Association

The principle of Association has its roots in the need that educators have to share experiences and have contact with their colleagues. Teamwork, mentoring relationships, and supportive encouragement can be especially vital to online instructors as they develop successful practices and navigate technological challenges. Although the word "community" is commonly used in reference to needs for networks and connection, we use the word "association" and acknowledge that its use has been inspired by Martin Buber's (1970, originally 1923) thinking in I and Thou.  Buber distinguishes between a community, where people share a genuine sense of belonging that is sometimes unexpected and difficult-to-anticipate or replicate, and an association, where people experience a transactional relationship that is developed to provide people with certain kinds of shared experiences, as is common in employment situations (92-107):

Marked by the transaction that binds the group, public institutions and employment situations most often are associations in that individuals are brought together to accomplish goals, to do something, to serve others, and to make money.  We view training and teaching online in a similar vein -- online instructor training brings together professional or peer educators who want to facilitate student learning in a work setting.  Trainees eventually will teach online and will be paid for their work and, to that end, there is always a transaction that binds them. (Hewett and Ehmann 18)

Whether one prefers to call a shared experience among educators who work together an association, as we do, or a community, it is important to provide some kind of mutually accessible network in an online training program. A training program that engages the principle of Association might include such characteristics as:

• Internal structures for developing professional relationships. In our work as online program administrators, both trainers and trainees -- as well as experienced and novice online instructors -- have expressed a need for association in terms of their relationships to trainers and to the broader teaching team. Thus, a primary focus of Association is to build into the training program the kinds of structures that enable relationships among participants. The specific goal is to help trainees conduct their business of online writing instruction, which happens best when their affective, interactive, and collaborative needs are met. Such structures include: (i) identifying team and sub-team leaders from whom trainees might request help, and (ii) providing a list of team members with whom they might talk about their online instruction. In synchronous chat, such as through an instant messaging client, members of the training and instructional teams might use such lists to gather around a cyber-water cooler, talking about their work and progress.
• An online "shared social context." A sense of "shared social context" in an online instructional setting can occur through both one-to-one and group interaction whether via instant messaging, synchronous group chats, or email and listservs. Such context enables trainers and trainees "to talk spontaneously across the state, continent, or world," which "creates the cyber-water cooler of a 'cyber association'" (19). Web-based communicative tools enable people to talk through the challenges of online instruction and to get help from more experienced team members in a prompt manner (see also Renwick 3). Shared social contexts help to eliminate a sense of being alone and "out there," as our colleague Barbara described, while they encourage a common sense of purpose and experience within the training program as a whole.
• Human interaction and connection. As writing professionals know, even when interaction is mediated by the computer or through the Internet, their students seek a sense of human connection. In general, instructor-trainees and their trainers also seek human interaction and connection. Trainees who indicate that they feel isolated or that they lack confidence may feel more enabled when they interact with trainers or other trainees to sort out both technical and communicative challenges. Our experience has been that connection among participants in an online training program may, in fact, help to reduce attrition and improve trainees' chances to complete the program (Kiser 72; Barkley and Bianco).
• Methods to achieve cyber-communication. As we have mentioned above, various cyber-communication tools can help to develop a sense of Association: email, synchronous group chats, and listservs are a few. These tools can be used in systematic ways that let trainees know how and where they can interact with other members of the online teaching team. For example, email addressed from the program director to the team as a whole can communicate the program's development, schedules, teaching guidance, and general and specific encouragement. Such team notes can be sent on a regular basis, which develops the team's expectations for information from directors or supervisors. Similarly, such email can be used to stimulate teaching-related discussions on a listserv or through synchronous chat about challenges that novice instructors have experienced and to which more experienced online instructors might respond. 

We are certain that program directors can design and implement numerous strategies for cyber-association. However they choose to develop their professional associations for the training program, the cyber-communication that ensues "can comprise an associative support network despite physical non-presence" (Hewett and Ehmann 19).