Building a classroom community in which learners feel both comfortable and supported can be a weighty endeavor in any setting. Attempting to build this type of community in the online environment can be especially difficult. The lack of face-to-face contact can impede the process (Maddix, 2013), and communicating in an asynchronous environment can harm the development of a supportive and comfortable arena (Huang & Hsiao, 2012). The diverse student population present in many online classrooms can further impair the process as students may come from uncommon backgrounds. In addition, the time instructors and students have to devote to the classroom can make the creation of a supportive and comfortable community seem implausible. However, developing such a community is pertinent toward both student success and instructor satisfaction. As Hawkins, Graham, and Barbour (2011) noted, online instructors and online students often feel a sense of isolation and a lack of connectivity in their classrooms.

Emerging technologies and pedagogies can help in this process, however. West, Jones, and Semon (2012) identified five crucial variables toward helping students feel a sense of community in their online classrooms. The variables include, developing connections, encouraging participation, ensuring safety, providing support, engendering belonging, providing empowerment. Instructors can help develop connections by welcoming the student to the course and personalizing communication. To encourage participation instructors should ask relevant questions relating to the material that demand critical thinking, and that extend the dialogue within the discussion forum. Students, especially online students, often feel a sense of hesitation within the classroom, to counteract this, instructors should encourage sharing and respond to student posts with positive, and edifying, replies. A sense of belonging can often occur by pushing students to interact with each other. This helps breakdown the lack of communication between students and creates an environment conducive to peer-to-peer learning. Lastly, to engender a sense of empowerment for students, instructors can ask students to relate the material toward their day-to-day lives, prompt them to make real-world connections to the material, and push learners to expand upon their thoughts and think in a more in depth manner about the material.

In order to create a classroom setting where students feel both supported and comfortable, instructors need to take the lead, as instructors are the "experts" in the classroom, and in general set the tone for interaction within the forums. By creating an online community predicated on the tenets of comfort and support, instructors can help encourage students to share, think critically, and connect the material to the real-world.

Thanks,

Eric

Reference:

Hawkins, A. Graham, C. R., & Barbour, M. K. (2011). Everybody is their own island: Teacher disconnection in a virtual school. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Education, 13, 124-146. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl

Huang, X., & Hsiao, E. (2012). Synchronous and asynchronous communication in an online environment: Faculty experiences and perceptions. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 13, 15-30. Retrieved from http://www.aect.org/intranet/publications/QRDE/subguides.html

Maddix, M. A. (2013). Developing online learning communities. Christian Education Journal, 10, 139-148. Retrieved from http://journals.biola.edu/cej

West, E., Jones, P., & Semon, S. (2012). Promoting community for online learners in special education. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher education, 3, 108-116. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/journals/jdlte