Community is a core value at NNU and sets us apart as an institution of higher education.

Community - We believe education flourishes in community. NNU provides a learning and faith community that teaches, challenges and encourages each other through intellectual and spiritual practices. Within covenantal relationships, we express our love for God and others.

A community does not occur naturally without intentional practices to encourage the formation of community. In online classes, it is the instructor's design of activities and interaction that creates community. Regardless of modality, we have the opportunity to build relationships with our students.

NNU's vision is to be a "vibrant educational community." While Title IV regulations can be about compliance, at NNU, it is about good and mission-focused practice. 

Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) developed the Community of Inquiry model to help online instructors design deep and meaningful learning experiences with an emphasis on building community. According to the framework, classes must have the following three elements to create an educational experience: social presence, teacher presence, and cognitive presence.

1. Social presence - a students sense of belonging within the class and is typically generated through student-to-student interactions (i.e., discussion boards, study groups, etc.)
2. Teacher presence - instructor-to-student interactions that design, facilitate, and direct cognitive and social processes necessary to reach the course outcome (i.e., content selection, instructional methods, facilitating the other two types of presentations, etc.)
3. Cognitive presence - student-to-content interaction with the course design that helps students construct and confirm their learning through activities, feedback, and assessment (i.e., aligning course objectives to assessments, how you build each weekly module, etc.)

It is easy to lose sight of how much instructor communication you typically have in a live classroom, and we forget to recreate or replace that interaction within our online courses. Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, and Archer (2001) state that teaching presence in online classes lacks non-verbal communication and interaction between instructor and students. In the absence of that natural in-class communication, online instructors must create that teaching presence in different ways.

Think through what you usually say or do in a face-to-face classroom to orient students to the course and content. Do you also do this in your online classes? For example, if you generally spend a good portion of a class period going through the requirements and expectations for a substantial research paper, you should make sure you have as much detail about that same assignment in your online class. Perhaps that means making a video of you explaining the paper as if you were in class. Another example is if you typically use a seminar style of instruction in-class and that is necessary for students to reach the course goals and objectives, then you should be recreating that seminar discussion in your online class.

References

Anderson, T., Rourke, L., Garrison, D. R., and Archer, W. (2001). Assessing teaching presence in a computer conference environment. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 5(2), 1-17.

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., and Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. 

Quality Matters Online Course Design Standards

Quality Matters™ (QM) is an internationally recognized set of standards for online course design. General Standard 5 aims to assess a course on the learning activities and learner interactions that could be helpful in evaluating online course interactions.

• Standard 5.2 - Learning activities provide opportunities for interaction that support active learning
  • Includes learner-content, learner-instructor, and learner-learner interactions
  • Not about the number of interactions but the quality of interaction
  • Learner-instructor interaction could include an online discussion either synchronous or asynchronous via grade feedback, discussion board, or video conferencing.
• Standard 5.3 - The instructor's plan for interacting with learners during the course is clearly stated.
  • Decide when students should expect to hear from you and clearly state it in the syllabus or at the beginning of the course.
  • Examples of times students may hear from instructors include instructor participation in the discussion boards, weekly announcements, summary feedback to the whole class (versus individual student feedback), and additional feedback on auto-graded quizzes and tests.
  • It is good practice to set expectations of your response time to emails or messages from students.

Online Learning Consortium Quality Course Teaching & Instructional Practice Scorecard

The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) is a leader in online programming and course design. The Quality Course Teaching & Instructional Practice (QCTIP) scorecard includes a section on the instructor's role and class engagement in an online course (p. 3-4).  The standards suggest instructors check the course frequently (5/7 days), uses the online grade book and posts grades promptly, the instructor is flexible and responsive to student needs and outcomes, and regularly provides encouraging feedback. OLC recommends professors demonstrate presence by modeling active engagement frequently throughout the course.

NNU is an institutional member of the Online Learning Consortium and a subscriber to Quality Matters. If you would like to access member resources, please contact the Center for Instructional Design.

Teaching & Learning Center • TLC@nnu.edu • 208.467.8034 • Learning Commons 146