Community is a crucial component to effective learning. In an online environment and in an age of technology, community can be hard to build in class. Some activities that can enhance community in an online learning environment include: peer review, group work, zoom meetings and discussion boards. Peer review is an excellent way for students to have the sense that they have a role to play in the class, specifically in another students learning. Group work can take many forms, but is always an effective activity to build and enhance community and student relationships. Being able to see your professors face and peer students in a zoom meeting is a helpful first step to building community. Meeting on zoom regularly is an excellent method to build community. Having every student (when in small class sizes) participate on a zoom class is a good way to get students involved in the community they are in. Discussion boards allow all students to hear their peers ideas and thoughts. Responding to student discussions and getting conversations going build community.
Best Practices:
Ideally, in an online learning environment, the objective of the class, the expectations for the class, rubrics for the assignments, and calendar are available to the students to access on day one of the course. These are the best practices. In order for student's learning to be successful and for class involvement/engagement to be high, students need to know how the instructor wants things to be done and what is expected of them and when- most importantly, students need to know what the learning outcome of the class is in order for them to make goals.
What Would I Do:
In order to create a successful online learning community, I would do my best to follow these above guidelines. I would ensure that my students were able to build relationships with one another, that I knew them all and had met them all via zoom, and I would make sure that every student knew what the goal of the course was. I am sure that there would be many different challenges and adjustments that had to be made, but as a general guide- implementing these activities, and following these best practices is a good start.
