3 Building Community
Creating a social presence helps to build a sense of community and is an opportunity for instructors, TAs, and students to get to know one another. Building a social presence online is linked with inclusive practices and can improve student learning and satisfaction and instructor satisfaction with a course (Greenler, 2020).
Stoo Sepp, an adjunct professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia, created the following video about teaching presence in an online course. The suggestions are pragmatic and reflect many of the suggestions listed below (see Establishing Teaching Presence for more info).
The following are suggestions and examples from Science faculty and staff of what you might do within your own class to build community. You can also review this short excerpt from the CTLT Online Teaching Program about “Creating a learning community“.
- Show students that you care and are mindful of the current situation we’re in. Within many studies/articles, students appreciate when instructors demonstrate compassion for their experience and learning and even though the course may not run smoothly or be perfect, students are appreciative of the effort of the instructor to do the best they can.
- Send consistent communications to students on a regular basis (e.g. weekly announcements about the course schedule, activities, assessments). Be mindful not to sent too many messages (e.g. daily updates) as this might overwhelm students and be a lot for you to monitor and handle. Students mentioned that they like receiving these messages within Canvas/Piazza and via e-mail so that they don’t miss it.
- Begin your lectures with a casual question or prompt to set a welcoming, interested tone (e.g. Use the lecturing platform chat box or discussion board and ask students what they did on the weekend and/or share what you have been doing for stress relief)
- Depending on the size of your class, you and/or TAs, might want to invite students to an online coffee/tea chat. You can send invites to 10-15 students at a time and let them know it’s an opportunity to talk about the course, your research/teaching, their career goals, and to build community with the students in this remote learning environment.
- Consider having students work in persistent, small groups during and outside of class so that they can work through the material and this situation together. You could have students/groups respond on Canvas regarding their “big questions” about the course or interesting tips/tricks they learned from one another (academic and non-academic).
- Depending on the content of your course, you could engage students in a form of Show and Tell and ask them to bring or take a picture of something from their current environment that relates to the course topic. Students could share these artefacts via video/audio in a synchronous class or could upload an image to Canvas. For example, a Botany instructor asked their students to bring a fermented food to class with them (e.g. kimchi, yogurt, kombucha).
- You could host “watch parties” for documentaries or other relevant media and have a discussion afterwards.
- Leverage humour and creativity by asking students to create course related memes, buttons, comics and/or greeting cards. These could be shared via social media or within Canvas. You could also select your Top 5 and share them with the class.
- Use your social media to post things that are relevant to the class or your discipline in general (e.g. Instagram photos of organisms that you study, webcomics, poetry contests, caption contests, content-related memes).
- Create a discussion thread for students to share general things such as recipes, novels, movies/television shows, games, and apps their enjoying.
References
Greenler, R. (2020). Applying evidence-based inclusive practices to the online synchronous classroom. CIRTL Webinar.