Just now, I got out of an Elluminate session that talked about Social Presence online and how important that is in order to help students succeed in online instruction. Much of what was presented seemed to be common sense to me, but likely there are just as many ways to bring these ideas into practice as there are ideas, but some key points from the presentation – that I got at least while I was debriefing from another meeting – were:
Students fail or struggle online because of:
- Technology overhead
- Role management
- Isolation
- Overextending student resources
I didn’t get the first part of the presentation, just the list, but I can figure that the technology overhead is akin to transactional distance and that will add additional layers of complexity to access content and others in the course. Role management, I’m not sure, but I would think that it’s roles within the course and how well they are defined – how much is the instructor expected to be a mentor, expert or what have you. Isolation is pretty obvious and overextending student resources – I can only guess at this and that would lead me to believe that instructors don’t think about how much they are actually giving the students to do.
Personally, I don’t think these are unique to the online sphere, but they are generally things to think about in any course. The talk then went on to talk about what I see as an interesting paradox – adult learners want to be autonomous, but they enjoy or need collaborative environments. This is certainly something that is a bit of a trick to get around – basically, they want the freedom to roam, but a water cooler to return when they have something to share.
The other point that was mentioned about adults, that I can tell you is likely applicable to kids as well, is that there needs to be a means to transfer the knowledge from the course into the world and then back again. Without this, there is a disconnect – just like IR workers and their widgets – students who can’t see where learning about blah-bitty-blah applies to their lives won’t care.
This not caring is sometimes hard to see online – it’s not one of the emotions that comes across as easily (the presentation had a list), but if there is no care, the student is not emotionally present, and therefore isolated. This emotional presence can be helped by finding ways to connect the students with the content and each other as well. If there is something more than the content that the students can get from the course, that might give them just enough of a push to deal with the content and learn minimally (or better). To accomplish this, the presentation suggested things like posting biographies, instructor introductions, using open discussions and playing icebreaker games.
Once this presence is established, it can be supported by using small learning objects that can be used as prep or reference by the students in a unified learning environment (one stop shop) or as I would suggest, in some manner of castable format that can then be used mlearning style to connect to the real world.
All this ties in (in my mind of course) to a posting on Tomorrow’s Professor about the “Theory into Practice” project that looks to do just that in terms of helping teach about service (Donald W. Harward – Bringing Theory to Practice project – Winter, 2007 Peer Review, Volume 93, Number 1 … bah APA :P) and creating some manner of emotional connection to service in students, again looking at that idea of transfer. From the article:
The development of the “whole person” has traditionally been the goal of liberal education; however, on most campuses today, the “whole person” is fractured into discrete parts. Students themselves are expected to integrate, cumulatively and developmentally, what institutional structures and operations formally divide. By compartmentalizing students’ intellectual, emotional, and ethical lives, colleges and universities dichotomize the various facets of learning. This paradigm of compartmentalized learning is extended to campus life: faculty take care of the intellect, student-services staff and coaches handle the rest. Accordingly, the classroom is regarded as the exclusive setting for “real” learning, which is seen as wholly separate and different from what takes place elsewhere.
…
Many students, faculty, and staff may see no connection between their lives and the problems facing the community, the nation, and the world. They may not feel responsible for others. The many students who today participate in volunteer programs may fail to take action to address the problems they seek temporarily to relieve. In fact, volunteering may reinforce preconceptions and stereotypic beliefs held by students. As D. Tad Roach, headmaster of St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, puts it, “students may volunteer in a soup kitchen, and accumulate hundreds of hours of volunteer service; but if service is not linked with learning, they are likely to understand nothing about the systemic socioeconomic conditions that lead to poverty. And they are, thereby, unprepared to address the desperate need for change.”
This links to what I think is essential to any kind of learning, there must be an emotional response to the content, without that there is nothing. So more important than social presence in my mind would be emotional presence in the classroom, regardless of it’s material status.
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