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In the Beginning:


Not so long ago, one room schoolhouses dotted the countryside. The teachers who manned these schools had to be a jack-of-all-trades. Not only did they need to know how to teach, but they lit the stove, chopped wood, and handled any crises that came up. They also needed to know how to create a community of learners. It was not possible for one teacher to teach everyone at once with several grades needing different lessons. So the teachers would assign older students to help the younger ones.


In some ways, teaching an online class is similar. Being an expert in your field is not enough; now you also need to know how to be everything your students need without ever meeting them. Early online classes often took the “Push approach” to learning. Instructors would basically put information online and students would try to learn it and then take a test. 

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(Kuhlmann, May 19th, 2009)

Now most instructors believe in creating a community of learners who can interact with each other, ask each other questions, support each other, challenge each other, and share knowledge and experiences. This is called creating “social community.”


For this lesson, we will be learning about the social community that online courses create. This page, called “Home,” gives the general definitions and theory concerning this community. The other parts of the lesson are contained on other pages. To access these pages, see the list on the right side and click on the page you are interested in. Throughout the lesson, we will be using the metaphor of a party; you are the host and your students are your guests. Like any good host, there are certain duties you have and ways to make the experience more meaningful and enjoyable for your guests. 

Definitions:

Cognitive presence reflects the abilities of learners to construct meaning though interaction with each other.

Community connects people together. In your class you will try to stimulate relationships between the students and each other as shown in this model from the Visual Thesaurus.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/


Social Presence describes how well students in a class feel there is a connection between them. In the traditional classroom, the next student was an arm’s length away. Now students may be in the same room or on opposite sides of the planet. Part of your job as a teacher/facilitator is to help students feel, on an emotional/social level, as though they are still within an arm’s length away. You need to help them draw lines between each other that they can feel.  If you cannot create this, students may feel frustrated and stressful to the point of having their feelings interfere with their ability to learn.

 http://www.visualthesaurus.com/


Teaching Presence encompasses all of the things you can do to guide students to a personally and educationally meaningful journey through your class. This includes your design of the course, the structuring of the knowledge, and your abilities as a facilitator.

When you put Social Presence, Cognitive Presence and Teaching Presence together, they form the educational experience known as a Community of Inquiry, which is shown here in this diagram.

(Rourke et al., 2001)

The facilitator helps students form a Community of Inquiry that discusses one certain topic or domain. Once the community exists, students have the opportunity to learn to a greater depth because they learn from bouncing ideas off of each other, filling in each others’ gaps of knowledge, and challenging each other to view ideas from new angles.

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Understanding Online Teaching Presence

View more presentations from Alexandra M. Pickett. (You need to be a member of Slideshare.)

This example is an advertisement.  Length 3:29
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Definition of community learning:  Length 3:08
 

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