In this topic the focus was shifted from being students/participants to being facilitators where we would try and design an online blended course that would promote student engagement, community and collaborative learning. We discussed about how important it is for the student learning process to feel part of the community, and it is the facilitators roles to engage and bond with students. Academic experiences were shared by the group members and there were members that found it hard to connect with students emotionally as they had limited time with them. Questions were posed of how or where in the classroom situation would the facilitator have time to address the different presences, and also being aware of emotional presence where one could pick up if students are being offended by what you are saying as a facilitator by maybe reading body language. And the question was asked “how do you show a student warmth without crossing a line where that could be perceived as some of harassment?”
The community of inquiry(CoI) was used to develop this course also with the addition of emotional intelligence into the framework. Gilly Salmon and her 5-stage model, for me this model is in a way a perfect example of what we are currently experiencing with the ONL course, we started off not knowing what to expect with moving into the online learning space and now we are gradually moving from stage to stage. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model emphasizes creating an effective learning environment where students feel a connection with other learners and the instructor and engage in well-designed collaborative learning activities. An online community of inquiry is a distinct personal and public search for community, meaning, and understanding. New roles are necessitated by the nature of the communication, which compels students to assume greater responsibility for, and control over, their learning. This model is structured around 3 characteristics:
- Social presence is the ability of participants to project their individual personalities in order to identify and communicate with the community and develop inter-personal relationships. An environment for trust, open communication, and group cohesion is created.
- Cognitive presence has been defined as the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry.
- The third and cohesive element, teaching presence, is associated with the design, facilitation, and direction of a community of inquiry. This unifying force brings together the social and cognitive processes directed to personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile outcomes.
Emotional presence in education and learning
Emotional presence is the outward expression of emotion, affect, and feeling by individuals and among individuals in a community of inquiry, as they relate to and interact with the learning technology, course content, students, and the instructor. While new technologies are often expected to make work easier, they also involve the development of new competencies. This change may, in itself, elicit an emotional response, and, more importantly, emotion may impact the experience of online learning emotions are phases of an individual’s intuitive appraisals either of his own organismic states and urges to act or of the succession of environmental situations in which he finds himself. For some, emotions exist comprehensively in the human experience; to ignore emotion in the human response to internal and external events is to ignore a central element of the human experience. Emotion, therefore, cannot be considered separate from the learning environment ( Cleveland-Innes and Campbell 2012:1). Emotion may constrain learning as a distracter but, if managed, may serve as an enabler in support of thinking, decision making, stimulation, and directing.
References:
Cleveland-Innes, M and Campbell, P. 2012. Emotional Presence, Learning, and the Online Learning Environment. Available at:
Salmon, G (2013) The Five Stage Model. [Homepage] http://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html
