Module 4: Communication and Community

I currently do not teach online courses, so my reflection is more about presence in my face-to-face course and how I might consider each type of presence in an on-line format.

Social Presence: I understand social presence to be the real connections between students and connections between students and the instructor as real people. One example of social presence amongst students is the semester long group project that students develop in weekly small group meetings. This fosters social presence as it involves group work, engagement, decision making, identifying group members strengths and weakness and so on. Such a project would be difficult, I think, to do in an online format unless broken into more discrete tasks where students could work in pairs or small groups. For student-instructor social presence, I always start a course with an introduction about myself – academic and personal background, how I got to where I am and how all this is helpful for their learning. In smaller classes I ask students to do the same introductions so that I can learn who is in the room, where their strengths and limitations are on the course content. I also emphasize that students are there to learn from each other as much as from me. This would be easy to transfer to the on-line environment through voice thread as we did in in EFOT courses.

Cognitive Presence: I understand this to be how students engage with the materials, apply the concepts and check their own learning. Many class assignments would do this as they involve applying concepts learned in an assignment.  One examples – students need to design a research instrument using lectures, weekly readings and examples, then swap this with a partner to critique each others instruments and share their assessment with the partner. This involves active learning by application of skills in design, critique and feedback and includes some social presence.

Teaching Presence:  I understand this refers to an instructors presence (real or virtual) in managing the learning process. In each of my lectures I try to embed small activity to engage the class in what I have just shared – for example, Ask someone to “define the concept of reflexivity in their own words” then ask others to “share examples of how you would use reflexivity in your group project”. Simple exercises so that I can engage with the class, check their understanding, discuss confusing elements, and students can listen to thoughts and struggles of others. I also share lots of anecdotes of field experiences – good and bad – and ask how they would do it differently. Perhaps this also intersects with cognitive presence.  I struggle with how to do an interactive lecture like this online.

Social presence: teacher and students as real persons.

In my fully online doctor or ministry course I believe students have found it easier to perceive me as a real person than I them. In my lectures each week I try to incorporate examples from my own experience. I also lecture from within my study and students have commented on “learning a lot about a person by the art and artifacts in their study.”

One of the assignments in the course requires students to make a 30-minute live audio-video social analysis presentation on their own professional context. This is a time when the student becomes most “real” to me, and perhaps also to classmates, as a three-dimensional person. However, only one or two students do this each week across the semester, which means this is a one-off opportunity and some students are not having this opportunity until the very end of the semester. Another opportunity students have to get to know each other socially is via a facebook site, which I think does work well for this purpose. However, I have not participated in the fb site because 1) I dislike facebook, and 2) I feel my absence there may enhance the students’ social presence there (note: the “presence” language in this context is new to me in this week’s readings, but the concept has been in my thinking about this previously).

I like the idea of using VoiceThread for discussion early in the course to enhance social presence. Perhaps I might have students do one audio discussion post early on, and then one audio-video post a week or two later.

Cognitive presence: students as meaning makers.

One assignment in the course requires student to use interpretive methods from the course to analyze a short ethnographic observation experience in some common social situation such as a high school football game, or a PTA meeting, or even an hour spent in a coffee shop. This explicitly requires students to draw on material from the course to make meaning of (and thereby come to “know” in a new way) everyday life experiences and prepares them for more rigorous analysis of their professional context and experiences later in the course. I like this assignment and think it works well.

Teaching presence: teacher as… teacher.

In a physical classroom I feel comfortably and confidently “present” as a teacher. Online I struggle with this. I find it awkward to record a lecture in front of a computer without any sort of meaningful sense of student presence. I find it even more awkward to lecture live—in which case students are “present” but I cannot readily discern the degree to which they are connected with me, or I with them, which causes me to feel not-entirely-present. I know that my comments in asynchronous discussions and in feedback on assignments can and does advance my teaching presence. But this issue of the lecture remains an important open question for me: how can I (given my particular connection-seeking persona) communicate and teach effectively in an online context?

I have several activities in my courses that fall into the three different levels of presence.

Cognitive Presence: I have several activities where students convey knowledge but the one activity that sticks out where they share knowledge with each other is with discussion posts. I typically post a hopefully thought provoking question that they have to think about and for an evidence based opinion and they are required to comment on at least two other classmates post, which I’m finding to be common. At least with my graduate students, this is going well and they really do their homework with their responses, obviously some better than others.

Teaching Presence:  Since this is really about me as the teacher being present in the course space, I accomplish this a few different ways. One is with an introduction post. Similar to what we have see with these EFOT courses, I have started a discussion board where I give a little information about myself and my background and throw in a few personal details about my kids or pets.

Social Presence:  I think this is best portrayed through my lectures. I use Voicethread as a voiceover tool with my powerpoint lectures. For my nutrition course, I have largely taken my traditional classroom based course and put it online. So, with these voiceovers I feel like I can let my typical lecture style come through in the online space, I can add a little humor, I rarely do retakes so they are getting the real deal as if I was in front of them, minus the questions I typically throw out in a live lecture, I now do this with built in study questions and I give them the answer on the next slide.

 

 

I hope I am understanding this content.  So, here’s my attempt using the EMPH Program Planning Capstone course I taught in the Fall.

In many ways, the completion of the Capstone represents cognitive presence – I think!  Students needed to apply what they had learned in previous classes to the creation of a plan. Weekly discussions challenged students to select a health problem of interest, review the intervention literature on that problem, and apply their learnings to the design an intervention program using a process called Intervention Mapping.  A case study was provided as a model, in addition to examples of key documents, such as a logic model.  Class structure used a combination of weekly discussions/ assignments in which students helped each other with the task (such as creating a logic model or devising a budget), peer review, and instructor feedback.

For teaching presence, I tried to set up the course so that the structure and weekly discussions helped balance instructor feedback with student to student learning. The course requires a 25-page Capstone program plan to be completed by the end of the course.  The weekly discussion questions were designed to build components of the plan and each module represented one of the Capstone’s four parts. If I am understanding this concept, I provided the exercise and structure and feedback at appropriate times to complete the final plan.

For social presence, this was a challenge for me with my online class as the EMPH students are a cohort going through the program together.  As a result, they already know and support each other, and are a very cohesive group.  Since we meet in person at the beginning (and end) of the semester, I created an introduction exercise in which they write down a unique tidbit about themselves on a card. (Examples include: I once shut down the French Embassy (shattered glass gift was mistakenly thought to be an explosive) or I met five first ladies (dad was in the secret service). I collect them and then read them out load and the students have to guess who belongs to what bidbit. I also put in my unique description. (I have won ribbons in the annual Xmas dog parade – see my intro!)  It really worked well, as many of them didn’t know the tidbits about each other, and they also got to know me.

If I’m understanding this element correctly, it’s not just the comfort of interacting and speaking up, but the personal side as well. The dog theme continues throughout the semester, as many of the student were dog or animal lovers and shared the fur kid pictures.

 

Greetings!

To be transparent, blogging is a new activity for me! I am very intrigued by the Community of Inquiry framework, as it makes intuitive sense to me. I went to the site https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/ and pulled the definitions again as my launch point to consider how I currently utilize and can incorporate each type of presence into my online classroom.

Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.” (Garrison, 2009). I think this is most challenging in my fully online, asynchronous course. The challenge extends past creating my own social presence, but also facilitating that among the students. As many are local and in courses together, they may have established relationships, but not necessarily within the course. I did a bio and introduction, including some personal information. I am not the coordinator of this course, so am not the primary driver of our approach. Having said that, my colleague, for whom this is her first online course, is definitely open and willing to learn and collaborate. I try to add humor as well.

For future courses, I would enhance social presence via a more robust introduction at the beginning of the course, using VoiceThread. In addition, I will plan at least 3 synchronous online experiences in addition to the course orientation. To be honest, I think we missed some opportunities for social engagement. I have definite opportunity to improve setting the climate.

Teaching Presence  is the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001). For this, I try to make activities of the student focused at the application or higher level per Bloom’s taxonomy for the modules for which I am responsible. I have encouraged my colleague to do the same. I use various examples to simulate how this content (research, not usually their favorite) will be pertinent to their future practice. I also try to provide clear directions to regulate learning and rubrics for activities and assignments, which require both individual effort and group interaction. We created small groups to better facilitate useful learning. We provide blueprints to guide preparation for exams.

Cognitive Presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001). I think this may be most difficult in my research course. I am most successful at this in staying in close contact during discussions, prodding them to take their original postings to the next level with probing questions, which I may direct at the “original poster” , the respondents, or both. By designing discussions so that students have to post their own responses before seeing or responding to their peers demands their individual effort. This supports discourse, and helps to regulate learning.

I am taking notes to improve the remainder of the semester as well as next year!