Pedagogy without Borders: New Frontiers of Teaching and Technology

When teaching went online in 2020, the opportunity came up to redesign the core, first year undergraduate course in the Trent Social Work Program as a full ‘bells and whistles’ online course in collaboration with colleagues at Trent Online. In addition to a suite of asynchronous online Modules, an additional tool was created for the course that aimed to engaging students in the course in accessible, creative, flexible, and social ways while they learned online. This tool, named “The Community Center” was a stand-alone website built with the goals of reducing the isolation, disengagement, and confusion that both online and first-time undergraduate students often feel. The site included a range of ungraded, optional opportunities for engagement, such as discussion boards, a drop-in video meeting with student peers, the virtual office hours of the instructor and TAs, file sharing, and academic skills resources, and its design was deeply informed by scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) around fostering a community of learners. However, the site was not a success; engagement with the site was low and decreased annually over the past 6 years, despite ongoing efforts to adapt or further develop its elements.
Based in the notion that 'failures' can be as instructive as successes, we seek to understand why students did not use The Community Center as expected, why something built on key SoTL principles and praised by colleagues did not produce anticipated benefits, and how students' identities and approaches to learning may have impacted their use and experience of the tool. In this presentation, we’ll discuss the tool, the ways students appeared to respond to it, and our preliminary ideas about why it didn’t work as expected. We’ll discuss the survey we are in the midst of using to collect data from student about their experiences of The Community Centre in its recent, final offering, and query whether the needs, interests, and learning approaches of first year undergraduate students in large survey courses are well attended to in current SoTL and Educational Technology discussions.