Online learning shouldn’t be ‘lonely’ experience. While many people know and don’t like this, very few platforms have been able to solve it. The question then is how has OpenLearning shifted this experience from a lonely to a social experience? The answer is through a focus on community.
Traditional learning platforms give a sense of a lack of presence or regular activity. They have been built with very little ways to allow students to interact and express their identity, ideas, and opinions.
OpenLearning, in contrast, has been specifically designed to facilitate student networking by creating in-built sharing tools to encourage group work, self expression, and peer-to-peer interaction that begin to form a safe and positive community.
1. Make full use of OpenLearning’s social media inspired feeds and “micro-interactions” that include features like the ‘like’ button and platform-wide commenting ability. Using these tools as a facilitator to interact with students leads to minimal barriers and maximum encouragement.
A micro-example of a micro-interaction from The Great Poems Series: Unbinding Prometheus
2. Aim to make your OpenLearning course both a meeting place for students with common learning interests (especially in the context of massive open online courses, or MOOCs), as well as an online environment where students can become an engaged member within a community of practice.
3. Build rapport between both learners and teachers, promote social appreciation, and encourage self-expression.
Teacher-student interaction, appreciation, and encouragement - your keys to a happy course community
4. Use the wiki and blogging features to advance the ways in which knowledge sharing, collaboration, self-expression, and personalisation can be used to ensure a vibrant and engaged community within courses.
5. Provide a safe and welcoming space and tone for students to be able to have their own voice. This can be done, specifically, by:
Online learning systems have traditionally entirely relied on submission drop-boxes or quiz-like assessments. More advanced systems have started to introduce isolated interactive experiences with simulations and virtual environments.
While this is all possible on OpenLearning, the platform takes an additional step of encouraging teachers to create activities that facilitate community interaction. You can incorporate activities that provide interactive collaboration and sharing with the tools provided to keep students immersed and engaged in your courses.
Sounds too good to be true? Here are some activity ideas to actually make this happen:
There is no doubt that creating interactive learning activities helps to bring your course community close together.
Create activities to embrace this connectedness and collaboration, rapport and promote dialogue, discovery, exploration, and the sharing of diverse new resources. The whole idea is to make your OpenLearning course a communal online space where the student community aggregates resources and personalises their own learning environment.
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