Group items tagged

This paper combines two of our course's concerns: the importance of social presence in the online classroom (deNoyelles et al. 2014) and instructional design. It refers to the ADDIE model of instructional design in order to optimize effective social presence in the online classroom, and lists several course design strategies in the final section (pp. 676-678) to increase the student perception of valuable instructor social presence.

A quick read about the nature of presence within online learning and the usefulness of social media platforms therein.

There are some great suggestions and examples of how to use social media to increase the "social presence" element of the online classroom.

Interesting little query.

Reconceptualization of the CoI framework that proposes learning presence as an additional construct in the framework. Reflects the unique contributions of students and teachers and embeds the social dimension as part of each presence (i.e., Social-Learning Presence, Social-Teaching Presence, and Socio-Cognitive Presence).

Kristy, thank you so much for locating and sharing this article and study. It's an important find. I really like the fact that it is hosted within our library system and that the authors are suggesting that the model may need some revisions - there is still much to learn and develop in the digital learning environments. Bookmarked!

"This research study provides new insight into how teachers use social networking sites, such as Twitter, as professional learning networks." Article was published in The Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT).

Following up on Brent's post on Justine Sacco, here is a feature story one of my students wrote last semester on public shaming at Emory. You also can go to her podcast which you might find interesting despite its length and annoying undertone of typing.

Applying the Community of Inquiry Model (Teaching presence, social presence, cognitive presence) to on-line doctoral education. Socialization and mentoring needs identified as rationale for blended designs.

This is an unpublished research article on a model for group work in an online or blended course environment. The two salient points in this article are that the students must have unique skills for the online classroom. First they must be taught how to use the necessary technologies for collaboration and the second is that they must be taught social skills for online collaboration. The first point seems obvious, but I think the second point is often overlooked. We assume that students know how to interact with others, however interacting online is quite different than in person. Therefore these skills must be included in our curriculum.

I'm sharing this slideshow from a presentation I gave last year on Facilitating Metacognition in Asynchronous Online Discussions because 1) the topic is relevant to our discussion this week, and 2) SlideShare is one of our Mashup options in Blackboard. I tested it this week and it shows up well, so wanted to demonstrate for any faculty interested. The analytics are a nice additional feature. FYI for those experimenting with social media ideas with your learners, I have also embedded SlideShare links into Tweets, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that you can view an entire slideshow in a tweet.

The centrality of teaching actively comes up a lot. All is not lost! Teaching presence is the key to social and cognitive presences.

This study affirms the need to attend to individual differences among learners. Whatever technologies we use or approaches we take, we need to keep in mind that there will be significant variation in how students use all these components of the course. Aim too low and we lose the top to boredom. Aim too low and we lose the bottom to confusion. I think this means we need to be reactive and be ready to alter plans and methods as needed. Leah demonstrated this when she made the group project optional.

This article delves deeper into the third part of the COI (cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence) and discusses how this area can be assessed for online learning.

"Technology integration is the use of technology resources -- computers, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, digital cameras, social media platforms and networks, software applications, the Internet, etc. -- in daily classroom practices, and in the management of a school." I found this article helpful largely because it just reiterated that we need to set educational goals and then choose technology which is helpful, not the other way round.

This article provides an overview of the benefits of a "backchannel" (such as Twitter and todaysmeet.com). It also explains ways to go about implementing Twitter into the classroom. Finally, the article touches on digital literacy (also web literacy skills). This article will be particularly useful for M4 and beyond.

This 2002 essay by Wilson and Peterson may be a bit dated, but it is one of the few broadly reflective essays I found on the anthropology of online communities. It is not a "how to" for online teaching, but I think an occasionally more critical, reflective piece can be very useful both for understanding our place in broader social processes related to online learning and in piercing through some of the enthusiastic corporate-talk through which these technologies are presented by our universities. I have included the abstract below. The URL is to the JSTOR site, which you probably need to access through your Emory account. I was not sure how to add a link here that would get you in directly, and that is something I need to follow up on with Leah. Abstract: Information and communication technologies based on the Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices-phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. De- spite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review ex- plores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena.

While this paper set out to discover what activities and/or interaction channels might be expected to lead to more highly engaged student s, what it found was a bit different. After first creating a scale to measure online student engagement, and then surveying 186 students from six campuses in the Midwest, the results indicate that there is no particular activity that will automatically help students to be more engaged in online classes. However, the results also suggest that multiple communication channels may be related to higher engagement and that student-student and instructor-student communication are clearly strongly correlated with higher student engagement with the course, in general. Thus, advice for online instructors is still to use active learning but to be sure to incorporate meaningful and multiple ways of interacting with students and encouraging/requiring students to interact with each other.