How to build a successful online learning community?
The concept of community is expanding. Apart from representing the country, state, and city, any human groups formed by people’s common ground, such as ideal, hobby, belief, etc., can be called community. And because of the development of science and technology, the community has broken through the geographical restrictions, so that people can form a community through any form of social media or information transmission. As learners, the existence of the community is particularly important. We can think of the school as a big community. In this large community, because of the different fields of study, it is divided into many smaller communities. In these small communities, students form more intimate communities for various reasons. In this community, learners can learn together, share knowledge and help each other to achieve better learning results. Because of the positive impact of community on learning, as online course designers, we need to provide help for online learners to build their communities. In the book “Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice”, the author provides us with six strategies to help students build communities:
strategy #1: present a social presence and have students do so as well strategy #2: create opportunities for sharing information and expertise strategy #3: create a safe classroom by establishing rules and norms strategy #4: create common space strategy #5: use tools that allow community to form strategy #6: use collaborative learning
And also the instructor’s behavior can affect the cultivation of learners’ community in online environments. Based on Todd Conaway’s experience, teachers themselves should be active learners, as role models for students. And also teachers should lead students to contribute to the community, which helps to enhance students’ sense of responsibility and participation in the community.
Here comes the question:
There is no doubt that the online learning community is very important for online learners. But is any social media suitable for creating such communities?
To answer this question, I listed three of my most commonly used social media and drew some conclusions based on my personal experience.
1.Youtube I have recommended YouTube as an online learning tool in my previous post. But after my in-depth study, I found that there are still significant limitations in applying YouTube, a video website, to online education. Even though YouTube has plenty of resources, most of which are free, it still doesn't have any function that could build complete communities. As a learner, the only way to do this is to leave am under the relevant videos, to complete asynchronous communication with other learners or video creators.
2.Facebook/Messenger As the most popular and famous social media application, Facebook has a complete set of community-building functions. Whether it is building a community on Facebook about a project to attract people who interested in the project to join the community, or creating a private chat room through messenger, these functions are very suitable for online learners to communicate with each other. But because of the popularity of Facebook, there is a lack of supervision in public communities. In communities without rules, students may lose their enthusiasm because of various reasons such as cyber violence. And for the more private function, the Messenger chat room, the limitation of communication between groups in the online learning community still exists.
3.Slack Slack, as a software specializing in an online community, not only has the complete function of creating community but also alleviates the limitations of Facebook/messenger in creating an online learning community. Communities in Slack simulates the tree structure which means that teachers build a large community(the root) to accommodate all students and teachers, in which students can set up their groups(Branches) to communicate with their closer classmates. This structure satisfies the existence of small groups in the community, realizes the communication between groups and enables teachers to keep track of students' progress and provide appropriate help.
In conclusion, the online learning community has the advantages of promoting communication between online learners, enhancing learners’ enthusiasm and helping learners understand the knowledge. Because of the importance of community, as an online course designer, we should help students create a safe and helpful community. Take our behaviors as models for students, choose the right tools to create the community, and lead students to integrate into the community, to achieve better educational results.