My Reflections

The tools that were introduced in this course really opened my eyes as to how to create online community. I have been teaching online courses for about five years now. My online classes were fairly standard. Each week I would provide students with a written lecture and open up a discussion forum to discuss issues raised in the lectures and readings. Through this course, I have learned how to use various tools to create an online community that allows me and my students to interact with each other in a ways that is much more engaging than simple text-based discussion forums.

The two concepts that I will definitely integrate into my courses is social presence and collaboration. The social presence piece will be developed through the use of webcam videos, VoiceThread, and Facebook. When I first started teaching online, I had observed other instructors who had used video in their courses. However, I did not think it added much to the course. After taking this class, I realized that videos are much more than simply providing information, it is about creating social presence. This course helped me to realize the importance of social presence and its relationship to learning outcomes. In particular, in the “Can you feel it?” lecture was the sentence: “The stronger social presence an instructor establishes in an online class, the greater potential s/he has for increasing a student's affective learning (emotions, attitude, interest, attention, values) which directly relates to cognitive learning (comprehending, organizing, evaluation).” Affective learning is a critical component in understanding the social world that we live in. It now seems to me that social presence is critical to a sociology course.

As well as introductory videos, I will also incorporate VoiceThread into my courses, particularly as a way of facilitating discussions of sociological topics. I have always loved the discussion board discussions I have in my Moodle discussion forums, but this course has shown me the how much richer discussions can be with video and voice comments. Social presence can also be facilitated by Facebook groups, as pictures and videos can more easily be shared.

The second key concept that I will be incorporating into my online courses in collaboration. This concept is one that I always think about when creating my online courses, but don’t quite know how to implement well. This is where VoiceThreads and wikis provide the tools that I need to experiment more with collaboration. I am considering creating VoiceThread pages that can be collaboratively edited. For example, one project that I am considering would require each student to contribute a slide showing a video or a picture that they took of a social scene. They would then give their analysis of the social scene using concepts learned in class. Other students, who can see the same scene, can then provide their own analysis. By this process, students can come to understand the social scene in a more complicated way. I hope to use wikis to collaboratively do research projects, where students contribute their knowledge about particular research methods and types of analysis to create a knowledge base where other students can draw from, particularly future students.