Community Building Strategies

Especially in the early weeks of your course, it’s important to foster a feeling of community. You’ll find that if you take the time to build community early in your course, students will be more motivated to be active and engaged in your course in subsequent months.

Here are a few simple ideas on how you can build community in your course.

Establish a Presence

  • Make sure to create a staff information page.  This page should tell your students a little about you, how to contact you, and the best times to contact you.
  • Respond to all emails & calls in a timely manner
  • Modeling – when appropriate jump in and join your students for an activity.  The Discussion Board is a great place to interact with students & you can model the way in which you’d like them to respond to their peers.

Be Inviting and Encouraging

  • Post regular announcements with words of encouragement, task and due date reminders, interesting facts, fun events, new websites, etc.
  • On occasion you may want to send important course reminders to your students via email, or words of encouragement or congratulations on work well done.

Encourage Socialization Among Students

  • Create a “Student Lounge” in your course.  It can be a place where students can discuss items that aren’t related to the curriculum (DB forum or chatroom), a place where you showcase student work, post interesting finds that may or may not be related to class work, etc.  Let your imagination go with this one.
  • DL buddy activities are a good way for students to work with and get to know their classmates.  At the start of the semester you might consider having your students do an online icebreaker activity that breaks them up into groups or buddies to get to know a few of their classmates better.  As the course continues, successful groups can continue to meet to discuss assignments or for group activities.

Highlight Achievements

  • It’s always nice to be recognized when you’ve worked hard to accomplish something.  Take the time to recognize the students in your course that put a little extra effort into a project or assignment by creating a Student of the week/month announcement to highlight their hard work.
  • If you’d prefer not to single out a student, another idea could be to highlight exemplary work.  Create a section in Blackboard that shares the creative, accurate, and imaginative work.

***Think about which of the strategies above you’d like to incorporate in your blended/online learning course and share them with the group by adding a comment to the post.  If you have any other ideas/suggestions on building community in online courses, please add those too!***

Course Management Strategies

Managing a blended learning course requires the educator to wear many hats. The common threads to many of these “hats” are communication and preparation.

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Communication will be essential for establishing expectations, eliminating uncertainty, and appeasing potential student anxiety.  Throughout the blended learning experience, communication can also take a number of forms such as email, phone calls, texts, participation in discussion boards, etc. Yet, regardless of the mode, communication must remain both concise and consistent.

Critical to communication will be a clear and shared vision of the course’s structure; an understanding of methods and modes of communication itself; reminders key dates and events; outlaying expectations for assignments, activities, and corresponding evaluations.

In preparing for our blended course and its many components, proactive investments made upfront will definitely pay off throughout the course’s delivery and evaluation. There are several things an instructor can do to prep for a blended course before the beginning of the school year. First, spend some time considering the class rules and create a draft document that you can review with students in the first week, or plan a lesson where students generate their own list of class expectations. Also, consider how you will ensure that all class work done in the online environment will remain secure and protected, and plan a strategy for how you will address any instance of data being breached. Setting the rules and expectations for students, and plans for data security in the beginning of the course will go a long way towards encouraging academic honesty in your course.

In addition, Blackboard offers a number of tools that you can take advantage of this summer to help better prepare for your blended course next year. Check out the performance dashboard, a Blackboard tool that can help you manage your students’ progress and activity. Setting up grading rubrics, progress reports, and early intervention plans are just some of the ways you can proactively help students stay on track with their academics. Blackboard also features a calendar that can help both teachers and students with deadlines and time management if set up prior to the school year and maintained throughout.

With both preparation and communication in mind, utilize this rubric and the resources below to write a reflection on resources related to at least 3 of the following management strategies as a blended/ online instructor.