Online Learning Community

I wanted to follow up from our chat session facilitated by Judy (Thanks Judy!). In that session we were discussing differences between online community and online learning community. The main difference being that in an online learning community there is specific content that is covered and Julie stated that the community will often end when the course ends. There are times, of course, when members of the community will stay connected and continue in the community. I am interested in facilitating that continuing community in my graduate courses. I think that is what Bethany and Julia are hoping to do in these courses. So, how to do that....

Julia mentioned using all of the "tools in her arsenal" to build community during courses. We are learning many of those tools in this course. I have taught online for several years and have learned some things along the way that have helped to keep students engaged - and now I know that these are strategies for building community (didn't realize it before!).

Things that we have added to our graduate program and that I do in my courses that facilitate community:

• F2F meeting at the beginning of the semester - students are strongly encouraged to come but some can't
• First week using discussions for students to introduce themselves
• Small group discussions about topics that students facilitate ( I do the first one and students facilitate 2-3 during the semester)
• Small group presentation that should be collaborative but often ends in dividing up the pieces and presenting individual parts
• Synchronous Centra events for group presentations
• Online chats for office hours (am considering Centra for office hours but may go with Skype)

I have gotten some other ideas from this course, of course, but am interested to know what others have done and how successful the strategies are.

In terms of my success, I think it's mixed. I always have students each semester that don't participate in the discussions and end up dropping out. Julia mentioned that has happened in our course as well. I'm wondering how many others have that kind of problem and what supports we can build in to prevent that?

Thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated!!!!