scholarly journals Beyond Social Presence: Facelessness and the Ethics of Asynchronous Online Education

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Rose

In this position paper, I argue that a focus on achieving and increasing social presence in online courses tends to derail a consideration of the ethical implications and dimensions of the essential facelessness of asynchronous education. Drawing upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Nel Noddings, who contended that the face is the basis of caring, ethical relations, I explore what it means for human relations, education, and society in general that learners increasingly come face-to-face with screens rather than with embodied, different others.

Author(s):  
Michael Marmon

Online education has become a ubiquitous and convenient method by which to complete courses at institutions of higher education across the globe. To achieve this level of parity between course delivery methods (online or face-to-face), the instructor or course designer must understand the complex relationship between the technology and instructional design theories being leveraged in these contexts. Within the context of this chapter, these barriers manifest themselves within Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance, a theory which states that the transactional distance between stakeholders (whether it is instructor-learner or learner-learner communication) has the potential to obstruct the path for comprehending the information being presented as well as influencing the level of rapport between students. This chapter examines the obstacles that are present because of Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance and the influence that social presence has on learners in online courses from the perspective of student satisfaction and positive learning outcomes.


2016 ◽  
pp. 1532-1550 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bowers ◽  
Poonam Kumar

Online learning has grown dramatically over the past few years and has become an integral part of most of the higher education institutions' overall strategy. While this explosive growth has created exciting opportunities for both institutions and students, high dropout rates in online learning environments continues to be a major concern for all institutions. Research has identified lack of social and teacher presence in online courses as major factors leading to student attrition. While it is easy to establish these presences in traditional classrooms, developing them in an online environment could be challenging due to absence of any face-to-face contact. The purpose of this preliminary study is to compare students' perceptions of social and teacher presences in online and traditional classroom. Thirty-four students enrolled in an online section and 29 students enrolled in a face-to-face section of an undergraduate course participated in the study. The results indicate that students' perceived stronger teacher and social presences in the online section compared to the face-to-face section. Implications of these results for practice and research are discussed.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Stephen A Leybourne ◽  
Vijay Kanabar ◽  
Roger D.H. Warburton

  The evolution of the internet and collaboration tools have made it possible to enhance the range of online education, and make it universally accessible and eminently affordable. Around 2000, the faculty at Boston University’s Metropolitan College proposed an online master’s degree in project management, using the emerging learning management systems. The program grew quickly from 40 to 200 students, and was one of the first in the United States to be accredited by the Project Management Institute’s Global Accreditation Committee. This academic model has now been extended to other disciplines and programs.It was expected from the outset that the BU online and classroom academic experiences would be completely equivalent. This presented several challenges, the first of which was developing online equivalents for the face-to-face pedagogical course components. Second, writing online courses, recording videos and developing innovative discussion topics is time-consuming, and we quickly realised that only fulltime faculty had the commitment and motivation to devote the required effort to produce quality courses. Finally, the technological resources associated with course development and course operation required significant investment, beyond the faculty time, currently estimated at around $60,000 per course.We surveyed our students and alumni every two years and now have enough data to describe accurately the evolution in attitudes to online education.As one of the earlier and premier adopters of a rigorous academic online education model, BU has a vested interest to contribute to the growing debate about the academic quality and rigour of online education, the application of high pedagogical standards, and the innovative use of online teaching frameworks and tools. This paper will address and document these issues and assist in raising awareness of emerging “best practice” in the online education domain. 


Author(s):  
James Bowers ◽  
Poonam Kumar

Online learning has grown dramatically over the past few years and has become an integral part of most of the higher education institutions' overall strategy. While this explosive growth has created exciting opportunities for both institutions and students, high dropout rates in online learning environments continues to be a major concern for all institutions. Research has identified lack of social and teacher presence in online courses as major factors leading to student attrition. While it is easy to establish these presences in traditional classrooms, developing them in an online environment could be challenging due to absence of any face-to-face contact. The purpose of this preliminary study is to compare students' perceptions of social and teacher presences in online and traditional classroom. Thirty-four students enrolled in an online section and 29 students enrolled in a face-to-face section of an undergraduate course participated in the study. The results indicate that students' perceived stronger teacher and social presences in the online section compared to the face-to-face section. Implications of these results for practice and research are discussed.


Author(s):  
Michael Marmon

Online education has become a ubiquitous and convenient method by which to complete courses at institutions of higher education across the globe. To achieve this level of parity between course delivery methods (online or face-to-face), the instructor or course designer must understand the complex relationship between the technology and instructional design theories being leveraged in these contexts. Within the context of this chapter, these barriers manifest themselves within Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance, a theory which states that the transactional distance between stakeholders (whether it is instructor-learner or learner-learner communication) has the potential to obstruct the path for comprehending the information being presented as well as influencing the level of rapport between students. This chapter examines the obstacles that are present because of Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance and the influence that social presence has on learners in online courses from the perspective of student satisfaction and positive learning outcomes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 2068
Author(s):  
William Villegas-Ch. ◽  
Xavier Palacios-Pacheco ◽  
Milton Roman-Cañizares ◽  
Sergio Luján-Mora

Currently, the 2019 Coronavirus Disease pandemic has caused serious damage to health throughout the world. Its contagious capacity has forced the governments of the world to decree isolation and quarantine to try to control the pandemic. The consequences that it leaves in all sectors of society have been disastrous. However, technological advances have allowed people to continue their different activities to some extent while maintaining isolation. Universities have great penetration in the use of technology, but they have also been severely affected. To give continuity to education, universities have been forced to move to an educational model based on synchronous encounters, but they have maintained the methodology of a face-to-face educational model, what has caused several problems in the learning of students. This work proposes the transition to a hybrid educational model, provided that this transition is supported by data analysis to identify the new needs of students. The knowledge obtained is contrasted with the performance presented by the students in the face-to-face modality and the necessary parameters for the transition to this modality are clearly established. In addition, the guidelines and methodology of online education are considered in order to take advantage of the best of both modalities and guarantee learning.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wally Boston ◽  
Sebastián R. Díaz ◽  
Angela M. Gibson ◽  
Phil Ice ◽  
Jennifer Richardson ◽  
...  

As the growth of online programs continues to rapidly accelerate, concern over retention is increasing. Models for understanding student persistence in the face-to-face environment are well established, however, the many of the variables in these constructs are not present in the online environment or they manifest in significantly different ways. With attrition rates significantly higher than in face-to-face programs, the development of models to explain online retention is considered imperative. This study moves in that direction by exploring the relationship between indicators of the Community of Inquiry Framework and student persistence. Analysis of over 28,000 student records and survey data demonstrates a significant amount of variance in re-enrollment can be accounted for by indicators of Social Presence.


Author(s):  
Neill Wylie

Maastricht University (UM) has a distinct global perspective and a strong focus on innovation. UM offers an array of PhD courses to distance and campus based students who have access to elective, credit bearing modules and the language needs of these students are catered for by the Language Centre. Many PhD candidates choose to take an academic writing course in their first or second year of their degree. In recent years, demand for a more student focused, flexible academic writing course has grown. In line with UM’s policy of supporting innovative teaching practices, the Language Centre’s face-to-face PhD academic writing course, PhD Writing 1, has been transformed into a fully online course containing eight interactive webinar sessions named Online PhD Writing, which runs in addition to the face-to-face rendition. On the back of the success of this course, coupled with increased demand for a follow up course, this author was tasked with creating an advanced online PhD academic writing course to cater for global students with diverse time zones and schedules. This paper evaluates the challenges posed and the advances made in constructing both online courses and explores the technologies used in implementing them.


Author(s):  
Whitney Kilgore ◽  
Patrick R. Lowenthal

The Human Element Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the Canvas open network was designed to be a connectivist experience exploring methods for the humanization of online education. This MOOC introduced and discussed methods that faculty could adopt in order to potentially increase instructor presence, social presence, and cognitive presence within their own online courses. The design of the MOOC and the learners' perceptions of social presence after taking part in this MOOC are discussed in this chapter.


Author(s):  
Bo Xing

Massive open online courses (MOOCs), also known as kind of free and accessible online education environment, have been deeply appeals to people and broadly covered in different medium. Nowadays, it seems MOOCs are everywhere. Originally, MOOCs are designed to offer learning content to the participants who do not have an adequate educational infrastructure, or where cost has become a barrier to educational access. However, as the MOOCs become more popular, an important question need to be asked: how do traditional face-to-face learning students benefit from MOOC environments as well? This chapter introduces MOOCs as an assistant platform to rebuild the course structure in order to tie education more closely to work. The major advantage of this hybrid teaching and learning model is that it is flexible as it allows students to work through materials at their own pace and at a time that is most convenient to them. Although the successful integration of such different teaching and learning modalities is a big challenge, the presented case study and the preliminary experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid methodology.


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