Caring and Social Presence of Online Community, Social Networking for Online Learning In Nursing Education

Caring and Social Presence of Online Community In Nursing Education, Social Networking for Online Learning In Nursing Education

Caring and Social Presence of Online Community In Nursing Education

   Palloff and Pratt (1999) identify six elements that are essential to building communities and promoting interaction: honesty, responsiveness, relevance, respect, openness, and empowerment. For meaningful participation to occur, students must be able to expect that they will receive honest, respectful, constructive feedback and prompt responses from faculty and students. 

    The subject matter and discussion need to be relevant to real life. Respecting students as equal participants in the learning process and empowering them to be self-directed, responsible learners are also important. Finally, students need to feel free to share their thoughts and feelings without fear of retribution in the form of lower grades. It is also important for faculty to create a sense of caring in the course. 

    In the on-campus classroom, caring is facilitated by expressing concern, being genuine, and the use of facial expressions and body language; Different strategies are needed when the classroom is online. Sitzman and Leners (2006), in a small study of students in an online course, asked students to identify the factors that created a caring learning environment. 

    These researchers found that caring occurred when there was frequent feedback, when there was participation and response to postings, and when the faculty member conveyed concern or empathy by asking about the students' welfare. 

    In a subsequent study with a larger sample, Sitzman (2010) further clarified student preferred caring behaviors and noted that students appreciated clarity in expectations and directions, timeliness in response to postings and e-mails, having faculty who were an empathetic presence, and being fully engaged and available to students. 

    In a replication of the study with graduate students, Leners and Sitzman (2006) found that along with knowing the faculty on a personal level, students also wanted affirmation and encouragement from both classmates and the faculty. 

    Other researchers refer to the need to create a sense of social presence, an awareness of other persons in the class (Brownrigg, 2005), and to reduce transactional distance, the space of potential misunderstandings between the student and faculty (Patillo, 2007). When students do not feel connected to the members of the class, motivation and engagement decrease (Lahaie, 2007a). 

    Strategies to overcome these barriers include increasing the amount of dialogue, interaction, and collaboration in an online course and establishing small discussion groups. 

    Other strategies are to use web conferencing software (webinars) to facilitate synchronous class meetings; assigning projects that require collaboration and interaction among students; using polling features of the CMS; and increasing the amount of contact students have with faculty through e-mail, communication technologies such as Skype, and, as needed, face-to-face meetings. 

    Emoticons can also be used to convey an affective dimension to the dialogue, although they should be used with caution as they are open to varied interpretation (Lahaie, 2007a).

Social Networking for Online Learning In Nursing Education

   Another strategy for promoting community in online courses is to use social networking via Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, wikis, and blogs to facilitate information and media sharing, collaborative work, and professional development. These tools, most of them already a part of students' daily lives, also can be used in the on-campus or online classroom to promote interaction among faculty and students. 

    Suggestions for using these tools for instructional purposes are provided below with the caveat that when used in courses there must be clearly defined instructional purposes and measurable outcomes; communication in the community must be restricted to the members of the online community with safeguards such as passwords; communication must not violate school or university policies or legislation that prohibits public sharing of private information; and there must be an agreement that all members will respect diversity of the opinions shared within the community and observe course norms for appropriate professional behavior. 

    Social networking sites (for example, Facebook and Twitter) are websites in which members create a profile and add “friends” with whom they wish to share information. 

    Facebook can be used in courses by having students create a Facebook page to introduce themselves to each other, share class notes, and work on class projects; some faculty create a Facebook page for a manikin in the learning resource center and then class announcements and assignments come from the manikin's “Facebook page” (Skiba, 2010). 

    One of the advantages of using Facebook is that many students already have accounts and are accustomed to sharing information in this format. Twitter allows users to send short (140-character) messages (“tweets”) to an individual or a group in the social network (Bristol, 2010; Skiba, 2008). 

    The messages are retrieved from an Internet website. Faculty and students can use Twitter to post challenge questions to students, to update assignments, or to share information from a conference. 

    Faculty also use Twitter during a class session to receive responses to questions posed in class. Blogs promote collaboration and can be used to develop thinking and writing skills (Billings, 2009). A wiki is a single document developed by a group; the software facilitates adding, deleting, and editing members' contributions as well as attaching photographs, video, and audio clips. 

    Wikis can be used for writing group reports or papers, posting the summary of a community assessment, hosting a journal club, or holding “grand rounds” in which each student presents his or her patient and others contribute to the care plan. A blog (web log) is a document composed of sequential postings by members of the learning community. 

    Blogs can be used as reflective journals, with each student posting individual reflections throughout the course. Blogs are also an easy way to elicit comments about a controversial topic, to conduct focus groups, and to share examples of a particular concept. 

    Professional networking sites (for example LinkedIn) establish interest focused communities, typically for the purpose of establishing and expanding a list of professional contacts and networking for seeking employment and professional development. Students can use these sites to market themselves and explore employment opportunities.