Moral Education: Communicating Care in an All-Online Course

• In Event: Roundtable Session 92
  In Roundtable Session: Evolving Contexts in Educational Technology: Design, Integration, and Evaluation

Abstract

One of the four essential components of moral education is practicing a caring pedagogy to create a nurturing environment. With distance education, this may not seem possible or practical. Four offerings of an all-online course were evaluated. A total of 269 students participated in this course. Based on content analysis results, care and connectedness were achieved. Three themes emerged regarding what demonstrated care: timely responses, personal feedback/interaction, and trust. This research demonstrates that caring and connectedness are possible in an all-online course and that course design influences the success of communicating caring and connectedness to students enrolled in an all-online course. After design changes were made, the percentage of students stating they felt cared for increased from 39% to 100%.

Authors

• Amy Louise Pittenger, University of Minnesota

• Doneka R. Scott, University of Minnesota