Building Community in the Online Classroom, or: Rehumanizing Online Learning

Building Community in the Online Classroom, or: Rehumanizing Online Learning

As the 2013-2014 academic year approaches, I find myself in a situation that is somewhat odd: I’m charged with teaching an advanced composition course to students in the Oxford, MS area, but I’m doing so in an online environment while I work from home in Chattanooga, TN. Creating a sense of community is one of my first goals in a writing classroom, and while I’ve been teaching online courses for the last three years, I find myself really stumped this time around.

In the past, I have taught online classes at a community college located in Chattanooga. The classes have been pre-designed, and I’ve been expected to step in as a TA of sorts. I graded papers, I answered emails, I tended to specific snafus that cropped up, but I wasn’t responsible for any of the design work.

As I stare down the responsibility of designing this class, I find myself looking for reasons to avoid it—and I’m not a procrastinator by nature. Being baffled by this, I spent this past weekend reflecting on my fear of this course and my willingness to put off the responsibility. The most obvious culprit is the blatant responsibility I feel, but my intimidation goes deeper than that. My biggest problem with this course design is that I don’t know how to make a composition course—a course central to the Humanities field—feel like a human experience. I don’t know how to create community in an online writing environment. My past experience with online learning has been primarily humanities courses that study history, art, literature, political movements, and various other facets of what it means to be human. I’ve also taught literature classes that require that the students focus on reading poetry, drama, short stories, and novels. The central elements of these courses require discussion and ask that students challenge their worldviews and try on new theories of what it means to be part of a society. These things require student community, and the community usually crops up on its own without very much prompting from me.

Writing is a comparatively solitary experience for our students, though. The task is so heavy, the assignments so intimidating, and the grading so esoteric that the students are often scared to share their writing with each other and intimidated by the responsibility of sharing feedback with their classmates. As instructors, we see that writing can be a community activity. Going to a coffee shop with a friend to work on writing assignments together can provide a much-needed sounding board and a built-in source of feedback. Reading a colleague’s writing helps that colleague, but it also helps you as you get to see how someone else presents written ideas.

Our students, unfortunately, don’t see it this way, so I’m faced with the challenge of creating a sense of community in an online writing classroom. My first solution was to make sure that I create peer review discussion boards that require regular attention from students and that involve specific responses to classmates’ ideas. While I think this is an important facet of the online classroom, I’m just not sure that weekly discussion boards are the most practical way to ensure engaged student involvement. I’ve seen too many students resort stock responses that stop at “I think this sounds great!” or “I don’t see any problems here!”—especially towards the end of the semester when everyone, including myself, is tired.

Instead, I’m in the process of fleshing out a system that alternates peer review discussion boards and interpersonal verbal interaction between my students and me. Letting the students see my face, hear my voice and verbalize questions are essential elements of keeping the composition classroom humanized and to reminding them that there is a teacher behind a computer screen somewhere invested in their success and hoping to help them grow as writers.

I’ve come up with three specific ideas so far:

1)    Periodically, I will hold online office hours in which students will talk with me via Skype, Google Hangout, or Blackboard chat—a function of Blackboard much like a chatroom which students can log in to and interact with anyone else who is logged in. One day I believe we should be able to require that online students purchase a webcam to use for Skype or Google Hangout meetings. This $15 (approximate) purchase may do more to ensure success in the online classroom than expensive handbooks that include information accessible on free and very reliable websites like Purdue OWL.

2)    When we do have discussion boards, students will be required to reference something we discussed during a previous online meeting to show that they are internalizing the information gained during those meetings.

3)    I plan to post a video (recorded with my cell phone, laptop, or tablet) every week that’s about 2-3 minutes long. These videos will include a description of the reading assignments, the writing goals for the week, and any upcoming due dates, along with a reminder that we have a discussion board or mandatory meetings coming up.

This plan will take some tweaking, but I’m excited to implement it and see what needs to change the next time I teach this course. Any suggestions from readers will be greatly appreciated, so if you have advice you’d like to share with me and our other readers, please do!