Building a sense a sense of community in online courses is a critical component and needs to be planned as part of the overall teaching strategy. While you may believe that a strong sense of community may only be achieved in a traditional classroom research has found that community can also be developed in online classes.
What does a “Sense of Community” mean? According to Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton (1985), in their book Habits of the Heart, they define community as follows:
A community is a group of people who are socially interdependent, who participate together in discussion and decision making, and who share certain practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it. Such a community is not quickly formed. It almost always has a history and so is also a community of memory, defined in part by its past and its memory of the past. (p. 333)
A strong sense of community in online courses has many positive benefits for learning such as:
- Increasing persistency in course attendance
- Increasing the flow of information and cooperation among learners
- Establishing a sense of well-being
- Reducing learner burn out
The key to facilitating at a distance is to discover a way to stimulate a sense of community in a virtual classroom specifically in an asynchronous learning environment. In this topic you will discover how to build a sense of community with learners who are not only separated by physical distance but who interact with each other through mainly the use of text-based tools and without the requirements of being online at the same time.