On this episode, joining Maurice Coleman, Jill Hurst-Wahl, and Paul Signorelli were Alec Couros, Susan Spellman Cann, Daniel Bassill, and Erin Luong for the topic of how do you create a sustainable learning community.
10 years ago, five of our participants (including Paul) participated in a massive open online course (MOOC) created by Alec on educational technology (#etmooc). Alec began with telling us how his MOOC was born and a definition of the different types of MOOCs.
Before #etmooc, Erin did her thesis on how to build communities online. which she finished in 2005-2006, 7 years before #etmooc. Her work helped #etmooc create connections between participants and build community. The #etmooc community has annual reunions. Daniel noted that CLMOOC (which was born out of #etmooc), also has maintained an ongoing community. [CLMOOC is Connected Learning MOOC.]
How do they (or can we) create and maintain community?
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- Learn together.
- Volunteer activities (raising money for scholarships).
- Use social media as a way of continuing the conversation outside of the MOOC platform.
- Work together on projects (textbook, research papers).
- Connect with people with people from other parts of the world and then seek collaboration.
- Bring the personal into the community. In other words, don’t leave your personal self on the sideline. Bring your offline self online.
- Model digital citizenship.
- Get to know the other participants (the co-conspirators).
- Provide a structure on which to build the activities, and then use the structure.
- Community will grow over time if people interact with each other.
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Important to have the right people together at the right time for the right reasons.
BTW #etmooc had 12,000 participants, with a smaller number being truly active participants. No matter how much those people participated, those 12,000 have spread information and created a ripple effect.
BTW they are thinking about doing a new smaller MOOC, perhaps on ChatGPT. And they bounced other ideas off of each other.
You can listen to this episode on TalkShoe, Apple Podcasts, and other places.
Resources
- Paul’s blog posts on #etmooc, https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/category/etmooc/
- Daniel’s blogs, https://tutormentor.blogspot.com/search/label/CLMOOC
- Dr. Doug Belshaw, What is ‘digital literacy’? A pragmatic investigation. https://dougbelshaw.com/doug-belshaw-edd-thesis-final.pdf
T is for Training 