Week 5 - Online Community

 Since prehistoric age humans needed to interact with each other in order to survive by hunting for food, and building shelters. Creating a community is necessary in order to transfer knowledge, values, cultures, language and it is important to be able to solve complex problems in a globalized world.  A diverse and integrated community, is also relevant to bring a new perspective to the society.

In the modern day educational setting, creating community should be part of the curriculum and it is more of a challenge when dealing with an online classroom. Using tools available to the online community, can facilitate the difficult barrier between the students and the teacher created by the virtual world. As stated in Pilar's video, the importance of (identifying )the purposes before choosing the tools to use to establish a community while teaching online, is necessary to design a way for students to interact easily allowing them to surpass the obstacle of the virtual world.  Pillar's comment in her video is an important point to take in account when addressing the development of an online community.

Below are the activities that I would probably incorporate in an online classroom in order to try to establish an online community:

Meet and Greet- students can use any format (video, letter, power point, avatar) to introduce themselves and share one strength and one difficulty that they had in their life (can be related to the course or not)  and how they used them to improve their learning/life.

Create a private social group (mandatory)- place where students post solutions and answers, students talk about problems in classroom and strategies that helped them. Students share resources through links and articles

Group Project - create a list of tasks (or students can generate one) and ask each student to pick the task in which he/she has a specific skill (talent for). Students then have to show the steps (evolution) of the project. At the end, each student shares his/her the experience and post a blog highlighting his/her positive and negative experiences and what they would change if they did the project again.

 Another group project would be that now the students would be paired. One student would be proficient at a specific skill such as making videos and the other does not know this specific skill. The skilled student has to teach the other and explain how he/she did it. The student who learned the material has to do a presentation showing what he learned giving examples and applying this skill to real life.

Below is an article about how to become a community in the online classroom by integrating cognitive and affective learning  to  maximizing e-learning:

http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring61/woods61.htm 

 Finally, I am posting a video from Jenny Thomas a CTAP specialist, Creating a Community in the Online Classroom