Building Sense of Community at a Distance

By Alfred P. Rovai. Distances et Médiations des Savoirs, 2002

649 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article challenges the belief that strong sense of community is limited to the traditional classroom and proposes that the virtual classroom has the potential of building and sustaining sense of community at levels that are comparable to the traditional classroom. Drawing on research literature, the concept of learning community is applied to the virtual classroom by taking on the issue of how best to design and conduct an online course that fosters community among learners who are physically separated from each other. Course design principles are described that facilitate dialogue and decrease psychological distance, thereby increasing a sense of community among learners. Key Terms Distance education, community, spirit, trust, interaction, learning, persistence, attrition, ALN, online

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb5d9c20316f48094ed41b61e6d56d0e27941605

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Networks, Technology, and Entrepreneurship: A Field Quasi-experiment among Women in Rural India (2017, positive): “Community ties are defined as social and informal interactions among adult women in the village (Rovai, 2002), with centrality in this network being community network centrality.”
The impact of perceived enjoyment, perceived reciprocal benefits and knowledge power on students' knowledge sharing through Facebook (2017, background): “This sense of community is the result of interactions and deliberations by people brought together by similar interests and common goals (Rovai, 2002).”
Research Based Practices for Improving the Effectiveness of Asynchronous Online Discussion Boards (2018, background): “• Divide the class into small discussion groups (Akcaoglu & Lee, 2016; Kim, 2013; Qiu et al., 2014; Rovai, 2002)”
Student satisfaction with an online and a face-to-face Business English course in a higher education context (2019, background): “Other issues to consider are how to create a positive and supportive online learning environment (Lucero, 2006) and build an online community (Rovai, 2002) which in turn increases student satisfaction, engagement and collaboration.”
Othering in online learning: an examination of social presence, identity, and sense of community (2017, methodology): “…when social presence is created within an online course it helps ‘establish social connectedness among online instructors and students’ (Liu, Magjuka, Bonk, & Lee, 2007, p. 9) and reduce dropout rates (Rovai, 2002a) and is vital to ‘student satisfaction [and] motivation’ (McCracken, 2005, p. 304).”
Investigating students’ perceptions of instructional strategies to establish social presence (2018, positive): “Busch, 2006; Kim, 2011; Richardson & Swan, 2003; So & Brush, 2008), social presence and community (Pollard, Minor, & Swanson, 2014; Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, 1999; Rovai, 2002; Ryman, Burrell, Hardham, Richardson, & Ross, 2009), and social presence and perceived learning (Caspi & Blau, 2”