Education Commons^™

Developing Critical Reflective Online Communities By Empowering Student Voice, Wendy Barber, Lorayne Robertson

Teaching and Learning in a Digital Context

This qualitative study examines the voices and learning experiences of students in online synchronous graduate courses by examining the role that student voice plays in developing authentic online communities. Transformational digital learning regards student voices as central to the process of learning in community, not extraneous to it. Effective online courses must be designed to allow constructivist opportunities for students to contextualize and integrate knowledge as well. With the wide variety and increasing landscape of new and innovative digital means of expressing concepts, placing students at the centre of the process is a digital affordance that holds the potential to …