Students’ Experiences with Community in an Open Access Course

Authors

Stephanie J. Blackmon, The College of William and MaryFollow
Theresa A. Cullen, University of Oklahoma Norman CampusFollow

Abstract

Online open access courses have become regular offerings of many universities. Building community and connectedness is an important part of branding and success of such offerings. Our goal was to investigate students’ experiences with community in an open access course. Therefore, in this study, we explored the sense of community of 342 participants in an open access chemistry course. We found that participants did not rate a sense of community as important to them, and did not report feeling very connected to the online course. We will discuss opportunities for building community features in such courses in the future.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Blackmon, Stephanie J. and Cullen, Theresa A. (2016) "Students’ Experiences with Community in an Open Access Course," International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Vol. 10: No. 2, Article 9.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2016.100209