From the Screen, with Love: Towards a Bichronous Pedagogy of Care for Enhancing Social Presence in Online Learning

Project Team

Will Zhao, Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business

Project Summary

This project revolves around developing, fine-tuning, and strengthening a bichronous pedagogical approach of care to enhance the social presence of students in online programs. Pedagogical and research insights will be developed on the basis of comprehensive, multimodal, qualitative data on the online experience of two cohorts of students attending a core course in the now completely online master's program at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. This project will address an important lacuna in our knowledge, i.e., how to narrow the gap between the level of engagement of face-to-face students and that of fully online students, against a backdrop of society's increasing pressure on higher education institutions to offer more learning opportunities online. The results will have significant benefits for the teaching and learning communities at the University of Waterloo and beyond.

References

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