Online Socialisation ... Getting Engaged!

Hi!  Welcome to my blog.  Come in, kick off your shoes and grab a seat.  Grab a seat and get yourself comfy.  How has your day been?  If you haven't been here before, I hope you're having a good day?  
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The weather here in Scotland has been snowing recently, so its nice to be tucked up cosey indoors watching television.  Do you have any favourite television programs that you watch regularly?  I love watching all the soap opera's.  After this, my partner and I are going to going to catch up via a videocall.  I've got the table set with food, wine, and romantic music by candlelight.  We haven't seen each other in such a long time.  But with things the way they are...  well it's the best we can do.  

There are other people who visit here on my blog.  Sometimes people all over the world pop in for a wee visit and a natter.  Can you excuse me for a wee bit.  I've got to nip into the kitchen to check on the food, but while I'm gone feel free to have a chat with some of the others around.  Introduce yourself to people and I'll be back in a moment to introduce today's lesson.  

Now, if you're settled and ready I'll begin.

You see over the past 60 seconds I've been trying to catch your attention, gain your trust and build what might be the start of some kind of online relationship.  But, as every teacher in the world will tell you, engaging students in online learning is hard.  It takes work!  It doesn't doesn't come naturally.  With people's increasing awareness of digital literacy, working with students in online environments is about gaining people's trust.  Salmon (2013) describes it as building, "web of trust that does not depend on physically meeting."  The online dating market is sufficient to prove that people have the ability to convey feelings, emotions and build trusting relationships online and, as uncomfortable as we might be with it, openness goes a long way towards building trust.  Yet we often skip this step out in a rush to get on with the task at hand.  Can you imagine the impact if you adopted the same approach with your romantic life?!


Online socialisation is one of the earliest stages of online education and is crucial to establishing a learning community.  It might start with a cringe worthy ice breaker moment.  But actually they don't call it breaking the ice for no reason.  There is a barrier there - it's called Transaction Distance (Moore, 1997 as cited by Bornt, 2011).  That barrier is difficult enough to deal with in a face to face environment but it is amplified in the online environment.  Moreover, according to Moore's theory, transactional distance is decreased the closer we get towards individualised instruction.  But the closer we get to individualised instruction, the less manageable that becomes for the teacher.  But breaking the ice and building a relationship with someone requires 1 to 1 time, or at least as close as we can get. That's why group teleconferencing software has had a huge surge in popularity and, in conjunction with group emails, group correspondence is as close as we can practicably get to that magic 1 to 1 relationship in most circumstances.  

Surprisingly, Moore's theory suggests that we need to reduce learner autonomy, increase learner dialogue and reduce structured learning.  How do we do that??  Reducing learner autonomy doesn't mean that learners need to rely on their teachers spoon feeding them each instruction one step at a time.  But by introducing group work, learners become dependent on each other and dialogue between the learners increases!  Finally, providing the students with less structure, allowing groups of students to be creative in their output not only encourages higher order thinking skills but, in theory, you've got a recipe for engagement.  

This doesn't work though.  Its all just theory!  Or is it?  

("Team" by Phillie Casablanca is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Think about the people you work with. You probably work together with your colleagues to some degree in unstructured group work of some fashion, your team probably have common goals and interests.  You probably all rely on each other to some extent.  So has your autonomy been reduced because our ability to do our job depends on others?  In order to do your job, dialogue becomes hugely important and increases with the size of your team.  How many emails, messages and video calls have you made to your colleagues recently to get some help, advice or assistance with some issue or problem?  But what about structure?  We all hate being micro-managed, so does that mean that less structure works for us?  That's right, we put Moore's theory into action every day when we go to work.

So we recognise Moore's theory and the skills required to operate in a distributed online workforce, but we don't teach the students the importance of online socialisation because there's not enough time.  

Now think again.   How well do you know the people your work with?  I'd bet on your first day that you took time to introduce yourself.  If you've been with your employer for an extended period of time then you probably discuss what's happening in each others lives, share a little bit of personal detail.  We do that because openness builds trust and that's crucial in a working relationship.  Can you imagine what it would be like if we didn't trust the people we work with, if the only time we ever heard from our manager was by email?  A faceless dot on the screen?  Work would be a terrible experience.  Never mind breaking the ice, you'd be buried under a layer of permafrost.  You'd feel completely unsupported and out on a limb.  You might even resign and leave the job.  Hmmm... I wonder why so many students are dropping out of online education?! 

But its impossible to get your students to switch on their cameras.  Or is it?  


How many of us have been faced with a sea of polka dots on the screen when we log in to deliver online classes?  Have we taken time to earn their trust?  Have we taken time to build a trusting online learning community?  While we can't force students to switch on their cameras.  The key is encouragement, not forced compliance.  Students can have a range of very valid reasons why they might not want to interact with their cameras on.  But the visual cues we can get just by reading people's faces is incredibly valuable as educators.

Just this week I had two students waiting to deliver an online presentation.  They were nervous and neither wanted to go first.  I suggested, "How about a game of rock  paper, scissors?"  They both turned on their cameras because I made it fun, put them at ease and made an effort to gain their trust.  

A more subtle approach might have been to create a sociogram.  Message the students in your group privately and, on the pretense of setting up a group activity, ask them to list two other members of the class that they would like to work with.  The nature of the group activity is irrelevant in this context because your aim is to find out about the relationships in the class.  This information can be mapped out in a diagram like the sort I used in my previous blog post on mathematical sociology.  

In a face to face situation, knowledge of class dynamics can be easy to observe.  Its less obvious in an online setting.  You can gain interesting insights with regard to cliques, groups and social capital within the class.  If you can identify students in the class who have influence then maybe you can work with those students specifically.  If these influencers decided to switch on their cameras, then maybe the others would too.  

There are techniques out there which can help build a sense of community in the online space.  Loya (2020) lists a range of techniques and strategies that might help you to encourage students to switch on their cameras.  If anyone else has any other techniques for online socialisation that have worked, please do leave comments!  Share.  

Ultimately, teaching at the moment does feel a lot like online dating using an app where you may or may not see the person's face and, as a result, you may or may not feel comfortable interacting with them.  You might not even feel that you trust them.  But given that I made the effort at the outset to invite you in, get you comfy, allowed you to chat to the other guests in my blog, can I ask - are you engaged?  

Follow me on twitter @McintoshMclean.

References

Bornt, D. (2011)  Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance [Online].  Available at:  https://k3hamilton.com/LTech/transactional.html  (Accessed 12th February 2021).  

Salmon, G. (2013)  E-tivities:  The key to active online learning [ebook reader].  Oxon, Routledge.  

Loya, L B. (2020)  Strategies to Encourage Students to Turn Their Cameras On [Online].  Available at:  https://www.edutopia.org/article/strategies-encourage-students-turn-their-cameras (Accessed 15th February 2021).







  

 

   


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