Creating a (Virtual) Learning Community
There’s been a lot of “community” talk recently. In addition to health professionals, cultural contributors, and the general public, educational institutions have been extolling the importance of maintaining, sustaining, or creating community. Belonging and a sense of community seem like obvious needs for personal well-being. As we experience the major shift to virtual classrooms, the idea of creating a learning community with our students is an important consideration. Dalhousie undergraduate students have reported that the places where they most often experience a sense of community are in a class and in their academic program (NSSE, 2017). However, it’s probably not the physical space that contributes to learners’ sense of community. More likely, it’s the common experiences within that course that provide feelings of solidarity.
What is Community?
The idea of “community” has certainly shifted from the place-based definition that relied on physical boundaries of neighbourhood, town or city. Since the end of the 20th century, it’s been widely accepted that physical places aren’t necessarily communities. As Ted Bradshaw (2008) explains, in 1964, urban designer Melvin Webber challenged the prior belief that a community is the physical geographic area in which we live and subsequently where we engage in meaningful community interactions and social relations. Following Webber’s article, many academics who study community have asserted “that place, e.g., the spatial location of residence, needs to be decoupled from the essential characteristics of community—the social relations that bond people” (Bradshaw, 2008, p.5). Community is much more than simply existing in proximity with others.
If physical space isn’t a requirement for community creation, the necessary foundational qualities are more ambiguous. Bradshaw (2008) argues that the essential features of a “post-place community” are the “social relations (solidarity or bonds) between people” (p.6). This may not be surprising, given that many of us have created and experienced online community through social media, in a virtual meeting or a classroom. While connection through place may have waned, it doesn’t mean the demise of community because place is no longer required for solidarity to exist among people. The attributes of a healthy community are rooted in social cohesion, that is “strong patterns of social interaction based on long-lasting and deep personal relations” (Bradshaw, 2008, p.6). In order for this to be cultivated, a social group requires shared values (not necessarily uniform opinion), collaboration with common goals, care for other members of the group, and individual vulnerability. This is also true of healthy education-based communities.
Learning communities have been defined in a variety of ways as: strategically coordinated curriculum through a collection of courses; any educational experience that is purposeful including extracurricular activities; and student collectives that work collaboratively on a shared goal. I like the O. T. Lenning et al. (2013) definition of learning communities as “intentionally developed community that exists to promote and maximize the individual and shared learning of its members. There is ongoing interaction, interplay, and collaboration among the community’s members as they strive for specified common learning goals” (p. 7). This definition can be easily applied to the course-level creation of purposeful social cohesion and shared values. Characteristics of these educationally-focused communities typically include partnership between instructors and learners, collaboration, vulnerability, and, just like other communities, social relationships.
How Does Community Promote Learning?
It may seem like extra work to try and cultivate a learning community in a virtual space, but social connections promote academic engagement. The Fully Online Learning Community Model (FOLC), in particular, seeks to address the question “does community matter to learning?” FOLC relies on the constructivist philosophy that “all efforts to understand ‘reality,’ including virtual reality, involves the social creation of knowledge and not just individual ‘ingestion’ of information” (Blayone et al., 2017, p.2). It relies on both social presence, defined as the learner’s ability to recognize themselves as part of the course and meaningfully engage within an environment of trust, and cognitive presence that requires students to explore course topics and discipline-specific problems and collaboratively provide feedback and determine “solutions.”
According to Blayone et al. (2017, pp. 2-3), FOLC-based learning conforms to factors that promote transformative learning, such as:
An environment that promotes a sense of safety, openness, and trust, encouraging the sharing of emotions as preparation for critical reflection.
Activities that facilitate the exploration of divergent perspectives, problem solving, and critical thinking.
A community that promotes each member’s sense of autonomy, engagement, and collaboration.
The use of feedback, self-assessment, and self-dialogue that are used to assist the process of transformative learning.
The activities typical in a FOLC educational environment include peer collaboration, problem-based learning, and discussion all facilitated virtually. Each of these can help students achieve complex learning outcomes and competencies such as contextual thinking, creativity, collaboration, negotiation, problem identification and problem solving.
How Can You Create Community Online?
Similar to the in-person learners, online students benefit from community and a sense of belonging in their courses. This doesn’t happen by accident. While solidarity, in some respects, already exists because learners presumably possess a shared value of education (in varying degrees) and a shared interest in the field of study (even if it’s a required course or elective, students selected a program or chose the course over other options). Those implicit shared values won’t establish a community or sense of belonging without some assistance. When organizing a course, we need to create social relationships by providing opportunities to engage with individual students, creating a place where students can interact with one another, exposing our motivations for the structure of the course and taking an interest in the students’ motivations.
Example of the use of a meme in the author’s Brightspace site.
In the recent end-of-term migration to remote learning, I benefitted from already cultivating a learning community in person. During the first few months of the term, I could enter my classroom early and chat with students about shows we were streaming, recent Toronto Maple Leaf losses to beer-league back-up goalies, and other random bits of shared social experiences. Students often engaged in learning activities in which they were required to work together in teams to problem-solve and achieve a common goal through a tangible learning artifact (a visual representation, a presentation, questions, discussion, etc.). We were in this learning experience together! Once we moved to an online environment, I created a survey to find out how they were feeling and included popular memes to add some levity. Periodically, I uploaded short videos that included class reminders as well as some details about what I’ve been doing at home (like eating my partner’s baked goods). I developed spaces devoted to sharing non-essential information like photographs of our new remote “classrooms” and music we like to listen to while we work. We continued the social bonding even though we’d been scattered far and wide.
Making some exciting announcements to students and introducing some online social bonding activities. (Author’s personal photo)
When developing your next course, reflect on the ways you’ve created community within the classroom and in other aspects of your life through social media or as part of a particular interest group. Plan to recreate some of those elements that encourage social bonding for your new online learning community.
References
T.J.B. Blayone, vanOostveen, R., Barber, W., DiGiuseppe, M., & Childs, E. (2017) Democratizing digital learning: theorizing the fully online learning community model. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 14, 13, DOI: 10.1186/s41239-017-0051-4
Ted K. Bradshaw (2008) The Post-Place Community: Contributions to the Debate about the Definition of Community, Community Development, 39:1, 5-16, DOI: 10.1080/15575330809489738
D. R. Garrison (2016). Thinking collaboratively: Learning in a community of inquiry. New York: Routledge.
O. T. Lenning, Hill, D.M., Saunders, K.P., Solan, A., & Stokes, A. (2013). Powerful learning communities: A guide to developing student, faculty and professional learning communities to improve student success and organizational effectiveness. Sterling, VA: Stylus.