Thursday, October 8 is Fall break for our students. However, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at SCSU organizes the Faculty Workshop Day. This year’s sessions are on student retention and success. Among many excellent presentations that will discuss this year’s topic, online and distance education are certainly a setting to be taken into account.

A member of our Academic Technologies Team, Roseann Wolak, will be holding a session on  Effective Online Teaching – Creating a Sense of Community from 2:15-3:30 pm in Voyageurs North, AMC:

“Sense of Community Theory is based on the work of Seymour Sarason (1974).  Sarason’s research explored community identity and social bonding.  In the online environment, where students are physically separated from one another, the strength of the learning community depends on the extent to which students feel like insiders rather than outsiders.
Faculty play a key role in designing an online learning environment which fosters interactivity, connectedness, and meaningful learning.  This hands-on session will cover instructional design that gets students interacting with one another:  student led discussions, peer review, collaborative research projects, and group presentations.”

Until then, here is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that focuses specifically on building community in an online class by doing student video presentations.