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V. Augsburg 'Fit'

The identity of Augsburg College, its institutional goals, and its fundamental sense of itself will drive many of the initiatives it undertakes with respect to e-learning. Augsburg’s commitment to providing access to education, the excellence of our education, and our sense of community are all key to this identity. We have a history of departing from traditional educational practice in order to provide greater access for education. Augsburg was the first college in the Twin Cities to offer weekend college for working adults. We established the CLASS program to offer improved support to students with disabilities that threatened their educational success. Augsburg established a branch campus in Rochester, MN to provide access to education for working adults in that area. E-learning techniques, even up to online courses and [remedial learning objects], are in some ways only a logical extension of our previous efforts to provide access to an excellent education to those who might not otherwise have the chance to obtain a college degree.

The excellence of Augsburg’s liberal arts and professional education is a source of pride, and it seems clear that well-designed and thoughtful e-learning initatives need not compromise that excellence. Best practices such as those established by the American Federation of Teachers (2000), the Sloan Consortium’s “Five Pillars of Quality Online Education” (Lorenzo & Moore, 2002), and Penn State World Campus’s “Effective Workload Management Strategies for the Online Environment” (Ragan & Terheggen, 2003), provide guidelines for creating effective, quality e-learning. Following best practices and using sound pedagogy to develop e-learning materials results in effective student learning. Asynchronous learning environments may even in some cases be better -suited to reflective learning than traditional classes, providing students with more time and opportunity to think critically and link ideas (Meyer, 2003).

Augsburg participates in many communities, including the physical city surrounding the college, the learning communities started in the freshman seminar and extending through a student’s academic experience, the collegial community of faculty and staff, and our link to the Lutheran community. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, community is also vital in the e-learning environment. Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s Community of Inquiry Model (2000) was used as the core strategy in a number of paper presentations at the 20th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, August 5-6, 2004. The Community of Inquiry Model places the learner’s educational experience at the intersection of three circles representing faculty and students’ social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. It is the development of these three presences by both faculty and students that creates in an online learning community a rich environment for student interaction with the content, teacher, and other students. Again, best practices address ways to structure and nurture a community of inquiry in an online environment, making the kinds of learning communities that Augsburg strives toward achievable in an e-learning environment.

Implications of Augsburg Fit

Understanding how e-learning can fit Augsburg College requires an expanded perspective on the elements that make an Augsburg education unique. An e-learning environment that “fits” Augsburg College would, we think:

1. Provide training and sharing of best practices among faculty through the use of the CTL collaborative model.
   
2. Ensure that all online courses use activities to build and nurture online community, providing interactions between all three circles in the Community of Inquiry Model.