Fostering a Sense of Community Online

I’m using a photo of my road to illustrate my work in the Intro to Online Teaching course this week as it seemed apropos. Last week everything was new and exciting and I seemed to breeze through, but this week the going was much harder. I feel like I need to give it a little gas and keep going at a steady pace or I'll never get through. Taking a professional development course like this reminds me how life intervenes and helps me to have empathy for my students.

For some people the term Online Community is an oxymoron. How can we have community when the actual people are not face-to-face and we never hear anyone’s voice? I like the quote by Howard Rheingold who wrote The Virtual Community way back in 1993, “virtual communities are cultural aggregations that emerge when enough people bump into each other often enough in cyberspace.” This same thing happens when people intentionally commit to form a group that communicates online, whether for fun, for political or cultural reasons, or as in our case here, for educational purposes.

Online communication can take various forms. There is Instant Messaging where you can ‘talk’ in real time to another person and Chat Rooms where you can communicate in real time with a group of people. I have found that Instant Messaging is like a phone call and Chat Rooms are like conference calls, and with both you are responsible for typing your thoughts. On discussion boards, a conversation takes place between people who respond to one another's ‘posts.' This seems to be similar to the idea behind a blog (weblog). On a blog you put out a thought or idea and give others the opportunity to reply to it. Discussion Boards and Blogs do not take place in real time. You may have something to say, but you have to wait to see who responds and that might take a bit of time. This is difficult as the idea of conversation takes on a whole new meaning. If you are in a group discussion board such as a virtual classroom, keeping pace with what is going on sometimes feels like you live in a world of sound bytes. It takes a retraining of your brain to hold information and add to several threads each day.

Online communication poses challenges especially because we can not pick up the visual cues that are normal in a face-to-face conversation. We may intend something we write to have intonation, but no tone comes through when someone else reads it. And that means that we must pay attention to what we write and reread it before hitting the 'submit' button. These challenges do not preclude us from forming communities online though. In a virtual classroom for example, the instructor simply needs to be specific about how to communicate online and when assignments are due. Having those guidelines in place will make the student comfortable about expectations. Group building activities at the start of an online class can help foster a sense of shared purpose and have each member understand his or her responsibilty to the community.