ASYNCHRONOUS DISCUSSION REDESIGN TO REBALANCE PRESENCE IN ONLINE LEARNING
Rationale/Background:The IP course has two components: theory and clinical. Group discussions are the primary learning activity for the theory portion of the course. Faculty had been exploring the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework as a best practice in online instructional design (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). Three types of presence are essential to developing CoI: social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence. IP faculty recognized that the assignments related to the theory objectives offered strong teaching and cognitive presence while there was limited opportunity for social presence in the online discussions. Additionally, students’ end-of-term course evaluations regularly noted the students’ desire to learn more about the clinical experiences of their fellow students. Faculty saw the opportunity to address both gaps by having students provide content from their clinical experiences to address the course objectives in asynchronous group discussion.
Approach: The redesign of group discussions needed to have a structure that would frame each student’s exploration of a particular clinical issue for their discussion group. The Practical Inquiry Model (Garrison & Archer, 2007) was used for this purpose. The model has four elements: triggering event, exploration, integration and resolution. To give time to move through the four phases of the model, the discussion period was expanded from two to three weeks. Specific course objectives were identified for each discussion period by faculty. A student’s initial discussion post (triggering event) would address the objectives, using a situation from the student’s clinical experience. Exploration, integration and resolution phases guided the unfolding of content over the three-week discussion period. For example, a three week discussion with concepts of collaboration, broader health care system and ethics and values found students with triggering events including emergency room usage, hospice, access to dental care, addiction services, dual diagnosis care and health promotion. Over the discussion period, each student explored the literature related to their topic, sharing findings and offering scholarly responses to their colleagues’ posts. On-going discussion posts began to integrate information shared across the discussion with a final post that summarized their learning (resolution).Faculty posted to the discussions to pose questions, share from their own clinical experiences and offer perspectives regarding the unfolding discussion.
Outcomes Achieved: Students took the lead in identifying and exploring relevant clinical issues. The content of the discussions became more diverse and participation was more robust. Students’ course evaluations acknowledged the value of learning from one another’s clinical experiences. Faculty noted students’ increased social presence and a growing collegial relationship among students and faculty.
Conclusion: The practical inquiry model effectively guides asynchronous online discussions as students share in learning from one another’s clinical experiences. Student-led/faculty-coached group discussions offer students an opportunity to practice their leadership skills. Strengthening social presence in online group discussions can improve satisfaction of both students and faculty with the learning activity.