Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace:
Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom.
Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (1999).
San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding, in spite of distances or thoughts expressed, can make of this earth a garden.
Goethe, cited on p. 21

Computers seem to be a permanent and growing element of education, at least in the wealthier countries. One development that computers have brought with them is the use of the Internet as a tool for distance learning, known as online learning. I’ve asked a number of people who have had a long involvement with cooperative learning (CL) what they think about such online learning. Their responses have often been negative. The reasons for their negative reactions include the fear that online learning will lead to less collaboration among students and that even when online collaboration does takes place, it is much inferior to face-to-face (F2F) interaction.

Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace offers some hope that the advent of online learning may foster rather than impede student-student collaboration. The book’s authors are experienced university professors who have been developing, applying, and sharing the book’s ideas for many years. The readers of this newsletter will find that much of what is proposed by Palloff and Pratt resonates with key concepts in cooperative learning, although the authors do not reference any of the many books and articles written on CL. I picked up their book because I was preparing to do a presentation on CL for teachers at a university that had recently begun online courses. I found many useful ideas. What I hope to do in this review is to share some of these ideas.

Drawbacks of online learning
The authors acknowledge the drawbacks of online learning, such as:
1. Some students may lack access to the necessary computer tools or lack knowledge
     about how to use them.
2. Health problems may arise from computer use.
3. Because we do not see the people with whom we are communicating, we do not have
     access to such communication aids as tone of voice, gestures, and facial expression.
4. It may be difficult to develop a sense of community among the class.

The purpose of their book flows from this 4th drawback of online learning. Palloff and Pratt argue that the disembodied nature of online learning makes cooperation among students even more important than it is in F2F learning. They explain how by employing a transformative pedagogy teachers can facilitate community building in online education. Without community, online learning descends into what is pejoratively known as “shovelware,” i.e., teachers using the Internet to shovel information at students far past the point of information fatigue. Fortunately, computers offer many new tools for promoting student-student interaction. The book provides details on some of these.

New meaning of community
An online community is different from the typical place-based notion of community, such as a small town. The Internet has sometimes been described as a highway or a network, but Paloff and Pratt argue that these metaphors can be replaced with one that sees the Internet as collection of electronic communities. Such communities can be consciously established by negotiating aims, ethics, and norms, in much the same way that F2F communities establish themselves.

On page 24, Paloff and Pratt list steps for building online community:
1. clearly define the purpose of the group
2. create a distinctive gathering place for the group
3. promote effective leadership from within
4. define norms and a clear code of conduct
5. allow for a range of member roles
6. allow for and facilitate subgroups
7. allow members to resolve their own disputes

One means of establishing community is via a virtual cafe, which is a space for students to meet to discuss matters not connected to the course content. While such chatrooms serve an important social-affective role, the authors suggest that they are not very useful for substantive discussion. Instead, they prefer asynchronous forms of electronic communication, such as listserves.

Indicators of the existence of community among the members of an online course include (p. 32):
1. active interaction involving both course content and personal communication
2. collaborative learning evidenced by comments directed primarily student to student
     rather than student to instructor
3. socially constructed meaning evidenced by agreement or questioning, with the intent to
     achieve agreement on issues of meaning
4. sharing of resources among students
5. expressions of support and encouragement exchanged between students, as well as
     willingness to critically evaluate the work of others.

The community that exists among the members of an online course can be extended to include collaboration with other learning communities (p. 125) by such means as:
1. providing a list of e-mail addresses of instructors or students in another university who
     are interested in receiving messages from members of the group
2. creating a common discussion area that can be accessed by participants and visitors
3. creating and posting a list of websites of interest
4. presenting “guest speakers” to the group online.

Paloff and Pratt state that the disembodied nature of online communication necessitates the development by community members of an electronic personality, i.e., the person we become when we are online. One way that computers help us display our online personalities is via the creation of a homepage where we can include photos of ourselves and include other information about ourselves, such as favorite websites. These homepages are a feature of some online learning applications.

One particular benefit of online learning for building community may be that it provides a means of treating status differences that can arise in groups. Paloff and Pratt state that: "The availability and number of personal interactions using computers is limited only by time and access, not by distance or social class. We can create, cultivate, and maintain social relationships with anyone who has access to a computer. Connections are made through the sharing of ideas and thoughts. How people look or what their cultural, ethnic, or social background is have become irrelevant factors in this medium, which has been referred to as the great equalizer (p. 15)."

Also, online participation in a group can be more thoughtful because students have an opportunity to think for a while before responding online, whereas in the classroom the more impulsive students have more opportunity to speak than do students who are more reflective.

Teachers’ roles
The roles of teachers in online learning and community building involve much more than just putting lectures on a website. Among teachers’ roles are:
 1. posting goals and expected outcomes
 2. providing guidelines for participation
 3. creating assignments to be done collaboratively
 4. attempting to create a friendly atmosphere in the course by such means as
      icebreaking and teambuilding activities
 5. initiating, monitoring, providing feedback on, and guiding online discussions
 6. helping groups that are having difficulty resolving conflict
 7. assisting group to monitor their group effectiveness
 8. teaching collaborative skills, including netiquette
 9. involving students in formulating assessment criteria
10.making sure students have technical support
11. encouraging students to discuss their reactions to online learning.

Paloff and Pratt maintain that online teaching is actually more time-consuming than F2F instruction. Thus, they reject the idea that online learning is a great way to save costs by increasing teacher-student ratios: “Given the lower costs involved in delivery, then, universities can afford to keep class sizes small without reducing revenues from these classes” (p. 16).

Evaluation in online learning communities
Consistent with their advocacy of transformative pedagogy, the authors urge that students also take part in the evaluation process for online courses. This evaluation includes the effectiveness of the technology and its user-friendliness. Involving students in assessing themselves, peers, teachers, and the course is part of what in known as “360-degree feedback.” The authors state that: "Because we are promoting the use of a collaborative environment in the teaching process, collaboration must also be incorporated into the process of evaluation. And, because we are attempting to create empowered learners as a desired outcome, self-evaluation is also an important component (p. 20)."

Paloff and Pratt suggest that teams have leaders and that these leaders can assign weekly grades to team members based on their participation, with these grades to be supervised by the teacher. One area of particular concern in online learning involves plagiarism and other forms of cheating. Paloff and Pratt (p. 147) maintain that: "when a course is well constructed, is learner-centered, and promotes learner empowerment and self-reflection, the notion of cheating should not become a concern. If the assignments promote the use of critical thinking and are designed to be shared with the remainder of the group, then participants gain a sense of responsibility for producing pieces of learning that will be useful for the others in the group. …”We [the participants] were all the teachers for one another.”

Our experience has shown that if we trust and empower our learners, they realize that they are the experts at their own learning. Cheating is irrelevant in this process because the participant would be cheating only him- or herself.

Conclusion
Throughout the book Paloff and Pratt stress that online learning should be part of a transformative learning process in which students become reflective practitioners, i.e., experts in their own learning. Students ask themselves questions, such as, “How were you as a learner before you came into this course? How have you changed? How do you anticipate this will affect your learning in the future?” (p. 140).

After reading this book I still do not think that pure distance is the best way to go. Paloff and Pratt agree that some combination of F2F and online interaction is the ideal. Nonetheless, I was very encouraged to see so many good ideas about pedagogy being incorporated into online learning and to see the many electronic tools for facilitating collaboration. The key weakness of the book is that too many of the examples come from the authors’ own courses on addiction counseling and organizational behavior. I would have preferred to see examples from a wider range of courses.

This review concludes with some of Paloff and Pratt’s suggestions for where to find out more about building online learning communities:
Christiansen, E., & Dirckinck-Holmfeld, L. (1995). Making distance learning collaborative.
CMC Magazine
The Journal of Computer Mediated Communication
T.H.E. - Technical Horizons in Education