Building a Sense of Community
Since Wild Davis began after shelter-in-place directives, the course was fully online and the students and instructors never met in person. One of the most difficult aspects of fully online instruction is building a sense of community among the students and between students and the instructor. The social dimensions of learning are often underemphasized in teaching and learning, yet educational research consistently shows how social relationships are an important mediator of educational processes and outcomes (Vygotsky, 1978). Two major components of the course supported students and instructors getting to know one another: synchronous lectures, and student presentations.
The content lecture portion of the course was held synchronously on Zoom during the regularly scheduled class time. Each lecture was recorded and posted to the learning management system. All students and instructors resided in the same time zone, reducing scheduling issues. Attendance was ‘required.’ though students were allowed a make-up assignment (used only once in the quarter) if they were unable to attend a lecture. The consistently high level of attendance contributed to the sense of community among the instructors and students.
Students were also required to give two presentations on Zoom to the rest of the class. The first of these presentations occurred during the quarter and involved sharing the ‘results’ of their data collection from the week’s activity. Students were allowed to choose which week they presented and students presenting the same week could either share results and present as a group, or present on their own. Participatory science projects for which submitted data were visible to users allowed students to also share the class or regional data in aggregate and compare their particular observations to others from the class or region. The second presentation was sharing the final product of their capstone project with the class and was done instead of a final exam. Since the capstone projects are completed mostly on the students’ own outside of class time, this presentation served to illustrate to the group the type of capstone project each student completed, and give each student a chance to share the results of their hard work with the group. To present, students needed to unmute and speak to the group, but did not need to turn on their webcams. Students whose internet bandwidth was not reliably able to screenshare sent their presentation to the instructor who shared it for them.