How amazing it is that I could find a single word to describe an entire process.  Synergistic perfectly describes the process of collaboration that occurs in an online learning community.   The coming together of many different people to produce many different thoughts and ideas. 

Online learning communities are small groups of students who share common academic goals and work collaboratively on projects.  It must be noted that these groups can either exist in a public or private location on the internet and they work together to achieve the learning needs of the group.

I can liken this to our experience as part of the ONL202 community.  We were divided further into PBL groups that served as our learning communities.  

During topic 3 –  we set out to show case connectivism through our online learning community.  We did this by creating a video which we showed the “pass the post-it challenge”.  We achieved this with much planning, discussion, brainstorming, laughter and hard work.   

Online Learning Communities share certain characteristics.  Which I noticed as we grew together as a team.  Here are the characteristics of our Online Learning Community:

1. We shared a common learning objective and effectively worked towards it
2. Our community enabled shared learning as we began to explore and learn new things from each other.
3. We set goals so as to achieve a desired result.
4. We connected on a higher level and even discussed cross cultural integration amongst our peers.
5. We shared online resources and tools with each other to enhance our learning experience.
6. We shared the leadership role as we paired up and took on the various topics.
7. The process of working together was both reflective as a group and introspective as an individual.   

Through the reflective journey of this topic – we soon realised that we could use our team as a model for what an Online Learning Community should be like.  COLLABORATIVE! INSYNC! SYNERGISTIC!