"It Takes a Community…" Building Trust, Presence, and Accountability in Online Learning Environments.”

This session will look at ways to effectively build and support community in online learning environments, using free/inexpensive tools in tandem with your institution’s LMS. Best practices around community building, coupled with purposeful technology use will be the basis of a discussion and demonstration on holistic, community-centered course design.

In any successful community, everyone is accountable for what transpires, as all members have significant contributions that can and should be made. For community building in the online educational world, the question then becomes one of utility - how do we create online communities that allow everyone to contribute and play an active role in their own learning, while designing it in a way where the tools and technologies are not cumbersome and intrusive?

Michael Cennamo, an online teacher and educational technologist, will demonstrate how community, trust, and shared responsibility can be created in an online course. He’ll first outline the various frameworks, models, and ideas that attribute to successful communities, both inside and outside of academia. He’ll then discuss how he applied those ideas into his own online course design. Through years of online teaching iterations, he has formulated 5 ways to better achieve online community, and he’ll demonstrate how they can be easily created and integrated into a holistic and effective course design. Those areas are:

1. Interactive Lectures: With a tool like VoiceThread, lectures cease to be a one-way, passive learning experience. A demonstration of VoiceThread for lecturing will include:

   1. Breaking down lecture content to make it  conducive for optimal student learning

   2. Knowing how and when to use the VoiceThread commenting tools effectively (pen, text, audio, video)

   3. Eliciting student questions, turning the tool into an effective discussion environment

2. Student Teaching: Exceptional work should be showcased, not just graded! Michael will show how to:

   1. Easily set up a tool like VoiceThread in a way that allows students to discuss their most creative work

   2. Allow students to become teachers in the community by eliciting questions, ideas, and feedback from their peers

   3. Create an environment such that everyone contributes to the teaching and learning in the community

3. Reflection Journaling: The metacognitive effects of journaling play a key role in:

   1. Learning new material

   2. Helping to gain more clarity of the material

   3. Becoming better at problem solving

   4. Forming new perspectives

And when the journals are transparent for all in the community to see, it opens a new dimension of insight and support. Several journaling ideas will be discussed and demonstrated - from prompts to tools to grading and feedback. Setting up an environment for journaling can be an effective experience for all community members.

4. Annotated Video Feedback: With a few simple and inexpensive tools like Quicktime Player and Ink2Go, feedback can become a visual experience that students can better utilize and benefit from. The presenter will discuss and show his evolution of feedback - from textual to audio to video - and demonstrate how it has improved the quality of submissions, as well as helping to connect with his students in a richer way, forming a much deeper sense of community in the online classroom.

5. Weekly Anonymous Feedback: End of semester surveys, while informational and helpful, don’t address the needs of students during the semester. Michael will show how he uses weekly Google Forms, easily embedded in the LMS, to uncover problems occurring, allowing him to make adjustments when possible in real time. A course should be a living entity that can be flexible and adapt to the needs of the community; the presenter will demonstrate how he has used the feedback to make changes that have had significant effects on his online courses.

Through this session, the presenter wishes to share his experiences and insight with the OLC  - a tribe that he has often times taken from in the past. He would consider it an honor to be able to give something back to the community.