The covid-19 pandemic forced the lockdown of entire countries moved any activities that could be done without physical access into the online domain. Teaching was one of the first to move online from primary schools through to universities. Despite significant prior opposition to moving traditional campus-based teaching online, nearly everyone was forced to migrate teaching into an online space. There are now discussions within traditional universities about the value of online teaching, and how we can improve the learning experience for students in online learning. I took up a position as a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, only 2 weeks before the was declared as an epidemic. I then started co-ordinating my first fully online subject in second semester 2020. From the quick literature review (Kerrie, Bremel, Alam, & Madhavan, 2016; Nejkovic & Tosic, 2018; Phan, McNeil, & Bernard , 2016) (Nejkovic & Tosic, 2018), subjective inputs from colleagues and feedback from students (UNSW, 2020; Zentari, et al., 2020), it was obvious that one big barrier in the widespread acceptance and ongoing use is the building of a community of engaged and motivated learners. The big questions are can online learning/teaching overcome its biggest barrier of engaging and motivating a community of learners and what is the role of a lecturer in the context of online learning.

In 2020, I enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in University Teaching and was studying a new subject Facilitating Online Learning – EDUC90970 coordinated by Prof Thomas Cochrane. One significant aspect of this subject was on building a community of inquiry (COI) (Garrison, 2007). The idea of the community of inquiry is growing in popularity as it provides a Community-centered (Student-centered) framework. In the subject, we also looked at, several tools or the ecology of resources that could be used and how best to use it. We now have exposure to a nearly unlimited number of tools to help, but which ones to use and how to use it optimally? The two topics are related and the second (tools) are integral to making the COI achieve their outcomes. The subject incorporated the idea of COI and used the different tools to facilitate this as well as student lead presentations.

The idea of the community of inquiry is increasing in popularity of a community-centred framework where students can engage with peers and the lecturers (Shea & Bidjerano, 2008). The COI is often demonstrated with a diagram showing overlapping domains of social presence, teaching presence and cognitive presence (Garrison, 2007) with equal weighting given to the different domains. In earlier blog posts, I explored the ideas of :

1. Co-dependence within the domains (Shea, et al., 2014).
2. An additional domain of ‘Learner Presence’ (Shea, et al., 2014).
3. That there needed to be differing weightings between different domains.

I present in the blog that Social presence was the biggest factor in improving motivation and engagement in students (Nejkovic & Tosic, 2018; Kerrie, Bremel, Alam, & Madhavan, 2016; Shea, et al., 2014) and that the social presence is intertwined in all other domains and therefore requires a realignment of the COI. Towards the end of the subject, we each created a prototype subject curriculum considering these learnings. The online curriculum included all tools and how they would be used in the subject. I used some of the aspects I learned in the subject I taught in semester 2, 2020 particularly, looking at improving social presence. I also designed my new/modified subject based on this as well as some learning from semester 2, 2020. From my experience of teaching in semester 2, 2020, I am not more confident that one of the most influential parts of university learning is the social influence of peers. However, I also found that:

1. Negative influences/influencers were louder than the positive influences/ influencers.
   1. Changing the way, we teach is only one side of the story, students are used to learning a particular way and like all people, students resist change.
   1. When changing the way, we teach we need to consider how this impacts the students when they need to change the way they learn.
   1. For a vast majority of students, online learning is a poor substitute for in-class/in-person interaction.
2. Many of the social interaction occurs outside class and not in the presence of the lecturers.
   1. Students have their social groups outside class on Facebook or other social media platforms.
   1. We need to consider how we see social interaction in class.
   1. Social interaction in class, cannot replace out of class interactions but hopefully, we can find a way to helps students initiate meaningful interactions that need to be taken out of class.

The Facilitating Online Learning – EDUC90970, was useful in considering how to include a good ecology of resources into online learning and how to build a community of inquiry. One aspect that could be improved is the use of student presentations. There were a lot of presentations not all were well thought through, and it did not lead to meaningful interactions out of class. The requirement for blog posts and responses both good and bad. Nearly all the blog posts I read were helpful and my comments to the blog posts also helped me understand my pedagogical pre-dispositions and evolution. But there were many blog posts from students, some were repeating topics between students and we didn’t get to read and comment on all of them. It would be useful to reduce the number of blog posts and increase the responses/comments so we can read more. Possible another thing that can be considered is team blogs, but it may not fit with the trajectory of the course in making blogs available online.

References

Brown, K. (2020, January 08). United Nations Foundation. Retrieved from https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/5-global-issues-to-watch-in-2020/

Cooper, M. (2005). Remote laboratories in teaching and learning – issues impinging on widespread adoption in. International Journal of Online Engineering, 1(1).

Crawford, J., Butler-Henderson, K., Rudolph, J., Glowatz, M., Matt, G., Rob, B., . . . Sophia, L. (2020). COVID-19: 20 Countries’ Higher Education Intra-Period Digital Pedagogy Responses. Journal of Applied Teaching and Learning.

Garrison, D. R. (2007). Online community of inquiry review: Social, cognitive, and teaching presence issues. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks,, 11(1), 61-72.

Kerrie, D. A., Bremel, P., Alam, M., & Madhavan, K. (2016). Big Data Characterization of Learner Behaviour in a Highly Technical MOOC Engineering Course. Journal of Learning Analytics, 3(3), 170-192.

Lawton, D. V. (2012). Online learning based on essential concepts and formative assessment. Journal of Engineering Education, 101(2), 244-287.

Nejkovic, V., & Tosic, M. (2018). Exploring factors for effective use of online information in SPOC within the engineering education. Computer Applications in Engineering Education, 26(5), 1457-1469.

Phan, T., McNeil, S. G., & Bernard , R. R. (2016). Students’ patterns of engagement and course performance in a Massive Open Online Course. Computers & Education, 95, 36-44.

Potkonjak, V. G. (2016). Virtual laboratories for education in science, technology, and engineering: A review. Computers & Education, 95, 309-327.

Rizzardini, R. H., & Amado-Salvatierra, H. R. (2018). Exploring New Ways to Increase Engagement in Full-Path MOOC Programs. International Conference on Learning and Collaboration Technologies (pp. 16-25). Springer.

Shea, P., & Bidjerano, T. (2008). Community of inquiry as a theoretical framework to foster “epistemic engagement” and “cognitive presence” in online education. Computers & Education, 52(3), 543-553. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2008.10.007

Shea, P., Hayes, S., Uzuner-Smith, S., Gozza-Cohen, M., Vickers, J., & Bidjeranof, T. (2014). Reconceptualizing the community of inquiry framework: An exploratory analysis. The Internet and Higher Education, 23, 9-17.

UNSW. (2020, March). Student panel breaks down assumptions about online learning. Retrieved from Inside UNSW: https://www.inside.unsw.edu.au/academic-excellence/student-panel-breaks-down-assumptions-about-online-learning

Zentari, M., Ridzwan, A., Chung, H., Gregg-Rowan, C., Zahroh, R. I., & Tapa, J. (2020, May 15). Being a student during COVID-19. Retrieved from Pursuit, University of Melbourne: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/being-a-student-during-covid-19