Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace. - Review - book review

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, June, 2000 by John G. Norman

Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt (Jossey-Bass, 1999)

Reviewed by John G. Norman

In discussion-based online education, if a student doesn't post comments, the student isn't there.

This new form of absence can lead to disappointed students, dropped classes, and frustrated registrars and deans. How can a teacher and an institution create an environment that supports students and keeps them involved and learning until the end of the course?

Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace may provide some answers. A handbook of theory and practice dedicated to the creation of a sense of inclusion among people separated by miles and time zones but engaged in a shared act of learning, the book is loaded with helpful techniques for encouraging community. But there are some significant warnings.

Before building or supporting your own cyberspace communities, consider the book's description of the teacher's burden in online education. In one case, the authors found that the total time required to teach a class was 18 to 19 hours per week, rather than a more typical 6.5 to 7.5 hours for a conventional face-to-face class. They also write that "[s]ome institutions pay faculty less for teaching online due to the absence of travel and designated class time, along with the smaller group sizes," Online teachers reported to Palloff and Pratt that "because they are required to be available every day for a particular class and are actually doing more work in the preparation and delivery of the class, salaries for this form of teaching should be higher."

If other studies confirm this comparative imbalance between pay and hours, then computer-mediated instruction may go down as one of the more oppressive, wasteful, and appropriative systems of pedagogy in higher education.

The comparison between teaching loads online and off leads me to ask if there are qualitative pedagogical advantages to the online environment. Part One of the book discusses the nature of the cyberspace classroom and the need for community. In the examples offered by the authors, the cyberspace classroom is supported with conferencing software, usually Web-based, that allows students and teachers to post comments asynchronously. It is not, however, the technology that creates community, but the participants. Palloff and Pratt write:

"The principles involved in the delivery of distance education are basically those attributed to a more active, constructivist form of learning--with one difference: In distance education, attention needs to be paid to the developing sense of community within the group of participants in order for the learning process to be successful. The learning community is the vehicle through which learning occurs online. Members depend on one another to achieve the learning outcomes for the course. If a participant logs on to a course site and there has been no activity on it for several days, he or she may become discouraged or feel a sense of abandonment--like being the only student to show up for class when even the instructor is absent. Without the support and participation of a learning community, there is no online course."

The key, then, is to create a sense of mutual dependence, where everyone is committed to reading and writing with one another.

Part Two, the remainder of the book, discusses specific techniques for developing community. Chapters explore the movement from the classroom to cyberspace, the design of an effective syllabus, the promotion of collaborative learning, the possibilities for self-reflection, and the nature of evaluation. They urge the teacher to create a setting where "students should be encouraged--even required--to provide constructive feedback to one another throughout the course."

The book contains extracts from students' online postings, as well as syllabi and screenshots of Web-based courses taught by the authors and others. Building Learning Communities is most useful in its taxonomies of methods for encouraging the development of community, and for its detailed descriptions of roles that students and teachers might play in online discussions.

Does cyberspace provide a better infrastructure for community than other forms of pedagogy? We won't learn this from Palloff and Pratt's work. Consistently, they compare the cyberspace classroom with the "traditional" or "typical" or "face-to-face" classroom. For them, in the "traditional" classroom "the role of the instructor ... is generally of the expert imparting knowledge to willing learners."

The implication is that most classes outside of cyberspace are "unidirectional," lacking in community. Is this the case? There are so many varieties of the face-to-face classroom (seminars, tutorials, lectures with sections, lectures with study groups) that it is misleading to compare the small online group with such a narrow conception of the non-cyberspace classroom. Still, this book will do little harm and much good for the teachers and students entering the world of cyberspace education. In fact, the authors' advice about community building should be helpful for a teacher in any classroom. But as to whether there is genuine added value in cyberspace, the jury is still out.