Today: Frustration, communities of practice, thoughts on methods…
and a workplace perspective on online teaching (that was missing so far)
The third module of our course was on… yeah, I cannot tell anymore. It was a firework of dimensions and theories, knowledge stemming from empirical research (somehow) and a lot of claims that (in my eyes) could be simplified a little more. Communities play a role in online teaching and learning. So far so good. I learned this from several reading in this module (e.g., McConnell, 2006). Learning is a social process – we know this since Bandura (1977) and his theory of social learning (one of the firework rockets that has been shot in this module). The fact that the extent of direct feedback of peers and teachers is lower in online settings was surprisingly not addressed that explicitly in this context. Communities of practice somehow caught my interest, even though the paper by Wenger (2010) is a difficult piece to start learning about the theoretical framework. I found a homepage that allowed me some further insights in the theory and its implications giving a good overview on the characteristics of a Community of Practice (the domain, the community, the practice; Wenger-Trayner, 2015). It helped me a lot to bring the lose ends between the concept and the field of online teaching together. I still think that the mechanisms underlying successful online teaching and learning formats are described and analysed in a manner that increases the knowledge on it but sometimes has the tendency to make the understanding of the phenomena in question more complicated. This is reflected in the long paragraphs of reading referring to so many dimensions, theories, and postulated effects that (with all due respect) have been applied and identified before. However, eliciting the foundation of a sense of communities within (collaborative) learning communities is always of importance and this was highlighted in the literature. Additionally, I learned a lot on the Community of Practice approach and even found a very interesting article on it that is closer related to my field but comprises some interesting reflection that can be transferred to the higher education context as well (McDermott & Archibald, 2010 – it is a critical perspective of the CoP approach in organizations). This leads me to my reflections on the article on frustration in online learning settings by Capdeferro and Romero (2012). Their findings on the sources of frustration in online learning settings have their place – however, I have some methodological concerns that I addressed in a discussion forum of our course. In a nutshell: I cannot see how the findings on the sources of frustration can be interpreted as a consequence of online learning formats. Only one condition (the online learning context) has been considered in the study and I doubt that the findings on the sources of frustration would be different in a conservative (offline) teaching format. If we want to learn something about the sources of frustration on social learning settings that are specific characteristics of online learning an empirical study would be needed that allows us to compare both conditions. But, same here: frustration was found being related to imbalanced commitment of students working in together in groups. The textbook of Jaques (2000) provides theoretical backgrounds of these findings. In terms of content, the findings of Capdeferro and Romero provide additional argumentation for the importance of community. By the way: form a stress research perspective it is not the imbalanced commitment itself that causes frustration but the stressors lying behind it (e.g., Irmer et al., 2019). And this leads me to my final reflection for this module: several times in the literature it has been emphasized that a tailoring of the teacher presence and the teaching formats, materials, media, interactions, and virtual classroom activities is crucial. Fair enough. At the same time the costs of this claim are mentioned, but not addressed (Anderson, 2008). To me as work psychologist the dimension of teaching quality is as important as the workplace perspective of teachers. The new quality of job demands stemming from online teaching formats need to be taken into consideration as well. Recent developments and publications underpin this call (e.g., Marek et al., 2021). This responsibility lies in the field of work design experts, but at the same time needs to be considered by education scholars when claiming certain tasks to be performed by teaching staff in a certain manner or to a certain extent.
References
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an online learning context. In The theory and practice of online learning (pp. 343-365). Athabasca University Press. McConnell, D. (2006). E-learning groups and communities. Open University Press.
Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences? The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44
McDermott, Richard; Archibald, Douglas (2010). “Harnessing Your Staff’s Informal Networks”. Harvard Business Review. Vol. 88 no. 3.
Irmer, J. P., Kern, M., Schermelleh-Engel, K., Semmer, N. K. & Zapf, D. (2019). ISTA – The Instrument for Stress Oriented Task Analysis – A Meta-Analysis. Zeitschrift für Arbeits- & Organisationspsychologie), 63 (4), 217–237. https://doi.org/10.1026/0932-4089/a000312
Jaques, D. (2000). Learning in groups: A handbook for improving group work. Psychology Press.
Marek, M. W., Chew, C. S., & Wu, W. C. V. (2021). Teacher experiences in converting classes to distance learning in the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (IJDET), 19(1), 40-60.
Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179-198). Springer London
Wenger-Trayner, E. & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice A brief overview of the concept and its uses. https://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/ [retrieved 04 May 2021]