The campfire is a space where people gather to learn from an expert. The teacher is the content expert or specialist. Yet, in the campfire, teaching becomes an iterative process. Each term is an opportunity to improve by making changes in our learning environments and then inquiring about how those changes improved student learning. These changes should be guided by the knowledge emerging from research about online education and what we know about how people learn.
What many educators in the United States fail to recognize is that the way we teach extends a worldview that may clash with our students' cultural experiences. Education is a cultural construct. Educación, the Mexican construct of education, is grounded in a mutual relationship between a teacher and a student, which is dramatically different from the hierarchical and authoritative instructor-student relationship that underpins U.S. higher education. When instructors teach face-to-face, they have ample opportunity to leverage their interpersonal communications to get to know students and create connections with them. When teaching online, an instructor must mindfully construct that presence and foster those connections or they don't exist.
The Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University analyzed online course characteristics to identify predictors of student success. In their study of 23 online courses, they rated the clarity of learning objectives, effectiveness of technology integration, and the depth of interpersonal interaction in the course. The study found that the level of interpersonal interaction in the course was the biggest predictor of student grades. Students in low-interaction courses earned nearly one grade lower than students in courses with high interaction.
In most of the courses that were observed, the discussion forum was the only tool used to foster interaction. Few courses made use of multimedia content or interactive technologies. Students noted the value of learning environments that provided them with the opportunity to see and hear their instructors, noting that voice and video improved the presence of their instructor and helped students get to know their teachers, even though they did not meet in person. In fact, students reported a greater sense of teacher presence and caring when instructors used interactive technologies consistently and purposefully. For instance, students reported a higher level of engagement when teachers incorporated live audio and video chats or video-capture lectures Students also got a sense of teacher caring when the instructors posted frequently in chat rooms, invited student questions and responded quickly to those questions, provided detailed feedback on student assignments, and asked for and responded to student feedback about the course.
Learn more details about the study by accessing the article, Creating an Effective Online Instructor Presence.
Cognition is a term used in neuroscience to refer to the process in which the human brain performs different types of tasks to acquire knowledge. Bloom's taxonomy is a framework that is often used in higher education to understand how the cognitive domain of learning works. Bloom's taxonomy is valuable to educators because our goal is to support our students towards the development of critical thinking skills, which are the highest form of cognition and represent the top of Bloom's pyramid.
Critical (or higher order) thinking skills, however, cannot be mastered until lower order cognitive skills are developed first. It is critical for us, as teachers, to understand that higher order thinking skills build upon lower order thinking skills. As such, before being able to create something new (which requires higher order, critical thinking skills), students must first memorize and then apply that knowledge to different contexts.
Cognition is central to learning, but it isn't the only learning domain. While they are discussed rarely in contexts of college teaching, the development of knowledge does not occur in a vaccum. It is entangled in a full body experience that includes emotions and physical activity.
For a moment, reflect on a vivid memory from your life. Chances are it is something that is connected to a strong emotion, as well as doing something. When we aim to engage the domain of cognition in teaching and learning without recognizing the importance of the affective and psychomotor domains, as well, our students lose out. Deep, transformative learning occurs as a result of engaging all three domains of learning.