Time to put a little fun into online learning--with good reason: 'Emotional arousal helps the brain learn'. Medina, Brain Rules (2008). Joni Dunlap leads the IDLive team in considering how to incorporate fun into the fabric of a course to provide a more stimulating learning experience.

John Graves, the lead faculty in the Master of Science in Science Education program at Montana State University, Bozeman, spends 30 minutes sharing over a decade of expertise in the design and delivery of online courses. John touches on a number of key considerations in terms of engaging learners in the early stages of an online course:

According to Garrison (2009), Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.”

Defining, creating and maintaining social presence in online courses is the focus of this week's show and is part of a three-part series that considers the Community of Inquiry framework.

This week, Jennifer Maddrell discusses the focus for her dissertation work: the Community of Inquiry framework: http://communitiesofinquiry.com/. Her primary research question focusses on whether there is a relationship between learner's perceptions of "community" and actual learning outcomes as identified by grades, papers, tests, etc. The discussion took a very practical turn as we sought to identify particular strategies that may be used by instructors to develop community within online courses.

This week we spoke with Mary Engstrom, Associate Director of Extended Learning Services, about plans for a revised program for supporting faculty developing online courses at The University of Montana. The proposed plan is available at: http://instructionaldesigning.org/content/draft-faculty-development-process. Please feel free to comment.

Due to a few technical difficulties, we didn't get too far into the Bridget Arend article, http://www.thejeo.com/Archives/Volume6Number1/Arendpaper.pdf. However, Mary gives a nice overview of the key points, and we have tabled the 'discussion on discussions' for an upcoming session. Some good notes included in the chat transcript a little later on.