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!***