In your face-to-face class, you actively build connections -- connections between you and your students, connections among your students, and connections between your students and the content. At first glance, an online environment can seem like learners are disconnected, separated by space and time. But in reality, teaching online offers us many, and even unique ways to build the kind of connections and community that encourage collaborative learning.

How do you establish connections and build community in the online environment? In this video, Matt Fajkus talks about speculation—or anticipating the ways a space might be occupied. As Matt discusses the importance of being flexible, think about the ways you might adapt interactive activities from your face-to-face class for the online context.

In this module, we will explore:

How should I think about building connections and community online?
What are the best practices for building connections and community online?
How do UT instructors build connections and community online?

Outside of the Tree House at night during a gathering

Key to the learning process are the interactions among students themselves, the interactions between faculty and students, and the collaboration in learning that results from these interactions." (Palloff and Praff, 2007: 4)

This is a community gathering at the Tree House by Austin architect and UT Associate Professor Matt Fajkus and his team. Building connections and community in an online environment is a lot like thinking about the ways you organize spaces in and around your home to welcome conversations and connections.

How should I think about building connections and community online?

Collaborative learning fuels student investment, engagement, motivation--ultimately, student success. In any course, fostering this kind of collaborative learning is important, but in an online learning environment--where you cannot rely on the frequent informal activities and conversations that occur in the face-to-face classroom between students and you or students and each other--getting students engaged and building community is imperative. Fortunately, the online classroom has a variety of strategies and tools to engage students in community-building dialogue, problem-solving, peer mentoring and review, reflection, and more.

There are different kinds of student engagement, which are described in the table below (adapted from "Designing and Teaching for Impact in Online Courses," Indiana University). Choosing a combination of examples will allow you to shape a variety of opportunities in which students can connect and build a community online.

Kind of Interactions that Build Connections & Community	Examples
STUDENT with INSTRUCTOR	Instructors can: provide meaningful and timely feedback facilitate and participate in discussion forums and chats send frequent announcements and updates as a means of encouraging community provide virtual office hours invite students to approach them with questions and concerns
STUDENT with STUDENT	Students can work collaboratively to: share points of view or answer one another's questions in discussion forums debate issues, discuss research, analyze problems, or compare and contrast solutions engage in collaborative brainstorming assess one another's work via peer review
STUDENT with CONTENT	Students can co-create content when you let them: build consensus and make collaborative decisions generate solutions to complex problems crowdsource a body of knowledge (e.g., contribute to a wiki or online content repository)

What are the best practices for building connections and community online?

In Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, Amy Jo Kim (2000) lays out three underlying principles that can help you approach the logistics of building connections and community online:

Design for growth and change. "Start small, simple and focused" (Kim). Don't try to implement every technology bell and whistle.
Create and maintain feedback loops. Just like in face-to-face classes, each group of students is different, both in how they interact with you and with each other, and how they engage with various activities. You can see and record feedback in an online setting easily; use that information to help you tailor your interactions.
Empower your students. Ultimately, creating opportunities for interactions is about empowering students to solve problems and create knowledge together.

UT Featured Snapshot: Two Truths & a Lie

Snapshot Introduction

Nancy Guilloteau and Karen Kelton From the moment students "click" into their online French courses, Nancy Guilloteau and Karen Kelton (Department of French and Italian) introduce them to their instructors, the content, and each other in interactive ways.

Snapshot Details

When students enter her online French course, Karen greets them with an introductory overview and links to helpful resources:

Screen Shot of Karen's course welcome page

She uses a short, formative assessment--a syllabus quiz--to help her students understand expectations for the course. Notice students are given two attempts on the quiz: The purpose here is to make students familiar and comfortable with course expectations and common questions and answers.

Aside from the syllabus quiz, one of the social presence strategies Karen uses immediately is the creation of an introductory video. This activity was her colleague Nancy Guilloteau’s idea, something Nancy said she found in a blog about teaching online. By asking students to introduce themselves via a video in Canvas, Nancy and Karen are helping them to get comfortable with technology while also allowing them the space to be visible and unique with their classmates and their instructor. Nancy and Karen ask them to introduce themselves using a fun ice-breaker activity, "two truths and a lie." But instead of leaving them on their own to create the video, Nancy created a screenflow video for walking students through how to upload their videos when she taught the class for the first time in the fall. In the video, Karen models the assignment herself to build rapport and expectations.

The use of Karen's model video quickly establishes instructor "virtual visibility," which fosters immediacy, or the degree of perceived physical and/or psychological closeness between people (Mehrabian, 1967). In addition, the video assignment allows students to take the first steps toward building community as they use the discussion forum to guess which statement in each person's introduction video was a truth - and which was a lie.

Key to the learning process are the interactions among students themselves, the interactions between faculty and students, and the collaboration in learning that results from these interactions." (Palloff and Praff, 2007: 4)

How should I think about building connections and community online?

Kind of Interactions that Build Connections & Community

Examples

STUDENT with INSTRUCTOR

STUDENT with STUDENT

STUDENT with CONTENT

What are the best practices for building connections and community online?

UT Featured Snapshot: Two Truths & a Lie

Snapshot Introduction

Snapshot Details