One of the keys to student success is making connections with both instructors and other students. In this session, we will discuss at least three different ways to build community in an online course that goes beyond the tired “introduction” discussion board.
Building community in a course can have a marked impact on the success and satisfaction of the students in the course. In on-ground courses, this can happen somewhat organically, or be spurred on by some small group activities during class. When we move to online synchronous courses, the opportunities to give students space to interact and connect in real-time still exist, but takes a bit more planning. For fully asynchronous courses helping students build community becomes an even bigger challenge.
Post-pandemic everyone is familiar with interacting in online spaces. We may think that our students, who are mostly digital natives, are experts at building community, especially in an online space. However, that isn’t always the case. Though at the same time, the expectation for engagement and even entertainment in classes seems to have increased. One way to support students and meet these new expectations is to level up your community-building activities.
In this session, we will look at several ways faculty have successfully built community in online courses. These strategies will go beyond the tried and true “introduction discussion board” and look at ways to incorporate social media, gamification, and multimedia into any course. For each strategy, there will be a brief introduction and discussion of free technology to facilitate it. Session participants will get to engage in the strategy themselves as we build community in the session. We will also have time for brainstorming and sharing of strategies that the audience has used successfully.
Session Goals:
Participants will be able to explain the need for building community in courses. They will be able to identify activities they can incorporate into their courses to help build community.
Session Takeaways:
Participants will leave with a repository of strategies to engage students and build community that can be implemented immediately in any course.