Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace.

Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace, by Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt, Book, 1999, John Wiley & Sons, $35.

Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom (The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series) attracted my attention because I am teaching online in an asynchronous environment using WebCT. I know from four years of online teaching that it is a very challenging way of delivering learning.

If you think getting the learner's attention, let alone holding it, is difficult in the physical classroom, talk to some cyber educators. Although I teach at a university not in a corporation, the concern for completion rates, participation, and on-the-job performance are the same. So how do we as workforce performance professionals create a virtual learning community in which students want to participate and communicate with each other?

New paradigm for online courses

The authors of this book, Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt, suggest "a new paradigm for an electronic seminar or course." They discuss a free-flowing framework in which participants "generate the bibliography of readings, negotiate the guidelines, and create the structure, venturing into areas previously unexplored." By contrast, I create the syllabus, choose the discussion items used to stimulate class participation, and assign deliverables.

Other than the challenge of determining a learner's "true" computer literacy level, another apparent challenge for an online instructor or trainer is to facilitate what the authors call "conscious community." They discuss how cyberspace creates an environment different from a physical classroom. The issues include virtual versus human contact, connectedness, and coalescence; shared responsibility, rules, roles, norms, and participation; psychological and spiritual issues; and vulnerability, privacy, and ethics. I require learners to acknowledge the discussion rules of the course--but his by no means guarantees learner participation!

Two issues that are controlled in the physical classroom fairly easily, time and class size, are crucial in the virtual classroom. A physical classroom has space for a certain number of seats, but a virtual classroom, in theory, can have an unlimited number of learners. A physical classroom is used at a certain time by a certain instructor; on the other hand, asynchronous online courses can be accessed 24/7 by instructors and learners.

Facilitating delivery

This, of course, leads to another issue--using technology to facilitate the delivery of the course. In the physical classroom, the instructor stands in front of the class to deliver instruction, while in the virtual world, the computer and related infrastructure stand between the instructor and the learner. The authors discuss this phenomenon in Chapter 5. In an online class, all the parties interact through an intermediary.

In Chapter 6, the authors describe a "Framework for Distance Learning." The model is drawn as a jigsaw puzzle; however, each of the five pieces of the framework puzzle is equal in size. The parts of the model are faculty guidance, facilitation, community, participant buy-in, and interaction and feedback. Palloff and Pratt begin to "deconstruct the model in order to provide suggestions and examples to the instructor who wishes to explore for the first time, or to reexamine, ways that effective courses may be delivered using distance education."

Chapter 8, Promoting Collaborative Learning, is a really important chapter. What we really struggle with as asynchronous facilitators and instructors is how to get the learner involved. What must we do to motivate the learner to want to participate in discussions? The authors suggest posting discussion guidelines, using expansive questioning, and sharing responsibility for facilitation.

Recommendation

Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace is a good basic book, and it's not much over 150 pages. If you are thinking of entering the online asynchronous teaching game, it's worth the price and the time to read it to see if you are "turned on" or "turned off" to this learning delivery process.

Review by Barbara Fillicaro

Product Ratings

Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace

Holds user interest  ***
Value of Content     *** 1/2
Self-Study Value     *** 1/2
Instructional Value  *** 1/2
Value for the money  *** 1/2
Overall rating       *** 1/2