I have been relating this topic to my recent involvement with an online course, which I am developing myself, it’s a very short course based on 4 weeks, one meeting per week and asynchronous work on facebook and whatsapp.
While designing the course the easy part was alignment of the course content activity and assessment. The tricky part came in while dealing with online environment. As it was the first time for me to deal with something like that it posed me to a lot of questions and challenges. The course came right in time, where we explored online and blended learning.
The concept of emotional presence was quite striking. And I kept on thinking how to bring in emotional presence in an online environment. Emotional presence becomes hard when people cannot recognize their emotions but to overcome this, we decided to keep a session by introducing ourselves as organizers sharing bit of our own emotional sides both good and bad. Will planning another thing was the level of digitally literacy our participants have. So, we planned to be directly available for the technological support. Also kept separate sessions for orientation regarding different tools and a full demo on zoom.
Facilitation is a key factor for me, to put down concrete rules , when the participants adhere to the rules then it becomes little less complicated to create the sense of community.
The seven design principles in chapter 1 of Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). were a good tool to help me to use them as a frame work for my own course.
· Design for open communication and trust
· Design for critical reflection and discourse
· Create and sustain sense of community
· Support purposeful inquiry
· Ensure students sustain collaboration
· Ensure that inquiry moves to resolution
· Ensure assessment is congruent with intended learning outcomes
Reference:
Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Edmonton: AU Press
