Building Online Learning Communities

Building Online Learning Communities, By Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, is a well-regarded text on, well, building online learning communities. It's a book of advice to teachers who may not be familiar with e-learning, or have some experience but are looking to do better. It's a very readable book, without some of the hard jargon of some other textbooks in the field, and certainly designed for the wider academic public.

The advice in it is excellent, and clearly based on the authors' own practice; they frequently quote their students' comments about the process and how well it has helped them.

Their central argument is that to do effective learning online, the key is to turn the class of learners into a community of learners, who communicate through online forums in a deep and meaningful way. They explain how this is different from the traditional model of tertiary education, since the discussion between the students becomes as important, if not more so, than their interaction with the teacher. Of course, the teacher is still required to keep a strong hand on the wheel, ensuring that the community is heading in the right direction, and providing a model of the right kind of behaviour.

It's not exactly what I was looking for; I build e-learning software, whereas the authors take it as a given - that the institution will provide software, and you have to deal with its problems and vagaries. I was hoping it would delve more into questions of what sorts of features of an online system promote high-quality discussion, but all they really got into was that it had to be reliable - that if the system crashes all the time things get difficult.

The issue of the importance of a strong teaching presence was of interest to me. My intended direction of research is into how to build a system that will foster strong student to student learning collaboration without the need for the constant guiding hand of a teacher to intervene regularly, so I'll have to try to take this into account, and work out what might stand in its stead - whether there is a hole that needs patching in my model. The Communities of Inquiry model has the same requirement for Teaching Presence in an online community, so I might be fighting an uphill battle.

Anyway, this one is a good book, and one I've already recommended to an academic I was talking to about this.