Hello everyone! Today I will be discussing how to promote community in online courses. With asynchronous learning, it can often be challenging to keep students engaged and still make them feel connected with their peers/ teacher. In this post, I hope to enlighten some of you guys on ways to end this cycle.
One way to make students feel like they are part of a community in an asynchronous course is to give weekly check-ins, such as announcements or a quick video of the teacher discussing their week. It is essential that within these announcements, you don’t discuss any type of work the students may have to do that week. When you think of learning in a classroom in person, teachers don’t only discuss work. Instead, they may engage with their students for a minute or two, telling them how their weekend was or simply just doing something like cracking a joke. This is important because it helps remind students that they are not just there to learn, but also to build connections with their teacher and their peers. To translate this into an online community, you can simply do a weekly check-in via an announcement page (preferably the first page that shows up for your students when they pull up the class) where you can just be yourself and forget about schoolwork for a second.
Create discussion board posts that are engaging to your students. Discussion posts do not always have to be about what your students are currently learning. You can still require discussion posts about current content that would be graded, but you can also create a separate discussion forum where you can have the students comment freely, whenever they want. You can support your students to post things about themselves, and you can even promote them to do things like creating a study group among their peers. When they are struggling with something, they can make a post about it and their peers can come together, make a study group, exchange emails, etc. A peer in one of my classrooms a while back reached out to everyone, and we made a study group that helped me so much with the class. We would reach out to each other about due dates, and help each other with current topics we were studying. It really helped me get to know them all better too, and reminded me that we truly were part of a community and not just strangers within an online course.
Create some sort of face-to-face interaction. Since the course is asynchronous, you can not meet in real-time. However, there are ways to work around this. You, as the teacher, can post videos of you teaching the weekly content, instead of just posting notes and telling your students to read over xyz content. It is important that you are learning along with your students as a teacher. Sure, you may be saying “but I already know this content”. However, you can just do simple things, like posting a video of yourself reading over the content and most importantly, having fun with it! In return, you can have your students submit videos of themselves giving a summary of the content or whatever they are currently learning. I suggest too that if you are going to require your students to upload a video of themselves, that you make it something only you will see, and not something all the peers can see as well, as this can create anxiety among students.
Of these methods, I honestly find them all appealing. I think it is incredibly important to use multiple methods and find whichever one (or ones) works best for your students. Some of the above methods may not translate well in one community but may thrive in another. That is why it is so important to use whatever tools are necessary to help your students succeed. I would say though, if I had to pick a favorite or one that I would most definitely use, it would be the weekly check-in method. Every time I have had a teacher or professor that can be themselves around us, whether through a joke or through a small discussion, I have always found myself actually wanting to go to class and not dreading it. When you think about it, you don’t just want to have your students pull up their online course and immediately become overwhelmed with the work that they have to do, but rather, a friendly face that they know cares about them!
That’s it for this post! Hope you guys enjoyed reading :)
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