Community.
Why is community so important for education?
In the graduate seminar on online teaching and learning that I’m teaching this term, we are looking at topics and issues within three contexts: the course context, the instructor context, and the learner context. We’ve just started the instructor context portion of the course, and the first topic up for discussion is “community” - why it’s desirable in education and how to start thinking about it within an online course framework.
Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
When I was setting up the course, I hesitated putting the community topic in the instructor context category. It seems more like a learner context thing: learners come together as a group at the beginning of a term to form a learning community (also known as a class, but that word is a bit passé nowadays), so what does that have to do with the instructor?
Quite a lot, it seems, or so the edupundits would have us believe. A quick explanation of the theory behind the importance of community in helping students learn can be found in Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes by Flower Darby with James M. Lang. It reiterates the growing conviction of many educators that, be it in class or online, “student-to-student interaction helps create new learning.” Discussion forums in online courses are popular because they are go-to place to allow students to interact around the course content and learn with - and from - each other.
The instructor’s role is to provide the conditions and framework for those interactions. That’s why thinking through course design is so important. Discussion forums aren’t the only way to create the conditions for community to form, and as with any repetitive activity, fatigue can set in, which is another reason why many online instructors are now turning to synchronous video sessions to mix it up a little. But that can get old pretty fast, too - Zoom fatigue is a thing - and so the search for new community-building activities in online courses will continue, probably for as long as we have online learning.
I’m a strong believer in facilitating student-to-student interaction, especially when it is centred on the content and themes of the course they’re in. I know from experience that I learn a lot from others, including students; interactions between people as they discuss a topic always yield new insights. But I’ve been somewhat resistant to the notion that it is my job to facilitate course community. More precisely, I’ve been less than willing to accept the responsibility for creating a community feeling in a course. In some courses that comes into being, and in others it doesn’t, and I’ve always just put it down to the make-up of the class in question. I’ve always felt my role as instructor is to focus on two types of expertise: subject expertise (the course content) and teaching expertise (helping students learn about the course content).
In the online classroom, however, community doesn’t just happen the way it might in a face-to-face situation. And if that community feeling enables student learning, I have no objections to thinking about strategies to help students get to know each other and become comfortable working with each other. What I want to avoid, however, is making myself the focal point of the community bonding; that really should be the content of the course and the students’ experience of that content. But it is difficult for instructors to avoid being the centrepiece or lynchpin for the course - they’re the ones who set it up and run it, after all. Some instructors embrace being the focal point of a course and view that as their role, but I think we should try to subvert that as much as we can.
One more point to bring these thoughts to a close: it can be easier to build content- or learning-centred community in an online course than in the classroom. If you’re a student in a 500-person psychology lecture, everything will revolve around the lecture - student-to-student interaction will be limited to saying hi to the person next to you when you sit down. Online tools and environments can bring students together in learning situations in ways not feasible in large lecture halls.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
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