In their framework outlining educational experiences for students, Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) identify and explain the critical elements of a Community of Inquiry that supports instruction and learning. The elements include: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. For online classes, many new online instructors tend to focus on the cognitive presence and teaching presence, and overlook the necessity of the social presence. They’ll build great online modules that help students enhance their understanding of course content but forget to attend to the critical social aspects that engage students and foster community building. While these aspects can happen naturally in face-to-face courses, they must be intentionally built into online classes.

Here are five ways you can build social presence in your online class:

1. Have your online students introduce themselves. This may sound simple but the first module of my online courses asks students to introduce themselves to their peers. I create a discussion board where students share short introductions with the group either through text or through a short multimedia production using Fotobabble, MyBrainShark or some other Web 2.0 tool. I usually try to connect the introductions to course content in some informal way to assess the students’ prior knowledge and experience with the material. More than anything, the introductions are designed to foster open communication amongst students outside of course content.
2. Introduce yourself to your students. When I ask my students to create short introductions of themselves, I offer my own introduction as an example. I also create a short orientation video where I provide an overview of the course and share a little about myself. Presented in a short video where students hear my voice, students can connect with me outside of the written text that I provide for most of the class material.
3. Create a “commons area” for off-topic discussions. In a face-to-face class, it’s easy to engage in off-topic discussions. Students walking into the classroom will argue about last night’s football game, discuss the latest movies, or talk about their favorite music. This type of engagement is extracurricular but it can help students build relationships that are advantageous inside the classroom. Without purposeful inclusion of risk-free environments for sharing, online students’ affective needs will not be met and they may not fully engage with course content or with their classmates. In my online classes, I create a discussion board labeled “Commons Area” or “Water Cooler” and offer some guidance to the purpose of the area. While I’ll often peek in to add a question or respond to a post, I generally give the students some free rein over this forum.
4. Use synchronous tools for office hours. Most course management systems offer chat rooms or synchronous online classrooms as tools for teaching and communication. I schedule online office hours where students can meet with me to discuss course content and ask questions. While not every student takes advantage of the office hours, publishing their availability communicates to students that I am committed to their success in the course.
5. Don’t be the center of every discussion. Many new online instructors try to respond to every post in a discussion board. This habit can actually limit student-to-student interaction and discussion. In a face-to-face class, few instructors would break up lively classroom discussions by evaluating every remark from students. In online classes, however, instructors will do exactly that. Instead of excessively participating in discussion boards, provide some thought-provoking questions and allow the students to discuss course content openly on their own. Offer guidance when necessary and communicate that you’re present in the discussion through carefully chosen posts. Give the students some space to interact with one another and build their understanding through collaborating with their classmates.

References:
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

Note:  This post was originally published on Faculty Focus on May 13, 2013.

As we reached the end of the semester, I asked the students to use data to evaluate their creations and to make recommendations for future improvements.  Rather than give a formal final exam, I decided to invite our school district partners to campus and have my students give presentations.  Some students analyzed the cognitive levels incorporated in the videos and how students were engaged through different manners.  Other groups looked at assessment data from the 4th and 6th graders to see how effective the flipped modules were.  Across the boards, the students in the schools performed as well or better on the assessments from the “flipped unit” as they had on other units during the year.  While this was a pilot study, we’re hoping to expand the project and do more data analysis in the fall.

During the presentations, one of the student groups made a recommendation about the course schedule for the semester.  They felt that certain topics needed to be taught at the start of the semester so they were better prepared for designing and developing their instructional materials.  During the group’s presentation, another student leaned over to me and joked that the group was “throwing me under the bus” in front of our school partners.  I explained that evaluation meant that everyone and everything about the project needed to be evaluated, including my teaching and even the structure of the class.  I explained while it was their “final exam” in the course the evaluation phase of this project is not an ending but the beginning of the cyclical process of refinement and improvement.  While it may be uncomfortable, the groups that evaluated me and my teaching was a critical part of the process.

When I returned to my office later in the evening, I checked my email and found that one of the students from my class had emailed me.

“The final presentations today along with getting feedback from the teachers was really exciting! Today has really made everything feel worthwhile! I knew when we went to the schools to present our mock-ups that this project would be rewarding. This class is prime example of successfully implementing technology to reach higher levels of learning.  Thanks for the opportunity!  Rachel”

Although her email was a much different type of evaluation from the ones shared during the final exam, it is the one I’ll remember the most.

1.  Be patient.  Innovation and learning can take time.  If you give your students an open-ended assignment, there will be times when it seems like students are going down a wrong path or doing something unproductive.  Wait it out and let situations develop.  While I definitely tried to facilitate students’ development throughout the project, I also realized that students needed to learn some lessons on their own.  I patiently allowed some situations to play out so students could benefit from their experiences and learn from their pitfalls.  Their work was stronger and more creative after they had navigated some setbacks and some moments of failure.

2.  Help identify the problems and involve your students in solving them.  The last week of our class has been pretty hectic.  Even though we had reached the end of the project, we encountered a major problem that initially seemed like an insurmountable hurdle.  While I started out trying to solve the problem myself, I realized that my students needed to play a role in crafting the solution.  They needed to see that even the best laid plans often go astray.  They needed to experience the stress that I felt and help me figure out a workable solution.  I walked into class, outlined the situation and had the groups generate solutions.

3.  Trust your students.  The vast majority of my students this semester embraced the process and its messiness.  At the start of the project, I outlined my motivations and explained that I couldn’t predict what would happen.  Even if the assignment was a complete failure, I said, the process would be educational and we’d all learn a lot from the assignment. I realized that I shouldn’t have been so pessimistic.  The students bought into the project and really impressed me.  Trusting my students more would have definitely saved me some sleepless nights.

4.  Model risk-taking and celebrate it when you see it. This entire project was a huge risk for me.  I was working with a local school district and I secretly worried whether my students could live up to the challenge.  In class, I explained to my students the risks involved with the assignment and how important it was as a learner to take risks and learn from the process.  As their instructor, I wanted to demonstrate that I was still embracing risk-taking and learning from the process.  As students took risks in class, I celebrated their work even if they failed.  This helped to show that while I was interested in the outcomes of their labors, I was more concerned with students learning from the process.

Creating offline versions was easy for my students.  Many were able to just save files using the video editors they were using.  Delivering them to our district partners, however, proved a little more challenging.  While the final offline versions weren’t gigantic in size, the University email service wouldn’t allow them to be attached to email.  Our learning management system would not support their sharing, either.  While I could dump all of the files onto a single flash drive and hand deliver them to the partner schools, I wondered whether there might be a technical solution. After some thought, I decided that DropBox would be the ideal tool for this but didn’t want to send DropBox requests to all of the students in my class.  That’s when I came upon DropItToMe.

DropItToMe is a site that allows you to create a password-protected space for students (or others) to upload files directly to your DropBox account.  Of course you’ll need a DropBox account before you set up your DropItToMe space, but the process after that is pretty easy.  First, create an account with DropItToMe and authorize it to access your DropBox account.  If you’re worried about security, DropItToMe doesn’t actually have access to your DropBox files.  The authorization process just gives DropItToMe the ability to upload files.  Which made the Flip Project uploading simple.  I shared the link to my DropItToMe page, gave my students a unique password and then shared their files with me.  I was then able to share the files from my DropBox account with the technology coordinator at our partner district.

DropItToMe is a free service and is really easy to use.  The only real hangup is that the upload process is limited to 75 Mb.  One of the projects in my class exceeded this limit but the rest were able to upload the files easily using DropItToMe.  Almost any file type can be uploaded through DropItToMe which makes it the perfect solution for sharing videos, pictures or documents across classes of students.

1.  Adaptive learning treats students like interchangeable widgets.   While the systems may appear to be static to individual students, adaptive learning leverages academic research in a variety of disciplines (intelligent tutoring systems, machine learning, knowledge space theory, memory retention, cognitive load theory, etc.) to create and deliver personalized learning experiences that are tailored to the varied needs of individual learners.  As students respond to assessment questions, the system adapts to meet their needs.  Different students will have different learning experiences based on their needs.

2.  Adaptive learning employs a “one size fits all” approach.  Looking across the landscape of options, a great deal of variety exists.  In their comprehensive examination of the adaptive learning landscape, Education Growth Advisors found a great deal of variety between the eight different suppliers they studied.  Each of the suppliers offers different support structures, content delivery methods, authoring options and assessment techniques.  With a diverse range of suppliers, individual institutions can select suppliers based of their individual needs and the culture of their campus.

3.  Adaptive learning is anti-teacher.  With content delivery and targeted feedback happening online through complex decision chains, many instructors feel the ultimate goal is to replace the classroom instructor completely.  The reality, however, is that the systems work in concert with the instructor’s role.  In a way, the adaptive learning modules prepare students to enter class and move to higher-order concepts.  The adaptive learning systems also report assessment data to instructors so they can walk into face-to-face environments with information about their students’ ability and progress.  Instructors can then adapt their lesson to better meet the needs of the students.

4.  Adopting adaptive learning systems can be costly.  While some academic publishers are marketing adaptive learning system in conjunction with textbooks, some more inexpensive options exist as well.  For instance, the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) developed by Carnegie Mellon University offers free adaptive course materials on its site.

5.  Institutions have less curricular control when they employ adaptive learning system.  While some suppliers offer closed systems with little options for editing, other systems are much more open to individual instructors and institutions authoring content that fits their needs.  Wondering which system would fit your institution’s needs?  Be sure to check out the institutional decision-making matrix in the Education Growth Advisor report.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

President John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962, at Rice University, Houston, Texas

In his recent Educause article, Josh Jarrett examines the different innovation strategies employed by institutions of higher education.  Of the ones outlined in the article, the concept of the “moonshot” really resonated with me.  Taken from President Kennedy’s iconic speech outlining the mission to the Moon, the moonshot as an innovation strategy involves clearly defining the operational goal yet recognizing the difficulty of the task.  In 1962, President Kennedy outlined the goal “of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” At the time, this was a huge challenge historically and scientifically.  As many people know, the Russians had launched Sputnik into orbit five years earlier and were planning its own mission to the moon. Rather than sit idly by, the President pointed to the heavens and gave a clear destination.  “We choose to go to the moon.”

Examining America’s space program at the time, getting to the moon would be a nearly impossible task for the country.  Sputnik didn’t just mark Russia’s ability to achieve the world’s first artificial satellite; it showed the country’s dominance in space.  Weighing in at 185 lb., Sputnik far outweighed the 4 lb. satellite that America was developing.  How could a country that lagged so far in the space race be the first country to land on the moon? President Kennedy, speaking before Congress, outlined the challenges.  “For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.”  The moon was the goal, Kennedy repeated that day.  And the country got to work.

I think a lot about innovation and the work many of us do in higher education.  In many ways, the traditional academy is being challenged by outside forces.  There are for-profit institutions, online programs, MOOCs, and so many other “disruptions.” Much like America was concerned about its security and its long-term technical competitiveness in 1962, colleges and universities are facing some of the same concerns today.  How should we respond?  Do we hold steady and hope that we’ll weather the storm?  Do we allow our institutions to slowly evolve and transform into some unknown entity that may be more viable in the future? Or do we select some nearly impossible task, define it as our “moonshot” and get to work?  The choice is ours.

It’s important to remember that the “moonshot” involves more than just identifying the destination.  The “moonshot” recognizes that there are challenges ahead and that we’ll learn from the journey.  We just need to select the appropriate target and get to work.

While it’s easy to chalk up students’ absence during office hours to laziness or to their lack of interest or effort, maybe we could be doing more to make ourselves accessible to our students.  With the changing demographics of the student populace and the economy, more students are working to put themselves through college.  Many non-traditional students are juggling family responsibilities as well.  When you also factor in the number of students taking online or blended classes from a distance, it should be no surprise that many students are not attending office hours regularly.  With the technological options at our disposal, there are a variety of ways to support students outside of traditional, face-to-face office hours.  This week, I thought I’d share a few different options I’ve used.

1.  Use Skype.  A few semesters ago, I started including my Skype address on my syllabus and told my students that I could be reached via Skype during my office hours.  While most students haven’t taken advantage of this route, Skype did offer some communication options for those students who had to commute from a great distance.  Instead of driving to campus just to meet with me, they were able to Skype.

2.  Create a Google Hangout.  Google introduced Hangouts a few years ago as an avenue to foster face-to-face interaction with small groups.  With this as the tool’s main motivation, Hangouts work better for meeting with a group of students.  While it’s sometimes hard to get a group of students to visit during traditional office hours, it may be easier to have them join a scheduled Google Hangout.  It can be a little tricky to get started but once everyone is inside Google+, it’s relatively easy to get them into a Hangout together.

3.  Hold office hours in an online classroom.  This semester, I created an online classroom with Blackboard Collaborate and have directed students to meet me in the space when they need help.  Besides voice and video capabilities, Collaborate allows me to share my screen and demonstrate different software steps to students in the online room.  This is a great option when students are having trouble accessing content in an online class or when they’re trying to complete a technology-rich classroom project.

4.  Chat with your students.  While I use the chat rooms that are available inside my institution’s course management system (Desire2Learn), any chat service could be used.  Unlike other technological options, I find that chat room conversations with students are usually short and to the point and great for answering simple questions that students may have.  It can be a little more difficult to explain in-depth, conceptual topics, however.

Truth be told, the benefits of the group wasn’t limited to the ideas we stole from each other.  While we each picked up strategies that improved our teaching, the most beneficial part of the group came from the spirit of inquiry that we had fostered in our group.  We shared articles, discussed ideas, and worked to expand our work with students and improve our teaching.  It was a shared mission, built on trust and professional development.

While we never explicitly used the terminology, my colleagues and I had created a Critical Friends Group (CFG).  In a CFG, small groups of educators gather together to improve their practice through collaborative learning and inquiry.  The term “Critical Friends Group” may in some ways connote a community based on negative evaluations or criticism.  In the CFG framework, however, “critical” is used to denote the essential and powerful nature that the collaborative enterprise can have over an educator’s development and practice.  Formed as reflective, democratic spaces, CFGs are built on trust, mutual respect and a shared objective of improving instruction from collaborating with peers.    Although my colleagues and I formed our CFG to improve our online teaching, Critical Friends Groups are traditionally formed to examine and improve face-to-face instruction.  As our group observed the online classes of our peers, a face-to-face CFG would incorporate classroom observations to give constructive feedback to those educators participating in the group. These observations could be paired with group discussions on practice, ongoing reflective journaling and selecting readings to spark innovation and professional growth.

While most schools mandate some observational processes for faculty, these institutionally governed observations are usually normalized by individual departments or by Faculty Senates.  Rarely do these observations offer the tailored feedback that individual faculty along the developmental spectrum need to improve.  In a CFG, however, the group develops the norms that dictate observations, feedback and other support procedures and can better tailor them to the individual needs of the educators involved.

I realize that the idea of a Critical Friends Group may sound intimidating to some educators.  The key to remember, however, is that the ultimate goal of the group is the professional development of the instructors involved.  When I worked with my CFG partners on improving our online instruction, I found the process tremendously rewarding.  The community helped me grow professionally and it certainly improved my online teaching.  If you’re considering starting a Critical Friends Group, check out the National School Reform Faculty website for some tips.

Despite its potential embarrassing nature, I’m sharing this story as an example and as a comparison point.   I’m not trying to disparage the Twilight books in any way but I want to examine time as a metric.  Looking solely at the time I dedicated to reading the Twilight series, one may conclude that they were challenging.    While the story of Bella, Jacob and Edward was compelling, the time I spent was not that cognitively difficult.   Stephenie Meyer’s writing is crisp and straightforward and the story itself was easily consumed.  Despite dedicating weeks to read the books, I never felt mentally taxed.  While I was absolutely entertained by the books, I don’t know how much I grew personally from the process.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately, specifically how time is used to evaluate instructional rigor. Somehow, over the course of history in higher education, time in seats became the measure for the rigor of courses in the academy.  A course that required five hours a week to complete is considered more rigorous than one that requires three hours.  Using that view of class time solely, the process of reading the Twilight series would be considered more rigorous than reading a book like The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Friere.  At 186 pages, Friere’s revolutionary examination of education took me a few days to read initially but has taken me years to fully understand.  Clearly, learning is not just about time in seats.

The great thing is that in this world of flipped classes, blended courses and online instruction, time in seats is harder to measure.  This difficulty is forcing us to re-examine instruction and learning and how we value and evaluate its worth and rigor.  This weekend, I co-facilitated a workshop on Blended Course Design.  Time was on everyone’s mind.  The participants wanted to know what percentage of time should a blended course still meet in a face-to-face environment.  While I provided some national data on the issue, I explained that some of it would depend on the course and the learners.  While this made sense to the group, some attendees still worried that a course could be devalued in some way if they didn’t consistently meet during the semester.  Others wondered if their institutions would reduce credit hours if a class didn’t mean in a face-to-face format as often.

I explained that stopwatches and clocks can’t really measure learning.  As educators, we should value the rigor of a course not by the time spent in classrooms but by the cognitive difficulty of the concept and the amount of learning that has occurred.  By the end of the workshop, I could see that the participants were beginning to change their perceptions on time and rigor.  One participant described not wanting to be “a prisoner of time” and another lamented about “time being in the driver’s seat.”  While time will always be a pressing issue, we need to sever the unnatural fusion between time in seats and rigor.  After all, it’s not about the time but the learning.

In reviewing proposals for the The Teaching Professor Technology Conference, I came across an article from the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching that might help.  The article outlined research conducted with students in an online Educational Psychology course and discussed the use of a four-question strategy for discussion forums. The four-question strategy was originally developed by Dietz-Uhler and Lanter (2009) for use in a face-to-face psychology course but the JOLT study translated the questions to online discussions.  In the strategy, students are asked to answer four questions when they post to online discussions.  These questions include:

1.  Identify one important concept, research finding, theory, or idea they learned while completing this activity.

2. Why is this concept, research finding, theory, or idea important?

3.  How does this concept, research finding, theory, or idea apply to some aspect of your life?

Understanding Plagiarism:

Indiana University has created a tremendous tool for educating faculty and students on plagiarism.  Offered through case studies with in-depth explanations, the site can help students and instructors better recognize and avoid plagiarism.  The site also offers a ten question quiz and certification process that would be great to use with students in any course that is writing intensive.  Students could complete the tutorial and the quiz and print off their certification to confirm that they understand plagiarism and how to avoid it.

Sources in Student Writing:

Turnitin is one of the leading tools for plagiarism detection.  At our institution, Turnitin is built into our course management system (CMS) to provide easy analysis for student papers submitted through the CMS’s electronic drop-box.  Besides reporting on plagiarism issues in papers, Turnitin has also been analyzing the papers to look for trends in the types of sources students are citing in their papers.  In this white paper, they identify the top paper mills, cheat sites and social networks students are using when crafting their papers.

Online Classes See Cheating Go High-Tech:

The Chronicle of Higher Education shared an article last summer that examined some of the ways that students are cheating online.  In this article, four students used Google Docs to share quiz questions from an online class.  The article offers an interesting lens into how students are “gaming the system” and cheating in online classes.

Essential Way to Prevent Cheating in Online Assessments:

Our group discussed ways to craft online quizzes and exams to decrease the likelihood of cheating.  Our solutions included decreasing the window for students to take online assessments, randomizing question order and building a comprehensive test bank with a variety of questions.  In this blog post from ProProfs, the authors share a variety of other ways to prevent cheating on online assessments.

Cheating with a Soda Bottle:

Our group also discussed how students are cheating in face-to-face classes through the use of high-tech cheat sheets.  In this video, a student demonstrates step by step how to scan a soda bottle wrapper to create a crib sheet.  While the technical aspect of the video is pretty simple, it is a little disheartening that the tutorial has been viewed almost 100,000 times.

Monitoring Online Testing:

After discussing some recent issues on campus, our group also discussed prevention methods.  A few faculty members commented that schools were adopting webcam solutions where students were monitored as they completed online exams.  In this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, efforts from Western Governors University are discussed.  While the implementation of such a system would greatly depend on the number of students taking online classes at an individual institution, the program offers a window into how some schools are using technology to prevent cheating.

From an assessment standpoint, I understand the desire to require students to comment before being able to read the submissions of classmates.  As instructors, we assign course materials (videos, readings, etc.) and we want to assess whether students have read and understood the content.  We also want students to take a position and critically analyze the content.  By having students “comment first,” we have the ability to assess whether the students have interacted with and analyzed the course materials.  Without the “comment first” feature, some complacent students may try to avoid interacting with course materials completely and simply use the comments from their peers to craft their own.

When I tried out the “comment first” feature with a recent online class, my students hated it.  Many expressed anger at not being able to see their classmates’ comments and argued that seeing how other people interpreted course material helped them better understand the content themselves.  While I am a strong advocate for leveraging the social nature of learning in my classes, I explained that I wasn’t necessarily grading their first comment but I wanted to see the progression and evolution that resulted from interacting with classmates and with me in the discussion forum.  I want to see real debates and discussions in my online classes and feel that open discussions can often have a normalizing factor.  In an open discussion without the “comment first” feature, the first couple posts set the tone for the rest of the discussion.  By building a commenting first aspect into the discussion, I was able to see what my students initially thought before they interacted with their classmates.  This could potentially decrease the normalizing effect and help the students think for themselves, at least initially.

This weekend, I read an article in the New York Times which echoed this stance on “commenting first.”  Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison examined comments left on a fictional news article and studied how the comments shaped readers’ interpretation of the news.  Groups of participants read a news article on the potential benefits and risks of a new nanotechnology product.   When presented with comments that were critical of the benefits of the nanotechnology and uncivil in nature, participants interpreted the news more negatively.  The “comments not only polarized the readers,” the researchers write “but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.”  While the research only examined the civility of comments and the reactions of participants to these comments, the end result was clear.  Comments impact how the readers analyzed the news.  The same effect could occur in our classes with open discussions.  The “comment first” feature could diminish this effect by forcing students to draw their own conclusions and interpretations before interacting with the comments from their peers.    At the very least, the “comment first” feature deserves more examination pedagogically.