Online Teaching with a Christian Worldview

I think most of us are used to thinking of Christian worldview in education as something that affects class content. For example, if I’m teaching a high school science class, I might take time to talk about what creation reveals about God, and I might think of that as Christian worldview integration. 

Those content-level connections often end up feeling—and being—squashed in where they aren’t actually helpful. When that happens, it cheapens the way we and our students think about the truth, because it’s a misuse of the truth. That kind of mis-integration can lead us to think of a Christian worldview as a habit of tipping our cap toward God at the end of every conversation. If we only ever portray God’s perspective as an obligatory afterthought, I would argue that that’s actually a subversion of a Christian worldview.

There’s a deeper level of Christian worldview integration available, and I think it’s actually a more helpful level. What if we could apply Christian teaching not just to the words we say, but also to the types of things we ask students to do? 

That’s the direction David I. Smith has been challenging me to think this semester, starting with his book, On Christian Teaching (Amazon / HooplaDigital / Goodreads). 

Smith’s thesis is that there is “such a thing as teaching Christianly, teaching in such a way that faith somehow informs the processes, the moves, the practices, the pedagogy, and not just the ideas that are conveyed or the spirit in which they are offered” (On Christian Teaching, preface). 

I think he’s right—and I think there’s a really close relationship between what he’s describing as teaching Christianly and what’s currently regarded as highly effective teaching in online classes.

Community of Inquiry

When people talk about quality online education, whether in peer-reviewed journals or on blogs or in webinars, there’s a framework that everyone points to. Lists of best practices are organized around it. Rubrics for measuring course quality use it. It’s everywhere. 

This is the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. Here’s the framework: 

You can measure the quality of online education by whether it deals effectively with these three “presences”:

• Cognitive presence—a student’s interaction with the course content
• Social presence—students’ interactions with one another in the context of the course
• Teaching presence—the way a teacher designs course activities and facilitates course activities

These overlap with each other, and the overlaps between them are also important to a class’s quality. For example, when a teacher responds to a student’s post, they’re contributing both social and teaching presence, and their contribution will influence how other students interact too.

Back in the early 90s, researchers created the CoI framework as an attempt to figure out what face-to-face education has that distance education doesn’t have—and how a teacher can compensate for what’s missing.

Does it matter?

But do all three domains of presence really matter in an online class? Doesn’t learning just involve each student learning the course material? If that’s the case, we should only need to worry about cognitive presence.

I think that’s the mindset most students bring to an online class. Almost everyone thinks discussion forums are a waste of time (the survey results are in). Most of us don’t appreciate social presence in our online classes, no thanks—at best, it’s harmless, but it’s busywork.

And teacher presence is good if we’re talking about effective, clear instructions, right? But beyond that, I think most of us aren’t really looking to get to know the teacher of an online class—we’d like them to give us clear information, then essentially get out of the way. 

But that mindset turns out to be wrong.

For example, this controlled study demonstrated that social presence and teaching presence both made a difference for students’ learning. And this was in a statistics class—we’re talking about math and data interpretation, not literature or history or spiritual formation. 

Why? 

Why would social presence and teacher presence make a measurable difference in the quality of students’ cognitive presence in the class?

Education is for persons

Community is really important in a domain that runs parallel to education: spiritual formation. 

There are Christians who emphasize the individual dimensions of spiritual formation and end up neglecting community, but I don’t think anyone outright denies the role of community in spiritual growth. It’s too prevalent in Scripture to deny (e.g., Prov. 18:1; Rom. 12:3-6; Eph. 2:19-22).

Why do effective education and spiritual formation both involve community? 

I think it goes back to what it means to be human: we are created in the image of God. God has existed as Trinity for all eternity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit working together in love and fellowship, both in creation (e.g., Gen. 1:26-28) and salvation (e.g., Eph. 2:18; 2 Cor. 13:14).

In the same way, humans were designed from the beginning to exist in relationship with other humans. Adam was initially alone, and that wasn’t good (Gen. 2:18). From the one human, God made two (Gen 2:21), and then the two became one kin (Gen 2:23-24). They were made to flourish in relationship with each other and with God (Gen. 1:26-31).

If we were created to be creative in fellowship with God and others, that’s going to be relevant to education—to how we learn and grow and become. 

Now, lots of attempts at creating social presence or teaching presence in an online class don’t work out. Community is hard to build—it emerges sometimes where you don’t expect it, and it doesn’t always respond to cultivation. That’s true in face-to-face classes as well as online ones.

But across the board, I think the principle still holds up: features of an online class that affect the community of learners also influence the effectiveness of the class. 

This is one example of how a theological truth can help us be better teachers. Even if the class isn’t about theology, we can still integrate a theological truth (humans are made for relationship) into the way we set up the class. 

We can try to make a discussion board a means of grace. 

After all, no matter how great the content is, when students interact with the teacher and each other, they’re interacting with the holiest elements of the entire class.