RSA#5 Building Community in an Online Learning Environment: Communication, Cooperation and Collaboration

By Chris Bohula

February 23, 2011

Online source: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~itconf/proceed01/19.html

The overriding theme in this reading in Palloff & Pratt (2007, pp157-206) is the importance of collaboration in the online learning environment and strategies to facilitate it.  They go as far to say “Collaborative effort helps the learners achieve a deeper level of knowledge generation…” (p.157).  At the collegiate level, I believe that this “deeper understanding” would be difficult to duplicate in the traditional face to face course without having an on-line component to move the student to the interdependence and discussion created with this collaboration.  As I was reading through this text I was also identifying experiences we have been exposited to already in our coursework at Concordia. Several of these include negotiating guidelines (p159), forming teams (p.165) and collaborative writing (p. 181) to name just a few.  Having experienced these, I see their value and look for ways to incorporate them into my own teaching.

The online resource (Misanchuk & Anderson, 2001) provides strategies to move a group of students from being a “cohort” to a “community.”  They provide definition for a cohort as a general group of students going though a series of classes together but rarely have a strong bond or interdependent working relationship.  However they also define a community as being “one of the ultimate goals” (p. 6) and comprised of close to 9 characteristics including participation and integration.  To make this shift Misanchuk & Anderson suggest interaction at three levels: communication, cooperation, and collaboration. (p. 5)

These reading are very similar in many ways.  In fact, Misanchuk & Anderson cite and earlier work of Palloff & Pratt from 1999 for their basic strategies in creating community.  However the slight difference between the two is in the text collaboration is more widely defined to include communication and cooperation whereas Misanchuk & Anderson have distinct characteristics for each of the three. In Misanchuk & Anderson collaboration is the highest level of “community” preceded by the steps or sublevels, communication and cooperation.  Even with this difference, the ultimate goal and strategies provided by both sources of collaboration within the community are virtually the same.  Just a few of the similar strategies include posting open ended discussion questions, breaking class into groups for assignments, and requiring students to provide constructive responses to classmates assignments and posts.

Resources

Misanchuk, M., & Anderson, T. (2001). Building Community in an Online Learning Environment: Communication, Cooperation and Collaboration. Retrieved from http://frank.mtsu.edu/~itconf/proceed01/19.html

Palloff, Rena M. and Pratt, Keith. (2007). Building online learning communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom (pp. 67-155). San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.