I have a new publication to share with you. My research article exploring how online course community and personal community influence learner engagement has now been published in Educational Technology Research and Development, an AECT journal. This research was originally conducted as my dissertation study. My dissertation committee lovingly and patiently encouraged me to publish, and I’m so grateful they did.
The study utilized multiple regression to try and explain how learner engagement is connected to a sense of classroom community in a course and a sense of personal community (support from friends and family). We were able to explain 40% of variations in learner engagement on the basis of course community and personal community support in combination. As a practitioner, it was always my hunch that connections to each other and connections to the instructor were key in online learner success, but this study confirmed the hunch. Engaged learners connect to each other and to their instructor during the course experience. Additionally, they have strong personal communities, made up of friends and family who support them in their educational endeavors.
What surprised me about this study was actually the outsized impact of the classroom sense of community in learner engagement. While personal community did contribute to learner engagement, classroom community had almost twice the impact in the model. Personal community mattered, but classroom community mattered more. It affirms what I’ve always said about online learning– we don’t learn alone. We learn in community, even in an online classroom. Please check out the article and share. I hope it will lead to a resurgence of conversations around how we can connect within and online classroom and what it means to create deep community in that space.
