Paper Title
Online Courses and Social Isolation Among Learners: Myth or Reality?

Abstract
When online courses first began to be offered, some were concerned that online courses will create social isolation among learners. Although online courses provide flexibility to enable students to learn at their own pace and place, provide opportunity to global learners, and allows adult students to maintain full-time employment while studying, do the online learners connect and interact with their peers. Our online physiology course which has been offered for ten years running and three times a year has provided us with immense data on the importance and impact of participation in online discussion board (DB). The DB has played a pivotal role in creating an intentional and relational virtual community. Often, there appears to be a correlation between the learner participation on (DB) and their individual performance/success in the course. We also have anecdotal evidence that in some cases our online learners who live in geographical proximity and form study groups activities benefit both academically and socially. In addition to online DB, we also offer to our online learners, real-time interaction through a Blackboard Collaborate, email or instant chat where the teaching assistant (TA) provides weekly, scheduled Office hours. These virtual TA office hours have further fostered a sense of community among our online learners. We will present data from our decade of experience in impacting nearly 2000 global learners.