Session Description

How do learning communities help students to acquire knowledge, skill and understanding?   By sharing  their perspectives and experiences,  students  learn to listen, question, and think critically within a community of their peers.  In a learning community, the instructor plays a pivotal role in connecting students to the course content and to one another. This session will explore specific strategies for creating and sustaining  learning communities within your online or blended courses.

Session Objectives

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Explain the instructor's role in facilitating a learning community.   
• Identify specific strategies for developing and sustaining a learning community within an online course.
• Create (or redesign) course activities and assignments to develop a  robust community of learning.

Essential Question What types of learning experiences encourage students to work together online so they can learn the content in the course, experience the value of multiple perspectives, and develop lasting relationships with NKU colleagues?

How Do Learning Communities Help Students Succeed?

In addition to the instructor and the course material, students can be an important source of knowledge and understanding for one another.   Substantial learning happens through discussion, reflection, and collaborative teamwork. For the approach to be effective, however, students must take responsibility for listening, questioning, and contributing their best thinking within the community of fellow learners.  It is a rare group of students who can accomplish this by themselves.  Most groups will need an instructor who designs activities and assignments with the intention of building a community of learning within the course.

Strategies for Creating Community

Humans crave connection.  In an online course that connection is both social and cognitive.  In The Online Teaching Survival Guide (2016), Boettcher & Conrad describe the importance of social and cognitive presence for both students and faculty: 

A getting acquainted posting helps to build social presence and launch the feeling of community . . . . you can almost visually see and feel the connecting threads that you and your students are weaving among the group as you discover common points of life experiences.  Part of the power of social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter is derived from this feeling of closeness that comes from sharing personal, often inconsequential, information that builds social links and an ongoing social ambience between people.  (pp. 136-137)

The purpose [of the getting-acquainted cognitive post] is to get to know students' minds. This posting focuses on what is in the learner's mind at the beginning of a term . . . . A discussion posting that requires students to review the course learning goals and to develop some personal and customized goals helps to focus students and give them something specific and personal to grow toward. (p. 138)

Beginning-of -Course Strategies

K-W-L Strategy - 

Use Flipgrid to Add a Video Introduction  Forum to Canvas - Flipgrid is a social learning tool that you can use in Canvas to engage students in Socratic discussions, research presentations, and project-based learning.  Create an educator account to begin posting discussions.  Students can use their NKU email accounts to log in.

5 Creative Icebreakers for the Online Classroom - 

21 Free/Fun Icebreakers - 

Community Building through Icebreaker Discussion Forums

Throughout-the-Course Strategies

Coffee Shop - a place inside the course for students to support each other through life stresses and celebrate personal accomplishments. 

Group Photo Sharing with Cluster - Set up a free cluster account and create a group for your class.  This is a place for students to  interact socially by sharing photos of their pets, their hobbies, and their interests.

Small Group Discussions - Whole group discussions can include an overwhelming number of posts; and often, the content of those posts stays at the level of comprehension/recall rather than rising to the level of critical analysis the instructor hopes to promote.  Small group discussions are more likely to result in high-quality threaded conversations.  Instructors can use strategies such as the Perspective Jigsaw or the Problem-Solving Jigsaw to engage students to connect more deeply with course content.

Reciprocol Learning -  In this strategy students teach one another.  All members of the community have shared responsibility for leading and taking part in dialogue during learning experiences.  In the most common approach, procedures are first modeled by the teacher.  In small groups, each student contributes a specific type of  cognitive "expertise":  predicting, questioning, clarifying, or summarizing the weekly reading assignment or lesson.

Small Group/Team Projects - One of the biggest challenges of team projects or small group tasks is ensuring that students contribute equally.  This Project Work Plan holds team members accountable.  I ask for a draft one week after teams convene and a final version one week before the project is due.