Developing Online Learning Communities - Consider This!

Editor's note: This is part 2 in a look at effective online learning communities. Find out what it takes to be an effective community leader in part 1.


As more and more districts, give in and extend at least a little rope when it comes to the creation and participation of online learning communities (see the policy in NYC here), more and more educators will need to understand how to develop a successful online learning community. In her recent interview for the  USDOE-supported Connected Educators site, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach author of The Connected Educator explains how to develop effective online learning communities.  You can read the full interview here.  Here is her advice.

1. Ask essential questions for building community -Know your need. Why is this community necessary? What is the purpose? What is it that we’re trying to accomplish? “What do we want to avoid?”
2. Work to ensure you have the composition of a great team -Bring people together who have different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges to enable them to each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. For example in the field of education this could mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles.
3. Create an environment where relationships can be built -With the right pieces in place members can build significant relationships and spontaneous collaborations could come out of that where none had previously existed. For example, an independent school community developed which was unusual because, for the first time, instead of seeing each other as competitors (independent schools often compete for the same student “clients”), they began to see themselves as collaborators.
4. Balance privacy and community -A hub can bring various communities together into a virtual commons area while providing each community with a private space.
5. Organize for success -Provide private spaces with a community leader, while also providing an opportunity for members to be able to participate together in a wider and even more diverse network where they can leverage each other’s thinking.
6. Know that size matters but bigger isn’t always better.   -One of the biggest mistakes is to think that size is what matters most, and that we’ve got to grow this community fast. Size becomes the most important metric, and if we can’t show a large membership, our community isn’t successful. I’d caution developers to not become fixated on size and numbers. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar said that you really can’t have significant relationships with more than 100 to 200 people at a time. The most common value you see is 120 to 150. You need to think about quality and whether you have the right people on the bus, not necessarily the most people. New communities that develop a relatively small but highly engaged core group are more likely to scale, if sufficient attention is paid to the pace of growth and to recruitment and induction.
7. Know how you’re going to sustain your community -How are you going to grow and sustain your community? Do you have a dedicated funding stream, and if you don’t, how are you going to provide the funding? Are you willing to create a business model that will allow funding to come in from the people who are involved, or is that a compromise of your purpose or beliefs, and if it is, how are you going to provide the financial support for the community over the long haul? You have to have some way to compensate that incredible community leader you’re going to hire, as well as the great speakers / experts.
8. Replicate what is successful in the real world -Consider staging virtual events and celebrations, online conferences perhaps, and those things need “event staff” just like they do in the physical world. You may want to have great speakers and other experts come in, and you want a site that’s going to have the technology and engaging design to satisfy the community’s expectations just like you would in a physical environment.
9. Know your approach -What approach will you use for your online community. One approach that works is a three-pronged professional development model which included
• prong one is local learning communities;
• prong two is an online community of practice that’s both global and deep;
• a third prong is more personal—the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice.
10. Turn to membership for recruitment -Look to community members to attract more members. You gain a lot of built-in synergy that way. Another thing you might do is survey your core group and find out what components might be included in your community design that would constitute value-added elements for participants like themselves. When you’re responsive to their ideas, they gain a feeling of some ownership in the community and begin to act as agents to both draw other people in and help hold and engage new and less-committed participants. They help make your community a “sticky attractor,” you might say.
11. Build community -Mitch Resnick from the MIT Media Lab (who developed Scratch) said that co-created content is what builds community. And so if you have this artifact that people are going to be creating and constructing together, then they will come together for that purpose. And even get excited about it.
12. Measure success
• Meaningless measuresSome of the popular metrics for measuring success or impact are really pretty meaningless. We all have counted “likes” and looked at page views, and analyzed the time spent on pages, things like that—the typical website metrics. They might give us some crude indicators, but to really measure success takes a lot more brain sweat.
• Measuring meaningfullySuccess by anything other than the quality of what goes on in the community misses the point. The measuring piece needs to be about these kinds of indicators:
  (1) the quality of the conversations;
  (2) the alignment with purpose;
  (3) the willingness of community members to give and contribute, not just take;
  (4) helpfulness… of information, of the community itself, of designated support people;
  (5) the amount of substantive sharing that’s going on;
  (6) evidence of collaboration and how much;
  (7) the relationships that are being built among participants; and
  (8) how the existence of the community is impacting the world beyond the community.

Whether you currently run an online community, are considering it, or support one that is existing, these are 12 thought-provoking considerations to keep in mind when doing so.  Now that you’ve read these considerations, what do you think? What’s missing? What’s right about this? How’s your group doing?

You have read this article online learning / online learning community / online learning network / online professional development resources / online social network with the title online learning community. You can bookmark this page URL https://machining33.blogspot.com/2012/05/developing-online-learning-communities.html. Thanks!

Traits of an effective online community leader

In her recent interview for the  USDOE-supported Connected Educators site, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach author of The Connected Educator explains, among other things, what it takes to be an effective online community leader.  You can read the full interview here.  


Here is her advice. 

1. Be a social artist - This person needs to be someone who is, in researcher Etienne Wenger’s words, a “social artist.” It needs to be somebody who really understands how to pull out and weave conversations, how to build relationships in virtual space, how to connect with people “behind the scenes” and use them as bonding agents inside the community.
2. Have a go-to core - Many times those people charged with growing a community don’t make the effort (and a considerable effort is required) to make sure you have a core group of members—really diverse members, not just a clique—who are the go-to people. These are the people a community leader can e-mail and say, “Hey, did you see Dana’s post on so-and-so? Nobody’s responded and that’s one of your areas of expertise. Will you go and ask some good questions and give her some useful feedback?” Having core members who really understand how this kind of responsiveness can grow and sustain a dynamic community is huge.
3. Be humble - Be a humble person—what Robert K. Greenleaf called “servant leadership”—someone who doesn’t have to be in the spotlight to find satisfaction. This is a person who understands that his or her job is to build the sense of belonging within the community—the sense that there is something so valuable here that I’m not only willing, but also eager, to give some time to this.
4. Have strong interpersonal skills - Have the interpersonal skills to reach out to folks who are not participating actively and find out what subjects will engage them, and where their own expertise might be shared with community members. It’s someone who can find the balance between too much and not enough hand-holding for any and every participant.
5. Make adequate time commitment - Doing this job well is very time-intensive. In a sizeable community with significant goals, it approaches a full-time job.
6. Support new members - New participants enter into the community space but may have trouble gaining traction—they’re not sure what’s going on. While you may post plenty of information, they may not read/watch everything (imagine that). You’ve got to have some way to scaffold the beginner’s experience so they locate the basic information and activities you need them to engage in. Creating multiple entry points into a community site can help address this.
   
   For many novice participants in a virtual community, posting is an act of bravery. We need to nurture and celebrate those acts, and do it in substantive ways. It’s not done with a smiley and a “Good job!” It can only be done by having lots of people involved in responding thoughtfully. You need more than the single voice of the leader or facilitator recognizing meaningful participation or drawing out deeper thinking. You need a strong core.
7. Build culture. Lose ego. Transition from leader to instigator to background facilitator - At the dawn of any online community, participants will naturally look to the community leader for structure and advice, and it can be very tempting to assert a dominant leader persona, complete with opinions on every topic. But the effective community leader will resist that temptation and move quickly from “leader” in the traditional sense to “instigator.” And in those communities that have a long life expectancy, the community leader will gradually move to “background facilitator” and let the natural leaders within the community rise up. And they will. All the research points to that.
8. Promote conversation around the community not around yourself - The job of the community leader is to promote conversation about what other people are interested in rather than conversations that revolve around the leader herself. The job requires someone who has the gift of pulling the best ideas out of participants and helping them grow as thinkers and doers
9. Foster natural leadership in the group - The sign that you’ve done your job well as a community leader is when a natural leadership group emerges, participants start instigating topics and agendas, and people begin shaping and assuming ownership of community norms. In a robust community, participants will start finding their niches.
1. Community roles
1. Nurturers who will always be seen greeting new people.
2. Responders who have the urge to comment and make sure everyone’s posts and ideas and contributions are recognized.
3. Pushers who can deepen the dialogue with their probing questions
4. Sharers who are always finding a good outside resource to enrich a conversation.
2. You may encourage these kinds of roles in the early going, but beyond the online community tipping point you rarely have to ask for it. On a slow day you may call on their help, but now you know WHO to call on for a welcome or a comment or a push. The niche people appear and you just recognize and validate their contributions as appropriate.
10. Celebrate the efforts of participants, both in and outside the community - The best online community facilitators ask for and share news of personal accomplishments—they’re tuned in to what’s going on in the professional world that surrounds this particular community. When members publish books, post widely read blog entries, garner awards and recognition, the community leader knows and makes sure the community knows.
    
    This, by the way, is something to really consider during the planning stage of community development. How are we going to celebrate what’s happening in the lives of the people who are engaged in the community? One strategy I’ve seen had the community facilitator creating a biweekly “community news” post that also invited participants to add their own news via comments. This was highly successful, in part because people who might be shy about “bragging” on themselves (a not uncommon trait, especially among teachers) felt comfortable adding to a “news blast” that already bragged on other community participants. It was a deliberate community-building and bonding technique that really worked.
11. Amplify community voice - How are we going to raise the voices of our community members in the outside world? This is particularly important in private or “walled garden” communities, but the principle applies across the board. How do we help communities and their members become adept at communicating what they know? And how can we call the world’s attention to the ideas being generated by the community and its members?
1. Possibilities
1. Publishing summaries of action research projects
2. Curating a group blog
3. Support members in publishing their work
12. Value the sociability factor and sense of belonging - Don’t overlook or devalue the sociability factor. Encouraging sociability and a sense of belonging makes for a sticky community. One easy way to begin is to offer participants symbols of their membership. This often manifests itself at physical conferences where your members like to have a way to find each other or meet up. Consider having group stickers or charms that you can display at conferences for you, your laptop, or your cell phone to wear. Plan meet-ups and gatherings that are as much social as they are PD experiences. One example is our Pecha Kucha Smackdown. where people use the Pecha Kucha format to talk about something cool that’s going on in their world as it relates to the group topic.

Whether you’re an online community member who wants to know how well your community is being run or you’re a community leader who is wondering how well you run your community, these are 12 traits to consider about the leader of the online community in which you participate. Now that you’ve read these traits, what do you think? What’s missing? How’s your group doing?

You have read this article online learning / online learning community / online learning network / online social network with the title online learning community. You can bookmark this page URL https://machining33.blogspot.com/2012/05/traits-of-effective-online-community.html. Thanks!