Creating a strong, active community around your online course can be the one ingredient that makes your course a long-term success. A thriving community improves learning outcomes, boosts course completion rates, increases student satisfaction, and attracts fellow students through referrals and word-of-mouth. In this blog post, we’ll explore practical tactics and best-practice advice for building and maintaining a community around your online course.
Why a Community Matters for Your Online Course
Enhancing the Learning Experience
Building community around your course can take a solitary learning experience and make it cooperative. With a community of students, your learners engage with and gain from other perspectives, peer support, and shared resources, all of which deepen their understanding of the course material.
Studies have also shown that students who take online courses in communities—that is, with discussion boards and other participation tools—complete more courses successfully and retain a larger portion of what they’ve learned. In this way, fostering that feeling of belonging and meaningful dialogue can truly enhance a student’s experience.
Building Trust and Credibility
A healthy community fosters credibility, and students will perceive you as an engaged teacher who is genuinely committed to their success if they see that you are responsive and active in the community. This can result in higher course ratings, repeat enrolments, and a good reputation within your niche.
Increasing Retention and Course Completion Rates
One of the major challenges of online education is to ensure that a student stays engaged through the duration of the course—or at least to completion—and that a community gives that accountability, that peer encouragement, and that support. It’s hard to be the person who drops a course mid-stream when you’ve made a commitment to your fellow students and to the instructor who made the course available, who probably took time out to make a short video welcome, and who is actively following the threads because they are living it and dedicated to seeing the group thrive.
Essential Components of a Strong Online Course Community
Clear Communication Channels
Good communication is what holds every community together. Although forums, social media groups, songwriter chat sessions, and voice notes could be used as some of the means of communication, the overall means should be accessible and easy to locate while also being monitored for regular activity.
Creating a private Facebook group, choosing one of the built-in forums your Learning Management System (LMS) offers, or adding a chat module like Slack or Discord are all popular options. Just be sure you choose an option that both your audience and your online course require.
Regular Interaction and Engagement
Your online course will not be successful unless you engage with others—both you and the students—on a regular basis. As an online course creator, you have to be the catalyst, starting discussions, asking questions, and posting content. Encourage students to share their experiences, ask questions, and provide feedback to one another.
Some studies have shown that courses with a greater degree of instructor-student interaction have higher levels of student satisfaction and engagement than courses that use automatic instructions. This can be done through live QA sessions, weekly check-ins, or even conversations on the community board.
Recognition and Rewards
We all enjoy receiving praise, and rewards motivate us; incorporate these into your community. Give badges to active members, recognise milestones, and offer discounts for future courses.
Just like for real gamers, some of the rules of the system can be designed to encourage participation with a leaderboard and a point tally. These sorts of gamification techniques can inject fun into the process of learning but also foster a sense of achievement among students.
Best Practices for Building and Sustaining Your Course Community
Set Clear Community Guidelines
Specifying what’s fair is necessary to keep a healthy community courteous and orderly. Enunciate guidelines specifying how members should behave toward each other, consequences for not behaving courteously, and the basic rules of behaviour. Post these guidelines in a prominent location so members are clear about what’s allowed.
Similarly, we need to make sure that the guidelines are enforced across the board. This will send the signal that it’s a community in which people feel safe to express questions, opinions, ideas, and feedback without being trolled or bullied.
Foster Inclusivity and Diversity
A flourishing community is one in which each individual is recognised as a unique part of an honestly plural whole and, as a consequence, comes to see herself reflected in the faces of each of her fellows, operating equitably. To this end, foster an environment that is openly diverse, where the ideas, experiences, and identities of those in your community are welcomed, respected, and valued. Challenge your students to articulate and share their own cultural identities, and encourage others to do likewise.
Moreover, inclusion often implies that the online space needs to keep a careful eye on the language and, therefore, diversity present within itself. This often translates to casting a critical gaze on others, as if membership in an online community needs to abide by the criteria of assimilation—for instance, recreating the environment by allowing multiple translation options, or even depending on the cultural nuances of how communication occurs within a specific group.
Provide Value Beyond the Course
To help keep your community alive after the course has officially ended, create value for them that is not directly related to the course content; it could be around participating in quarterly or bi-annual webinars, getting exclusive industry news, or resources that can help students with their continued learning journey outside the course.
Alumni communities are particularly helpful here. Creating a space where past customers can stay in touch with each other, share what they learned, and continue to practice the skill you taught helps you stay in touch long-term and creates brand loyalty.
Leveraging Technology to Build Your Community
Choosing the Right Platform
The platform you pick to host your community will have a strong influence on whether it grows. Important factors to consider when picking a platform include:
Ease of use: The site needs to be easy for students to browse and explore, regardless of their technical knowledge.
Integration with your LMS: If you can, go for an LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) version of the software your institution uses to ensure students have to log in to one system rather than two.
Scalability: As your community grows, your columnar database should be able to deal with more members and increased activity without slowing down.
Utilizing Automation Tools
There are automation tools to help you sustain your community, like email automation to welcome new community members, remind students of an upcoming event, or send a weekly roundup of your community’s activity. Moreover, there are social media scheduling tools that allow you to post consistently on social media to stay present in your community’s minds without having to spend every waking moment there to manage your community.
Analyzing Community Data
At a community level, you need to be able to track and analyse data to find out what’s working and what isn’t. Most platforms already have this information available to show which posts are performing the best, who is engaging in the community more, and/or where members are the most active. Use this information to hone your strategy so that your community keeps growing from strength to strength.
Engaging Strategies for Long-Term Community Success
Host Live Events and Webinars
Live events and webinars are the perfect way to bring your community together in real-time, to explore content beyond the course, introduce new topics, or just to meet other students and engage with you directly.
Live events create a feeling of excitement and immediacy, but you get greater participation because people know they can all see it live. Then record what’s happening and make it available afterwards to those who were unable to attend.
Encourage Peer-to-Peer Interaction
Though the course instructor is often the central figure in the course, that doesn’t mean you should neglect peer-to-peer learning. Encourage learners to form study groups, work together on projects, or even post their own expertise for others to utilise. When students can interact with each other, they can often teach each other in meaningful and impactful ways. Peer learning is invaluable because learners frequently feel more comfortable discussing a concept when speaking to another student.
Regularly Update Content and Resources
It takes constant effort to keep your community alive; you can’t just build it and expect it to run on its own. Keep it current by adding new resources, discussion topics, and course materials on a regular basis, so it’s a dynamic resource that students have a reason to keep coming back to.
Overcoming Common Challenges in Community Building
Managing Different Engagement Levels
It is a community with you, and not everybody is going to be equally engaged with it (and this is fine). Recognize and do something about differences in participation. If you notice that people are not well integrated, send messages to them encouraging them to participate, or, if they are not interested in posting their responses in the community, you could offer an option for students to complete a survey or request an appointment to speak with you individually.
You can provide different tiers of participation: asking low-risk, low-commitment questions (e.g., a poll) from your students for those who are timid and/or short on time, and more time-intensive and emotionally committed activities (e.g., leading a discussion) for those who are game for it.
Handling Negative Interactions
Negative interactions can happen in even the best of communities, and when they do, they need to be addressed as effectively and as quickly as possible. Plan out ahead of time how discussions will be moderated, how complaints will be handled, and how rules will be enforced.
In dealing with negative interactions, communicate transparently: let your community know how such incidents will be addressed and let everyone feel safe and respected.
Maintaining Consistency
Consistency is crucial to sustaining the community. Post updates regularly, interact with the community consistently, and keep the content coming, as it’s difficult to engage students in the long term if the community isn’t maintained. Post at regular times, set up recurring activities such as weekly discussions or monthly webinars, and stick to it.
For example, you might get community managers or student leaders to help you maintain this consistency so that your community continues to thrive even when you only pay attention. Hand off some activities. Sometimes your own attention just won’t be enough to keep murky pond waters clear. Then it’s time to hand off some activities to a responsible person so as to assure a broader network of quality control, natural play, and curiosity.
Be clear about your children’s expectations. Anytime you make decisions in upper or middle management, it’s important to let your subordinates know. Communicate these management decisions to the children in your care, using terms they can understand and adjusting your language to reconcile the contradictions and mysteries that make play such a rich experience.Shift your thinking.
Remember that if the chosen activities seem to impede tests and standards, they might actually benefit your children in unforeseen ways. A final caution about rules. Keep an eye out for unnatural consequences that arise from a single objective.
Conclusion
Building a community around your course is a great creative strategy for enhancing learning in the short term, but it also paves the way for long-term success. When an online community becomes supportive, dynamic, and inclusive, it can lead to improved student results, increased trust and goodwill, and continued interaction within the course.
Still, though you can run a great class without a community at all, if you can manage to build a community of students interacting regularly, clear on what they’ll contribute and learn, and with you foregrounding what community members can learn far beyond the course content, you are well on your way to creating a magnetic platform.
You can build a community successfully only by following the best practices I’ve outlined here, using the right tools, and adopting the right strategies. If you can do this, your classes will become not just more fulfilling courses for your students but also a means of building your brand and increasing the success of your online courses.