Creating Community

There are a number of articles, tutorials, and books written on creating community in online spaces. Keep in mind that building community is a must-do for a course that doesn’t have the face-to-face dynamic to build empathy. Please read through the selection of best practices for communication below or take a look through the additional resources/literature for more information.

In this section, you will find information and resources on Discussion Board Facilitation, Google Apps and Group Work, Collaboration Guidelines, Online Peer Review, Group Meeting Guidelines, among other useful tips and links.


Discussion Board Facilitation

Discussion Boards play a key role in online learning. When used effectively, they can provide many learning benefits that do not always occur in the face-­to-­face environment, including enhanced critical thinking, more thoughtful and reflective participation, a stronger class community, a greater likelihood of citing research, and a greater sense of race­ and gender-based equality (Worcester, 2008).

Discussion Board Best Practices from DELTA

Discussion Board Example Rubric from DELTA

Mastering Online Discussion Board Facilitation from Edutopia


Using Google Apps for Group Work

NCSU students report that one of the ways faculty could improve online courses is through building in more student-­student activities (DELTA, 2015). While group work can be daunting for online faculty, there are many tools that can make it an effective use of students’ (and your) time. Google Drive contains multiple applications that are useful for group work in online classes. The most frequently used include Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Maps.

Google Apps offers numerous advantages for teaching and learning, including extensive sharing options, collaboration capabilities with editing and commenting features, an autosave feature and 30 GB of storage, viewable revision history, and core apps already integrated with Unity accounts (Gracieux & Giro, 2014).

Organizing Group Work using Google Apps from DELTA

Video Tutorials for Using Google Apps from DELTA


Group Contracts and Community Guidelines

If you’d like students to work together in peer groups for peer review activities and/or other group or collaborative assignments and projects within the course, consider how you’d like to establish community guidelines and/or implement group contracts. You can find some resources in this Google document for Creating Community.

The subpage Communicating with Students offers a number of other practices to employ in the online/hybrid classroom.

There’s also an example of a peer rubric here that will be useful in developing your own. Much of the work that you have put into your face-to-face classes can be easily translated to the online environment.


Group Work and Meeting Guidelines

Since cooperative work may seem a bit onerous in an online or hybrid environment, DELTA has developed a number of resources to help instructors with the work. Although group work may take a bit more scaffolding and may require video conferencing, it is worth enacting writing as a social act and prepares students for much of the collaborative work they will do later in their careers.

Best Practices for Group Work Evaluation from DELTA

Meeting Types and Group Meetings Best Practices from DELTA


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