Here at Athabasca, our undergraduate courses stress maximum freedom and independence - we allow continuous enrolment and nearly complete self -pacing. The cost of this freedom is lower completion rates than we would like and loss of students who need or prefer social motivation to successfully complete a course.

We also have long arguments about the importance of a sense of community  and social interaction with peers (non existent in current model of self-paced courses). A recent study from Turkey to indicates that sense of community is associated with persistence and satisfaction - but these are in paced courses (see abstract below). Interesting was that sense of cognitive presence (ie learning) was most strongly associated with student-content interaction, followed by student-student interaction and least of all by student -teacher (tutor) interaction.

I take these results to confirm the value of both stimulating and allowing community to be built- even in self paced courses and the value of high quality content. Fortunately, we are in a position to improve our programming in these two areas. Social tools like the Landing allow students to forms communities of learning with other students. We have to however build in meaningful learning activities that stimulate this interest if we are to gain the attention and commitment of our busy students. Secondly, the use of and contribution of Open Educational resources and lower cost of media production and especially student created media, promises to allow us to continually improve the quality of the content we use.

Continuous enrolment is Athabasca's strategic edge, but I don't think we will ever make it a rich and satisfying experience, until we get beyond lonely, independent. Independent learning may work for some students, but it is turns off, and is not successful for many more.

Reference: 

 Baturay, M. H. (2010) 'Relationships among sense of classroom community, perceived cognitive learning and satisfaction of students at an e-learning course', Interactive Learning Environments, First published on: 19 March 2010

This study aims to determine whether there is a relationship between students' sense of community, perceived cognitive learning, and satisfaction in an e-learning course. Additionally, the relationship of these variables with Internet self-efficacy and final examination scores is investigated. The participants were 88 students enrolled in elementary level English as a Foreign Language course of the distance education program at a higher education institution in Turkey. The results of the study suggest that sense of community and course satisfactions are strongly related to each other. Moreover, students' course satisfaction is highly related to their perceived cognitive learning. Students' perceived cognitive learning was observed to have a very strong relationship with learner-to-content interaction, while learner-to-learner interaction was at medium level and learner-to-instructor interaction was weak. Keywords: e-learning; sense of community; cognitive learning; satisfaction; achievement