 Having a good design methodology can help to create a more balanced course. We use the community of inquiry model and the outcome is often more balanced than it might otherwise be. Instructors give consideration to developing components of their course that will enhance instructor presence. They also will think more about how they're facilitating social presence for peer-to-peer interaction and, of course, cognitive presence. Without the design methodology as a framework, they often default to considering content as the primary content delivery as the primary goal of the course. But through some coaching and provision of a good design methodology, they will have a picture of a course that includes all of those components. The community of inquiry model provides a framework that helps us think about how we can get our students working with each other and working with the instructor and working with the content in the course. Again, it's just a model that can be useful, but it doesn't necessarily explain everything about how we can promote effective discourse and effective engagement in a course. What it says is that we should think about the types of interactions that our learners would have in a couple different ways. One, learners will be kind of interacting with the content in some ways. And a second way is that they're going to be interacting with each other, so learner-learner. And then third, they're going to be interacting with instructors in the course. So that might be a teaching assistant. It might be a faculty member. It could be somebody from the outside and outside expert. And so that can provide a way of looking at a course maybe from a 20,000 feet view and thinking about, okay, are we providing opportunities for each of these three approaches? In most cases, the student-to-content interactions are pretty heavy in a course. And then students usually will have an opportunity to interact with instructors as well. So those are pretty common. But what's less common is really that effective peer-to-peer interactions and as they kind of wrestle with content. And that's important because one of the challenges of an online course is that faculty can be overwhelmed dealing with student questions and trying to maintain a presence in the course without being online 24-7. And so if you can build in activities that let students interact with both the content in each other in effective ways and really be unpacking the content, raising questions, coming up with questions for each other and identifying areas where, well, maybe they feel very comfortable with certain aspects of the content or areas that they are really struggling with. If they can do that in a way where the community is working together to come up with those pieces of information, that can help the faculty member kind of look and kind of go through that and see, okay, where are the people struggling and it can help direct the efforts that you to try and address some of those challenges or maybe spend less time on areas where students are clearly understanding the concepts in a strong way. Among the students themselves, I create opportunities within the course for them to actually talk to each other. So we have structured discussions that are an assessment in the course, but we also have general discussions about anything that's bothering them. I tell them, if you have a question, post it here. I'm going to wait because one of your colleagues is going to answer it. I tell them a colleague of yours will answer it, a classmate, so that they understand that that's expected of them. And also they have a space in the course to just talk about anything. So they're posting recipes, they're posting movies, myths, music, events that are going on in the community that might be useful or helpful to this community. This community of people is speaking Spanish. So when is there a Spanish movie showing in the city? They can post it there. So we try to create these opportunities for them to just talk to each other. There are required opportunities and then there are optional opportunities. You know, my most basic strategy for getting discussions going, I think in any class context but online as well, is to try to take the perhaps drier material from a textbook but relate it to students in ways so that they see it in the world all around them. One example I like to use in my course, at one point we talk about behaviorism and we talk about this notion called schedules of reinforcement. In the class experiments, it's all about rats in a cage, pressing levers, and how they might press the lever differentially if they were rewarded every fourth press or every eighth press and what role randomness has in there. It's all interesting enough but when you suddenly turn this into flirting behavior and you talk to students about, well, someone's smiling at you, how many times should they smile at you before you smile back and what makes them most interested in you? But then ultimately, let's say you're not interested in them, what makes them give up on you, something we call extinction? By talking about learning and extinction in the context of flirting, students now care and they have all these questions come to mind and the discussion just erupts. So in a general sense, that's my strategy, bring the content to their world and try to touch on their interest points. In terms of building the community through the duration of the term, there's a number of activities that both the students and the teaching assistants are involved in and it follows a model, a five-stage model that I learned about that reflects the work of an individual named Gilly Salmon. And this five-stage model basically starts with trying to build a level of trust, then having an activity that identifies how the team, in the context of the teams of four, will work and then has them involved in a series of activities where they are in fact hopefully involved in their learning with regards to the course concepts. So the initial work that is done in terms of implementing this model is that or requires the teaching assistants to reach out to the students that they're working with and try to establish a basis of trust. And this is all done through online communication, through the use of discussion boards. From there, the team's first activity is to develop a team contract and the team contract will identify how they're going to work together and what they're going to be doing together and this team contract is then vetted or shared with the respective teaching assistant who provides an evaluation, also provides them feedback. And then from there, the teams are involved in a series of online discussions through the term and those online discussions are focused again on work on various activities related to concepts from the course.