It's All About Community...

This week, we've been asked to reflect on the existence (or lack thereof) of community in our online course experiences. As I sit here thinking about it, I find it hard to generalize about these classes, as each of them has had different levels of community presence. I've only taken three online courses (this one included), and all three were run very differently.

The first was through a professional organization that I belong to, and ran only three weeks. Based on this timeframe, and what we've been discussing this semester, three weeks is not nearly enough time to create a community of learners. There were few (if any) opportunities for personal introductions, and each of us completed individual projects with no peer feedback. In fact, the course could have easily been offered as an unpaced program, because teacher presence was nearly absent.

The second course was definitely a step in the right direction, and was part of the Instructional Design program. We started the semester-long class with personalized introductions that helped to break the ice and help us establish some connection with other students. Something small, but helpful in this was the use of a Google map to visually pinpoint where all of us were from. In addition, as the semseter went on, we partnered up with another student in the class to provide feedback for our final projects. All in all, this offered more opportunities to 'mingle' with classmates. On the other hand, these experiences were limited to the one or two people that we worked with, outside of the discussion groups.

Finally, there's this course. We began with an 'ice breaker' that not only encouraged, but *required* that we interact with each other on a personal level, from the first session. The use of blogs offers a bit less formal opportunity to share our experiences, as well as express individual personalities. In addition, we had the chance to work in a synchronous setting with one of our classmates, and have been given opportunities to work in small groups on the wiki as well as the forthcoming peer review projects. These activities give us a chance to be 'people' instead of just nearly anonymous keystrokes, and also encourage/require working together.

So, as you can see, my experience with online classes have been very different from one another. The only consistent thing that I have been able to see about these classes is that each has become *more* community-based. Now, this could be one of three things... either,

1. each course is better designed for community building than the last, or
2. I'm getting better at participating in an online learning community, or
3. it's a combination of both.

One other observation I made was that there was a lot of talk at the beginning of the semester about the shared Nantucket experience. Those students who had been to one of the summer courses seemed to feel a stronger connection with those that had been there with them. I think that this says something about the nature of community-building activites in an online experience. The more opportunities that students have to independently work together, the better the chance for community to build. Without these experiences, or with too rigid a control over activities, students are simply going through the motions to complete assignments.