Some Suggestions for Building an Elearning Community

I can understand the frustration of many instructors that go into their LMS to check on their students and find the tumbleweeds as the only inhabitants in the course. You created a lot of content, you spent a lot of time making video lectures, you develop assignments you thought would stimulate ideas in your students. None of that seems to work because your students spend time in the LMS watching videos, completing assignments, downloading PDFs; so far not a single question, not a comment, maybe a couple of emails from students requesting a deadline extension on an assignment. You scratch your head, you set up a discussion board for students to ask questions but nobody has posted anything. Oh, I forgot to mention this, your students are taking this class remotely, so no chances of meeting with them in a classroom.

I have experienced such situation before, and I have seen other instructors go through the same difficulties. And it seems we do ask the same question: what’s going on? What am I missing? In my case, I failed to spend time building a community. I spent more time in what I thought was more important: making the content. After these learning experiences and seeing what other successful instructors have done, I can just say I wish I had checked the literature for empirical evidence on best practices to building communities in elearning environments.

1. Spend an equal amount of time on planning how to build and foster your community. You could use the discussion boards to start the conversation, ask each student to introduce themselves and reply to each of their comments, if you can, ask them questions back, this way you will start conversations that others can read.

2. Develop group assignments that require students to meet at the same time. Many LMS systems have a virtual classroom solution, but the discussion board can work too. You can encourage students to meet at free platforms such as Google Hangouts or Skype.

3. Engage students with gaming elements such as team competitions, completion of levels, and earning points for accomplished missions. You could assign projects where the teams will present in a virtual environment, the best presentation wins the competition. Create a rubric so students know the rules of the game.

4. Use social media but with measure, not all platforms are suitable for Higher Education. You could create a private Facebook page where students can share resources, you could also share posts with students regarding additional materials.

I wish somebody had suggested these options to me, it would have been fun at that time. I haven’t taught in quite some time and I am looking forward to doing it again, and I will share my experiences with you when that happens. In the meantime, send me suggestions or questions to my email [email protected], you can visit my blog at https://www.elearninginmotion.com. I have other posts and tutorials for you to check out. See you next time and thank you for reading this post.

Julio