Connection Is More Vital Than Ever For eLearning
In recent months, eLearning has become an essential asset to education. It is vital to make sure that those you engage in eLearning have a positive experience and return to you to learn more. Many who were not accustomed to this style of learning were thrown into this form of learning very quickly. As eLearning professionals, learning to adapt and give our students a chance for success is an essential piece of the puzzle. Building a thriving community on top of your curriculum could be the answer.
How Do You Build An Online Community?
To benefit from creating an online learning community, you must put in the work to help it flourish. Here are 5 simple ways to help develop your online community:
1. Engagement Is Everything
Make sure you regularly interact with your online students via discussion forums or other media that you are using for group communication. This can also include social media. Make regular announcements about news or content to create engagement.
2. Include Icebreakers
Encourage the use of icebreaker games. These can help your online students to become more comfortable around each other, resulting in a more relaxed, positive learning environment.
3. Encourage Discussion
Encourage your students to ask questions. These can help prompt discussion in a group, especially if the question requires a more detailed, collaborative answer.
4. Fuel Positive Debate
Ignite discussion and debate, encouraging your students to spread their ideas and challenge each other. This will strengthen the community spirit within your group of students.
5. Provide Opportunity For Self-Expression
Create a community forum that your students can all interact with. They can create their own posts about different topics they found particularly interesting, further their learning, and encourage other students to interact and leave comments.
What Are The Benefits Of An Engaging Online Community?
Greater Discussion And Debate
One of the most important ways to cement new ideas and concepts is to include them in discussion and debate. With the presence of a strong, positive online community, your students will be able to exchange information with each other and develop their unique ideas through collective discussion. Interacting with the students on your online courses can help you understand what topics within your courses receive the most attention and interest.
This can help you to better tailor the content of your courses to people's needs. Overall, this results in better outcomes for students and increases their satisfaction with the course itself.
An Increase In Returning Students
By providing a strong community with positive benefits, you significantly increase your chances of attracting returning students. They will be encouraged to continue interacting with your courses through community experiences' positive benefits, such as debates and more personalized discussion.
The presence of community support is also beneficial to their ability to learn, leading to better results from your courses. These factors increase overall customer satisfaction, leading to positive reviews, repeat learners, and a better chance of your students recommending your eLearning courses to others.
Benefits To Your Personal Brand
One of the key ways to ensure that your learners positively view your personal brand as an educator is to build an engaging community surrounding your eLearning courses. It increases your reputation as it results in a more engaging form of learning and can offer your students more methods of absorbing information outside of the confinements of a structured course through student-to-student interaction.
Establishing a solid online community also helps make the courses more personalized. Students can introduce their own topics of interest to the group for discussion and debate. This can become a unique benefit to your course—the course's personalization and the ability to discuss a wide range of topics that are of interest to the collective group.
Overall, building an engaging community within your eLearning course has various benefits for you and your students. You create a more positive and interactive learning environment that allows students to bring their own knowledge and experiences to discussion and debate, enriches each student's learning individually, and ultimately leads to better results on your courses.
This, in turn, brings many benefits to your personal brand. Positive learning experiences encourage individuals to recommend your eLearning services to others and increase students' likelihood of returning for further teaching in the future. These factors will help to create a better reputation for you personally and the courses that you provide.
