Transactional distance describes the psychological and communicational distance that may arise in any instructional context. It is determined by the degree of interaction amongst learners, teachers, their institutions, and their environments.

According to the Manifesto for Teaching Online, distance is not only geographical, but also psychological, temporal, spatial, communicational, emotional, political, and social. All of these interact in online education and profoundly impact on the students’ engagement with courses and programmes, and so it is important to consider it in our teaching and learning design.

In general, as transactional distance increases, student experience, satisfaction, course engagement and completion, and educational outcomes are all reduced.

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Here are my notes on this video about Distance from the Near Future Teaching Project:

There will be more and more online education.

Online education is a great equalizer.

With artificial intelligence and you can access online resources, would you still need to go to university?

Online education is more accessible to students in rural areas who have less options.

We should be looking at how to get our degree courses available as online learning.

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We were given three case studies of students who were disengaging from an online course for different reasons, and asked for suggestions about how to respond.

Fortune cookie image: Chow-fun philosophy., via Footnotes on epicycles.. Licence: CC-BY-3.0

These were the three disengaging students: difficult work life balance, with a demanding job and caring responsibilities. Asked early on what the minimum was and seems to be only doing that. Busy, travels a lot for work, posts very briefly from his phone, leading to frustration from other students. very keen international student, posts frequently and is eager to interact but other students do not respond well to this. Personally, I feel like I have been both A and C!

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Teachers who are moving from on-campus to online teaching will have a lot of questions. Here are some examples:

Questions about Teaching Online

• How often is it necessary to be online?
• Should they have synchronous teaching sessions or rely more on asynchronous discussion boards?
• Would they need to work unsocial hours?
• How would they know if students were struggling?

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Group Work: Video Reflections

Students will find a way to do group work, even online across time zones. They will be designing their own digital creations, organising via email, Skype, and similar applications, screen sharing and sharing films.

Assessments should be designed as much as possible so that they can align with what all the students are doing in their different contexts.

Group work raises the fears of letting the group down, and taking a lot of time. It’s important to set expectations of what is due and when.

If new technology is required, it’s very important to provide good guidance and not assume that all the students will have the required technical skills.

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I’m quite enjoying these word cloud generators they use on the course.

Here’s the word cloud my cohort in ‘The Edinburgh Model for Online Education’ course came up with for Community:

Community, as seen by students of The Edinburgh Model for Online Education

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Well this is ironic. No one else from my group is anywhere to be seen, and the task is this:

In this activity you are going to be working in groups to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities around the size and scale of learning communities, particularly online. In your group discussion area, share a positive and/or a negative example of your experience of being part of an online community (informal or formal). What were the key things that made or make the experience positive or negative? Provide a short overview of your personal experience in your group discussion area. Once you have all posted your entries then, as a group create a list of your:

• three essentials considerations for positive community building
• three things to avoid or mitigate when trying to build and sustain a community

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