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.