There's a friend of mine, named Terri O'Fallon, who has been teaching online courses for graduate student cohorts, that are involved in a learning community lasting over extended periods of time (1-2 years). Terri says she knows a learning community is "taking hold" when she can sense an overall feeling of comfort and camaraderie. She says this is not unlike getting to know a friend over time. In the cohort, participants are initially superficial and formal, but gradually move into discussions having greater range and depth, when things are going well. This is her touchstone for a successful program.
I'm not sure the sheer number of posts is necessarily the best way to measure effective student learning. You can assign a grade to discussion assignments, and that will always be a motivator to participate - but I think working towards a thriving community with all cylinders firing - requires building the right conditions for rapport and engagement to take place. That's a much trickier prospect, and I'm not sure you can always be successful within the short span of a quarter.

Thanks for posting this, Mary Ann and Joy... I just hope that we don't all end up teaching only online courses - or worse... being replaced by next-Gen forms of fully automated artificial intelligence instructors :)

Last night I had a great conversation with Jennifer during her office hour on Elluminate (Thursdays from 8-9PM). This was a very valuable experience for me! Jennifer gave me an overview of Elluminate, and then proceeded to demonstrate screen sharing by showing me how she makes use of Twitter to filter information, and connect with a wide variety of different communities of interest. The demo itself, which allowed me to view her screen while she surfed the Web, was a great example of one useful form of real-time online instruction. I filled up two full pages of notes during our conversation, with a wide variety of links and keywords to investigate over the next week.
Today, in a subsequent email conversation, Jennifer generously has offered to cover the Twitter overview next Thursday during her class office hour. I think you'll find this as valuable as I have - and I'm planning to rejoin her next week during another live class session. I hope you all can make it!

Here's the link to the Elluminate session:
Thursdays 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM in Elluminate Live! : http://bit.ly/EDUC251

Helen,

Thanks for your information about the collaborative media app, Voice Thread. I'll have to check it out!

In this week's module overview, Jennifer posted some general outcomes/objectives. Two of them are the following:

1)What are the teaching and learning metaphors that can help me find my voice in online teaching and learning? and 2) Identify several teaching metaphors that describe online teaching.

So, putting on my metaphor cap, I came up with a few ideas that are my early attempts to model and understand this new Web-augmented teaching and/or facilitating situation that we're now having to come to grips with.

It's in the form of a short narrated slide show. I'll be curious to see what you think, or what metaphors you've been considering in your teaching.

I really enjoy Joy's description of teaching as a magic act, in this case giving students the tools and skills for creating their own "magic" events.
Jennifer, I for the slide show I used a free (for educational use) online program called Prezi (prezi.com). I then brought it into Camtasia (the same program as Jing) to create the narration, clean up the pauses/glitches, and post to the Web.
I really love these new presentation tools coming onto the scene!

Bruce

Jennifer,

Almost forgot... please feel free to use the slide show if you think it's useful...

One article that had a big impact on how I'm now thinking about Web-enhanced teaching / learning comes from Henry Jenkins, talking about "participatory culture". It's available at: http://tinyurl.com/63pmfm