Online Learning community building

  

Online learning is a very useful tool in the modern educational settings, but how does a teacher create a classroom community online? In this post we will go through three ways that a teacher can recreate some of that classroom community online in a asynchronous environment. The first way is the presence of the instructor, setting up ways that the students can interact with the teacher, they can set up announcements, respond to discussion boards and make sure that the are available to the students for any questions and clarifications a student may need.

 

Furthering the ideals of teacher interaction is Zoom meetups, the opportunity to have teacher led discussions can be wildly helpful to students. Who may need extra help setting  aside time for students to have questions responded to in real time and it allows teachers to recognize and misunderstandings that they may have and let students feel like they are apart of a community

 

 Lastly Collaborative learning, getting students to work together and talk to each other in a variety of ways to encourage peer to peer learning. Teachers can create discussion boards that encourage students to respond to each other, another way is to create study groups to allow students more opportunities to explain and respond to questions from a variety of different viewpoints.

 

Collaborative learning is by far the most appealing to me personally, this allows students to create a social network that will continue to help them past the class that they took together if they so wish, providing them with good real-world experiences in interacting with others in a professional setting and just as important a opportunity to make new friendships to help them in their personal lives.