Facilitating Community in Online Programs for Adult Learners: Taking a Systematic Approach

This session explores approaches to facilitating the development of a community experience in online graduate programs for adult learners. Using reflections collected from the first cohort of the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Health Care Innovation, as well as our pilot certificate program, we examine some of the successes and challenges in generating cohesiveness and collaboration in an online setting geared toward full-time working professionals. And we use that overview as a catalyst for a structured conversation among session attendees about the elements of effective community-building activities, and how designers and administrators can take a more intentional approach to integrating those elements into courses and program-level events.

A strong community is a key element of most graduate experiences. Developing a professional network, a pool of future collaborators, and (indeed) lifelong friendships provides graduate programs with value beyond the immediacy of specialized disciplinary knowledge. But this aspect of the graduate experience can be challenging to achieve online. As Janet Reilly and her collaborators explain in their 2012 article, “Me and My Computer,” online learning can lead to a sense of isolation and uncertainty. And in an environment where attrition may already present a problem, this constitutes an institutional challenge, as well.

The challenge, in part, is that online learners are likely to be geographically dispersed, and for adult learners especially, school may be just one compartmentalized aspect of an already busy life. In a face-to-face setting, casual social contact such as department picnics or breaks during a class period provide much of the soil in which community germinates. But those casual contacts depend on regular proximity and easy synchronicity. Absent those two elements, course and program designers must look for alternate arrangements to achieve the same ends.

In the case of the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Health Care Innovation, and the pilot certificate program that preceded it, activities designed with facilitating community as one of their goals have included:

• A residential component (2 in-person seminars in 18 months).
• The use of discussion boards that emphasize peer contact and peer learning.
• Faculty-directed interactions, including weekly synchronous sessions and asynchronous multimedia interactions through VoiceThread.
• Peer feedback on written work, both within courses and as part of the capstone process.
• Frequent interactions with faculty capstone advisors, teaching faculty, teaching assistants, and program staff.

In many respects, this approach has mirrored the one that Tisdell, et al. lay out in their 2004 article, “Cohort Learning in Graduate Higher Education.” This includes dual-purpose activities that emphasize interaction while forwarding the pedagogical ends of courses. But in our case, this approach has been at least partly ad hoc, inserting community-building elements according to the dictates of common sense, without a systematic framework.

Given that community is an important element of the student experience, a more intentional approach seems appropriate. In his 2002 article, “Building a Sense of Community at a Distance,” Alfred Rovai provides a starting point, contending that the essence of community is more complex than just proximity and frequency of contact. He writes that “classroom community can be constitutively defined in terms of four dimensions”:

• Spirit, which he defines as “recognition of membership in a community and the feelings of friendship, cohesion, and bonding that develop among learners” (4).
• Trust, which is learners’ belief that their colleagues are credible and benevolent partners in the learning process.
• Interaction, which must emphasize quality and cannot be exclusively task-driven.
• The common experience of learning – a recognition among all members of the classroom community that they share values and goals.

This session asks attendees to consider collaboratively how these four dimensions can serve as a launchpad for intentional community building at the course and program levels. In groups, we will encourage attendees to discuss:

• What elements in designers’ toolboxes can facilitate community spirit?
• How can we build trust among learners before they are asked to critique each other’s work?
• How can we create opportunities for interaction that are technologically streamlined and pedagogically useful, but not necessarily task-driven?
• How can we instill a sense in learners (and faculty) of common purpose and common experience?

And then we will work together to synthesize a thumbnail set of practical best practices than can inform attendees’ work moving forward. By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

• Identify the stakes in developing an experience of community among adult learners in online graduate programs.
• Describe the challenges and opportunities in taking an intentional approach to community-building.
• Apply a framework for understanding the structure of classroom community to generating and revising course- and program-level activities.
• Develop a sense of community among session attendees, with the goal of carrying these connections into contexts beyond OLC Accelerate.

Works Cited

Reilly, Janet Resop, Susan Gallagher-Lepak, and Cheryl Killion. “‘Me and My Computer’: Emotional Factors in Online Learning.” Nursing Education Perspectives 33, no. 2 (April 2012): 100+.

Rovai, Alfred P. “Building Sense of Community at a Distance.” The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 3, no. 1 (April 1, 2002).

Tisdell, Elizabeth J., Gabriele I. E. Strohschen, Mary Lynn Carver, Pam Corrigan, Janet Nash, Mary Nelson, Mike Royer, Robin Strom-Mackey, and Marguerite O’Connor. “Cohort Learning Online in Graduate Higher Education: Constructing Knowledge in Cyber Community.” Journal of Educational Technology & Society 7, no. 1 (2004): 115–27.