Thursday, April 2, 2015

Technologies that Promote Social Learning in Online Courses (Part 1)

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I'm sure you've heard the phrase "social learning" being tossed around in the online education discourse for quite sometime. What exactly is social learning? Basically, it is comprised of three situations - 
* students helping one another learn
* students inspiring and motivating each other
* students teaching each other


In the online environment, we are the facilitators and the course designers of the learning space that students find themselves in. To that end, how can we create online learning environments that encourage social learning? In this post, I will talk about the MOST POPULAR course activity that promotes social learning and is the easiest to implement in courses.


Online discussions are a staple technology for online courses and are the most commonly used. They are indeed a favorite online activity for ALL subjects. The question is: how do you get students to learn socially? While there are many ways to do this, the primary ways are through activities that get students to interact on a personal, deeper level with you, the material and with each other. In thinking about this question, I've taken cues from why my students DON'T feel comfortable in a discussion forum and have slowly developed ways to minimize these situations.


Why students don't feel comfortable in discussion forums:

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  • they feel intimidated by speaking in a "public" space
  • they don't feel like they know enough to contribute (i.e. perhaps they are not prepared or don't think they have enough prior knowledge)
  • they are embarrassed by their writing skills (i.e. they write the way they speak, and that's how it comes out)

 
Luckily, there are ways around this that can really help students feel more comfortable about engaging and interacting online. The tips presented below involve human and computer solutions to encouraging students to engage more comfortably in discussion forums.

Human solutions

  • Give students a relevant icebreaker topic where they need to suggest advice or solutions to a common problem. Present a situation and ask students "what would you do?" Any student regardless of their "level of knowledge" can answer this question based on their own life experience.
  • Set up a "collaboration forum" based around an upcoming class assignment such as a midterm, portfolio or final project. Ask students to participate by giving advice to fellow classmates on successfully completing the assignments. This forum is great for the students who act as "leaders" in the discussion forums by making them feel more powerful. A collaboration forum can also help weaker students but giving them a nudge about how to approach an assignment. This encouragement often prompts them to reply by thanking another student or with ideas of their own. Students engage in social learning in this process of motivating and inspiring one another.
  • Divide students into smaller groups to analyze a situation, develop an argument or solution related to a topic. Shy students will feel more comfortable with working with fewer students and will lean on the leaders of the group. This helps them to feel less isolated and empowers them to have an opinion about class topics.

Computer solutions

  • Ask students to use the LMS features to interact on a "1-to-1" level.  Simple features such as avatars (photos), user profiles and direct emails allow students to interact with their fellow classmates on a "1-to-1" level. That way, students see that their classmates are living human beings just like them and not some "entities" out there in cyberspace. Give students an assignment in which they have to engage with another student on a more personal level about a topic. One assignment that I give is to have students pick a person in the class to interview about a topic and then post that interview in a forum. Students tell me that they like this assignment because they get to learn personal things about their classmates that they wouldn't otherwise get to learn.

  • Ask students to collaborate in shared spaces such as Padlet.com, GoogleDrive (for using GoogleDocs), and MindMeister.com. MindMeister is particularly good for course activities that involve learning steps or methods for doing something. The visual nature of these types of spaces gives students the awareness of learning together. Also, most students will embrace using a different way to complete an assignment. I have used the following discussion forum activities in shared spaces --

    -"One thing I've learned about {topic} is..." (Padlet, GoogleDoc with a list for students to add on to)
    -Tips and advice I recommend on {topic}...(Padlet)
    -One reference you must check out on {topic} is...(Padlet, GoogleDoc with a list for students to add on to)
    -Complete a block in the flowchart for {topic}...(MindMeister)

  • Ask students to make audio recordings in technology such as VoiceThread.com or with PowerPoint's narration feature to answer a discussion question. The use of voice can be helpful in dispelling the "anonymous" aspect of students' participation. I find that the iinflections in someone's voice tend to invite other students to respond to a classmate in a way that is not possible with just text.


So, as a course designer and/or facilitator of the online learning environment, you can greatly impact the level of social learning that students will engage in. Research on student success in online education has shown that social learning (often called collaborative learning) is one of the major factors to students' success online. The bottom line is that students who engage more with you, the material and others will have a more enriched learning experience which increases their chances of succeeding.

Click here for Part 2 of this series.

Other Articles Related to this One


Research on Student Success


Other Resources
(*Look at information on technologies such as Google Docs, Padlet, Mindmeister)

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