Questioning the Necessity of Nonacademic Social Discussion Forums Within Online Courses (Report‪)‬

George Santayana, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, said that the great difficulty in education was to get experience out of ideas. Knowledge must be linked to experience, experience must evolve from socialization, and socialization must be the result of interaction within a community. The difficulty lies in the linkage of knowledge to socialization and process that connects the two. According to one researcher, "Educational practitioners and theorists have long recognized that education is a social activity where people make sense of information through interactions that support internalization and externalization. Unfortunately, applying a social theory of learning to the field of e-learning is challenging" (Amelung, 2007, p. 501). Within the online environment, social interactivity is a necessity to the formation of knowledge. Learning, in order to be truly affective, must embody a social element that nurtures an individual through the multi-intelligences of a group while it also embraces and fosters an individual to recognize self-efficacy. The idea of successful learning within a social environment has been reiterated by educational theorists (Bandura, 1994; Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Dewey, 1963; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Miller & Dollard, 1941; Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976; Vygotsky, 1978; Walther, 1996). Some researchers (Kerka, 1988; Stacey & Rice, 2002) have indicated the importance of providing time and activities for establishing social presence within a friendly online environment was a great way to build successful learning. Others (Tu & Corry, 2003), however, suggested that it is the instructor who provides the foundation and learning structures to guide learners through various learning experiences involving active social interaction by applying modern technology. Tu and Corry (2003) believed that true learning successful for the student was achieved when the instructor initiated the course with a definition of an online collaborative learning community and explained its purposes and expectations to motivate learners to sustain online learning collaboration throughout the course. If the design of an online course is well thought out, social presence naturally evolves from students' interactions and their consciously being aware of each other in the context of moving forward. This study suggests that the learning community creates its own semblance of social awareness when the design of the course is structured so that it forces the members of that learning community to do so. If there is a design that pushes the learner into the community of learners, socialization becomes an integrated part of the learning experience.