Building Online Learning Communities: Design Principles and Strategies

Abstract

Too many higher education institutions have rushed into online education without understanding how to design effective socio-technical learning environments that utilize the networking capabilities of the Internet. This workshop will equip you with the essential background and skills for conceptualizing, designing, and developing online learning communities that engage in collaborative inquiry-based learning. It will demonstrate how social media and online learning can support the advancement of collaboration to support trends in higher education. We will explore a learning design model for online learning that details principles and strategies for developing an online learning community, providing mentoring and learner support for students to engage in inquiry-based learning. The goal of this workshop is to design a community building activity and an online collaborative learning experience for a selected discipline or organization to be delivered by a Learning Management System such as Moodle, or a combination of social media.