Building trust in an online environment

Collaborative inquiry requires educators to establish a high degree of trust: but how can we establish this when we can’t see each other? In this learning story, an ISTE describes some of the strategies she used to build trust and encourage teachers to engage in an online learning community.

Working as a facilitator in an online environment, I came to realise that asking the questions was only half the solution to stimulating quality discussion. Initially I was focused on sharpening my higher order questioning skills and setting up quality hooks to stimulate deeper discussion and to involve more people. Responding online, however, requires considerable trust – more than I had acknowledged, as the feedback from teachers made apparent.

Teachers said they liked to lurk (read without responding). They liked to see what others were saying, and their responses to the posted professional readings were considered – they liked to have time to generate a response, after checking that they were “on the right track”. So I was asking them to take a real risk in making public their ideas with people they didn’t necessarily know, especially as the contributions they posted were permanent and archived.

As a facilitator, I needed to develop strategies that would increase social presence in the online environment. When measuring social presence, we look for text-based clues that promote rich dialogue and support the learning community. High social presence in turn increases the engagement of the learning community.

The teachers needed to feel comfortable and valued and that their contributions were respected. Their feedback made me realise that it wasn’t the initial quality of the questions but the way I modelled my replies that encouraged them to participate. An opening self-disclosure from me was a great way to build trust: “I DON’T use clipart … In my job, I see …”. As the facilitator, I was putting myself on the line, too. Such self-disclosure modelled ways of responding, acknowledging that it’s all right to talk about yourself and your experiences in the classroom.

The nature of my feedback to those tentative early responses was crucial. Responding to every reply with a positive and personalised comment proved instrumental in building trust. (“Hey, Carolyn, that’s a good point you’ve raised.”) Knowing that their contributions were valued and responded to helped cement relationships and build confidence in sharing with others. Humour and the use of emoticons also helped break down barriers. :-) When responding to a comment, I would often ask a question: “What do you think about …?” Here was I, as the facilitator, reaching out my hand, inviting the respondent to trust and risk.

What I had not anticipated was the cascading effect and its impact on developing the online community into a learning community where things no longer had to be mediated through me and where real dialogue began to take place. When the teachers felt comfortable and knew a little about the other members, they started to ask questions of each other and to respond to the comments others made.

In an online environment, attention to building relationships and acknowledging the particular risk-taking required (because of the lack of visual cues) are crucial factors. They promote deeper levels of thinking and critical reflection and engagement, turning lurkers into active members of the community and reducing reliance on the facilitator.

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