Active Learning & Online Learning Communities
Palloff and Pratt advocate for an active learning model for distance learning classes, a paradigm for teaching and learning that is less formally structured than those courses that simply convert traditional lectures and lessons into Web texts. This model is also tied more closely to collaborative learning. Based in part on the California Distance Learning Project’s study of key distance learning components, the authors conclude that distance learning differs from traditional classroom education in its increased dependence on student-directed learning. In other words, while the teacher still shapes the class through the Web-based classroom, students need to collaborate more and have more opportunities to shape their projects. Because it is virtually impossible to learn passively online, students are compelled to become involved or fail. But it is not just an increased emphasis on collaboration that distinguishes this model. The pedagogical paradigm Palloff and Pratt propose includes attention to access, co-created and flexible guidelines and procedures, self-initiated participation, facilitation rather than direction by the instructor, active collaboration, discussion of learning and the medium’s effect on it, and participant evaluation (18-20).
          This argument for active learning parallels those made by community-engagement practitioners and scholars and critical pedagogues. Paulo Freire and Ira Shor have long argued that the way to effective learning is through dialogue and participation that places the instructor as much as possible as an equal engaged in co-creating meaning. Community educators, too, advocate for reciprocity and collaborative problem solving in community learning situations (Cushman; Flower).
           In fact, collaboration's role in fostering community in the composition classroom has been debated actively since the late 1970s (see, for example, Bleich; Bruffee; Clifford; Lunsford and Ede; Gere; Howard; Trimbur). Kenneth Bruffee's "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind,'" considered foundational to the dialogues about collaboration in composition classes, notes the value of collaboration for helping students acclimate into new discourse communities, among other benefits. Invoking Richard Rorty, Bruffee claims that collaboration is critical to the effectiveness of composition and literature classes because "collaborative learning provides the kind of social context, the kind of community, in which normal discourse occurs: a community of knowledgeable peers" (402).
          Importantly, though, even as he advocates for collaborative approaches to writing and writing instruction, Bruffee also recognizes teachers' hesitations to use collaboration and the possibility of struggle when a class attempts to establish a collaborative atmosphere. That struggle and hesitation continue almost twenty years after the publication of Bruffee's essay.
          Palloff and Pratt add to the conversation by considering the possibility that productive community learning and problem solving might be fostered just as deliberately and to similar effect online. Their pedagogical philosophy–and their motto for distance education consulting–is that everyone can and should be an expert at their own learning. However, becoming an expert at one's own learning does not preclude the importance of collaborative discourse and negotiation.
          They also address difficulties associated with collaboration and active learning online, continuing the conversation Bruffee engaged with "Collaboration and 'Conversation of Mankind.'" For example, Palloff and Pratt note in the "New Issues and Concerns" section of Chapter One that "Professors, just like their students, will need the ability to deal with a virtual world in which they cannot see, hear, or touch the people with whom they are in communication. Some participants may even adopt a new persona [...]" (7). For some students and teachers, this distance may be more comfortable than traditional classroom settings, but for others, the distance may be inhibiting. The community-building strategies offered here attempt to reduce the gap for those students and teachers who may not learn as well at a physical and psychological distance.