Geology Goes Hollywood: Building a community of inquiry in a fully online introductory geology lecture and laboratory

Abstract

Promoting collaboration and discourse in asynchronous online courses is challenging; students need something engaging to talk about, a communications medium in which to fluidly discuss it, and a social environment that supports discourse. We designed a fully online introductory geoscience lecture and lab course called Geology Goes Hollywood that emphasizes all three of the dimensions of the community of inquiry framework: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. To heighten cognitive presence, we pair Hollywood movies with documentaries about issues relevant to students’ lives (specifically earthquake hazards, water supply and contamination, and issues of fracking). To promote social presence, students worked in teams to evaluate one another’s conceptual understanding of the course material, collaboratively analyze data and interpret findings, and discuss real-world scenarios. Our teaching presence involved appropriate collaborative technologies that enabled human interactions and consistent deadlines. Because of the effort to build community, about a third of students reported that our asynchronous online class felt “more human” than many of their face-to-face general education courses.