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We offer professional development, consultation and support for distance learning for Adult Basic Education (ABE) programs. We are a Minnesota ABE Support Services provider, and provide services nationally as well.

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Introduction
While effectively communicating with the students in your online classes aids in the retention of your students, as educators, we should want to do more than just retain our students. We should provide them with a sense of community while enrolled in online classes to avoid the sense of isolation that some online students experience. The goal of online communications is the same as the goal in face-to-face communications: to bond; to share information; to be heard, and to be understood. Fostering a sense of community in online classes will make the learning experience more meaningful for online students and help them stay connected during the life of the course. Learning Management Systems (LMS) have built-in tools to assist in communicating with your online students, but there are also many other technology tools to help you bridge the gap between you and your online students. This chapter will explore several tools and methods that can be used to enhance your communications with your online students.

"For most online students, their primary contact with an institution is through their communication with faculty" Betts (2009).

The above quote emphasizes why it is important that online instructors learn to communicate with their students in ways that will support and enhance their learning experience. One of your primary goals as an online instructor should be to foster a sense of community within your online class. When and how you communicate with your students helps you foster a sense of community in your class which helps your students feel connected to you and their classmates. As an online instructor, you are expected to communicate with your students in a timely and effective manner. Whether you are new to teaching online or a veteran online instructor, finding the best methods for communicating with your students should be your number one priority. How you communicate with your students and the methods you use to communicate can make a difference in whether or not a student is successful in your class. This chapter will examine why effective communication is required in online classes. What it takes to show your presence in your online class. How knowing your audience can help improve communications. How to make your communications personal. Methods that can be used to communicate more effectively in online environments; and how having a communication plan in advance helps you communicate better.
Why Effective Communication is Required in Online Classes
When we are communicating with students whether in a face-to-face (F2F) class or an online class, we are communicating to give information or get information to gain understanding and build relationships. Communicating with students in an online environment requires a little more thought and planning than communicating with students in an (F2F) environment due to the absence of body language in the online environment. In an (F2F) class, you have the benefit of using body language and facial expression to help you communicate and get your message across to your student. When communicating in an online class, since you are limited to using text and/or images to help you get your point across, you do not have the benefit of using body language to help you communicate to your students. Awareness of limitations to communication capabilities within online environments will help you determine how to develop timely and relevant communications and how to effectively communication with your online students. To determine what would be considered timely and relevant communication in your online class, you first need to decide why and what you need to communicate to students.

Why are you communicating with your online students? To answer this question, you have to know the end result you want to achieve with the communication you are sending to your students. Think about why you need to communicate with your students and what you want to gain from your communication. For example, you need to send a notice to your online students to let them know that the deadline to complete a test has been extended. Why are you communicating with students in this particular instance? To let students know they have more time to complete the test if needed. What do you want to achieve with this communication? To inform your students that the deadline to complete the test has been extended. Now, if you were in an (F2F) class, it would be sufficient to tell your class that the deadline has been extended and you would probably write the information on the board so that they could copy it down as a reminder. When teaching online, it is up to you to craft the message that you want to send to your students and then determine the best method to use to send your message to your students.

Crafting a timely, relevant and useful communication to your online students is not always a simple task. Here are some guidelines that you can use to help you write a communication that will be timely, relevant, and useful to your online students:

Remember, Less is More - When you are composing the message that you will be sending to your online students, try to use as few words as possible while ensuring that your intended message is communicated with your choice of words. Online students are bombarded with communications that consist of mostly text, so the last thing they want is to read a lengthy online message from their instructor. Your students are more likely to read and get the message from a concise, well-crafted communication.

Be Clear - Not only should your message to your students be concise, but it also needs to be clear and leave no room for confusion on the student's part. Using the example above, if you want to let your online students know that the deadline for the test has been extended, the message that you write to them should only talk about the extended deadline for the test. You need to make it clear by giving them all the details they need to know about the deadline extension:

_______ Example Communication _____________

Hello, Students:

The deadline for this week's test has been extended. You will now have until 7/10/- to submit your test for grading. If you have additional questions, please contact me. Thank you.

Professor Bee

_______End Example Communication __________

Method of Communication - Before you determine how you will send your message to your students you will need to determine how important the information being sent is to your students. To decide how important your message is to your students, ask yourself these questions?

Do your students need to have the information right now? If the answer is yes to this question, then you will want to ensure that the method you use to send your communication is a method that will contact your students immediately such as a text message because most everyone is attached to their cell phones. You'll also want to post an announcement in your online class to serve as a permanent record to show that particular information was communicated to your students. Also, to catch the students attention, use bold and capital letters and include "IMPORTANT' in the subject line of the communication.

Is the information concerning an imminent deadline? If the answer is yes to this question, you can use additional methods to communicate with your students to increase the chances that they get the message quickly. Once again, because everyone is literally attached to their cell phones, you can use this to your advantage by tweeting, texting and emailing them to communicate your message regarding imminent deadlines or you can go old school and call them.

Be Courteous: Reread your communication to make sure that it sounds the way you intend it to sound. Check the tone of the communication and check for clarity and completeness of your message. Invite your students to ask questions about your message if they don't understand it. You want your messages to be professional and let your students know that you welcome their questions.

Robinson, Segal and Smith (2015) stated that "Effective communication is also a two-way street. It's not only how you convey a message so that it is received and understood by someone in exactly the way you intended, it's also how you listen to gain the full meaning of what's being said and to make the other person feel heard and understood." I think the previous statement illustrates why it is important to utilize different ways to communicate with your students. To effectively communicate with your online students, you have to think outside of the box, the text box that is. Everyone does not like to communicate using the same methods, so you have to be prepared to use different types of communications and different methods to communicate. Your communications with your online students can and should go beyond the written word. Since you will already have several communication options available in your Learning Management System to you to help you communicate more effectively with your students, you should start by using the communication tools most readily available to you. You are not limited to using only the communication tools included in your LMS to communicate with your students, there are numerous online communication tools that you can easily use to help you get your message across to your students. Some of those other online communication tools will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. Because the success of your online class relies largely on how effective the communications are between you and your students, you will need ways to determine if your students are getting your message. Some of the ways I use to determine that my students are understanding and responding to my communications are:

Message Receipt - Did my students get/acknowledge my message?

Did my communication achieve the desired outcome for me?

Did my students follow the instructions in my communication?

Did my students ask follow-up questions?

Know Your Audience
Flahavan (2001) writes that "When communicating online, your tone will be communicated to your students through your choice of words, your sentence structure, the punctuation that you use and the order of the information that you present." When you are communicating with your online students it is important to remember that they may be ethnically diverse and of varying ages. These factors may affect how they perceive your communication. First, as stated before, keep your message short and to the point. Do not use acronyms or slang terms unless you are sure that everyone reading the communication will know what you are referencing. Your communications may be important to you and your students but go easy on the punctuation that you use to show this. Your students will get your message without the use of emoticons and exclamation points. Even though it is best to keep your communication brief and to the point, you will always want to give your students the opportunity to ask you additional questions if they do not understand your message.
Make Your Communications Personal
Venable (2015) state "Personalizing your communications will help you connect with and build positive relationships with your online students." The students in your online classes want to feel connected to the instructor and to their classmates. That is the primary reason why you should make your communications personal and why you should encourage your students to make their communications with each other personal. What does it mean to make your communications personal? Making your communications personal does not mean that you get to ignore good netiquette or that you get to judge your student's personal feelings. Making communications with your students personal means that you should communicate with your students in such a way that they know that you feel that they are a real person and that you respect and you value your communications with them. Here are some tips to use to help your keep your communications personal with your online students:

Make a personal connection early. Provide an instructor bio which includes a picture of you early in your class. Providing your students with your information will help them get to know a little about you before the class gets started and help start the bonding process.

When responding to a student's communication to you, always start by using their name:

_______ Example Communication _____________

Hi, Janet:

Thank you for letting me know that you will be late submitting quiz #5. Please email me once you have completed it, so that I can grade it.

Professor Bee
_______End Example Communication __________
Use Introductions. Using an introduction assignment can be a fun way to introduce yourself to your online students and to have the students introduce themselves to each other. The introduction "icebreaker" assignment can give your students a chance to bond and learn things about each other. The first requirement in my online class is the introduction assignment. I used to set this assignment up as a discussion board where I would ask my students to share three things with the class:

1. Tell us a little about yourself.

2. Which degree are you seeking and why you choose that degree?

3. What do you like to do in your spare time?

I ask my students to get to know their classmates by responding to at least two other student's posts. The instructor should always participate in this assignment so that the students get the sense that the instructor is a part of the class and is a real person.

More recently, I have my students use VoiceThread. VoiceThread is a collaborative tool that allows you and your students to create a video message such as a class introduction and then share the message with their classmates. Their classmates can then respond to their introduction by leaving a text, audio or video comment on their introduction. VoiceThread offers a free account for anyone who is 13 or older and has a valid email address. You can use the free account to create up to five VoiceThreads, leave comments by microphone or text and then share your VoiceThreads via the share link provided. You can check out VoiceThreads at http://voicethread.com. Video messaging is a tool you and your students can easily use to make class communications more personal and more meaningful. Seeing the person who is communicating with you adds another level of connectedness to the conversation.

Send audio messages. I have used audio emails or audio messaging to provide feedback to my online students and I have found that they like to hear the messages. Some of the students have commented that the audio messages added a more personal touch to the feedback and made it more meaningful to them. I also like to use the voice podcaster feature in my LMS to create voice podcasts that I use to introduce each learning module in my class. Allowing your online students to hear your voice will also help them form a bond with you and help them to feel your presence more firmly in the class.

Provide Timely Feedback. Because your online students are learning from a distance, it is important that they receive timely and consistent feedback regarding their progress in the class. If a student asks you a question regarding an assignment, you should first provide that student a personal response to their question and then if you feel that their question is important to the rest of the class, you should address the question with the rest of the class and thank the student for bringing it to your and the class's attention.

Keep your Virtual Gradebook Current. Your online gradebook should be the place where your students can consistently go to assess how they are progressing in your class. Your gradebook is the most important tool you have as an online instructor to help you communicate a student's personal progress in your class.

Go! Live and synchronous. Hosting online office hours using Blackboard Instant Messaging or Chat Quick can make a more personal connection with your online students. During virtual office hours, students can ask questions and get an answer in real time. I also like to use Blackboard Collaborate to hold online study sessions. I use the web conferencing tool to provide my students with extra learning support and to enhance my communications with them. Blackboard Collaborate allows real-time interactions and you can record the session for those students who are not able to attend the live session.

Ask for their opinion. Asking your students what they think adds another personal touch to your communications. I have found that students appear more interested in the class when I use surveys or short opinion polls to get a feel of how they think things are going in the class. Students like to give their personal opinion and their feedback helps me improve the course content for future students.

Methods that can be used to communicate more effectively in Online Environments
Hranstinski suggests that "Social support is desirable as a way to foster knowledge work and collaborative learning; it provides an environment where communication is encouraged; e.g., anecdotes and personal experiences encourage trust, which foster receptive and creative learning environment" (2008). The ways we communicate with online students should mirror the diversity of our students. There are many synchronous tools available to help increase the effectiveness of your communications with students. You can start by using the communication tools included in your LMS to get a quick start in communicating with students, but your class becomes more interesting with more innovative communication methods. Wardlow (2014) wrote that "communicating with your students is now possible " 24/7-anytime, anywhere." Technologies like email, texts, websites, electronic portfolios, online surveys and video chat applications like Skype and Google Hangout have made communication between instructor and students more timely, efficient, productive, and satisfying for both parties." Some of the methods that I have explored using to communicate with my students are:

VoiceThread - http://voicethread.com is a web-based platform that allows teachers and students to upload images, video, or documents, record audio, video, or text comments, and then invite others to record comments as well. You can use VoiceThread with your students in a variety of ways such as a live introduction assignment, for peer reviews, or to create a presentation using images, video, and audio.

Google Hangouts - https://plus.google.com/hangouts is a messaging, video, and voice application. With the messaging feature, you can have a private conversation with one of your students, a small group, or you can talk to all of your students at once. Using the video feature, you can turn your conversation into a video chat.

Wikis - are a collaborative tool that allows users to contribute to and modify pages of course-related materials. You can use this tool for group assignments because it is easy to see which students have been participating and contributing to the project.

GoToMeeting - www.gotomeeting.com is a video conferencing software that allows users to collaborate in real time. You can use GoToMeeting to host study sessions. You can use the whiteboard to share your screen or illustrate learning concepts. Students can use computer audio or their phones to connect to the meeting. GoToMeeting also allows you to record the session viewing at a later date.

Podcasting applications like www.spreaker.com - Podcasting, a series of audio files, can be distributed on a regular basis for summarizing learning content and be distributed to your students to use as a study guide.

The online tools mentioned above comprise the top five communication methods I use to increase the effectiveness of my communication with online students. There are so many other synchronous tools that you can use with your students. When you are making a communication plan in advance, be creative and think outside the box to find your top five communication tools.

Have a Communication Plan in Advance
Planning how, when and why you will communicate with your online students in advance is a great way to ensure that you are able to provide your students with meaningful, timely, and consistent communications. It would be useful if you wrote out your communication plan and kept it handy for future use, that way you will always know what your communication plan is for different situations. Your communication plan should include:

Methods you will use to communicate with your online students such as email, announcements, messages, podcast, video messages, video conferencing or even phone calls. It is important that you decide how you will contact your students so that when the time comes, it will be easy for you to choose the right method to contact them. It is also equally important for you to tell your students which methods you plan to use to contact them so that they know where to look for your communications. You don't want your students to miss any of your communications because your communication to them is the lifeline between you and them.

How often you will communicate with your students. For routine communications such as announcements, you need to plan in advance how often you will post announcements for your class. Will it be bi-weekly, weekly, or once a day? It's up to you how often you want to make class announcements, my only suggestion is that you be consistent with the timing of your announcements, so if you choose to make announcements weekly, always make announcements weekly so that your students expect and look for your weekly announcement.

How do you want your students to communicate with you? Do you prefer to be contacted via text, messages, email, or phone? Whatever your preferred method of contact, make sure that you clearly communicate so your students know how to contact you. It is also a good idea if you give them another way to contact you in case the first method of contacting you does not work. I make sure that I tell my students what my preferred method of contact is in my course syllabus, in my course bio, in my course introduction, in my first class announcement, and then I also remind them periodically throughout the class.

Which communications method will you use for the different types of communications to your students? I like to use weekly announcements for general announcements to the whole class to comment on how the past week's assignments went or to clarify a learning concept. My students know that they can find general class announcements on the announcements page. I use email or messages if I want to send my students a personal communication and video or voice messaging to provide personal and sometimes group communications to my students. I use my class grade center to provide my students with timely feedback on their course progress. My students know that I may use any of these communication methods because I tell them in advance and remind them throughout the course of my class.

How will my student and I communicate in emergency systems if the regular communication methods are not available? I always give my student several ways to contact me and I like to have more than one way to contact them. I let my students know at the beginning of class about a planned Hierarchy of contact:

Messages - I like to use the LMS messages function because it provides a permanent record of communications within the class. I have my students use this when they need to ask personal or general questions.

Email - I have my students use email if they need to contact me fairly quickly because I check my email every day.

Text - I have my students text me if it's an emergency. I always have my phone handy.

Phone Call - I have my students call if it is an emergency that must be addressed quickly.

Know what type of communication methods you choose to use since it's important for your students to know how you will be communicating with them and how they can communicate with you.

Summary
Using different methods to communicate with your online students can aid in their retention in your class. Personalizing your communications can help foster a sense of community in your class and help avoid the sense of isolation that some online students experience. It's important to know your audience so that you are able to effectively communicate with your students to get your message across. Planning your communication strategy in advance will help you be prepared to efficiently communicate with your students in a timely and relevant manner.
References
Betts, K. (2009). Lost in translation: Importance of effective communication in online education. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, (12)2.

Flahavan, L. and Rudick, M. (September 28, 2001). "5 Tips to a ringing email tone" http://www.inc.com/articles/2001/09/23688.html

Robinson, L., Segal, J. and Smith, M. (July 2015). "Effective communication: Improving communication skills in your personal and work relationships." Helpguide.org http://www.helpguide.org/articles/relationships/effective-communication.htm

Venable, M. (July 22, 2015) "Make a personal connection in your online classroom." http://www.onlinecollege.org/2013/07/22/make-a-personal-connection-in-your-online-classroom/

Wardlow, L. (November 14-2014) "Using technology for effective parent-teacher communication" http://www.digitalpromise.org/blog/entry/using-technology-for-effective-parent-teacher-communication#.VbZwrVnpuLA.email
Additional Reading
Tannen, D. (2011). "That's not what I meant!" New York: Harper Collins Publishing.

Carvill, M. and Taylor, D. (2013). "The business of being social: A practical guide to harnessing the power of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Youtube for all businesses." Great Britain: Crimson Publishers.

Wang, H. (2-18-2010) "Eight ways to increase social presence in your online classes." Faculty Focus. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/eight-ways-to-increase-social-presence-in-your-online-classes/

Junk, V., Deringer, N. and Junk, W. (2012). "Techniques to engage the online learner." research in Higher Education Journal. http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/10597.pdf

Hrastinski, S. (2008). The potential of synchronous communication to enhance participation in online discussions: A case study of two e-learning courses, Information & Management, 45.
Key Words
Communication - an exchange of information to facilitate understanding.

Community - a sense of fellowship with others.

Conversation - a casual exchange of thoughts.

Effective - producing the intended result.

Instructor - a person who teaches something to another person.

Online Learning - education conducted in a virtual environment; connected by a network.

Social network - an online application that facilitates social interactions.

Education - the processing of teaching someone to do something.

Synchronous - actions occurring at the same time.

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Introduction While effectively communicating with the students in your online classes aids in the retention of your students, as educators, we should want to do more than just retain our students. We should provide them with a sense of community while enrolled in online classes to avoid the sense of isolation that some online students experience.

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So often, orientation is a one-size-fits-all firehose of information that may or may not be meaningful to students. When we think about the student experience, particularly for online learners, institutions should consider the expectations that students bring into the environment. Today, empowered consumers expect a personalized online experience that enables them to get what they need when they need it. This increase in consumer expectation is often referred to as the "Amazon Effect" (Phelps, 2017) and higher education is not exempt from it.

The "firehose" approach to student onboarding contradicts current research and consumer trends, which indicate that a student's desire and ability to learn are enhanced when they have greater control over their learning experience (Redding & Temple University, 2014). So, what is the balance between too much and not enough? How do we empower students to "shop" for what they need from their orientation and not become overwhelmed by information they don't need? These are two questions we asked ourselves as we reimagined an online first-year experience (OFYE) that could serve the diverse needs and expectations of thousands of students.

To get started, we first considered who our students are. In recent years higher education has seen rapid growth in non-traditional student enrollment, and Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is no exception. Like many institutions, SNHU's population includes working adults, first-generation students, and students returning after many years away. We examined student feedback, analyzed data, interviewed stakeholders, and reviewed industry trends and research to learn as much as possible about the challenges facing new students. Furthermore, we utilized a design-thinking approach and imagined what a personalized, just-in-time orientation experience could look like. We experimented with a course framework that enabled us to meet consumer demand and expectations while remaining agile and responsive to our future needs and diverse student populations. Here are some of the things we included in our first iteration.
Make it Personalized
Utilizing native checklist functionality and release conditions inside the existing LMS, we designed an activity that enables students to curate personalized content within their orientation course. In this activity, students select from a list of self-identifiers, values, and interests to release relevant content. Some examples of self-identifiers include military affiliation, first-in-family background, and international home base. In addition to self-identifiers, students select from a wide range of interests, like study and time management strategies, developing grit, finding balance, and staying motivated. By selecting a topic, relevant modules are released into the student's orientation course. This model removes the "firehose" aspect of the orientation process and enables students to control the information they need. By opting in to relevant content, students can manage their experience, thereby increasing its value and cultivating an internal locus of control, which has been shown to correlate to engagement and academic success (Gifford et al, 2006). Furthermore, by asking what matters to the student and connecting them with the right resources, the model increases a student's sense of belonging to the university, regardless of where they are in the world. With the addition of personalized content, orientation is no longer a momentary experience, but rather a continuous resource that can be drawn upon when it's needed.
Extend Access
Once students have a personalized online orientation, it makes sense that they should be able to access it when they need it. But when is that? What is the difference between what students need prior to the term versus what they need while the term is in progress? These are the questions we asked students and stakeholders as we considered more options. Although most orientations end before terms start, we determined that keeping it open was essential. Extended access enables students to return to or revise their personalized content as they need it. Orientation now provides the just-in-time experience that today's consumers (and students) expect.
Implementation Success Criteria
In 45 business days we developed a personalized orientation experience, increased student access, and rolled out a new orientation course, all while staying positive and goal driven. Here are the biggest contributors to the project's success:

We involved the right people in a design-thinking process

We took a design-thinking approach, which enabled us to keep students at the center of the problem we were trying to solve. We started with questions like: How might we extend access to orientation? How might we create a personalized experience with a scalable model? Using this method, we dodged potential roadblocks by involving the right people early and often. Some of the stakeholders we included may seem obvious, like admissions representatives or advisors, but some may not, such as the Registrar's Office or academic technology. Together we developed creative solutions that met our students' needs, and we did it fast.

We shared the "why" for increased buy-in

We sought to inspire the hearts and minds of our stakeholders as we described the impact that a personalized, accessible experience could have on student success. In return, we received their vested interest in the success of the project and a spot at the top of their priority list.

The philosophy of build, measure, and learn (Ries, 2011) was central to our development approach. Students and internal stakeholders provided unexpected breakthroughs and improvement ideas as they experienced a personalized framework and customizable content. This iterative development method enabled us to improve the student experience and support operational processes quickly.

We had expertise and clarity of roles

We had the advantage of an experienced project lead with in-depth knowledge of the student experience. We also had a group of dedicated team members who understood their roles and were willing to go above and beyond to make the project a success. With a clear vision and well defined scope, we set out to change the world (or our small slice of it).
Student Insight is Driving Us Forward
Now that we have deeper insight into what matters to our students, we are using this data to drive additional relevance and value into the student experience. For example, academic advisors can use their student's self-identifiers, values and interests to provide contextualized support. We can systematically trigger experiences and messaging to students based on what matters to them. As an institution, we can identify themes in recurrent areas of interest. These types of insights will be powerful tools that will enable us to connect with students in new, inspiring ways, exceed their expectations and support their success.
References
Gifford, D. D., Briceno-Perriott, J., & Mianzo, F. (2006). Locus of Control: Academic Achievement and Retention in a Sample of University First-Year Students. Journal Of College Admission, 191 18-25.

Phelps, Stan. (2017). Mind the Customer Expectation Gap. Forbes.

Redding, S., & Temple University, C. L. (2014). Personal Competencies in Personalized Learning.

Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup: How today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses.

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Building Next Generation Online Orientation: Personalized and Accessible

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So often, orientation is a one-size-fits-all firehose of information that may or may not be meaningful to students. When we think about the student experience, particularly for online learners, institutions should consider the expectations that students bring into the environment. Today, empowered consumers expect a personalized online experience that enables them to get what they [...]

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Colleges have the ability to gather more student data than ever before, and with that information comes the pressure to put it to good use. Nudges, when done right, are proving up to that task.

Nudging is a concept that has gained traction in higher ed ever since the 2008 release of the book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" brought the subject to the public's attention.

Put simply, nudges are interventions that steer someone toward a better decision without taking away their choice. In higher ed, they take the form of messages delivered through texts, emails or the learning management system that warn a student if they've fallen off track, alert them to important deadlines and make them aware of campus resources. Student data comes into play by helping colleges figure out who needs what kind of information most.

College leaders are increasingly looking to nudges as a way to buoy student success. So far, the results are promising, with various studies finding they've helped to reduce summer melt , boost enrollment and increase retention . But experts on nudging warn it isn't a magic bullet - and can even push students out of college if the nudges aren't well-designed.

"We have to make sure that all this work is designed in a way where it's 'do no harm,'" said Mark Milliron, the co-founder of Civitas Learning. "This is really about helping that student make a good choice for them."

Good nudges get good results

When nudges are targeted and executed properly, they can help colleges achieve progress on some their most hard-to-solve issues.

Joel Lee, the university's assistant vice chancellor for enrollment management, credits AdmitHub with helping find a solution to one of the university's pressing problems: students showing up to campus without having completed basic enrollment requirements.

As a result, Lee said, those students "were spending that first week of school ... trying to take care of basics rather than focused on the new student experience and getting to know the campus and making friends."

The chatbot acts as a virtual assistant to help answer students' questions about how to fulfill those requirements, pulling answers from its information database or passing along those questions to a university staff member. So far, the chatbot can answer roughly three-fourths of students' questions on its own, Lee said.

Readily accessible information is of particular importance at an HBCU such as Winston-Salem State where a large share of incoming freshman are first-generation college students who may not have someone at home who can guide them through the enrollment process.

In the fall of 2018, following the university's Ram Ready and chatbot rollout, college officials saw a 74% year-over-year spike in the number of new freshman who had fully met their financial requirements,along with a 37% increase in immunization compliance.

After nudges help get students through the door, they can help them stay there.

The University of Washington Tacoma partnered with Persistence Plus to develop nudges to help first-year students stay on track. They are piloting a similar effort for students who are a few credits shy of being able to graduate.

So far, the university has used nudges that have ranged from reminding students about Pell Grant deadlines to notifying military veterans on campus about free donuts, simple gestures a college can use to foster a "sense of belonging," said Colleen Carmean, the university's associate vice chancellor for academic innovation.

Changes in who is attending college are one driver of the growing use of nudges. Once reserved solely for the elite, college is now marketed as a pathway for low-income and other underserved populations to secure a high-paying job and a better future.

But colleges have been slow to respond to the different needs of this new generation of students.

"Until recently, most universities have taken the attitude that if a student doesn't succeed, it's the student's problem when, in fact, we're taking their money and we're letting them down," Carmean said. "There are some universities that are doing a really good job of understanding that we have some responsibility to know our students, to offer services that will assist them in making the right choices and to get them to the finish line."

A college's responsibilities don't end with setting up support services. They also must make sure those services aren't backfiring.

For instance, students who are barraged with daily messages that don't pertain to them may opt out of the service, limiting a college's ability to reach them. "You can end up with nudges turning into noise," said Civitas' Milliron. "And when nudges turn into noise, there's no impact."

Even personalized messages can push a student away. For example, sending students an email alert that they will be dropped from a course if they miss one more class could drive them to stop going.

"A student ... whose kids got the flu and they've missed a week and a half, they get that message and they go, 'Oh God, it's just not worth it,'" Milliron said. "They just quit."

To design effective nudges, colleges should start by identifying which populations face the biggest roadblocks to their success.

With troves of student data, it's now easier to see which groups are showing up to class and which aren't, among other measures of student success. What's harder - but usually far more useful - is finding out why.

As Milliron noted, students may not miss class because they are forgetful but rather because they are juggling life's responsibilities or dealing with emergencies. In those cases, nudges that simply remind students of class times and policies won't do.

An example outlined in the Society for College and University Planning's " An Analytics Handbook: Moving from Evidence to Impact," which Carmean co-edited, recalls how one academic advisor was able to help a student obtain emergency funds to replace her car tires only after she responded to a follow-up nudge about having transportation issues.

Similarly, a student struggling in a class may not benefit from a nudge listing the time and location of the tutoring center if they feel as though it would be admitting failure to show up there. A better nudge may try to develop positive social norms around that targeted behavior, such as by noting that students who go to the tutoring center tend to get the best grades, Milliron said.

It's no small feat to use the data to figure out where nudges are needed and if they work. And if institutions don't have the capacity to monitor that data, they should forgo nudges until they can, experts said.

At U of Washington Tacoma, a team representing various corners of the administration met about once a week to do just that. "The more people you have at the table, the more ideas you have for just who could we pull up next and see how they're doing and what could we do to nudge them to take some action in their own interest," Carmean said.

However, Milliron cautions colleges against viewing even the most well-designed nudges as a cure-all for the broader woes hampering student success.

"Nudges aren't going to save the world," he said. "Nudges are a strategy in a larger family of activities. It's the right kind of information. It's the right kind of support systems. It's the right kind of curricular resources ... combined with the right nudge at the right time."

'It's a double-edged sword'

In the same way nudges can target behavior beneficial to the student, they can be turned around to favor only the institution.

In 2016, an email exchange revealed a proposal by Simon Newman, then the president of Mount St. Mary's University, to use student data to dismiss those deemed unlikely to succeed, The Washington Post reported . If the university could get between 20 and 25 students to drop out before late September, the deadline for submitting enrollment data to the federal government, it could increase its retention rate by roughly 5%, Newman wrote to faculty, according to the student newspaper . He later resigned amid the controversy.

Though the Mount St. Mary's example is extreme, colleges can end up using nudges unethically whether they intend to or not. And those cases may fly under the radar because institutions don't want to advertise their failures.

As Ezeugo and Palmer note, an ethical nudge gives students choices instead of directives, is transparent and comes with extra support.

Bias is also important to watch for, Ezeugo told Education Dive. Colleges should train staff to know the data's limits and to avoid having their implicit biases affect what nudges are sent to what groups.

The pressure to compete over a shrinking population of undergraduates doesn't help, Ezeugo added. In a dash to improve their student outcomes data, colleges may view nudges as a quick and low-cost solution. But that can lead to trouble.

To be effective, Ezeugo said, nudging requires constant testing and oversight from a team whose members can bring different perspectives to the table.

"It's a double-edged sword," he said. "It really does take careful consideration, careful thinking to deploy nudges ... in a way that doesn't harm students."

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Giving a nudge: How digital alerts can keep students on track

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Colleges have the ability to gather more student data than ever before, and with that information comes the pressure to put it to good use. Nudges, when done right, are proving up to that task.

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Creating an interactive and engaging environment for your learners can be the key to running a successful online program. By building an interactive online learning community for your learners you are not only improving your course, but providing a much greater learning experience for everyone involved.

How To Build A Thriving Online Learning Community

Just because you are running your learning program online, that doesn't mean that you don't have to consider building an online learning community. It's common for the community aspect of online learning to be ignored as instructors are not seeing their students face to face on a daily basis, but one of the most important aspects in building a great program is forming an online learning community that can provide the help and support that a learner needs.

In this article we will be looking at 6 tips that will help you create an active and engaging online learning community.

1. Be present at the course site.
When the teacher or instructor is interacting with students in a traditional classroom setting, they are building a community in which all members feel that they can openly discuss the course content or ask questions. There is no reason why the same experience cannot take place in an online setting though. The key with establishing your online learning community is establishing some clear expectations at the beginning of your course or program. The best way to do this is to define some clear "Office Hours" for when you will be online. Depending on your subject, students, and other variables, this could be as simple as being online and ready to answer questions for a couple of 2-3 blocks every week. This can be invaluable for students and can provide them with the support that they need to excel in a course as opposed to just scraping through.

2. Get your students involved.
At the beginning of a program, it's always great to get students to start with providing a personal introduction to the group so that they can get to know more about each other, as well as letting you find out more about the personalities that you will be working with. Don't forget to post an introduction yourself too! The types of things that are great to encourage students to share are info on professional experiences, personal information such as family, friends, and pets, as well as photos or short videos. Setting up a virtual classroom or group message board/chat rooms is also a great way for students to learn of each other when they have questions and allows them to form bonds that make the learning experience more enjoyable. Encourage use of a general forum for students to post and ask for help or assistance from each other through. Breaking the class up into smaller groups where students can mentor each other and assist in supporting their learning is also a great technique. It's a similar approach to the more traditional study group, but with a modern twist.

3. Set expectations from the beginning.
This best practice is one of the most important to take note of and can be the greatest help for you in the long term. Before you even begin your course set some clear expectation in the course details prior to enrollment, so that students understand how your interactions will be taking place. As an example, many instructors tell their students that they will receive a response to any question within 24 hours on weekdays, and leading up to exams periods there will be office hours' periods held online where students can join in a conversation via live chat. A great way to reduce the workload of the instructor is to post responses to questions in a location for all learners to view and avoid answering the same questions over and over. Monitoring questions can also be handled by the students themselves, and when posted in a course message board or similar, it can be a great way for everyone to learn together, even with the instructor not being available. Online learning is just as intensive as classroom learning, and time to do the work needs to be scheduled and planned for, just as when you attend traditional classroom style classes. Being clear as to how much time is required on a weekly basis to keep up with the course will always keep stress levels down.

4. Don't forget to interact with your students!
"How is the course going?" "Do you have any suggestions?" Talk to your students about the learning material. You'd be surprised how much you can improve a course based on the feedback you get from the people actually taking it. If you start this process early on in the program you also assist in helping provide a better learning experience for the people raising questions. Using this process will not only improve the learning experience for your current students, but over a longer period of time, and feedback, your program will be much more well-rounded and enjoyable for new enrollments.

5. Prepare posts that invite questions, discussions, and responses.
When preparing posts for your communication with your learners, always think about what you'd like their reaction to be. Do you want them to ask for more information, have a discussion, or respond with their opinions/answers? You might use a discussion if you are looking to create an open question and answer forum, encourage critical or creative thinking, or reinforce domain or procedural processes. Once you have got the students engaged, begin to raise some follow-up questions. Why do you think that? What is your reasoning? Is there an alternative strategy? Get the students thinking about why they are giving you these answers and if they might have missed something. Let the students know how you'd like them to respond, e.g. a two-part response: What you liked or agreed with, and a follow-up like what you are you still curious about, etc. Working professionals are often overwhelmed with many problems, and providing options makes it easier to associate their learning with their work experience.Important: Don't post YES/NO questions. Once you have an answer, that's the end of the discussion and we want to keep our students active in discussion. Make sure that you are actively answer email, monitor discussions, post reminders, and hold online office hours at least four times every week so that your students get the help that they need.

6. Mix up the way that your students are learning.
Identify and discuss the core concepts that are required in a course and then set the students to apply this learning to a complex project that encompasses these concepts. This technique allows the students to bring their own style of learning into the course through the project and will deeper ingrain the core messages that you are covering. Many online learners within professional programs are working professionals. Supporting learners with their professional goals that are closely linked to the performance goals of a course is a win-win for the learners individually and as a group. How do we do this? Offer opportunities to students to have options and choices in assignments.

With these tips you'll have no problem getting your students interacting through their own online learning community and learning much faster and more effectively. Plus, it's a whole lot more fun to have people to talk to when you are learning!

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6 Tips To Build A Thriving Online Learning Community - eLearning Industry

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Creating an interactive and engaging environment for your learners can be the key to running a successful online program. By building an interactive online learning community for your learners you are not only improving your course, but providing a much greater learning experience for everyone involved.

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Over 21 million students were enrolled in online courses at institutions across the United States in the fall of 2012 ( NCES). Since the boom in online education, for- and non-profit institutions alike have sought to stay ahead of the field with the latest technology to engage Millennials, one of the largest groups of COE students. While many of these features include new online tools, more often the Millennial student wants opportunities to connect with her online classmates and instructors in person. To engage this growing population, COE leaders seek to create experiences that cultivate community among online students and promote lasting relationships with their respective programs.

For-profit organizations, like General Assembly and Fullbridge, understand the three learning preferences unique to the Millennial student:

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Over 21 million students were enrolled in online courses at institutions across the United States in the fall of 2012 ( NCES). Since the boom in online education, for- and non-profit institutions alike have sought to stay ahead of the field with the latest technology to engage Millennials, one of the largest groups of COE students.

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More and more, college enrollment has become digitized, further streamlining the onboarding process for both online and on-ground students at universities. And while we're seeing significant growth in and adoption of online learning, helping those online students feel a part of their university or college can still be a struggle. Physical distance for online learners can translate into a lack of support or the inability to tap into a network of coaches and advisors that historically have only been available to on-ground students.

However, more institutions are realizing that support structure is critical to student success. At Arizona State University, we work quickly to introduce our online students into the Sun Devil family at the onset of their experience and ensure they have the resources and support they need from their first point of contact through graduation. This is particularly important for online students who can feel uncertain or overwhelmed by a new learning environment.

To ease the enrollment and onboarding process and help students succeed from the beginning, universities can work to minimize the distance between online students and the university by implementing:
A Comprehensive Enrollment and Orientation Process
From the moment an online student submits a request for information and submits their application, it's important to make them feel connected to the university and empowered to ask questions during their enrollment process. One way in which we accomplish this at ASU Online is to offer enrollment counselors as dedicated individuals there to assist students through the process, help them check the boxes on application requirements, make sure they are off to a good start and build a deep connection with the university.

Additionally, before classes begin, we offer students the chance to participate in a week-long orientation class that will prepare them for success in online classes through assessments, articles, videos, assignments, tips and strategies. Orientation instructors ensure that students are equipped with the skills they need to begin coursework and to help them feel comfortable in their new online learning environment. To further a sense of community with their peers and professors, students can connect with classmates and professors through Facebook, Twitter, peer-to-peer chats and online clubs.

Students who complete the ASU Online enrollment and orientation process are more prepared to overcome their time management obstacles and are more adjusted to a work/school/life balance.
Supplementary Student Success Coaches
After acceptance, as students prepare to take courses, it's important to have supplementary student support to educate students on academic best practices and serve as an enthusiastic proponent of their education. ASU Online fulfills this need by providing success coaches that are solely focused on helping online students with success strategies and reminders, continuing the one-on-one contact with the university. Through quality conversation and meaningful exploration, the coach will focus on goal setting, overcoming obstacles and achieving success. Success coaches are exactly what they sound like-personal cheerleaders who encourage online students throughout their entire college journey. Implementing this service has proven to be incredibly valuable for ASU Online students.
Engaged and Educated Academic Advisors
After students are enrolled, they're often left with the question of "what's next?" in terms of planning for long-term growth. Academic advisors within students' colleges offer in-depth knowledge on degree requirements, and can assist in planning courses in an appropriate sequence to keep students on track. They also offer course optimization along the way, including recommendations for additional courses that may benefit students' future goals. These in-house academic advisors serve as a one-stop-shop for students, not just for major-specific course information, but for all university-related questions, too, even if it's connecting a student to another resource that will assist them.
Ongoing Virtual Support for Career Planning and Technical Needs
It's also important for online students to get the person-to-person interaction they deserve, especially when it comes to preparation and success. By providing technological and career support, students are able to start their journey off on the right foot.

Technology is a critical component of online learning, making it important to have students review the online program's requirements and reach out to tech support with any questions before starting classes. Providing tech support 24/7 is imperative in serving students across the globe who may be enrolled in online courses.

Receiving support from a career services professional is also critical to success in an online program, making it a truly valuable offering to students at the start of their collegiate careers. This year-round support for online students will allow them to solidify their career plan when they enroll, as well as continue to grow throughout their time at ASU Online. These services are designed to strengthen job search skills, resume building, enhance interview skills and more. This group can also help with career planning and determining the types of jobs your degree can lead to. Other services offered by online programs may include virtual career workshops, online resume reviews, virtual practice interviews, online chat with a career professional and access to downloadable handouts and resume examples.

Offering online program student services ahead of time may feel like a significant resource commitment on behalf of universities, but it is proven to be worthwhile. Getting familiar with advisors, counselors and tech support will only make students' online experiences that much easier to manage.
Reducing Transactional Distance and Supporting Student Success
As technology advances, students are expecting more and more from institutions when it comes to facilitating a smooth transition to online learning. Students will continually seek a program that offers strong online resources and support, so they can reach their goal of earning a degree. By implementing the above online offerings, you can reduce the distance between students and the institution and ultimately help students achieve a success and foundation for tomorrow, while allowing them the flexible lifestyle to balance their responsibilities today.

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Going the Distance for Online Students: Closing the Gap Between Academic Institutions and Students

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More and more, college enrollment has become digitized, further streamlining the onboarding process for both online and on-ground students at universities. And while we're seeing significant growth in and adoption of online learning, helping those online students feel a part of their university or college can still be a struggle.

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Colleges and universities across the world have started to look to online courses and programs as a mechanism to create greater access to offerings for prospective students, and the modality has grown spectacularly in popularity over the past decade. However, many institutions are still having trouble creating offerings that are truly engaging, which is leading to questions about the quality of the online method of education. In this interview, Allison Rossett shares her thoughts on the five key ingredients to engagement in the online space and reflects on some of the key mistakes institutions typically make when launching online offerings. The EvoLLLution (Evo): How do students benefit when an online educational experience is built with engagement in mind?
Allison Rossett (AR): It's hard to imagine any teacher, instructor or professor getting themselves involved in an educational experience and saying, "I don't care if I engage them, I'm just going to spray this content at them and worry not at all if it doesn't touch them or move them."

Obviously, in a world where we're moving towards more asynchronicity, more student choice, more independent learning and, of course, more online learning-all of which are directly involved with each other-students get to choose. If they're not engaged, they won't choose you. They won't choose your class, won't choose those assignments, they won't choose that reading, they won't choose those assessments and reflection exercises.

In this new significantly online, independent and asynchronous world, we have to build engagement in and it isn't automatic. An instructor who is great in the classroom won't necessarily be great online. What's more, great classroom instructors are often not mindful about what makes them great. They don't know how to package the secret sauce of engagement.
Evo: When it comes to the online space specifically what do you think constitutes the secret sauce of engagement?
AR: I want to start by defining engagement as attentiveness to something accompanied by a positive feeling. When engaged, the students read, they post, they react, they try, they question and they keep coming back to the material and to their peers and instructor.

The secret sauce to engagement is composed of five essentials. Number one, in my view, is the "right stuff." When you're teaching material, it is obvious to the students if the instructor has carefully selected material because of its importance, relevance and usefulness given their concerns and interests. To put it another way, it's obvious when the material wasn't simply plucked off a shelf because the instructor themselves studied it in the 1970's or 80's. You want to be teaching the "right stuff," you want it to resonate for the students and that might mean-even if it's not obvious-that the instructor has to spend some time demonstrating the links between the material and whatever is important to the students. The first ingredient in the engagement secret sauce is careful selection of meaningful material and outcomes, and, if it's not obvious, a plan for how to make it matter to students.

The second element of the secret sauce is a guidance system. Students who flop around, can't find their way, can't make the videos play, don't know what to do first and next, who don't know where they are in the course, they drop out, they get lost and they are unmotivated. In a situation with a strong guidance system, students know what the outcomes are, they know what the expectations are, they know what the standards are. A classic, familiar guidance system is a syllabus but online it has to have more detail, it has to have more examples because it's asynchronous. Not everybody is online at the same time, which means they they can't always ask questions. You have to think carefully about, and plan fully for, how you're going to keep students from being lost in the material and how you're going to help them when they do get lost.

The third element of the secret sauce of engagement is being active in the zone of proximal development. This goes back to the Vygotsky scaffolded learning theory, which states that learning happens in the ZPD (zone of proximal development)-the area just beyond our current capabilities. Learning has to build on what students already know and then push them a little bit further. That is what good instructors have always done. This is critical for online courses because students will not value material they have already mastered. Conversely, if we ask students to do something way beyond their abilities, it will affect their confidence and if their confidence is reduced, their motivation and engagement are reduced.

The fourth element of the secret sauce is building relationships and community. Students aren't alone in the classroom and they shouldn't be alone when they're online either. Professors and instructors need to consider how they can help students use each other, how they can help students give each other feedback. Students should have conversations with each other and rely upon each other. I've taught enough to know how students get crazed on the subject of having group-work partners that don't work well, so you have to have a feedback system that provides early warning signs if students are dropping the ball or being "free riders" when they're part of groups of three or four students. In essence, you want to create a habit of community.

The fifth and final component of the secret sauce is helping our students look to references and online performance support. Doesn't matter whether they're studying to be doctors or nurses or lab technicians or criminologists; every profession is creating reference materials that people refer to at the moment of need. We want to build rich resources into courses and we want to allow people to take exams and to do projects as they rely upon and use those resources.
Evo: To your mind, is it more expensive to develop and deliver online courses that meet those five conditions of engagement than universities might be willing to spend?
AR: We've run into that question of cost repeatedly. You can't just tell somebody who teaches nursing or astronomy to simply put their course online. Just because they've taught it for 15 years at the university doesn't mean they are going to be able to put it online.

An engaging online course is so much more than a webinar. Webinars can be a piece of the course but you have to invest in analysis so you get the right stuff so you can offer thought-provoking activities and materials.

In a physical classroom, you can look out at the classroom and you can see who's engaged. When I'm teaching online, I don't know if students are online and reflective unless I have a system that captures their engagement and involvement. That means I have to plan it in advance and that requires help from teaching assistants, instructional designers and others. It's a job! It's not easy but the results can be great.

One of the things I have to say about working on designing an engaging online experience is that, for instructors, we often get a fresh view of our professional lives. It's a gift in some ways, but it's not cheap.
Evo: Along the same lines, how do institutions benefit from delivering engaging online educational experiences?
AR: The benefits of offering engaging online programming for institutions are relatively clear. Do they want their students to thrive and prosper? Do they want to keep their students or lose their students? Engagement plays a key role here.

If I were a student who signed up to take a course online and the course was dreadfully dull with nothing but reading, I would want my money back. These kinds of poor offerings don't take advantage of any of the online possibilities. Universities want to be known for being effective at what they do and if they're going to offer online instruction they have to recognize that they're not just giving access to more people, to their instructors, to their experts, to their faculty, not just a way to get more students. It's a way to create learning experiences that serve more people and if they don't see it as engaging learning experiences and just access to an instructor then all they should do is provide a telephone. Students who enjoy online learning and social connections can become permanently engaged with their institutions and professors-for many good reasons.
Evo: What are some of the most common mistakes people make when trying to develop engaging online courses?
AR: A big mistake is to see online learning as mostly about technology, not instruction. Some instructors see online courses as a PowerPoint presentation, where they put up a slideshow with an audio track. That's grim. They think they can do online on the cheap, and that tends to be a widespread thought. Let's be honest. When administrators think about MOOC's they tend to think, "Oh my God, one instructor and so many students!" MOOC's translate to dollar signs. It's a business model, but these offerings cannot be effective if you really aren't pulling the engagement levers. If you're not guiding carefully, if you're not making expectations very clear and very vivid and linking them to the students concerns and needs and if you're not connecting students with each other, the online course will not be successful. The biggest mistake here is thinking the transition from face-to-face to online instruction is going to be easy, and not building it up with a great design or taking advantage of the secret sauce of engagement.

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The Secret Sauce of Engagement: Creating Successful Online Programs

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Colleges and universities across the world have started to look to online courses and programs as a mechanism to create greater access to offerings for prospective students, and the modality has grown spectacularly in popularity over the past decade. However, many institutions are still having trouble creating offerings that are truly engaging, which is leading [...]

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It is often assumed that it is the role of the online department to create community for online students, but I believe it's the role of the entire institution to ensure the culture and systems to enable faculty and staff to create and sustain community for all students (online and on-campus).

While it's true that team members in the units dedicated to online studies tend to be better versed in the needs of the online learner, they cannot be working alone to create and maintain a welcoming and supportive environment.

One important caveat I've learned from our students is that community may mean different things to different people. Some students want to meet a few classmates with whom to engage in and work through the program. They may stay friends after they end their studies. Others want more connection with faculty. Some prefer to feel connected to the department or institution because of familial tradition, and prestige of the institutional brand.

In the case of the programs I administer, many of the business and operational items related to students' academic experience-term dates, academic calendar deadlines, fees, tuition, etc-are out of sync with the parallel campus-based practice. To help address this, we ensure online students receive diligent communication from the online department to help students to feel supported and connected to the institution.

However, online students also receive communication from campus offices intended to help them feel included that includes information about dates and deadlines that do not apply to them. The confusion that ensues as they call various offices (who may not be aware of the communication the student is asking about!) takes their valuable time and disenfranchises them quickly.

Institutions endeavoring to build community must make recognizing their various constituents in their respective locations a priority. It matters that the university leadership recognize the online programs (including faculty and students) when speaking about the institution and its impact. It is important that division leaders plan for and acknowledge the needs of online students in their business processes as well as communications. Due to the newness of online at many institutions, the processes for online practice are secondary to traditional campus-based practice. Careful planning, policy and procedure implementation, training and communication are required to ensure inclusion of online students.

This may seem rather simple but it's very difficult for many to manage appropriately. The efforts of online units to foster online social spaces, present in-person events, support online student government and more can easily be foiled by the confusion and disconnect that comes from disparate and disconnected communications coming from the institution.

Best intentions to be inclusive can also disable an institution's ability to build community. For example, sending online students announcements through email about an employer coming to campus can seem inclusive to the sender. However, for the student who is hundreds of miles away and who may not have resources to travel, this emphasizes that they are "missing out." There can be two alternatives to this method. The first is to exclude the online set in campus related communication that doesn't engage them or is superfluous. The second is to create virtual or online events that have the same effect as a campus event.

While I say this, there are events and activities that occur on campus or in other locations that can excite students about their relationship with the institution and foster community that lasts beyond their terms of study. When a team or organization has success, the students will be proud to learn of it. For example, sharing the news of a team winning a business plan competition may increase online learners' confidence in their peers. Providing communication about sports schedules at home and away allows students awareness of the institution's activity beyond their participation and in a way in which they can have a shared awareness with others. Invitations to events or activities in their areas including (but not limited to) "away" games for sports teams or non-campus based events for other presentations can engage students and help them feel connected to the institution. We have had success alerting students to alumni events in their geographic locations so that they can connect with generations of graduates who have affinity for our school.

The people closest and most familiar to the online students are often those working in the online department or unit. As such, for the rest of the university to understand the needs of online students, those team members-from the leader to front line staff-must advocate for their presence in meetings across campus relating to institutional business processes that affect their (and all) students. These include meetings focused on financial aid, registrar or bursar policies, student accounts, information systems, commencement and academic affairs (to name a few). Online unit leaders must also effectively communicate the impact the online unit provides for the institution as it works to fulfill its mission. This ensures that institutional leadership recognize the contributions of their online divisions and understand the needs of the online students they may not see regularly.

When the leader of the institution recognizes the multiple student types under their service-both campus-based and online-students know that they are an important part of the university community. The recognition enables the activity of the units across campus to support the message through their intentional actions as mentioned earlier. Staff and faculty in the online department who work to foster community building through social media channels (existing or home grown), online live or face-to-face live activities, will find that the affinity students feel for the institution can be the foundation for increased community building through their efforts.

Online learning is still considered new to higher education. Yet, it is no longer novel for the students enrolled in these offerings. For institutions to successfully build community, intentional culture building, systems and process implementation and communication must occur at all levels of the organization designed to address the needs of all the students being served.

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It Takes a Village to Make a Village: How to Make Online Learners Part of the College Community

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It is often assumed that it is the role of the online department to create community for online students, but I believe it's the role of the entire institution to ensure the culture and systems to enable faculty and staff to create and sustain community for all students (online and on-campus).

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This is a guest post by Josh Murdock, an instructional designer at Valencia College in Florida.
Students today aren't the students we knew when we were in school. They are learning in brand new environments, using tools that didn't exist as short as five years ago. Over 21 million students are taking at least one online course, and that number is growing every semester. The reality is that there are no longer traditional or online students; students everywhere are taking courses both online and in brick-and-mortar classrooms. As instructors and administrators, we have the opportunity to help students accustomed to traditional courses become successful in online environments.

One of the hardest adjustments for students transitioning from a traditional classroom to an online environment is feeling connected to their teacher. Many times in online courses students are a username while instructors become virtual computers responding back to questions and grading projects. But, this doesn't have to happen with a few key tricks to creating an environment where online teachers become real.

Here are three simple tips to help students make the transition from traditional to online easier:

Tip #1: Create a Community From the Start

Develop a sense of connection between yourself and the students early on in the course through an introduction discussion. Have students post about themselves in discussion boards or blogs to the rest of the class encouraging them to respond to each other. (Don't forget to include some background questions that relate to the course in this discussion.) As the instructor, the biggest way to start that connection is personalizing your replay to each student, instead of just a cookie cutter response. To get the thread started, post about yourself with some personal information (your interests, favorite book, etc). Offering personal information will help students connect with you and make it so you aren't a robotic, online teacher.

Tip #2: Assign an "All About Me" Project

Another assignment that helps me learn more about students and teaches them how to use a type of software is an "All About Me" project. I have used both PowerPoint and Glogster for students to create projects on their background, education, job history, personal interest, and future goals. I create an example with my own information, which helps us get to know each other. I make sure to respond, not to just the project feedback, but to the information they include on a personal level.

Tip #3: Increase Student Engagement With Video Announcements

This tip has been the most successful and seems to be rare among online courses currently. Provide announcements or weekly updates via video updates. I have created weekly updates via webcam for my online educational technology courses for a few semesters now. Students have given great feedback on this type of video announcement. Students say they feel more connected, understand expectations better, and get a better sense of the assignments each week. I tend to follow a similar theme each week for the video announcements.

Discuss the previous week with any type of encouragement or reminders needed.

Discuss upcoming week assignments with particular details on assignments, best practices, and questions you typically get from students on the various assignments.

Highlight something new and refer students to my Tips and Tricks section for a weekly extra on a tool or information.

This type of video announcement is easy to produce using a basic webcam, sometimes recorded directly to YouTube as an unlisted video. Unlisted setting allows you to easily share the link or embed without having the video searchable or showing up on your YouTube channel. YouTube is great because it will automatically transcode any media to the correct format and is accessible on most mobile devices. Don't forget how important audio quality is when recording; consider using a microphone instead of the webcam microphone, depending on its quality and clarity. Create a simple script or outline to follow each week as you record, this will help you keep on track and not forget that detail you wanted to discussion.

This type of video announcement lets your students see their online teacher, which is often rare in a fully online course. I typically will embed the video into the announcement area, which will be even easier now with the new Video Everywhere feature added into the Content Editor. It's also important to include a transcription of the announcement for students needing access to a text version, until auto transcription improves.

Feeling more connected to the course always is always comforting for students, especially those taking their first online course or struggling to understand assignments based on text directions and examples.

Example of one of my Final Week's Announcements:
httpv://youtu.be/Qqt-XjSSiZM
Follow these 3 simple tips and I guarantee students will give you positive feedback in the end about feeling more connected and understand assignments better. I receive few questions about the assignments and tend to have less feedback about missing key part by emphasizing them in the video announcement. I get to know my students much better and much earlier in the course using through the introduction discussion and "All About Me" projects. I feel more connected to my online course following these tips, too.
Josh Murdock, also known as Professor Josh, is an instructional designer at Valencia College in Florida, where he has experience building online courses, training faculty on technology, and solving the Blackboard problems of the world. He has taught online, hybrid, and face-to-face for the past ten years. Follow Josh on Twitter @professorjosh.

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3 Tips to Connect With Your Online Students

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This is a guest post by Josh Murdock, an instructional designer at Valencia College in Florida. Students today aren't the students we knew when we were in school. They are learning in brand new environments, using tools that didn't exist as short as five years ago.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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"I'm sorry to bother you, but..." was the opening line of every email I received in the first week of this semester. This line was usually followed by nothing that would actually bother me: a question about the week's materials, a link to an interesting resource, a discussion about a potential research topic, and the like. This was all despite my many attempts to ensure that students did not feel like they were imposing whenever they contacted me: a pre-semester introductory email, a video welcoming them to the course, my biography and teaching philosophy, virtual office hours, and multiple reminders about my contact information. Yet, with all of my entreaties to reach out, I was still dealing with the real issues of isolation, fear, and frustration that results in students leaving their online courses. To combat these feelings, professors-myself included-have to deliberately, consistently, and relentlessly work to build student-faculty and student-student relationships in online courses.

As educators, we know that building community in the online environment increases the likelihood of student success. Finding ways to concretize something as ephemeral as "a sense of belonging" can be difficult; however, here are five places where you can start:

1. Make yourself available. As the professor, you are the touchstone of your online course community, which means you need to model citizenship in your course. Upload a photo and provide instructions for students to do the same. Personalize your course wherever you are able by using original video announcements, overviews, and lectures. Establish the tone of the community through class correspondence, discussion board replies, and assessment feedback. Often, this also requires you to give students some of yourself (an anecdote about your weekend or a link to something you found interesting). When students are comfortable with you, they are more comfortable learning, participating, and sharing in the learning environment.

2. Create a communication plan. Communication is essential to any relationship, and before you ask students to put themselves out there, you have to show them that it's safe to do so. Before the start of a semester, create a calendar of when you will reach out to each student individually. After the first week, reintroduce yourself and let them know that you're available to them. Before and after midterms are great opportunities for confidence-boasting. And before finals is a good time to remind them that your door (or inbox!) is always open. These communications reinforce the importance of individual attention and personalized education.

3. Encourage interaction. Classroom interactions happen by proximity in the brick-and-mortar classroom, but in the online classroom, you have to be more deliberate about student-student and student-faculty exchanges happen. "In" the classroom, you can use synchronous sessions, communal discussion boards, group projects, student presentations, wikis, and peer review groups. "Out" of the classroom, you can help create study groups and establish crowd-sourced notes. Like all interactions, these should be meaningful, relevant, and theorized to avoid confusion or resentment that can sometimes result from group interactions. When done successfully, however, these interactions create not only a community of learners but can also become lasting friendships.

4. Build "outside class" spaces. Unlike the brick-and-mortar classroom, online classrooms can feel all encompassing, lacking the traditional space and time borders that demarcate the classroom. This often means that there is no "before" or "after" class when much of community-building often occurs. In an online course, you have to consciously build in these "outside" spaces that are free from content delivery and assessment. Make "water cooler" or "café" discussion boards where the class can talk about current events and common interests. Create a social media page for the class where ideas can be shared. Watch a virtual event together and discuss it afterwards. Deliberately creating social moments acknowledges this fundamental aspect of education.

5. Bring the outside in. Paradoxically, online courses can also feel compartmentalized and isolated from the wider campus community. In our courses, we need to remind students that they are a part of large campus culture. Post announcements about events happening on campus. Assign attendance at webinars and live-streaming events for course credit. Encourage them to take part in campus organizations that are especially friendly to distance and continuing education student. Explain how to access student support and resources. As possible the only touchstones to campus, faculty members have to be ambassadors for the college community.

Being deliberate, consistent, and relentless, we can build communities in our online courses that help students to connect with not only with the course materials, but with one another. And by working to create these relationships, we can turn "I'm sorry to bother you" emails into "I'm glad I have someone to reach out to."
References
Bawa, P. (2016). Retention in online courses: exploring issues and solutions- a literature review. SAGE Open, 1-11. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244015621777

Donovan, J. (2015) The importance of building online learning communities. Colorado State University. http://blog.online.colostate.edu/blog/online-education/the-importance-of-building-online-learning-communities/

Erickson, A. & C. Neset. (2014) Building community and creating relevance in the online classroom. Faculty Focus. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/building-community-creating-relevance-online-classroom/

O'Malley, S. (2017) Professors share ideas for building community in online courses. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/07/26/ideas-building-online-community

Stone, K. (2016) Building community in online courses. American Association for Adult and Continuing Education. http://www.aaace.org/news/272788/Building-Community-in-Online-Courses.htm

Talbert, R. (2015) How student video presentations can build community in an online course. Wired Campus. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/how-student-video-presentations-can-build-community-in-an-online-course/57435

Williams, G. (2011) Use GoogleDocs for crowd-sourced notes. ProfHacker. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/use-googledocs-for-crowd-sourced-notes/31644
References Consulted
Angelino, L.M., Williams, F.K., & Natvig, D. (2007). Strategies to engage online students and reduce attrition rates. The Journal of Educators Online, 4(2).

Covelli, B. J. (2017) Online discussion boards: The practice of building community for adult learners. The Journal of Continuing Higher Education. 65:2. 139-145.

Infande, A. (2013) A dozen strategies for improving online student retention. Faculty Focus. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/a-dozen-strategies-for-improving-online-student-retention/

Park, J., & Choi, H. (2009). Factors influencing adult learners' decision to drop out or persist in online learning. Educational Technology & Society, 12(4), 207-217.

Reed, A. (2015). Online student retention requires a collaborative approach. Faculty Focus. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/online-student-retention-requires-collaborative-approach/

Dr. Melissa Wehler serves as the Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Central Penn College. She has published on topics of teaching, pedagogy, and student success. Melissa co-manages the open educational resource, The Online Lecture Toolkit, developed to support the needs of educators who want to create effective online video content. She enjoys teaching classes about writing, literature, culture, and film and has won two teaching awards for her student-centered approach.

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Five Ways to Build Community in Online Classrooms - Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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"I'm sorry to bother you, but..." was the opening line of every email I received in the first week of this semester. This line was usually followed by nothing that would actually bother me: a question about the week's materials, a link to an interesting resource, a discussion about a potential research topic, and the like.

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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Online learning, said Lynda Randall, a professor of secondary education at California State University at Fullerton, can be "a lonely enterprise if it's just a repository of articles."

Yet many traditional online courses, she said, are "based solely on text discussions.... That really results in an anemic learning experience."

Randall takes a different approach. She engages her online students in discussions -- with each other -- about themselves and about the coursework via video and video conferencing in an effort to create an online community in a class whose participants are unlikely ever to meet each other in person.

Randall isn't alone. As online courses become routine offerings at institutions across the world, more professors who teach them are embracing the notion that "social presence," a concept promoted by the researchers D. Randy Garrison, Terry Anderson and Walter Archer in the early 2000s, is critical to the success of the online learner.

Together with cognitive presence and teaching presence, social presence occurs when students can connect on a human and emotional level. This is more likely to occur, the researchers concluded, when students can see and hear each other than when they simply read text-based messages.

Michelle Pacansky-Brock, innovations lead at California State University's Channel Islands campus, calls this approach "humanizing learning." On her website, she explained: "In our digital age of knowledge abundance, an educator's value is no longer derived through the delivery of content. Rather, our new focus is on designing human-centered learning experiences."

Instructors who aim to create a sense of community in their online courses advise others to:

Let students get to know you. Humanizing a course, Pacansky-Brock said in an interview with Inside Digital Learning, begins with humanizing the instructor.

"It's important for instructors to present themselves as a real person, and also design a course that involves opportunities for students to do the same thing," said Pacansky-Brock, author of Best Practices for Teaching With Emerging Technologies.

That does not involve a single formula, she said: "Everybody does this differently. Some instructors get really goofy and can be playful and really fun in videos." She is more reserved, she said, but still lets students get to know her interests and personality.

So does Jody Donovan, an assistant professor in Colorado State University's School of Education and co-coordinator of its graduate program in student affairs in higher education.

"I share who I am and all of my identities," she said. "It's not just about my credentials as a faculty member. I'm a white woman. I have an invisible disability. I talk about the pieces of who I am and how that informs how I show up in the classroom. Then I ask students to introduce themselves in the same framework."

Encourage students to reveal their non-academic lives. For a unit on Jean Piaget's four stages of cognitive development in Randall's class on adolescence, the professor assigned her students to create a three- to five-minute presentation that included a demonstration of one of the stages. A student with two small children at home videotaped them as he tested one of the concepts.

"Very often in a [video] web conference, we'll have a child sitting on a parent's lap and we get to say 'hello,'" Randall said. "We often meet children and pets. We take an interest in getting to know each other."

When Donovan's children were in college, she conducted video interviews with them that tracked their development-and she shares her experiment with her classes. Likewise, she encourages her students to observe their kids and share those results with classmates.

Incorporate video. That wouldn't happen, of course, if classmates could not see each other. So Randall provides assignments that use video and other visuals and incorporates it into her lectures.

She uses PowerPoint presentations for online lectures so students "have the same benefit they would have if they were able to be in the classroom. They can also play it back and rewind and play it as many times as they want," she said.

In addition, Randall regularly records her feedback on student assignments rather than delivering written notes.

Meet in real time. It's not always possible, especially if students have jobs or live abroad, but Randall schedules synchronous meetings with students so they can talk to each other in real time. During those sessions, she said, "our students find they have a lot in common."

Randall organizes five synchronous sessions on the same topic, all at different times of the day and week so everyone can schedule one.

Work in small groups. "It just gets too unwieldy when students are in large groups," Donovan said. So she breaks her classes into groups of eight or fewer for discussions, group projects, peer reviews and other collaborations.

"They don't feel the size of the class," she said. "They get very connected with the students in their group." In a class of 50, she added, students "only feel like they're in a class of 10."

In fact, she said, some of her students -- even those who live far from Fort Collins, Colo. -- have gotten together to meet in person. Some have taken their families to Fort Collins for vacations and stayed at their classmates' homes. When one traveled to Colorado to defend her graduate portfolio in person, several classmates flew in to meet her and hear her defense, Donovan said.

Require constant interaction. Group projects, required participation in discussions and collaborative writing assignments "force them to engage with one another outside the classroom as well as in the classroom," Donovan said.

She recalled three students working on a group project a few years ago. One member was a recruiter for a Japanese university; another advised students taking classes in Hong Kong; and a third worked at an all-girls boarding high school in the U.S. "They taught each other," Donovan said. "They brought their own contexts and broadened the world for one another."

Rise to the challenge. Building community in an online classroom takes time, noted Donovan, and that downside can discourage professors from trying.

For one thing, she said, many instructors do not do community building in their face-to-face classrooms, so trying that online might be new and require planning and experimentation.

In addition, depending on the demographic makeup of the class each semester, professors attempting to build classroom communities face the challenge of mediating disputes that rise from cultural and demographic differences among the students.

"If students are fully engaged, this is a lot easier," she said. "But if there are students who come and go and are fairly invisible in the [online classroom] community, it's more challenging to get to know the students. It takes a little more time."

Pacansky-Brock said this kind of engagement is what students will remember when the course is finished. "When you reflect on your college classes, the ones that you remember the most were the ones that involved relationships," she said. "They were the ones that made you feel connected in some way to the instructor and you felt like you were part of a group in the class.

"That's exactly what is important in an online class."

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Let students get to know you, require interaction and other strategies.

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Anyone going back to college will have myriad options, and one of the first choices a new student has to make is between an online program and a classroom experience.

Many people naturally assume it will be more enjoyable to learn where students gather in a traditional classroom setting, but this choice comes with structures that are limiting. The requirement to attend a class at a certain time every week becomes unworkable once you add the demands of a job, children or a spouse.

The limits of the traditional approach are leading more students than ever to choose online learning that fits their busy lives. Online learning also has its own drawbacks, such as the potential to feel isolated as a student. One university has found ways to create community among students from all walks of life by connecting them with faculty, fellow students and alumni.

Western Governors University created an online learning model that places student success at the center of all decisions. This includes efforts to ensure students are supported and connected to the university. Because WGU focuses on serving working adults, its students tend to be older, more focused on their career, and they often have families of their own. This means they typically have a built-in support system, but it also means they can be distracted from their studies by other obligations unless their commitment to their degree is supported.

An important pillar of the WGU model is the mentor support provided to students, which I highlighted in a recent article in The EvoLLLution (focusing on the mentoring model of faculty support). Weekly phone communication ensures that faculty mentors are up-to-date on important developments in their students' lives. But the model doesn't stop there. The faculty members who lead learning for specific courses are charged with guiding students through the coursework and creating an online forum for students to connect with other learners currently in the same course.

The personalized WGU learning model allows students to start and finish courses on their own time. That means students can enter and complete a course on any date. The online forum has a social media format, and learners can engage with fellow students as much or as little as they choose. Students connect with other WGU students across the nation, tackle the subject matter most challenging to them and support one another in the learning environment. Because our students are adults, they appreciate receiving help from other adult students.

Students under age 35 have grown up with Web-based tools, and are as comfortable with online interaction as with in-person gatherings. There is an expectation that a student can engage on their own terms, at their own time, and WGU's online tools and forums take advantage of this expectation. Learning resources include videos and texts, but also online learning communities, simulations, discussion thread and Web conferences. Many WGU students also create informal communities through Facebook pages and offline study groups.

By creating a personalized learning environment that students can jump into with both feet, WGU has won 97 percent student satisfaction and one-year retention rates of 79 percent in 2013. In addition, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) in 2013 polled 350,000 students from 613 institutions. Senior-level students rated WGU 9 percent higher than other institutions in the area of quality interaction with faculty and 19 percent higher than other institutions on the entire educational experience.

There are other ways that WGU creates a sense of community among its students, beyond their engagement with coursework. In a growing number of states, WGU has created state-based affiliates that serve students even more closely. The first state affiliate was created four years ago at the request of the Governor of Indiana, with the goal of creating a presence within the state to connect students and alumni and grow awareness of the WGU opportunity. Since then, WGU Washington, WGU Texas, WGU Tennessee and WGU Missouri have been established.

Each state affiliate has a state office and a chancellor championing the university's efforts. Here in Missouri, the creation of the state university has not only increased enrollment but has also created a sense of WGU pride at the state level. Chancellors and state-level staff spend time hosting events and visiting students in their workplaces, embodying the concept that WGU is everywhere.

One example is the mixers that are hosted in cities and towns across the affiliate states. These meetings take many forms, from happy hours to breakfasts. All are designed to bring students, alumni, and state-based staff together to network and have fun. WGU students can connect with graduates and receive advice on their studies as well as their careers. Chancellors share news about developments within the university and points of pride that alumni should include when discussing their education.

The distribution of branded promotional material like shirts and pens is intentional. These are visual and physical reminders of the university's presence in the state. Another way WGU shares its merchandise is with surprise visits to students and alumni at their workplace, celebrating their accomplishments with food and swag.

Chancellors of the state affiliates encourage students to show their WGU pride. Western Governors University has been called the "best university you've never heard of." When students and alumni are engaged in distinguishing their university not just from local colleges but from other online institutions, their sense of affiliation is boosted. Enthusiastic students and alumni are vital to help ensure employers learn about WGU and its competency-based model. In that way, the entire community comes to recognize that the university produces high-quality graduates ready for the workforce.

These connections help WGU online students and graduates realize that they are not alone in their online university but rather, that WGU is everywhere. In surveys, 98 percent of WGU students say they would recommend WGU while 85 percent said they already have. This data provides a compelling argument that WGU has created a breakthrough model for higher education: a quality, student-centered online format that is highly personal and conducive to success.

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Creating a Sense of Connection: Online Education in the Modern Era

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Anyone going back to college will have myriad options, and one of the first choices a new student has to make is between an online program and a classroom experience. Many people naturally assume it will be more enjoyable to learn where students gather in a traditional classroom setting, but this choice comes with structures [...]

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In the absence of face-to-face interactions, how can professors of online courses develop relationships with their students?
Implement these 10 tips to generate a sense of personal connection with your students:

1. Post a short biography of yourself at the beginning of the course so that students have a sense of who you are. Talk about your background, education, interests, and include a photo.

2. Create an introductory discussion board where each student can post something about themselves - their background, interests, job history, educational goals, personal goals, or anything else they're like you and their peers to know. Respond to students' posts, and encourage all students to respond to their peers as well.

3. Better yet - request that all students create a quick personal moodboard. There are several free online moodboard creation tools such as Mural.ly and Glogster.

4. Take note of students' interests and incorporate them into class discussions. For example, if your are teaching a course about economics, and know that one of your students is the manager of his own small business, create a discussion thread in which you ask that student to write about his marketing techniques and let the other students comment with their thoughts and input.

5. Instead of posting your weekly announcements as text, post video announcements recorded with a webcam. Being able to watch a video of their professor on screen helps students feel a stronger sense of connection.

6. Respond to students' posts on weekly discussion boards as much as possible so that students know you're listening and interested in their thoughts.

7. Create assignemnts that allow students to share their personal thoughts and experiences. In essay questions or discussion board threads, ask students questions such: When have you seen the concept of XYZ played out in your own life? Where have you seen this phenomenon occur in your own community?

8. If you notice a particular student who is not completing his or her assignments, don't be afraid to reach out and send them an email asking if everything's okay or if you can help them in any way.

9. Make a list of all your students and keep track of when you made personal contact with them. Jot down the date and method of contact - email, discussion board, phone call, etc. Keeping track of all your students will ensure that no one falls through the cracks.

10. Consider splitting large classes into smaller classes to allow for more individualized attention and a sense of community.

Sources:

Related Posts

Tags: course introductions discussion boards interaction with instructors

Even if you haven't been a social media maven in the past, the recent shift to online learning is pushing all of us to use social media to its fullest. Social media can be a great resource to turn to to gather information and inspiration about online education. Here are some tips to help you use social media to support your online teaching!

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10 Tips for Making Personal Connections With Students in Online Courses - Online Education Blog of Touro College

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In the absence of face-to-face interactions, how can professors of online courses develop relationships with their students? Implement these 10 tips to generate a sense of personal connection with your students: Post a short biography of yourself at the beginning of the course so that students have a sense of who you are.

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Sergiy has 18 years of experience in eLearning and management. Creating educational programs, career paths, online and offline courses he is making the educational world better as a co-founder of RG.

The Importance of Establishing Strong Connections with Online Students

For an online teacher, establishing a strong connection with the students is important because they have no visual on the latter. While a few of the students in the class do most of the talking, the rest of them may remain quiet.

Hence, it becomes really hard for the online teacher to ascertain which student is doing other work, sleeping, unable to understand course outline, or absent altogether. This happens, when an online learning course fails to incorporate an important learning key, i.e., individualized connection with the teacher.

Moreover, in the absence of meaningful interaction with the instructor, learners can get disoriented and may feel disconnected. This makes them demotivated and they start to lose interest in the learning course.

Distance education instructions must be highly organized. Plan ahead and establish strong communication with the learners. They must be accessible to the learners, play the role of facilitator, work in teams whenever possible and mentor during their interactions with the students. - Ragan, L.C. - Good Teaching is Good Teaching

So if the course is 100% online, with no face-to-face interactions, then how would you establish personal connections? Well, there are a number of proven ways to work around the problem. In this article, we pulled up some of them for your assistance, so let's just discuss them in detail.

Introduce yourself

Establish a sense of interaction and connection between the students and yourself by arranging an introductory discussion. Try to create this session by motivating discussion in terms of educational and personal goals of students, their common interests, and other extra qualities.

You can start by posting a short biography of yourself. This may include the education, background, interests and your latest photo. This will make the students feel that you are a leading instructor and they will use your introduction as a starting guide to posting information about themselves.

This is one of the most effective ways to engage the students in a classroom environment and to know their interests. For this, you may take the help of PollEverywhere or Google Forms to survey students with regards to their academic inclinations, interests and background info. Another good idea is to assign a specific section on your course website for posting pictures and brief bios of all of your students.

Or better yet, request your students to develop a personal and quick mood board. For this, you can ask them to use several available online mood board tools.

Humanize your course

One of the most effective ways to maximize the individual connections and to increase the potential of eLearning is to humanize your course. When we say humanize the course, we mean to make it more interactive.

A humanized course is more likely to develop a relationship with the students and this can be achieved in the following ways:
Leverage online discussions
Try to provide the learners with a discussion platform. Having an online discussion board helps in connecting with peers, learners and in receiving invaluable feedback. For this, your best option is to go with a familiar social media platform - the one which is comfortably accessible by the students. Moreover, you can use the discussion boards' tool, or maybe you can create Google, Facebook or Twitter groups and invite your students to become members.

However, if you want to expand your conversation platform further, you can try using the tools such as Stride or Slack and create your personal professional networking platform.
Enrich Multimedia with Personalization
Multimedia incorporated courses enable the different types of students to meet their individual learning needs. Different students have different learning styles, so the best way to provide them with suitable learning resources is through multimedia. For this, you may use YouTube and help the visual learners with online videos. Similarly; provide a podcast for auditory learners and interactive games for tactile learners.

However, if you wish to get the interactive and accurate feedback you should create video updates and video announcements of learning course. According to Josh Murdock who is a famous instructional designer at Valencia College in Florida, students feel more connected if you provide them a learning video each week. This video may include:

Discussion regarding upcoming week's assignments and its particular details. Also, best practices and questions from students in terms of various assignments.

Discussion about the learnings of the previous week or any information which needs any reminder or some sort of encouragement.

Additional information to the main content: some industry-based tips and tricks.

You could create a live learning broadcast through VoiceThread, where students can interact with you and fellow students during translation.

All of this will help in keeping your multimedia course interesting and it will also help in improving your learner's experience.

Create cooperative learning

This teaching technique is an excellent way to increase the motivation of students to learn and to make them more organized. Cooperative learning sometimes also called small-group learning. In this instructional strategy, a small group of students works together on a common project or task.

Hence, the ownership of learning and teaching is shared by the group of students. This provides students with much more opportunities to actively participate in their learning, in asking questions and challenging each other. Moreover, students get a better chance to share and discuss their ideas openly and to internalize their learning.

If you structure the activities carefully, you can significantly help the students in learning the skills which are required to successfully work together. These structured discussions also help in avoiding conflicts.

Another way to avoid these conflicts is to encourage the students to communicate with each other through more meaningful discussions. For this, you must design your discussions which would capitalize on interpersonal communication among the learners. Also, manage the classroom in a way that would promote a safe and comfortable platform for substantive and thoughtful discussions - including questions to give rise to result-oriented arguments.

Create a choice option

Nothing could be more engaging than allowing a person to become a part of decision making process. While this is a common practice in the business world to make employees feel engaged, the same is also effective in building a more strong connection with online students. So let your students participate in decision making.

For instance, give them a chance to choose the projects which they are about to do or the particular topics which you will be discussing in a special lecture. You can make as many variations in this technique of engagement as you like, but the most important aspect is to enable them to feel they are an actual part of eLearning course and the overall teaching platform. To make this happen, you may use SurveyMonkey to learn about students' opinion or you may just add some grades to your eLearning course. Moreover, if you do have Slack, you could also use Polly app for your survey solutions.

Enable interactive communication

The easiest way to promote interaction is to enable interactive communication. This may include instant messaging or live chats. Real-time communication platform develops a sense of connectedness and control amongst the students. So whenever possible, try both asynchronous and synchronous forms of communication with your students.

Encourage the learners to make the most of this interactive communication platform, not just to interact with the instructor but also with their other classmates, with regards to their project discussions or group projects.

However, in some cases, you might not need to connect with everyone at once or in the same way. Throughout the whole academic experience, there will be many occasions in which you will have to build individual connections with your students through direct communication. This is also a great way to check-in with one of your students who seem to remain away, missing assignments or has been having no recent activity in the eLearning course. One of the Illinois Online Network's tips also suggests that the faculty should not be afraid to raise an email to their student and ask him/her if anything might be disturbing or interfering in his/her course participation.

Find your student reward

Rewards are the great way to keep the learners motivated. It helps them in engaging more with the course, helping them in taking interest in the learning. Since people appreciate rewards, a lot of educators make the most of rewards systems to draw the attention of students enrolled in their eLearning course. These rewards can be offered against many project completions or group activities.

Similarly, these activities and rewards may be timed challenges or simply to reach an achievement level. Another way to engage the students, is to take the their opinion in deciding the prize.

A reward for completing the course or an activity will motivate students to put maximum effort in learning and they will always remain connected to you through course objectives.

The bottom line

As an educator, it is important to understand that every student should have the best learning experience that could possibly be offered in the course. To achieve this, the students must have the sense that the instructor is always 'there' and not 'missing in action'.

For this, you will have to respond them in a timely manner in terms of their questions and concerns. It also means to show your presence by participating in online discussions and giving students timely feedback on their comments and work. Also, keep the course outline consistent with the received feedback and make changes to the course mid-stream to incorporate the feedback received from the student through various communication channels.

Hence, if you wish to develop a strong connection with your students via online learning, then you must take into consideration the above-mentioned suggestions. Moreover, if you keep up frequent communication with your students, all above suggestions will work in your learning process.

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How do you make individualized connections to your students via online learning?

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Sergiy has 18 years of experience in eLearning and management. Creating educational programs, career paths, online and offline courses he is making the educational world better as a co-founder of RG. For an online teacher, establishing a strong connection with the students is important because they have no visual on the latter.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Online student retention is one of the most critical components for the success of any college or university. The key to a successful online retention program is the realization that student retention is everybody's job.

The main objective of a well-established online retention program is to maintain a student's enrollment and to keep him highly satisfied with the level of education he is acquiring in an online environment. This is not an easy task since there are many reasons why a student might need or want to withdraw or leave the program of study.

Below are a dozen strategies for improving online student retention for administrators and faculty:

1. Make a good first impression. The first day of class should be both welcoming and informative. The instructor should create a welcome letter with a few details about herself and the course and have students introduce themselves as well. After students post their introductions in the discussion board, the instructor should respond to each and every student. These first-day activities help set the tone for the course as a community of learners.

2. Never underestimate the importance of instructor presence. Providing students with immediate feedback and being highly visible in the classroom and online threaded discussion boards will improve the online experience for learners.

3. When grading student assignments, it's best to provide constructive recommendations for improvement that are highly motivating and encouraging. It's easy for attempts at humor to fall flat or words to be misinterpreted in the written word, so be sure reread your comments before hitting submit.

4. Answer all questions posed by students in the faculty forum section within 24-48 hours, and communicate this feedback window to students so they know what to expect. A student could be encountering a discouraging issue or a personal emergency that could lead him or her to withdraw from the program, so a timely response is critical.

5. Make students feel they are a part of the program by letting them know how important their contribution is to the class. One of the most important factors impacting retention is whether students feel they belong to part of a larger community, which can affect whether they continue on a course of study or drop out (DeVries and Wheeler, 1996; as cited by Ludwig-Hardman and Dunlap, 2003).

6. Let students know they were missed when they return from being absent. This gives awareness to the student of how important they are to the class, that their classroom contribution was greatly missed, and that you're aware of their absence.

7. Practice proven adult learning principles and strategies in the classroom. For example, students should perceive that the goals of their learning experience are directly related to their own personal goals. Also, their learning experience should be organized around what they see as relevant to the "real world." The student is provided with self-directed and independent learning activities. The faculty should ensure that the learning environment is characterized by mutual trust and respect, freedom of expression, and acceptance of differences.

8. Introduce collaborative learning techniques in the classroom. The famous Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978), who contributed to the later formation of constructivism, theorized that students learn more effectively in a collaborative environment where they can share their ideas and experiences.

9. Engage students by hosting live webinars. In addition to the classroom experience, introduce a variety of career skill topics that will provide students with learning tips and other strategies that will help them in the future.

10. Establish an early alert system. Identify and assist underperforming students who are at risk. Recommend to the students to seek assistance with the appropriate support staff.

11. Help students establish specific goals for attending the program and each course. At the very beginning of the course, in the announcement section, the instructor should establish the course expectations. This ensures the students know early on what is required of them for a successful completion of the course. If the student does not meet their weekly goals, the faculty should contact the student and remind them of the course goals and help to get the student back on track.

12. If you're an administrator, be sure to involve faculty in student retention matters. Because faculty have the most interaction with students, they serve as a tremendous resource for helping improve online student retention and success.

Dr. Al Infande is the online human resources lead faculty at Columbia Southern University in Orange Beach, Ala. He also serves as a professor at several colleges and universities where he teaches courses in human resources management. He can be reached at al.infande@columbiasouthern.edu
References:
DeVries, Y. E., and Wheeler, C. (1996). The interactivity component of distance learning implemented in an art studio course. Education Indianapolis, 117, 180-184.

Ludwig-Hardman, S., and Dunlap, J. (2003). Learner Support Services for Online Students: Scaffolding for success. Available at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/131/211. Accessed February 28, 2013.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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A Dozen Strategies for Improving Online Student Retention

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Online student retention is one of the most critical components for the success of any college or university. The key to a successful online retention program is the realization that student retention is everybody's job.

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The higher education sector is experiencing a signiﬁcant period of change. Universities have been steadily increasing online learning options to provide greater ﬂexibility for students.

Unfortunately, online classes continue to experience retention issues, which universities need to address.

One reason is clear; when studying online, students are physically disconnected from their peers, staff and the campus, resulting in feelings of isolation and a lack of support.

Increase in online learning

Advancement in technology is facilitating a significant increase in online learning.

Technology breaks down the geographic restrictions that once existed, allowing students to take courses from colleges in other states, or even other countries.

The student demographic has also shifted from the prototypical recent High School graduate to mature-age learners looking to advance their career.

When asked about the most important reasons for choosing online classes, students indicated that they selected online courses based on considerations such as convenience, flexibility, opportunity to fuse their current lifestyles to their desire to study, availability of programs, and affordability (Shay & Rees, 2004).

29.7 percent of students at U.S. universities now take at least one distance education course (a total of 6,022,105 students) ( source). Approximately half of those students are studying entirely online.

Online enrollments are therefore being driven by:

Retention rates

It can be difficult to pinpoint exact retention figures, particularly as the methods for calculation vary widely. Having said that, here are some interesting figures:

The causes of poor retention

To tackle the problem universities must understand the leading reasons students drop out.
Students often misunderstand the difficulty of online courses.
They think it's easier than having to attend campus. Generally speaking, the reverse is true, online courses actually require significantly more discipline.

Staying motivated is a challenge. The convenience of never having to be on campus can encourage poor study habits, like the increased temptation to procrastinate.

Lack of support. It's easy for universities to overlook online students in favor of on-campus students. It is challenging for staff and faculty not to fall into the trap of online cohorts being 'out of sight, out of mind.'

Complex digital ecosystems. Unfortunately, most universities are stuck using archaic systems that were never developed to cater for online students. They are clunky, difficult to use and fail to create an environment of social engagement.

Lack of community and connection with peers. Particularly in the case of online learners, self-determination theory prescribes the need for a sense of inclusion or affiliation with others. (Chen and Jang, 2010). Before online education, many students developed strong relationships with their peers, resulting in a sharing of content, learning, and ideas. Without this social connectedness, students are prone to feeling isolated.

The cost of poor retention

Poor retention rates are expensive for students, faculty, and institutions.

In a study published in 2013, the 1,669 colleges and universities studied collectively lost revenue due to attrition in an amount close to $16.5 billion ($16,451,945,426) with the average school losing $9,910,811.

Publicly assisted colleges and universities averaged a $13,267,214 loss from attrition. The average private college or university lost revenue of $8,331,593, and for-profit schools lost an average of $7,921,228 ( source).

Taking online seriously

Online learning and student retention require an institutional commitment, including innovative approaches to create student community, support, and engagement.

Online courses require more effort by staff and academics than traditionally needed.

Dr. Cathy Stone investigated the effectiveness of practices, supports and retention strategies in online learning at Australian universities. She discovered that staff who teach online units didn't feel adequately supported by the university.

"There was often a sense of frustration among participants that their institution didn't take online learning seriously, it was seen as an add-on, and that they didn't get sufficient support as a lecturer delivering these programs," she said.

Given on-campus students also access much of their content online under the blended learning approach, Dr. Stone argued that universities should adopt an "online first" attitude to the creation and delivery of all learning materials and content. "That requires ongoing and deliberate consideration of how we present and deliver material online in a way that it is engaging and meets learning outcomes," she said.

Strategies to increase retention

Create connection and build community

When students feel disconnected and isolated, their chances of success are slim. There are many ways to build community online, including purpose-built technologies. Creating a support network around each student does take effort and persistence, but the potential benefit is immense.

Communicate personalized information

Frequent and personalized communication helps students to feel connected to staff and the university. The key is to avoid inundating students with irrelevant information. Keep it relevant, frequent and personal.

Centralise and prioritize

Universities must approach online learning as "core business" rather than an aside, by adopting an institution-wide approach to standards, staffing, and resourcing.

Use data effectively

Getting the fundamentals correct first is essential, but once achieved, learning analytics and other technologies can be used to understand the characteristics and progress of online students better.

Create an early intervention strategy

As soon as a student displays signs of wanting to drop out, the university should act as swiftly as possible to retain them. This can happen in the form of automatic emails to relevant staff when a student persistently fails to attend class or hand in work, or if they are using keywords in online systems (e.g. "under pressure" or "dropping out").

Promote support services

Students need to be aware that the university has support services that they can access whenever they need them. Support staff should proactively provide information in creative and fun ways, as students are often hesitant to ask for help.

Invest in the digital campus

The digital campus is now arguably more important than the physical campus, so a significant investment needs to be made on an ongoing basis. Purchasing the best technologies available in the marketplace is the first step.

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Strategies to Increase Online Student Retention

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The higher education sector is experiencing a signiﬁcant period of change. Universities have been steadily increasing online learning options to provide greater ﬂexibility for students. Unfortunately, online classes continue to experience retention issues, which universities need to address.

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Numerous studies published in recent years paint online learning as something of a gamble for students. Though it provides a flexible pathway for non-traditional learners to access post-secondary content, the success rates tend to be lower than in-class options. That said, students that persist through at least one online course have higher completion rates than those that never enroll in an online course. It's up to institutions to create the conditions for online student success, and minimizing the transactional distance impacting distance students while creating as engaging an environment for these learners as possible has a significant impact on their persistence. In this interview, Tim Gordon discusses the factors that contribute most to online student attrition and shares his thoughts on the steps institutions can take to maximize online students' chances for success. The EvoLLLution (Evo): What are the most significant challenges to retention facing online students?
Timothy Gordon (TG): Students need to be able to identify the online model that best works with their learning style. The first thing we need to do is create mechanisms to help students assess what's best for them in online learning. The other challenge is that online students, similar to campus-based students, need to balance their education goals with their day-to-day lives, whether it's raising a family or working.

Online students certainly face the challenge of also being in an environment that can be a lot less structured. In addition, there is not a visible community for them to be a part of. Online learners need to take the extra step of connecting with the online communities that are provided for them. They need to work a little bit harder to make sure they are connecting with the tools that many programs provide them to connect to the campus and to resources.
Evo: How do these differ from retention challenges for face-to-face learners?
TG: Many of the retention challenges facing online students are very similar to those facing on-campus learners in terms of connecting with community and balancing studies with all of the competing life demands. In that way, retention challenges for online students are very similar for campus-based learners.

Some of the significant differences are obviously there's not that face-to-face community that students can connect with, that encourage them and support them. Additionally, because there's typically not a carved out time to show up for class, online students can put off some of the pieces that relate to online studying to deal with the face-to-face challenges that they have in life, whereas a campus-based student would know their class times.

Many online models have built robust opportunities for students to connect with campus-based resources in ways that are designed for distance and online learners. However, there are other pieces of the campus where a student may have to, even though they're an online learner, adapt to a more traditional model, such as making a call within a specific time frame. There may not necessarily be 24/7 support.
Evo: What can a college or university do to help minimize those retention barriers for their online learners?
TG: The campuses that have had the best programs learned to align the resources for online and campus-based students, and consider where modifications in services and support need to be made on the institutional side so that it's really seamless for online learners. Ultimately, campuses have to take a really hard look at how their services are structured and define whether there are arbitrary barriers that are prohibitive for online students. It's similar to the discussion about serving non-traditional students. When we have offices that are only open until 5 p.m. and we have students coming to campus who work until 5 p.m., we had to really look at our hours to make sure we served all students. That is also the case here with online learning. Campuses have to take the leadership and initiative to look at what might that campus experience look like for an online student and how do we move barriers and create great access to services and support.

There is a large obligation on the campus' part to make sure that, as it launches into creating places for online learners, it also operates inclusively and provides them connection to the campus community. Maybe that's a model such as different opportunities for students that participate in campus traditions or a periodic touchstone by email or mail that are similar to what a student might get in a campus-based environment. The reality is online students will have to do things differently than campus-based students because the learning modality is different. We need to be conscious to ensure that we are creating as few barriers as possible to connect them to campus.
Evo: From the institutional side, how challenging is it to create the systems to maximize persistence in online programs while keeping the program costs low and the price competitive?
TG: It has been my experience that with online learners, many times the windows of accessing resources may be limited or different than what the campus is delivering and larger campuses are going to be able to scale something differently than a campus that is smaller. As you provide high-touch programs and leverage that through technological solutions or greater staff ability, you're going to have some additional costs.

With the UW Flex system, we can really leverage the power of an entire system and then look at what each campus is able to do. We have online students as part of the mix. We're not necessarily adding an online advising office but we are looking at current advising structures and we are making those advisors available to students. If another place doesn't have that same structure, then there will have to be some real cost-benefit analysis done. In most cases, when you look at competitive programs that are high-touch and able to support students well, doing that will certainly reap benefits and provide resources to the institution as students are recruited and then retained. It's much less costly to retain students than it is to recruit them. Institutions invest in really retaining those students, they reach some of those additional resources, but they may have to consider myriad options, whether that's outsourcing some services or providing some additional hours to services. Students are great partners in looking at what they need and how that can be accessed. It has to be very intentional, focused on what the learner's needs are. If there are ways to provide that or ways to train peer staff as opposed to full-time staff, those are different ways that campuses can do that.
Evo: Is there anything you'd like to add about the retention challenges for higher ed institutions when it comes to their online students and what institutions can do to really maximize retention while minimizing costs?
TG: One of the areas we see evolving with online programs is really how students engage with services. How are we supporting online students that also need access to campus services such as counseling or tutoring? What many campuses are looking at is the modality in which they deliver that. It's not necessarily about adding lots of people to these teams, but more about looking at how do these teams serve all students, including online students. Ultimately, campuses have to look at this as an opportunity to examine the entire campus community and how it continues to be more inclusive and intentional about serving students and not treating online students as an add-on but really as a robust part of the campus community. When schools do that, that's when online students are served really well in additional to adding value to their fellow campus-based students.
This interview has been edited for length.

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Engaging Experiences and Student-Centered Service Critical to Online Retention

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Numerous studies published in recent years paint online learning as something of a gamble for students. Though it provides a flexible pathway for non-traditional learners to access post-secondary content, the success rates tend to be lower than in-class options. That said, students that persist through at least one online course have higher completion rates than [...]

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As the non-traditional student demographic continues to grow, the demand for greater programmatic flexibility grows with them. Increasing numbers of colleges and universities have launched online programs, but what does it take for a program to truly be considered high quality? In this interview, Nancy Rubin shares her thoughts on what it takes to deliver a truly engaging experience for online students, both inside and outside the immediate learning environment. The EvoLLLution (Evo): What are the hallmarks of a truly engaging online program?
Nancy Rubin (NR): One of the most important aspects of an engaging online program is the level of support provided to faculty and students.

It is very easy for online students to feel disconnected from a course, their program, or your school. At Columbia Video Network, the online division of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University, we use many different methods to connect and communicate with our online population, including social media, telephone, email, videoconferencing, an online help desk and regularly updating our website.

Online students, and faculty for that matter, often do work in the evenings and on the weekends. Providing support outside of regular university business hours (8AM to 6PM) is critical to success and plays a significant role in overall satisfaction with a program. Just-in-time support, giving people what they need when they need it, is a key component to our service model. We have put considerable effort into creating easily accessible online resources that anyone can access as needed.

Building an instructional design team is one of the significant commitments we have made to ensure the success of our online programs. The design team offers training and orientations for faculty and students, assists with content development, helps integrate new technologies, and offers support in real time. Faculty teaching online classes for Columbia Video Network have an instructional designer, a course developer, and multimedia specialist they can work with to build courses, develop content and experiment with new tools and teaching methods. Students have a dedicated team of experts who can answer questions or help direct them to the right people to get the answers they need.
Evo: What are a few of the most significant challenges to creating this engaging online educational experience?
NR: A significant challenge to creating an engaging online ecosystem at Columbia is ensuring the experience provided online is virtually (pun intended) the same as our on-campus experience; in quality of course content, level of interaction with faculty and TAs, and a robust set of course offerings.

Many schools use Learning Management Systems (LMS) for online courses, and properly training faculty and students on those tools can be critical to their ability to interact, access materials and communicate, and to their level of comfort and satisfaction.

An LMS with a mix of asynchronous tools, such as discussion forums, and synchronous tools, for things like live presentations, is important from a pedagogical perspective but also for communication.

Students often access resources on the go. As a result, having a mobile application to do their work is becoming increasingly important. Being able to use a cell phone or tablet to read, post, or send email is not something that we thought about a few years ago. Making sure you factor that into requirements for vendors is critical, as is designing content that can be viewed or interacted with on a mobile device. This is something faculty do not often think about.

Convincing faculty to adapt course material for teaching online can present a challenge. Working with instructional designers has made that process easier for many of our faculty members. Online content is usually consumed in smaller pieces. Taking a 90-minute lecture and breaking it up into smaller units is one of the first lessons faculty learn in our trainings.
Evo: How have you and your team worked to overcome these obstacles?
NR: One major change we made at CVN is building a new learning ecosystem, including a new student management system, implementing a new learning management system and choosing a new video-hosting provider.

There is a lot of talk in the eLearning industry about Learning Management Systems but not as much about Student Management Systems. Online students need to be able to access records, complete forms, and register for classes online. Easy access to those systems through a single sign-on process is something we have spent quite a bit of time working through with the information technology experts at Columbia.

Migrating to the Canvas Learning Management system has not been easy but the benefits outweigh any obstacles. The communication and notification tools in Canvas have improved interaction between students, between faculty and students, support staff and faculty, and support staff and students.

The conferencing tool is an easy way to hold office hours for online students and it is the way online students make presentations and share content and ideas with their on-campus classmates. We are even seeing more on-campus faculty take advantage of online tools for office hours and presentations.

Within the last year, we built two recording studios, a booth studio and a light board studio, both of which are used heavily to record content for online classes and to flip on-campus courses. Studio recording content allows us to create content that is higher quality than simply using a webcam or even using a lecture capture system. Our early experiments with flipped classes have been so successful we are already looking into building more studios.
Evo: Why is it so important for institutions to ensure their online programs are truly engaging?
NR: The success of an online program depends on a number of things, the most important being the satisfaction of the student. If the learning environment provided is not easy to access, if faculty are not comfortable with the modality they are teaching in or if support is not available when students need it, the program will not succeed.

Courses, course materials, library resources, advising, all need to be accessible online and in a timely manner. Online students should be able to solve their own problems with resources available to them 24/7, or receive a reply from someone they have contacted within 24 to 48 hours.

At Columbia Video Network, we ask faculty members to dedicate teaching assistants solely for their online students. The teaching assistant answers questions, holds virtual office hours, and provides feedback to online students so that they are aware of how they are progressing in each online class.

Providing online access to on-campus events is an area we have recently begun focusing on. With our new video hosting system, we are able to live stream events and have been making a concerted effort to publicize those events to our online students.

Creating a community of online learners, and connecting them to our on-campus students and events, is the best way to create engaging online programs and engaged learners.

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Engagement Inside and Outside the Virtual Classroom Critical to Success in Online Ed

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As the non-traditional student demographic continues to grow, the demand for greater programmatic flexibility grows with them. Increasing numbers of colleges and universities have launched online programs, but what does it take for a program to truly be considered high quality? In this interview, Nancy Rubin shares her thoughts on what it takes to deliver [...]

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Taking an online course should be more than sitting in front of a computer - real engagement involves becoming a part of the community of learners.

Building Online Communities

Online learning communities can be educationally and personally fulfilling when students approach their courses with a commitment to initiate, respect, value, and fully engage in the material, dialogues, and group work. Much has been written about the importance of the relationship between students and faculty in online courses. More and more attention is being given to the tremendous influence of the online peer community.

The concept of peer learning recognizes that students are an important source of knowledge in addition to faculty and course material. Students are not passive receptacles to be filled with information, instead, they are active learners. Being a member of a learning community means engaging in reciprocal learning activities, soaking in new ideas and sharing perspectives and experiences to make meaning of the information. Learning happens through discussion, reflection, collaborative teamwork, and most importantly, taking initiative and responsibility to listen, question, and think critically within the community of fellow learners.

Asynchronous learning in online classes allows students to reflect and think about their responses prior to voicing them. Students learn a great deal by explaining their ideas to others and by participating in activities in which they can learn from their peers. They develop skills in organizing and planning learning activities, working collaboratively with others, giving and receiving feedback and evaluating their own learning. (Boud, Peer Learning in Higher Education)

Students Thoughts - Online Learning

In a previous article, I wrote about the characteristics of successful online students compared to those qualities needed for success in a residential classroom. Taking initiative to reach out to classmates in an online format may be one of the most important strategies for successfully building an online learning community. When I asked a number of online students to share their thoughts on the importance of peers in the online learning environment, and how they went about building online learning communities and relationships, they provided terrific insights:

These relationships help me when I am struggling in courses. Having strong relationships with my classmates is an important support system - they can totally relate to my experience.

Building a few supportive relationships with my classmates is critical because as an online student, it would be easy to miss the camaraderie that often exists in a traditional classroom. That same camaraderie online motivates and keeps me engaged in classes.

It helps to talk to someone else who has taken a class before me and can tell me what to expect, or discuss assignments and share insights.

My first semester I didn't "talk" (email, Facebook, etc...) to anyone outside of class and the work just seemed like work. It was interesting but it just didn't mean as much as when I finally made a significant connection with a classmate. Once I made that connection, I started to make others and realized what a difference it made in helping me feel more like a part of a community rather than a solo student doing homework online.

Having these relationships impacted my learning by giving me a more well-rounded and diverse experience. If you learn online only in your own bubble, you risk missing out on what your classmates can share with you. Additionally, it's comforting to know others are balancing jobs, families, and school just like me.

Help Build an Online Community

Encourage students to reach out to classmates with similar life circumstances as a first step in building relationships in the online learning community. Model how to read one another's discussion posts and follow up with additional probing questions. Lead students to share rich dialogues that enhance learning and relationships. I have found many online students share more and take more risks than in the residential classroom.

Introverted students have time to think and reflect on the material and their classmates' comments prior to constructing their own responses in online learning. Students may edit their comments before posting, as opposed to blurting out a response in a physical classroom that cannot be retrieved. The ideal online learning community is a safe space for risk taking, vulnerability, and sharing diverse ideas. Faculty and students share responsibility for creating and maintaining this learning environment.

To facilitate students engaging with one another, I created a "coffee shop" for my online courses. Students learn about one another, support each other through life stresses, and celebrate personal accomplishments. Over the years, I've heard stories of my online students traveling great distances to spend time together, attending one another's weddings, supporting classmates who are serving as caregivers for aging parents, and lifting up those going through various marital/familial challenges. Physically separated by distance, they are connected through their commitment to one another and to learning.

Online learning communities can be academically successful and personally life-changing when created, fostered, and sustained by all involved.

Updated July 1, 2020

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The Importance of Building Community in Online Classes

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Taking an online course should be more than sitting in front of a computer - real engagement involves becoming a part of the community of learners. Building Online Communities Online learning communities can be educationally and personally fulfilling when students approach their courses with a commitment to initiate, respect, value, and fully engage in the material, dialogues, and group work.