Online Instructional Effort Measured through the Lens of Teaching Presence in the Commu... - 1 views
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The focus of this paper is teaching presence, which has been defined as “the design, facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile outcomes” (Garrison et al., 2000).
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Instructor teaching presence is hypothesized to be an indicator of online instructional quality. Empirical research has supported this view with evidence indicating strong correlations between the quality of teaching presence and student satisfaction and learning (Bangert, 2008; Picciano, 2002; Shea, Pickett, & Pelz, 2003)
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The third limitation relates to the locus of research investigating teaching presence which has been limited largely to threaded discussions.
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Lastly, a careful review of the original teaching presence indicators developed by Anderson et al. (2001) reveals that they are largely reliant upon the threaded discussion activities of the instructor and thus fall short in identifying and articulating the full range of online collaborative tasks and effort demonstrated by both instructors and students.
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If students’ perceptions indicate that they place a premium on instructor interaction (Anderson, 2003; Shea et al., 2006) instructors must actively manage students’ expectations about the nature of online learning and the role of the instructor in this process. Online instructors can accomplish this by taking the time to communicate that online courses are not teacher-centered models of learning and by explaining the rationale behind student-to-student interaction in negotiating shared meaning through discourse.
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These results suggest that students’ teaching presence may have a “floor” threshold level and when the instructor's participation within the threaded discussion drops to zero students attempt to recreate “instructional equilibrium.”
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When accounting for instructor teaching presence in all areas of a course, we see that there is a certain ebb and flow to teaching presence.
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restricting analysis of teaching presence to discussion areas may present too narrow a view of individual instructor’s effort. Some instructors may take a strategic approach by participating in early discussions to model how to formulate probing questions and by providing direct feedback with the goal of withdrawing once this scaffolding is completed
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These results also document a significant correlation between instructional effort reflected in frequency of teaching presence behaviors and learning outcomes evidence through instructor-assigned grades on closely related assignments.
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Where does teaching presence occur in online courses? 2. How do instructors employ communicative functionality within the course to demonstrate teaching presence? 3. In what ways do students demonstrate teaching presence? 4. Does teaching presence shift over time? 5. Does teaching presence correlate with learning outcomes reflected in instructor-assigned grades?
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In this study we found that the effectiveness of the instructor did not depend on participation within the threaded discussion per se, but that responsiveness and effective interaction with students was carried out through a variety of forums, including the ask-a-question area, email, and other modes of communication. We suggest that benchmarks for effective interaction be communicated to instructors and that institutions provide training and support for online faculty around teaching presence.
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With more than 4 million students enrolled in online courses in the US alone (Allen & Seaman, 2010), it is now time to inquire into the nature of instructional effort in online environments. Reflecting the community of inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) this paper addresses the following questions: How has instructor teaching presence (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001) traditionally been viewed by researchers? What does productive instructor effort look like in an entire course, not just the main threaded discussion? Results suggest that conventional research approaches, based on quantitative content analysis, fail to account for the majority of teaching presence behaviors and thus may significantly under represent productive online instructional effort.