Where many online courses are weak it seems to me is in neglecting the social aspect. Highlighted on its own like that it can seem rather irrelevant. I have found that many new online students just want to ‘get on with it’ and go straight to the content. Come to think of it, if there is one thing that teachers new to online learning want, it is to ‘get on with it’ and work out how to present the content.
But unless you are trying to teach something esoteric and not well known, I wonder if this is the main issue. Some of the most successful online courses have been built on a very bare skeleton of content! I am referring to the Connectivitist courses where the prime responsibility of the learner is to find and organise their learning and where the course facilitator’s role is to suggest a path and a time plan and to summarise and showcase what learners have achieved.
If we take content as a starting point and relate this to the 7 affordances framework from my previous post we can begin to see that throwing a group of strangers together in an online space is not going to work beyond knowledge transmission unless positive steps are taken to nurture social relationships between this disparate group of people.
You can argue how content can be given added value through all the 7 affordances of Kalantzis and Cope’s elearning ecologies model but I would highlight the active knowledge-making affordance as the one most likely to benefit from learners working together, and with others, to create meaning through active tasks for example in a project-based approach.
If there is one thing that the MOOC storm has shown, then that is how limited the time of the tutor is. Online learning must make use of the expertise in the virtual room and this refers to your learners. However, if you, the learner, are going to display your work to your peers, you must trust them and to trust them, you must get to know them, and so we are back to the ‘silly’ social activities that it is a good idea to include in every online learning course. Not only does this give learners a chance to try out the interface in a low risk activity but it also serves the purpose of building the trust which will be essential to making the most of what your peers have to offer.
Gilly Salmon’s 5-step model shows us how much more is possible once you get a group of learners willing to work together. Salmon’s model shows us that it is important to think of the social aspect even before the learners have arrived by making sure that the online interface is friendly and welcoming and that the tutor is there to welcome new participants warmly right from the start. The second stage is online socialisation where learners are given trivial social tasks, such as filling in their profile page or sharing their favourite dish that not only demonstrates how to move around the online environment but also discloses a small amount of personal but not private information about the learners. Stage 3 is when you can start setting tasks where learners exchange information with each other to complete the task andstage 4 describes the situation when you can start expecting learners to co-create.Stage 5 describes the situation when learners trust each other to the extent that they are willing to peer review and help each other out spontaneously. Salmon’s model shows us why it is not reasonable to expect learners to start peer collaboration and review immediately.
SOLE
As well as the connectivitist courses mentioned above, another logical end point to the paramount importance of the social aspect of learning is Sugata Mitra’s work into the effectiveness of small groups of children working together to answer a motivating question with minimal or no adult supervision, known as SOLE, Self-Organised Learning Environment. Mitra has also experimented with what the adult role should be by offering simple, non-specific encouragement to these groups of children.
Eg ‘You must be very clever to come up with that’,
as against,
’I agree with your conclusions but your methods should have been a bit more precise’.
These findings run counter to the advice given on feedback that usually centres on giving specific rather than general feedback. Mitra’s work has proved controversial in some respects but his main contention that small groups of children with access to only one computer per group can come up with good answers through social interaction, does highlight the importance of the social side of learning; a social side which should be transferred to the online arena.
So what is social all about really? It is about building trust when the default human instinct is to tribalise and mistrust those people that we don’t know. We need that trust to enable our group of online learners to
- work together
- to make meaning,
- to go beyond the transmission of facts and
- to support each other in their learning through peer support, peer feedback and the sharing of experiences so that they can learn from each other, and
- in the end to lessen the burden and expectations placed on the tutor to be not only the font of all knowledge but also the arbiter of quality.