Building an Online Community of Learners

I believe that there is significant learning payoff when instructors take time to front load an online course with activities that facilitate the rapid development of online communities of learners. Instructors who are quick to prompt their cyber novices to interact online with one another negate fears of isolation and help them to forge interpersonal bonds that enhance the learning experience. Also, ice-breaking activities at the beginning of the course that require the students to use the various features of the course management system (e.g., the functions for email, discussion, posting assignments, and quiz taking) instill confidence for the learners and save everyone a lot of time in the long run. Ultimately these activities encourage course participants to take responsibility for their own learning experience.

Thy Kingdom Come

One strategy that has worked fairly well for me--even in large classes (60+ students)--is to have the students introduce themselves by their "medieval vocational personality." They find out their personality by answering 8 easy questions on the Kingdomality inventory. I ask them to post their medieval personality and explain why it either fits or doesn't (interestingly, most of them say it fits them).

Once profiles are posted, participants are asked to mingle and talk to one another much as they would at a party. Towards the end of the exercise, they are reminded to go back and read/comment on the responses they've received from others.

When the exercise is completed, I post a table in the syllabus with everyone's name and medieval personality. Later on I can form class assignments for various combinations of the personalities, e.g., "the white knights" and "the benevolent rulers."

The whole exercise is quite simple but in one week it gets everyone using a fun "game" to introduce themselves, and meet and talk to others. And it gets them familiar with the course management system--in this case WebCT--so that they're ready by Week 2 to dig into the first learning activity. They also learn enough "real" information about each other to begin to socialize in the course lounge where further bonding occurs. I'm always amazed at how involved students become with each other online (and at a distance--students who never actually meet f2f). During the courses students have gotten divorced, lost close family members and gone through all kinds of other difficult experiences--and shared these online. In so doing they've received a tremendous amount of support. I've had people say that they don't think they would have survived their crisis were it not for the support and encouragement of their online classmates.

And of course throughout the course I devise an array of learning activities that require the students to work together in pairs, small groups, and sometimes as an entire class. I don't have evidence beyond the anecdotal to suggest that my introductory Kingdomality exercise jump starts the class into cooperative learning--but that certainly is my "biased" impression.

Reach out and touch someone

There are many such strategies that an instructor can use to help course participants to connect with one another.

Another example is to have the students assess their learning styles at the beginning of the course and in a process similar to that explained for Kingdomality above, have them post an explanation of their learning style, meet others with similar/different learning styles, and identify ways that they will use to make the course work for themselves. I have found the free, online VARK inventory to be useful for this.

Useful references:

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (1999). Building learning communities in cyberspace: Effective strategies for the online classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Solloway, S. G., & Harris, E. L. (1999). Creating community online. In Educom Review, Volume 34, Number 2: