Draft of Article Critique

I reviewed the article Bounded Community: Designing and facilitating learning communities in formal courses by B. Wilson, S. Ludwig-Hardman, C. Thornam, and J. Dunlap. This was an enjoyable article, easy to read and I found many strategies I will be able to take away and use in my own practice.

Summary
In the article, the authors first define a bounded community as one which includes formal courses, such as online courses and state these types of learning environments are different than other more informal and less bounded learning experiences and term them bounded communities. The authors suggest that in the environment of a formal course, participants find themselves in a situation where they are required to participate, don’t choose the instructor or their classmates, commit to a fixed length of time and must make an explicit effort to connect with others (Wilson, Ludwig-Hardman, Thornma, and Dunlap, 2004, page 2). This type of situation is termed a bounded community which is the type of learning community that the discussion and strategies of this article focus on.

The authors assert that specific strategies can be used within a bounded learning environment, and specifically in an online course to develop a learning community.
Building community in learning environments was promoted by Lave and Wenger (as cited in Wilson, et al., 2004) in their communities of practice model. This model relies on collaborative forms of learning and sharing and group participation, where control is distributed among participants. The authors of the article under review feel that the presence of a learning community, as described by Lave and Wenger enhances the learning experience for the student and thus feel it is important to have strategies in place that promote it. The authors feel this development of community is necessary as it can provide a richer and more authentic learning environment.

A positive sense of community within a course doesn’t always happen spontaneously, but needs to be developed through the facilitation of the instructor, but also with the tools and structures built into or developed in an online course. The authors have identified seven features that should be considered within a course to facilitate community of practice formulation. These features include shared goals, safe and supportive conditions, collective identity, collaboration, respectful inclusion, progressive discourse, and mutual appropriation. They offer these seven features as a framework for strategies to increase levels of community found in courses. Further in the article, they provide strategies for each of the seven features, that developers and instructors can use in their practice.

Critique
I enjoyed this article as it was written in a style that was easy to read and provides a good summary of existing thought on strategies for developing community in a specific context and learning environment. The article is based on a literature review of existing research on the subject, so it doesn’t provide any new research or insight into this topic. This would be the main drawback of the article, that it does not provide any new and defining research. The authors do a fairly thorough review of existing research on this topic and this information is condensed into a format that is useable for the practitioner.

Reflection
I chose this article as currently in my practice I am involved in developing online courses as well as teaching/facilitating online courses. In the face to face courses I teach one of my priorities is to promote or facilitate a comfortable learning environment or community and now want to explore how to do this in online courses as well. I feel a comfortable learning environment where students feel comfortable participating and asking questions is a better and richer learning environment. In her discussion of emotion and motives in adult learning, Dorothy Mackeracher states, “for adults to become fully engaged in learning, they must be aroused, feel relatively safe, and be willing and able to channel their motives into change processes. For these reasons, adults need a supportive and encouraging learning environment that does not threaten them. This is facilitated when relationships between the facilitator and learners are built on trust” (Mackeracher 2004 page 127). The article under review summarizes and provides some strategies that developers and facilitators can use in developing/facilitating online courses to build trust between the participants and the instructor and thus to promote positive community.

The authors provide a job aid for assisting in using these strategies. This job aid was developed by others (Trice and Beyer, 1984), but is used in this article to summarize some of the key strategies. Some key points from their summary are to establish informal leaders within the class and use them to help develop community. Additionally they also encourage the inclusion of stories, symbols or language that may be unique to the course and may assist in developing a unique experience for the students. This is a new strategy of developing or using rituals or artifacts for me that I hadn’t considered before that can be used to help define the course. These are meant to help students identify with the course, see it as a unique place and help define or set up the bounded community as discussed in the article. The authors state, “designers of online courses could establish a number of signs, symbols, rituals, and language pointers to strengthen the developmental arc of the course and to encourage positive engagement in community interactions” (Wilson et. al., 2004, page 11).

This article can be found at the following link: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/204/286


Mackeracher, D. (2004). Making sense of adult learning. Toronto: Culture Concepts Inc.

Wilson, B., Lugwig-Hardman, S., Thornam, C., Dunlap, J. (2004). Bounded Community: Designing and facilitating learning communities in formal courses. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Volume 5, Number 3.

Welcome to My Blog

Hi Everyone:

Welcome to my blog. This is my very first blog post ever. I look forward to adding to this over the coming weeks.

Lauren