Designing for social presence

How do we move whole groups of students forward, making progress, while personalising their learning and getting them to participate online ?

I went to a workshop / lecture on "social presence" in distance education. The presenters defined social presence as the ability to see each other as 'real' people based on collaboration, therefore reducing the psychological distance between teacher and student, teacher and teacher, student and student.

Online course designers can build in opportunities to maximise student engagement, and teachers actively network with the students regularly to keep the contact. This was evident at the Florida Virtual School, for example, which had a daily target for each teacher to make 'social' contact with 10 students each day, just to say 'hello and hows it going'.

Teachers could push the boundaries of social contact in their teaching. They could be creating avatars, their personalised online characters, to deliver notices and messages, audio announcements and give and recieve feedback. Testdrive this programme, which was recommended by the presenter - www.voki.com

Teachers could be putting visuals, graphics and animations into their emails as simple and effective ways of gaining interest and appearing more personal. Although this may not be their generation's ideas of a personal approach, it is the learners definition.

Teachers might like to create social spaces outside of the students own social networking. Students don't necessarily want their uncool teachers appearing on Facebook. In fact, a friend of mine's teenager was recently in trouble for the same reason. One of his teachers went into his facebook site to give him a telling off, and he promptly responded with a short video of how he felt about his space being invaded. His response was sufficient for the school to ask him to leave. Not to worry - his father is a human rights lawyer and the parents still found away of being proud of their boy!

One of the recent trends in online learning, is to create the social presence of teachers and students. One idea within a school environment, is the Student Cafe. This is a space dedicated to simple but effective ways of getting students to engage with each other, knowing that there are 'school rules' involved. Asking them to introduce themselves, post their comments on current affairs or homework etc, helps bring about conversations that help positive social contact. A recommended tool is www.gabcast.com

Teachers are able to make students responsible for their own participation, contribution and working with others. These techniques are particularly relevant to our new curricuum, as they are some of our key competencies. While we think of ways to implement these key competencies in schools, we should, at the same time, be thinking of introducing them into the design of online learning.

Techniques such as getting students to participate and contribute to discussion threads and forums, and then to summarise their own and others contributions, as an assessment event. This helps teachers gain insight into the students competencies, higher order thinking and social presence.

In summary, students can be experiencing a disconnect between the 'voice' of their teacher and their online participation. They want social experiences such as debating with their teacher online, through devices such as voicethread.com . They want to be working socially alongside their teacher, perhaps through acrobat.pro, which shows their work being marked by their teacher on screen, in real time, while they talk it through with them and discuss feedback together.

Other practical, simple ideas include:
- Inserting youtube or video clips in your emails to students as conversation starters.
- Assessment rubrics can be designed to look at student online particpation in social discussions ( a rubric such as : not completed / interested / exploring / connecting ideas / applying new ideas ).
- Play with these web tools that develop collaboration between teachers and students : bubble.us, mindmeister, learninglab.org

If you are interested in these themes, I purchased some books for our library from the conference :
" 147 practical tips for synchronous and blended technology teaching and learning "
" 147 practical tips for teaching online groups "
" Learning in real time : synchronous teaching & learning online "

I also have a handout from this lecture titled " The role of a successful online/blended teacher " which looks at ways of self assessing course design, course organisation, facilitating students learning and direct teaching.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Your views are welcome, so please contribute to the Blog.