In the design of my first course, I failed to capitalize on the medium’s potential for promoting the development of a learning community. Online courses provide several venues for development of a learning community, among them asynchronous discussion forums and group projects. In my course, the assignments were all individualized, as were the discussion postings. There were no group projects, since the course lasted only two weeks and I thought there was not enough time to include them.
The closest resemblance to a learning community occurred on two occasions when students posted responses to their classmates’ reflections and observations about lesson planning. The outcome of this activity did not apparently engage students to continue the discussion beyond their responses. They had no motivation for interaction beyond the requirement that they must respond to someone else’s posting.
Once again, students had no model of how effective discussions occur online. They also had no rubric or guide for explaining what was expected in their responses. For example, students were asked to respond to the following prompt:
Based on your experience and your discussion with colleagues, name and discuss one variable that affect how you conduct a lesson plan. Please address the following in your response:
- What is the variable, i.e., time?
- Give an example of when this variable affected how you conducted the lesson plan.
- How did you accommodate this variable when you realized it would have an impact on the plan?
- How would you revise that lesson to accommodate that variable for future use?
There was no explicit direction to respond to their classmate’s postings, so most “discussions” looked like the following:
Student A: A very major variable that impacts on my lesson planning is time. During the school year, students are supposed to attend classes for 180 days, which is 180 hours in each class at Shelby High. However, testing, absences, schedule adjustments, etc., cut deeply into this time. I think of every class period on every day as an opportunity for students to learn new things. When a class is canceled for testing or other reasons, it is a learning opportunity that is lost to students and can’t be recovered. For this reason, it is important to use every day in the best way possible. Classes are in session from first bell to last bell during each class period, and there are no free periods. I plan lessons for each day with the expectation that every day is the most important lesson of the year.
Student B Response: I agree with your perspective of making each day as important as possible. It is unfortunate that this perspective is not always that of everyone else in the school. Wouldn’t it be great if as a school, the decision could be made to limit interruptions, with specific ideas of when, how, and by what means class could be interrupted?!
Sadly, the discussions never extended beyond this level of interaction. Another likely explanation for the sterile discussions comes from the missed opportunity to allow students to get to know one another via their online profiles. Instead of participating as distance education learners, they might have more aptly described as distant learners.
