Emergence of Trust
It should come as no surprise that trust is one of the key ingredients in creating an effective and welcoming online learning environment. Establishing trust quickly is the key to effective Internet communication, especially when it comes to teaching online, according to researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). You can read about their recent findings in this article at Science Daily.
The authors of our text felt similarly and shared the following details:
- A little trust leads to some information sharing, then more trust, in a dynamic spiral.
- The decisive element for trust is the conscious act of suspending judgment about others as people and instead seeking understanding “from the other’s point of view.”
- The dropping of some defensiveness by one party leads to further dropping of defensiveness by the other party… [until] communication tends to be pointed toward solving a problem rather than toward attacking a person or group…. These defensive distortions drop away with astonishing speed as people find that the only intent is to understand, not to judge.
Question for Reflection: What implications does the importance of trust have for online teachers? What are some steps you can take to build a "trust-filled" learning community?