virtual – Michele Brannon-Hamilton's Blog

Building a Virtual Community

Welcome to my virtual community reflection blog. Currently, I’m designing a virtual community for students to interact in a college environment. I’m using this blog to reflect on the process and share my experience.

So far, I have covered the following topics: Designing a Virtual Community and Conducting an Environmental Scan.

Today, I’m looking at the context of the community.

Once you have analyzed the environment around you, you need to determine how your educational institution fits into the bigger picture. What is your school doing now? Is there a gap in your services? What are your current strengths and weaknesses?

Determining Your Current Situation

Create a list of your current services and speculate how you could add value to those services using technology. For example, if you offer face-to-face writing services are you fulfilling the need at your school? Are you reaching everyone or is there a gap?

Perhaps you determine that you have students who don’t use your services because of time or travel constraints. You now have a gap you need to fill.

Online services provide students with choices and new opportunities to connect. Besides time and travel factors, many students have work and family commitments that make visiting services difficult. You can meet these students online.

Will this hurt your current services?

In a word – no. There will always be students who prefer face-to-face help and there will always be students who will never use face-to-face services. Creating a virtual community gives students choices and gives you a chance to reach a new group of students.

Once you determine how your community fits with current needs, you will need to define the scope of your project.

After completing my UBC master’s degree, I was able to take one of my projects and turn it into a reality. I’m currently designing online student services for a local college. I’m going to use this blog to write about my journey through the design and implementation processes.

A Sense of Community

It didn’t matter that I lived in Ontario and went to school in BC. I still felt like part of the UBC community because I had connections with people who made me feel like I belonged. I could log in to my Master of Educational Technology (MET) courses each day and know I would find friends, mentors, classmates, and instructors there. I was able to discuss, connect, collaborate, create, and belong to a safe, caring community.

At first, the newness of online learning was overwhelming because there was so much to do and so many posts to read but it soon became apparent that I wasn’t in a race to do it all and there were always people there to help. In fact, logging in became addictive because I didn’t want to miss a thing. This is the feeling I wanted to create at my own college.

Our College Campus

Currently, the people at our college create a similar feeling on campus. Staff and students like being there because there is a sense of community apparent in the hallways. I wanted to bring that community online to reach the students who couldn’t be on campus or who couldn’t access our services in a face to face environment.

The Idea

If I could design a virtual community for our students, we could provide a place for students to interact, connect, and collaborate with our staff, other students and our resources. I would use constructivist principles and base the design on educational pedagogy. I could almost hear one of my professors saying, “pedagogy before technology.”

Once the idea started, the project soon grew beyond my expectations but first I had to do an environmental scan to determine if the project was really feasible. I used the notes from ETEC 520, Planning and Managing to figure out my next steps.

Next: the Environmental Scan