Building A Healthy Online Student Community Through Education Environment Design

Studies have highlighted social interaction and collaborative effort within a student community as important elements that contribute to successful learning. College students in face-to-face settings build a sense of community and bond through real-time interpersonal interactions during classroom experiences and co-curricular activities. Online college students often do not enjoy such substantive community experiences, and, in part because of this, they achieve lower rates of persistence to degree completion. Studies have examined this discrepancy in persistence to degree and found that the physical separation between an online student and their educational institution can lead to a sense of isolation. This sense of isolation in turn can lead to an online student’s sense of alienation from their institution and powerlessness to change their situation. Numerous underlying factors appear to contribute to these feelings, including the usability of the technology tools that power the online education environment and the quality of student-faculty and student-student interactions that those tools enable. As online education becomes increasingly pervasive, educational institutions should consider how best to design online programs to foster healthy student communities. The literature suggests several methods for achieving such communities and improving student retention. First, students (and faculty) should be carefully introduced to effective online education tools that facilitate interaction. Second, effective channels of student-faculty communication should be outlined and encouraged so that students and faculty interact in a timely, clear, and positive manner. Third, educationrelated student-student avenues for online interaction should be introduced so that a sense of student community can develop. The activities reported here build upon the literature, which has generally focused upon asynchronous online learning environments, by considering development of student community in a synchronous online environment. While the underlying strategies are similar, the particular solutions vary. This paper describes a recently developed online learning environment for engineering education and student use of the tools of that environment to forge bonds with one another, their faculty instructors, and the broader engineering community. The strengths and opportunities for improvement from the perspective of the student were captured in a survey administered to students participating in the online engineering program. This survey serves as a baseline from which to measure the development of community and to determine which resources offer the most effective means for communication and community development.