The Modern Parlor: Co-Creating Knowledge in Online Learning Communities
Concurrent Session 1
Brief Abstract
Where do passionate, thought-provoking conversations happen? Parlors, libraries, maybe the green? Online learners often miss a critical aspect of learning - co-creating knowledge with peers as they discuss and debate what they’re learning. This session explores uniting learners through asynchronous online communities to drive deeper learning across different subjects.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
How can online educators enable learners to freely converse and debate about what they’re learning? In this presentation, panelists provide a metaphor for understanding the power of creating communities of learners engaged in meaningful discussion. The metaphor comes from a famous passage in the work of Kenneth Burke, who spent his life and work describing how people use language to identify with and persuade each other. For Burke, these conversations are the drama of human relations. In his essay “The Philosophy of Literary Form,” he writes this:
Where does the drama get its materials? From the "unending conversation" that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. What happens next? You listen for a while, then put in your oar, debating issues and questions with others, sharing experiences, exploring ideas, and even entertaining one another. Eventually, the hour grows late and you leave with the discussion still vigorously in progress. We transform experience and form communities through social dialogue. In this kind of parlor, conversations must be genuine, not merely monologues, explanations, or performances to be judged. The unending conversation of history includes everyone talking or writing to and with each other, all the time, forever.
This presentation will show the audience ways to improve student engagement and learning, drawing examples from student communities in college-level writing courses, business and management courses, and an online MBA program. Asynchronous online communities can be the students’ parlor where they feel free to engage with course topics, their own topics, and each other in spirited dialogue. The central topic of this session is uniting learners by creating meaningful learning communities where they have the autonomy to co-create knowledge and are motivated by proven pedagogical techniques and gamification to actively engage. This topic is critical for everyone in attendance at OLC. Creating a connected learning experience through strategic communities is a key factor in belonging and student success, which leads to retention increases, an important metric for administrators. Instructional designers will be interested to learn about the innovative approach to online community building, which humanizes the learning experience, and the details of integrating co-creation into the phases of the week. Faculty will gain an understanding of the pedagogy necessary to create effective communities that drive deeper learning and how the right tools help to make their time spent more meaningfully. The session will also cover how to weave a similar community of practice approach into faculty professional development to foster belonging among faculty members and spark collaborations that likely would not have formed organically without a “parlor.”
All panelists in this session have utilized a community-building, asynchronous discussion platform designed to improve student engagement with course content. This tool has many elements audience members would be familiar with, but stands out by “gamefully” fostering dialectical inquiry. Students automatically earn points for a variety of actions in addition to posting and responding to each other. This tool makes it easy to add links, embed video, and attach files to posts. Instructors set a point goal per week, and grades for this aspect of the coursework tally automatically. Some would call this play gamification. Kenneth Burke would call it competitive cooperation, the conversation of humanity.
In online learning environments, creating a connected learning experience is critical. It begins by humanizing the experience and ensuring that humans are at the center. Creating community through online tools has been instrumental in achieving this goal. Learning communities offer an opportunity to foster authentic conversations that bridge topics covered throughout the term to what is happening in the real world. Contrary to traditional online discussions, where students respond to the same prompt using appropriate citations and reply to two classmates (whether or not they have something substantive to say), students in these communities are creating their own content. They are connecting more frequently and in meaningful ways to share their insights, argue their position, or share additional resources that may aid their classmates. Following the metaphor of the Burkan parlor, asynchronous communities provide a space for students to join in-progress conversations that interest them and engage in rich conversations that enhance the learning environment for themselves and their classmates at a frequency and cadence that is right for them. Furthermore, as Burkean Parlor-esque conversations have seen more frequent engagement and an enhanced sense of humanity, this innovative approach sparks conversations that go far beyond the former discussion protocol of post and reply to create true community (Elbow, 2000).
Panelists will explore how Burkean Parlor-esque conversations fit into a weekly learning architecture. They’ll discuss the pre-conditions and common language necessary to succeed in the effective implementation. A learning week can be broken down into 3 phases that translate into different roles for the faculty and require different tools/techniques to execute. The phases flow from “expert” where content is disseminated through “facilitate” where the faculty work with the learners to see if they’ve mastered the material, and ending with “orchestrate,” where peers co-create knowledge.This “orchestrate” phase will be the focus of this session, which will show teachers how to empower students to take learning to the next level.
Many institutions are moving toward a faculty pool that is primarily part-time, and at an internet distance from the university center, where connections can be challenging to establish, nurture, and maintain (Dolan, 2011). A key driver of human centricity is a common problem to be solved. The notion of co-creation could be extended to not only finding solutions but also to identifying the problem(s) itself. This can be powerful especially when learners are geographically not co-located (dispersed). The enhanced human connection and community building that is so effective with students in the online environment, can also enhance professional development opportunities and foster a deeper sense of affinity and sense of belonging with an organization. As an addition to the LMS course that serves as the virtual center for teaching and learning, utilizing an online community platform has offered an avenue to create connections and cultivate community amongst faculty. Using the same principles as student communities, “Faculty Conversations” offers opportunities to connect around topics of interest, pose questions, and share best practices with the larger teaching community. Again, following the Burkean parlor analogy, this faculty community humanizes the teaching experience by making the world a bit smaller, a bit more accessible. Faculty teaching in different academic colleges, in different parts of the world, can glean perspectives from diverse colleagues. The creation of videos can enhance a connection and sense of belonging traditionally absent among part-time instructors (Dolan, 2011). Moving away from one-time professional learning opportunities to a more personalized and engaged professional learning community is possible with the formation of online communities of practice.
This session will have ample opportunity for the audience to interact with the panel and each other. The panel will kick off the session with a Mentimeter poll to create a word cloud that visualizes how the audience perceives online communities, which they’ll compare to the same poll taken at the end of the session to see how their perspective has shifted. If the audience is interested, the panelists may also lead them in a brief Burkean parlor exercise where groups are formed and conversations are started and then a new person joins the group and must adapt to the conversation already in progress. Additionally, questions will be encouraged throughout.
Step into the parlor and join in on the conversation as this panel explores the challenges and opportunities of creating true asynchronous conversations, establishing community even across space and time, as well as fostering authorship and co-creation of learning materials in a human-centered design through the use of online learning communities. Overall, the key takeaways an attendee can expect from this session are the following: understanding the pedagogy shift required to curate effective communities, being able to articulate the benefits of active learning communities, having a deeper understanding of how knowledge co-creation can fit into the broader structure of a course, and how communities can be leveraged to support faculty in engagement conversations and beyond.
References:
Dolan, V. (2011). The Isolation of Online Adjunct Faculty and its Impact on their Performance. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(2), 62–77. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v12i2.793
Elbow, P. Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching. Oxford Univ. Press, 2000