This week’s reading materials expounded on some of the topics in the previous chapters of the book. Regarding fostering the sense of community, I would like to focus more on discussion forums and peer review functionality on Canvas.

It is really important to understand the importance of student-to-student interaction and faculties’ roles as moderators and reviewers in those interactions. Setting up discussion forums strategically can help increase students interaction with one another. When I think about an effective discussion forum, I always think of Reddit. People on Reddit check the discussions often and many of them try to participate in the conversation. The first thing for creating engaging discussion forums is coming up with an interesting topic that most students have an opinion about. I think very technical questions about the content would not encourage students to share their thoughts. Even if the participation is mandatory, they look at it as something that they should just get over with. The second thing is to have a certain requirement that motivates interaction among students. As the book mentioned, it might be good to require students to leave a minimum number of comments on other students’ posts. I do not believe Canvas has this capability to set a minimum number of comments a student should leave. Please let me know if I am mistaken.

The book also mentioned that sometimes instructors require students to post one original thought before reading others’ writing. I personally don’t agree with this approach unless there is an exception about the topic. Generally, the point of having discussion forums is to provide students with a relaxed environment to exchange information and connect with one another. If it helps students learn how to think about the topic of the discussion and how to write or use other tools to express themselves from somebody else’s post, why not let them read other students’ posts before posting their own? I believe the fact that they are sharing their thoughts with other students – and most probably those thoughts will be viewed by others – should encourage them to have their own original views.

The other concept that drew my attention was peer review. Personally, I believe we do not look at our own work as critically as we do our peers’ work. Having peer-reviews can give a chance to the reviewers to see the strengths and shortcomings of somebody else’s work. As a result, the reviewers can recognize some of these strengths and shortcomings within their own work. Simultaneously, the individuals whose work is being reviewed can benefit from somebody else’s view who is in the same shoes as they are. Receiving feedback from your own classmates can help you gain an understanding of not only what the instructor expects in an assignment, but also what other novices expect.

Canvas has a straightforward peer review functionality for the assignments. Students can be assigned manually or automatically to review other students work. In my opinion, for most of the assignments, anonymous peer review can be a great tool. Since students might not want to criticize other students’ work, it would be good to let them to do it anonymously to help them step outside of their comfort zone. Although, I do think some of the peer reviews should be non-anonymous so that the students feel that they are participating with others.

Lastly, I want to add what role instructors play in all of this. First, the instructors are the ones who put together the strategy to use these tools in the most effective way. This is not an easy task. I believe part of it comes with experience.  Second, the instructors should provide students with timely feedback so they don’t feel left alone with each other in the course. The instructors need to ensure that students know what is expected from them and when they are supposed to be provided with feedback. Third, the instructor should have a constant social presence within the course for example by posting regular announcements and sharing some things about their personal lives (e.g. maybe a picture of what they did over the weekend or holidays).

All of these elements together can help foster the sense of community in online courses.