Creating Community Online (Overview)

Consider instructor presence and student-instructor relationships

As convener of your course community, how you approach teaching has an impact on the community as a whole. Several Teaching Resources articles address these topics and can provide ideas and considerations for you as you begin designing your online course.

• “Helping Students Get Started in an Online Class” offers strategies for communicating and establishing connections with students at the start of a new semester.
• “Humanizing Your Online Course” discusses practices for building trust, awareness, empathy and presence, ultimately creating connection with students and positively impacting their success.
• “Perfectly Imperfect: On-The-Fly Videos” – Discusses how informal, quick, and conversational videos can convey important information and help develop more connections between instructor and learner.

Define and agree on a culture of trust and respect in your community.

• Share your own expectations about netiquette in your syllabus.
• Allow time for feedback and/or for on adding to these expectations as a community at the start of the semester, perhaps in Yellowdig.
• Be sure to model the type of behavior you expect from your student, such as being mindful that language used in the course is respectful.

Facilitate simple “get to know each other” opportunities.

Get-to-know-you activities in the first week of classes are not difficult or time-consuming to design, and they can have enormous benefit. Michelle Pacansky-Brock describes the week prior to the start of instruction and the first week of your course as a “high opportunity zone” for building connections in your course. Citing Estrada et al, 2018: she recommends “incorporate kindness cues of social inclusion” during this time.

• The Teaching Resources article on Course Introductions gives ideas about using forums, VoiceThread and/or Padlet as tools for letting course community members introduce themselves and start getting to know each other.
• Yellowdig is a community-building tool, and is a platform that is perfect for students to get to know each other. Invite students to introduce themselves in the first week. You might consider creating some non-point-earning student lounge areas in your Yellowdig community for students to connect over topics like pets, food or hobbies. Learn more about Yellowdig in Get Your Student Talking with Yellowdig.

Design effective online discussions.

One positive effect of vibrant course communities is the rich learning that takes place through discussion. What makes a discussion interesting and engaging? When participants contribute a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives to a topic. This holds true whether the discussion is taking place face-to-face in real time, or online with asynchronous participation. How should you participate in discussions? While students appreciate your presence, be mindful that heavy participation by instructors in discussions can draw attention away from peer interaction as students look to the instructor or approval and authority.

• “Get Your Students Talking Online” offers a survey of four tools for student-student discussions.
• “Discussion Forum Best Practices” suggests not using a prompt that is likely to result in students answering the same way and provides alternative ideas.
• “Get Your Students Talking with Yellowdig” describes how Yellowdig eschews the practice of narrow or prescriptive discussion prompts to invites learners to relate course content to their life experiences and their own interests in a more open way, in a gamified platform.
• “VoiceThread: Interactive Presentations and Student Discussions” provides ideas for hosting discussions around multimedia slideshows.
• “Perusall: Interactive Reading Assignments” invites community annotation and discussion around text and other media.

Use group activities and/or collaborative assignments.

Several Teaching Resources articles provide guidance on group work in Moodle:

• Group Work in Moodle: Introduction and Examples  — Moodle provides technical solutions for student submission of group work, online group discussion, and peer review.
• Tips and Strategies for Successful Group Work — Planning an assignment or project to be completed by a group of students can raise lots of questions and concerns for an instructor. This article provides tips, strategies, and some tools that can make group work go smoothly.
• Assessment and Evaluation of Group Work in Moodle – This article presents four different options or strategies for group work evaluation and provides pros and cons for each as well as resources that can help you apply the strategies.
• Group Work With Digital Tools — Group work can be made easier with digital tools that offer valuable features for collaboration and communication, help streamline the process, and support productive group interactions in online and hybrid environments.

“Digital Whiteboards for Teaching and Learning” offers examples of ways to get student collaborating in a visual way.

If you meet synchronously in Zoom, you might find some good ideas for group activities in the articles “Leveraging Zoom Tools for Student Engagement” and “Using Breakout Rooms in Zoom.”

Further Reading

• Cooper, S. (2016). 6 tips to build a thriving online learning community. e-Learning Industry.
• Estrada, M., Eroy-Reveles, A., & Matsui, J. (2018). The influence of affirming kindness and community on broadening participation in STEM career pathways. Social issues and policy review, 12(1), 258–297
• Fiock, H. (2020). Designing a Community of Inquiry in Online Courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(1), 135-153.
• Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2 -3), 87-105.
• George Washington University (n.d.). Building community and interaction online.
• Hammond, Z. L. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin Publishers.
• Kaufmann, R. & J.I. Vallade (2022). Exploring connections in the online learning environment: student perceptions of rapport, climate, and loneliness. Interactive Learning Environments, 30:10, 1794-1808.
• Lowenthal, D. A., & Lowenthal, P. R. (2010, April). A mixed methods examination of instructor social presence in accelerated online courses. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Denver, CO.
• Palloff, R. and Pratt, K. (2007). Building online learning communities. San Francisco, CA. John Wiley & Sons.
• Pappas, C. (2016). 8 tips to build an online learning community. e-Learning Industry.
• Wilcoxon, K. (2011). Building an online learning community. Learning Solutions Magazine.