Developing groups to teams can be quite a challenge in real life. How much more is it a challenge online? Online learning is really strongly depending on the quality of our personal relationship to the members of the group we are learning in. My personal learning network almost naturally consists of people whom I can swing with. If swinging gets hard, learning gets hard. Honestly is my PLN not exclusively a learning network. It is much rather a multipurpose network. I can work, explore, hang, plan and organize through it. I would consider the members of my PLN to be my friends or close colleagues.
On the other hand, flipping it, all the above activities are in one or another respect also learning experiences. Let’s therefore consider my personal online network my PLN.
When joining online courses however learner groups are often formed without prior knowledge of the teammates among each other. That happens intentionally or not. But working or learning together requires some sort of interpersonal relationship. Relationships have thus to be formed at the beginning and during the learning experience. That can work out fine or not. It is therefore very interesting to explore how relationships and emotions that are necessary to form them, affect online learning experiences and online communication.
In one of the readings for topic 3, Neus Capdeferro and Margarida Romero, in an online course on teaching (published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 2012), looked at what are the factors of online groups that are most likely to lead to frustration and dysfunctional groups when there are common tasks to do.
The learners stated that among others, an imbalance in commitment and mismatch in goals were the main causes of frustration and disagreement. These imbalances lead to frustrations and frustrations lead to drop outs from classes. Social loafing as well as dissatisfied learners are a major source of a hampered learning efficiency. These frustrations could be avoided or even healed if communication of the emotional reaction to them was sufficient. If communication is however dysfunctional it can be more difficult to address controversial issues at a personal level.
An important question therefore is, how emotions are conveyed in an online communication setting and how emotional messages in online communication affect the atmosphere in communicating groups. The first question would thus be, if there are major differences in the communication of emotions in online versus real life face-2-face communication.
Derks and co-authors in a review article in “Computers in Human Behaviors” in 2007, “Science direct” wrote that their findings taken together indicate that emotional communication online and in direct contact are surprisingly similar, and that the direct expression of emotions are even encouraged online.
The next question asked could then be if emotions expressed online will affect others in a specific way?
To that end, Anna Chmiel and co-authors analyzed in a “PLOS-One” published study four million posts from forums and blogs. They grouped them according to their “emotional value”. The data demonstrated: There are emotional expressions of varying intensity. The higher the emotionality was rated, the more posts there were in the threads. They conclude that emotions in group conversations can be induced and modulated by posts, and that the emotional expressiveness is the “fuel” of some Internet communities.
And from my own experience, I can certainly state that I find it very possible to maintain and even develop and maintain friendships from “real life” and make new friends online, even if only temporary or permanent electronic channels are available, indicating a very powerful possibility for emotional communication in online communication and relationships. It is rather a matter of being making myself aware hw important the quality and thereby emotionality of my online communication is in groups that I am not all that familiar with. A bit of formal support in reflecting this aspect with the whole group after an introductory phase to make sure to have everyone on the same page could help that.
In essence it could therefore be very important to integrate reflections on group and emotional communication in curricula of online courses at specific time points to assure that members of learning groups are aware of communication quality and deficits in their groups in order to support them in maintaining a group functionality that allows to address difficult phases and solve issues on the fly.
ONL181-PBL3 topic 3/GTheilmeier
Refs:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563207000866?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563207000866?
http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/rt/printerFriendly/1127/2129
