The third topic centered around how to create learning communities and foster collaboration. We spent quite some time discussing what precisely a community is, and how this differs from say a network. Briefly, one could say that in the former, you “cook together”, in the latter you just “eat together”. A community requires active participation from all members, and tend to strive towards a common goal, of benefit to all community members. 

As for the question of how we generate a community? The five stage model of online learning developed by Gilly Salmon provides some good advice (https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html). The first steps are important. To start with, everyone must have access and feel comfortable about the online tools that will be used. Moreover, its imperative to create a welcoming and encouraging environment.  This can be done in a few ways, such as setting up norms for how the group should interact online, and make sure that everyone knows what the tasks and goals are. Gamification is another key aspect. Make it fun, and make use of polls, quizzes and other available competitive tasks. Another trick is perhaps to provide credits or rewards for active participation (e.g. think pokecoins in Pokemon Go). In my own teaching I have noted how well gamification works. In the course I teach now (over Zoom), I have made frequent use of polls, which really engaged the students. In my Zoology class I print out photos of representative species from each phylum, and then hand each student one sheet. Then they together have to figure which photo depicts which phylum, and then jointly piece together a phylogenetic tree of all the species. This is a fun and collaborative task, well received by the students.  

I also liked the idea of positive interdependence, i.e. to create an envirnoment where the success of one person is dependent on the success of the group. One could use shared grades, mutual rewards, hand out complementary information that the group needs to combine etc.

Again, a fun topic!

Here is the link to our google slideshow on this topic!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nwEmUoFtU__mFg5W5zkIsF_r3CLuVtDwP0u0njQiQTY/edit#slide=id.p