A learning community is an “intentionally developed community that exists to promote and maximize the individual and shared learning of its members. There is ongoing interaction, interplay, and collaboration among the community’s members as they strive for specified common learning goals” (Lenning et al). Rovai suggests that building this kind of community requires four elements:
“… spirit (feeling of bonding), trust (relying on other members), interaction (disclosing personal information and exchanging empathetic messages), and common expectations (committing to shared goals).”
Rovai (2002)
Yet we know that in a remote teaching environment, these can be difficult to nurture. In reflecting on the Spring Term 2020, a team of instructors* in Princeton's Spanish department collaborated to identify the obstacles to creating community in remote courses, and possible approaches to overcoming them. First, the obstacles:
- Even though we can see one another, we cannot feel our presence – and this becomes exacerbated if we cannot see everybody on the screen.
- Some students may not be noticed as much as others, which may result in their feeling isolated.
- This lack of physical presence may lead to limited accountability; student are more easily distracted and may resort to doing other activities online during the class.
- Distractors in the learning environment and physical inactivity while online may result in a shorter attention span.
- “Zoom fatigue” diminishes the participants’ sense of community.
- It is difficult to build rapport, or create the right atmosphere for working together — especially at the beginning of the semester — if students do not know each other.
And then some suggestions for creating a community of learning:
- Spend at least two days at the outset of the course with fun, integrative, get-to-know-you activities.
- Make yourself available through participation in discussion boards and forums, and give detailed assessment feedback.
- Encourage interaction among students, both in the whole group (e.g. the Zoom Main Session) and small groups (i.e., Breakout Rooms).
- Build interactive spaces that are “outside class,” that is, free from content delivery and assessment. Create “water cooler” or “café” discussion boards where students can talk about current events and common interests.
* Adriana Meriño, Iria Gonzalez-Becerra, Perla Masi, Raquel Mattson-Prieto, and Eliot Raynor.
References & Resources
Darby, F. and Lang, J. (2019). Small Teaching Online. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Donovan, J. (2015). The importance of building online learning communities. Colorado State University. Accessed: June 10, 2020.
Guillén, G., Sawin, T. and Avineri, N. (2020). Zooming out of the crisis: Language and human collaboration. Foreign Language Annals, 53, 320-328.
Lenning, O. T., Hill, D. M., Saunders, K. P., Solan, A, and Stokes, A. (2013). Powerful Learning Communities: A Guide to Developing Student, Faculty and Professional Learning Communities to Improve Student Success and Organizational Effectiveness. (Sterling, VA: Stylus).
Meskill, C. and Anthony, N. (2015). Teaching Languages Online (2nd ed.). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
O’Malley, S. (2017) Professors share ideas for building community in online courses. Inside Higher Ed.
Palloff, R. and Pratt, K. (2007). Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classrooms (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Papadopoulou, A. (2020). Learn Worlds: Build Online Community. Accessed: June 10, 2020.
Rovai, A. (2002). Building a sense of community at a distance. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 3(1), 1-16.
Toor, R. (2020). Turns out you can build community in a Zoom classroom. The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23, 2020. Accessed July 13, 2020.