Historically first-year human services classes in the Education Assistant and Community Support worker program have equipped students with the knowledge and skills they need to move out into the workforce and, beyond that, set the stage for students to learn more about themselves, their communities of practice, their own learning preferences, while connecting them with other students in that beautiful blended edge between the classroom and the community.
Many of the students in our program are coming from rich, adult lives and are new to being in post-secondary, with all the attendant concerns endemic in first-year students. They join us with already developed self-concepts as relate to their abilities (including their facility with computer use), and lenses by which they see the world. In-person instruction has allowed students to connect and grow together through the year as they move into growth mindsets about themselves, and see their values shift and deepen.
One of the ways we, as instructors, can endeavor to build a rich online education experience for these students is to work within a Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. The CoI framework consists of three presences: Social, Cognitive and Teaching (Garrison et al., 1999). Each of these presences overlaps and interacts with the others to create an engaging social community of learning in which students can take risks and co-construct understanding of course content.
Human Services instructors can set the context of the classroom from the outset through careful choices of activities that support each of these presences.
Human services is human centred and relationship based. Historically those relationships have been formed in an in-person classroom: students can choose where to sit, and who they connect with. Instructors can support students to build their social presences by being human and available, “encouraging and modeling” (Vaughan et al., 2013) connection, co-building behavioural norms with students to support their emotional and academic risk taking safely, and connect them to resources that will help lower the technology learning curve to let them focus more on course content (Weller, 2020) and being present. We can set them up in different group activities so that people get the chance to meet and know each other, co-constructing learning (Merrill, 2002).
Cognitive presence can be supported through drawing in participants to keep them engaged, create spaces for them to converse about course content and concepts, and summarizing their conversations “without taking over the discussion” (Vaughan et al., 2013).
Teaching presence can be supported through cohesive design and organization (keeping things clear and sequential), facilitation of each of the presences (both in myself and in the students), and direct instruction (ensuring that students have the foundational understanding they need to progress into more complex thinking) (Vaughan et al., 2013). We can also decentre ourselves as teachers, empowering students to bring their own learning to the classroom, to share their experiences with other students.
Part of the beauty of this model is that each of the actions and presences overlap each other, creating an intricately linked, holistic experience for students.
References:
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2), 87–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1096-7516(00)00016-6
Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(3), 43–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02505024
Vaughan, N., Cleveland-James, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in Blended Learning Environments—Creating and Sustaining Communities of Inquiry. AU Press, Athabasca University. http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/751
Weller, M. (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. Athabasca University Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01
