Building online communities: creating interpersonal and cognitive connections

Marike Kluyts, Kershree Padayachee, & Phiwokuhle Dlamini

With the continuation of lockdown learning in 2021, feelings of isolation have increased significantly for staff and students alike. Remote teaching and learning have stripped away many aspects, such as the ease of connection, central to ‘brickand-mortar’ institutions that helped both staff and students successfully complete their respective tasks pre-Covid-19. Thus, the question arises: how can we create spaces for connection (interpersonal and cognitive) in the current online environment. This talk explores various communities within the Academic Development (AD) spheres of the presenters, such as postgraduate writing communities, a community of Instructional Designers at the institution, and teaching and learning communities that emerged between AD staff and lecturing staff. These communities will be unpacked and explored using the Community of Inquiry Framework (Garrison, Anderson & Archer: 1999). This framework highlights the importance of 3 presences in developing successful online communities. These include social presence, which allows participants to function in a trusting environment where they can develop as individuals as well as become a part of the community; cognitive presence, which provides participants the opportunity to construct and confirm meaning, and thirdly, teaching presence which is linked to designing and facilitating the first two presences in such a way as to create personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile experiences for members of the community (Bektashi, 2018). In this presentation we discuss the nature of the communities we were each involved in and how the three types of online presence influenced the interactions and invariably led to knowledge production. We further reflect on the benefits and challenges we experienced as participants occupying different roles in these communities, and we conclude with a final reflection on how the various online communities might be strengthened to enhance teaching and learning beyond Covid-19.

Type of Contribution

Presentation

Keywords: Community of inquiry, Academic Development, isolation

References

Bektashi, L. 2018. Community of inquiry framework in online learning: use of technology. In: Power, R. (ed). 2018. Technology and the Curriculum, Summer 2018. Available at: https://techandcurriculum.pressbooks.com/ [Accessed on: 14 Jun 2021].

Garrison, D.R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. 1999. Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3): pp 87 – 105.