Creating a Community via CourseNetworking: How a Social Media Platform Can Increase Engagement while Creating an Online Community

Community: A word to describe a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals. This word is one which we, as educators, are extremely familiar with and continuously trying to nurture. Cultivating a strong classroom community is often one of the positives of teaching; having a space that encourages learning, engagement, and excitement over the topic at hand leads to dedicated and involved learners. This sense of community has been shown to have both academic and social benefits for students, found in both online and in-person classrooms (Lai, 2015; Lovitts, 2001; Rovai, 2003). The academic benefits include increased classroom participation and deep learning (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2010), while the social benefits include an increased ability to manage stress and greater overall emotional well-being (Pyhältö, Stubb, & Lonka, 2009; Stubb, Pyhältö, & Lonka, 2011). It also helps with retention; students who feel a sense of community are less likely to drop out of an academic program (Ke & Hoadley, 2009).

However, encouraging a sense of community can be difficult for online students (Ke & Hoadley, 2009). If there are limited opportunities to interact with their classmates in person, students may cite feelings of distance, possibly leading to the undermining of the students’ sense of connection in distance programs (Koslow & Pina, 2015). They may also struggle with creating and maintaining friendships while trying to pursue personal and professional goals in the online program (Conrad, 2005).

Therefore, it falls upon the instructor and instructional designers to create as many opportunities for the facilitation of community as possible. One way to do this is via coursework. Assignments that require peer knowledge sharing can help students create connections online (Waycott, Sheard, Thompson, and Clerehan, 2013), as well as utilizing blogs, wikis, and discussion boards that increase collaboration and peer support (Barak and Rafeli, 2004). Other research findings related to creating online community via course activities include:

• Teaching activities that encourage deep reflection stimulate students’ engagement in the learning community (Shea, Li, and Pickett, 2006).
• Discussion-based strategies in online courses can reduce anxiety and increase participation (Baran, Correia, and Thompson, 2011).
• Small group discussions where students can think deeply and share meaningful insights increase student engagement (Martin and Bolliger, 2018).
• While some online students prefer working independently, many indicate that collaborative activities with peers can increase students’ sense of community (Athens, 2018; Berry, 2017).

Another key to the development of online community is the teaching presence.  The instructor’s ability to facilitate connections online can encourage a positive and supportive community (Garrison et al., 2010). Through connecting with their instructor, the students can also create connections with their peers, if the right opportunities are provided. Utilizing curriculum and instruction to facilitate connections via collaboration, interaction, and reflection, instructors can help students strengthen relationships with peers. Activities that help cultivate openness, trust, and support are critical to supporting students’ sense of community (Berry, 2019). By creating opportunities for students to learn with and from each other, instructors cultivate strong teaching presence, help students develop social presence, and promote students’ cognitive presence (Garrison, 2011).

This leads us to the current way of teaching an online class, done typically via a Learning Management System (LMS).  However, this conventional approach is often limited by its focus on course delivery and management. CourseNetworking not only supports course management, but also generates new learning opportunities with social networking as the foundation for learning.  It is a social learning environment for students to exchange knowledge, resources, and ideas. With CourseNetworking, students become members of a global academic network in which they can connect with students and instructors in the same academic discipline from other institutions and countries in order to increase learning engagement and collaboration. Learning in the Course Networking approach builds upon social networking paradigms to which many college-aged students in particular are accustomed, leading to socially mediated learning that is rewarding, engaging, and entertaining (Jafari and Baylor, 2012).

Several integrated feature sets distinguish the CourseNetworking model from the traditional LMS approach. These feature sets may appear as a set of distinct tools or a new set of features that, when integrated, offer unique functionality that cannot be found in the conventional LMS approach. These include:

• Comprehensive posting and reflection tools allow learners and instructors to create postings with a variety of media attachments, including files, images, YouTube videos, and links. Members with appropriate access permissions can “like” a post or “reflect” upon it.
• A reward system provides reward points or badges to learners as they engage in social learning, knowledge sharing, peer assessments, and collaboration. Such gamification techniques make learning more fun and engaging (Kapp, 2012). Within  CourseNetworking, the Anar feature is a reward system that monitors student activities and offers real‐time points via a smart software agent.   
• An extensive notification system provides notification messages via smart phone, email and the website based on each member's personal settings. With these notification features, members are no longer required to sign into a learning environment to look for assignment due dates or to review classmate reflections on their work.
• Personalized social networking offers the capability of creating learning groups, interest groups, and groups of courses within the same or similar learning categories. Both official instructors and authorized course members can create an online course or a MOOC (Massive Open and Online Course) to be shared with their respective learning communities.
• Course pairing allows for courses to be mapped based on same or similar subject categories. This provides group-to-group social learning opportunities that expand beyond the immediate classroom, providing dynamic networking among learners from courses within different institutions and countries.
• Access control features securely control the access permissions for every post and of personal profile information, allowing the user to define the viewing rights of classmates, students taking similar courses, followers, colleagues, the public, or some combination thereof.  This enables the instructor or course creator to determine whether a course functions as a standalone, closed course (as within a traditional LMS) or as an open course or MOOC, offered to millions throughout the world.

Therefore, in this presentation, an overview of CourseNetworking will be provided, as well as a showcase of its endless possibilities for the online classroom and beyond.

References

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