliments. ... Let Students Have a Voice.

Why are online learning communities important?

Online learning communities are essential to achieve a productive online learning environment. This is why they are so popular, especially in higher education. In online learning, community participants create an interactive canvas of diverse reactions and feedback. They find ways to explore, to think, to innovate, to develop skills, ...

Why is it important to have an online class?

During the early part of an online course, it is critical for class members to get to know one another, and learn to share things from an online class community.

Why do instructors struggle to make learners participate in the discussion board?

However, most instructors struggle to make learners participate in the discussion board because learners attend the courses in their time-space. However, there are ways that you can use to gradually establish participation and, in the end, a real sense of community.

What is sharing in learning?

Sharing is thinking together, negotiating, collaborating, and co-creating. These are the main elements of productive communities of learning. The cycles of sharing, commenting, responding, synthesizing among learners promote community-building emotions since learners no longer focus solely on their understanding.

Is e-learning a good thing?

Since the early days of e-learning, its benefits have significantly outweighed those of face-to-face training. The rapid growth of the internet and mobile devices has made e-learning flexible, time-saving, and cost-effective in training. This has highlighted e-learning as an essential part of education market growth.

Is learning a social act?

Learning is a social act by itself. We learn through contact and discourse with another person more competent in the field. Speech and conversation with one another generate knowledge negotiated and subjected to endless talk. However, building an online learning community is neither automatic nor simple to achieve.

Can a community of learners coexist?

As an extension of your course topics, you might like to create a blog outside the course platform, where learners will post articles, reflections, diary entries, images, links to websites, audio, or video clips, etc. A community of learners can co-exist and co-develop in several social means concurrently.

What is the importance of community in online learning?

Building a sense of community amongst your learners in an online course can offer great benefits to your learners and their persistence in your learning experience while also creating a rich, dynamic, and inclusive learning experience with lasting benefits beyond the timeframe of the course. Fostering a sense of community in an online course is ...

What is teaching presence?

Teaching Presence, also commonly referred to as instructor presence, is the primary way that an instructor can influence the sense of community in a course along with students’ perceived learning and satisfaction.

What is cognitive presence?

Cognitive Presence is the process through which students make meaning of and construct their knowledge on a subject or topic. Through critical engagement with the content paired with opportunities to share and build upon their own interpretations and meaning of the content, cognitive presence is fostered.

Is Duke Kunshan University online?

In the face of the current Coronavirus outbreak, Duke Kunshan University (DKU) is moving all classroom instruction online. In order to support this effort, Duke Learning Innovation and DKU’s Center for Teaching and Learning are creating materials to help faculty effectively transition their traditionally in-person courses to an exclusively online environment. We will share some of these materials via our blog in the coming weeks. Read more about the entire effort in this Duke Today article.

Can a faculty transition to online classes?

When faculty first transition traditional classes to online, mostly asynchronous courses, they can find it difficult to conceptualize what the class will be like without in-class time. It’s a good reminder that, even for traditional face-to-face courses, most of students’ engagement with the course materials and activities is asynchronous (outside of the classroom, on their own time).

What is the Community of Inquiry framework?

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) theoretical framework (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2001) is perhaps the best-known and most researched approach to designing learning experiences for the online environment.

What is social presence?

Social presence is defined as students engaging with a learning community where trust has been sufficiently established for students to feel comfortable with risk-taking, and where relationships are built through personal connection with each other and the content.

Does technology create interaction?

While there will be a few technologies mentioned, the technology does not create the interaction nor does it build community. It is all about the task that you, the instructor, design to define the interaction and presences (social, teaching, and cognitive) that are supporting the building of community.

Why is community important in online courses?

Community is particularly important in online courses given the potential for students to feel isolated and alone.

How to promote community in online courses?

There are several strategies we can use to promote community in an online course. 1. Create a Plan for Communication. Communication is essential to community, and it is a good idea to model effective communication from the very start of the course. Create a calendar of when you will contact students, individually or as a group.

What is social presence?

Social presence, or the sense that individuals have that they are interacting with real people, is an important concept for developing community. Several related factors influence social presence.

Why does community form differently when teaching online?

When we teach online, community forms and happens differently than when we teach onsite because the connection is mediated by technology. For example, interactions happen predominantly by text rather than physical presence and there are different markers of who has more or less influence in the group.

What draws us to communities?

One thing that draws us to communities is the rich resources that individuals provide. Providing opportunities for students to share information is a useful strategy for helping to develop community. A few options include:

Is online community better than onsite?

Online, community is not worse than onsite – indeed, some educators argue that connections can be deeper online than onsite – but it is different. The manner in which online community develops, however, has implications for our roles and responsibilities as teachers. It can be challenging to achieve community in an online course ...

What is a community in education?

“Community” is a word that is used liberally in the educational context. Generally speaking, there is a distinction between geographical communities and relational communities (Gusfield, 1975). The former refers to clusters of people sharing and inevitably interacting in a geographical space such as a town or neighbourhood, and the latter refers to groups of people who are drawn together in a relationship due to common interests or goals (even if they do not share a geographical space) such as a disciplinary academic organisation, religious group, or other interest group. In as much as a community is composed of a group of people with shared interests and/or proximity, community has a social (group) and psychological (individual) element to it.

How does online communication contribute to egalitarianism?

We noted that online communication facilitates a measure of egalitarianism because of the lack of immediate access to physical and other socio-economic markers that inevitable influence social perception in face-to-face communication. One of the known instruments in online community research is Rovai’s (2002) Classroom Community Scale (CCS) which consists of two sub-scales, namely “connectedness” and “learning.” Connectedness taps into feelings of belonging, shared values, emotional and intellectual connection. The learning dimension identifies the unique aspect of a classroom as a community formed by the common goal of learning, including incorporating the interactions of both faculty staff and students. Connectedness or sense of belonging is a demonstrably significant part of having a sense of community. However, in face-to-face interactions, often there is an initial phase of introductions and getting to know one another, during which those who are perceived as attractive and/or socially competent have an advantage over others. Kraus (2006) proposes that: People do not simply choose affiliations; they have to negotiate them with others and are positioned within them by others. Their distance to some collective identities or their closeness to others must be expressed by them – and affirmed or rejected by present others. This does not entail the individuals not disposing of concepts of belonging which are available in a specific situation, but rather that belonging must be negotiated, tested, confirmed, rejected or qualified again and again and not simply shown. (p. 109)

Is online learning asynchronous?

The advent of new technologies has facilitated the possibility of education that is outside the face-to-face synchronous classroom; asynchronous education, to be consumed at the convenience of the student. While online learning is arguably limited in its availability to students who have access to technological facilities necessary for this mode of learning, it does present unique opportunities as well as challenges. Research in traditional face-to-face classroom environments demonstrates the merits of collaborative active learning and learning communities that form due to peer-engagement (Buchenroth-Martin, DiMartino, & Martin, 2017; Rojas-Drummond & Mercer, 2003; Vygotsky, 1933/1978). The face-to-face, physical, interpersonal contact that imbues the sense of a learning community in a traditional classroom has been reported as being scarce in the online learning mode (Akyol & Garrison, 2008; McInnerney & Roberts, 2004; Swan, Garrison, & Richardson, 2009). The dilemma facing the modern educator, who is often expected to teach in both on-campus and online learning contexts, is the online application of learning theories that acknowledge the importance of social constructivist learning theories (Herrington & Standen, 2000; Swan et al., 2009).

Building Online Communities

See more on blog.online.colostate.edu

Students Thoughts – Online Learning

Help Build An Online Community