By Carol Hernandez, Ed.D. Senior Instructional Designer Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT)
carol.hernandez@stonybrook.edu
Teaching online requires a reconceptualization of how you will design and deliver your course.
CELT can walk you through all the steps to get your course ready for the online platform. And we can show you ways to create a sense of community where students interact with you, the course content, and (perhaps most importantly) with each other. In a well-designed and well-delivered course, both you and your students will walk away feeling seen, heard, and engaged.
Building a great online course takes some time, but CELT can help.
Join us for the Online Teaching Certificate Course, which starts October 11. You can take it in the 5-week format or the accelerated 2.5-week format. Both are live facilitated by the CELT team members. These multi-week online courses will provide you with basic pedagogical, research-based practices specific to the online space and will assist you in planning instructional activities for your course. We will not focus on how to use Blackboard or Brightspace, but rather how to best use technology to meet your pedagogical goals. These courses will be delivered asynchronously online with one optional synchronous session.
OTC: This is a 5-week asynchronous course. Plan on spending 3-4 hours per week with assignments due weekly. We suggest logging on 4 times/week during this course.
OTC Accelerated: This is a condensed, 2 1/2-week version of the OTC. Plan on spending 6-7 hours weekly with assignments due every 2-3 days. We suggest logging in daily during the course.
Over the past few months as courses have moved from face-to-face to remote online, both faculty and students have had to – for better or for worse – adapt to the new format. Whether moving to remote, synchronous classes or to fully online, asynchronous courses, the transition has many faculty rethinking their course design. Many are reevaluating how they teach their courses and what they need to do to engage students when they may no longer meet at a scheduled time or in a physical space.
Shifting your course from face-to-face to online requires more than just using technologies to move your content online. It requires reflection and careful consideration on how you might adapt and redesign elements of your course to engage students as a community of learners.
One useful model for informing our course (re)design is the Community of Inquiry Framework (CoI) (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000; Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007). A Community of Inquiry is a group of learners who through collaboration and discussion construct meaning and understanding. The CoI framework lays out a collaborative-constructivist approach to the learning experience which consists of three essential and interdependent elements – teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence (Community of Inquiry Framework, n.d.).
Matbury, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Teaching Presence
Within the CoI framework, teaching presence can be established by thoughtful and evidence-based instructional design principles. Careful course design, active facilitation, and direct instruction work together to promote social and cognitive processes to achieve meaningful learning. This requires us to rethink our assumptions about how our courses should be designed and delivered in the online space to engage students. We have to ask ourselves, will what I do in the face-to-face course work well in my online course?
Some factors to consider in the design and implementation of the online course are:
Facilitating student learning through discussion boards/VoiceThreads – giving consideration to the ways you want students to participate and how you will moderate those discussions
Providing students with frequent, timely, and formative feedback
Determining the layout of the course in Blackboard or Learning Management System (LMS) – thinking about how will students engage in the content, where they will find pertinent information, and being explicit about what students need to do to succeed
Social Presence
Garrison (2009, p. 352) describes social presence as “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop interpersonal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.“ With careful consideration and intentional instructional design, we can create and facilitate social presence in an online learning environment.
Some ways we can create social presence are by:
Projecting our teaching persona via regular Blackboard announcements, welcome video and/or course or module overview videos (using Zoom, VoiceThread, or Echo 360) thus modeling behavior for our students
Developing course activities that allow the class to establish trust and rapport facilitated through the use of icebreakers, discussion boards, and group and collaborative assignments and projects
Offering virtual office hours via Zoom
Cognitive Presence
Cognitive presence relates to the extent that learners are able to construct meaning through discourse and reflection. By conveying the big ideas we want students to know and carefully designing activities and assessments around those activities.
Ways to develop cognitive presence are by:
Providing frequent formative assessment and meaningful feedback
Articulating clear and measurable learning objectives for the course and modules
Using a variety of teaching methods, media, and modalities with multiple opportunities for practice and reflection to achieve the learning outcomes
Encourage critical and creative thinking where students question their own assumptions, consider diverse perspectives, and respond to open-ended questions through online discussions and reflections
The CoI can be a useful framework when thinking about (re)designing your online course. If you would like more information about the CoI or you would like to consult with one of our instructional designers to talk about your courses, please contact us at CELT@stonybrook.edu
Garrison, D. R. (2009). Communities of inquiry in online learning. In Encyclopedia of Distance Learning, Second Edition (pp. 352-355). IGI Global.
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The internet and higher education, 2(2-3), 87-105.
Garrison, D. R., & Arbaugh, J. B. (2007). Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. The Internet and higher education, 10(3), 157-172.
