Engaging Students Online

Building Community Online

You can create cohesive online communities by designing a sense of presence within the course, where you and your students feel connected as a group. Unlike a face-to-face class, presence in an online environment depends on the course design, facilitation of online discourse, focused instruction, and feedback immediacy.

Online learning research by Garrison, Anderson, Archer and Rourke (2007) tells us that there are 3 types of presence, which cultivate an online community when combined together. These presences include:

1. Teaching presence
2. Social presence
3. Cognitive presence

It is essential that online instructors create all 3 types of presence.

Cultivating Teaching Presence

Creating a sense of teaching presence is a matter of allowing your students to feel connected to you and to see you as actively involved in the course learning. It is accomplished through your course design and online teaching methods. Here are a few ways to cultivate your teaching presence.

Create a welcome message.

Use technologies you are comfortable with to create a quick welcome message. Consider creating a video to introduce yourself and to welcome your students to the course. Post your bio and personal photo using the discussion forum tool. Send a welcome email to your students before the course begins, and include a few introductory guidelines for the course. Consider implementing a combination of all three.

Send out weekly communications.

Create weekly wrap ups that could be emailed or posted to your online course highlighting the ideas and questions that emerged over the week’s session. Post weekly discussion forum summaries. Survey students for feedback on what’s going well and what questions they may have. Be sure to close the loop by providing feedback in some manner.

Cultivating Social Presence

Creating a sense of social presence is a matter of designing ways that allow students to feel connected to you and to each other.  Here are a few ways to cultivate social presence in your online course.

Give students the opportunity to lead and nurture online discussions.

As teachers, we often believe we need to be actively involved in online discussions to show our presence and to shape the discussion. However, the more involved we become, the less students take ownership of the discussion. Try monitoring the discussion and interjecting when there is a need for redirection or for sparking further discussion. Also, consider assigning the roles of discussion leader and summarizer to different students throughout the course.