How To Build an Online Community to Increase Awareness of Your Online Course
Building online learning communities is a great way to raise awareness for your online courses and make your students engage with each other. As they discuss the course topics, they will become more interested in the material, increase course completion rate, and increase their chances of buying your new courses. You make sure that this online community is immediately informed of your new online courses, which increases your chances of selling more of your course and the incentives you propose such as digital certificates. These people will also probably tell their friends about your courses, potentially increasing their user base.
Importance of Online Communities
When it comes to creating an effective online learning environment, online communities are critical for learning. This is one of the reasons that they’re so popular, particularly in higher education. In distance learning, community members collaborate to build an interactive canvas of reactions and comments from a variety of perspectives. They discover methods to explore, think, invent, build skills, and seek conceptual understanding—things that they would not have been able to accomplish on their own otherwise. Instilling a feeling of connection and fellowship in online learners helps to keep them interested and motivated to complete their studies on time.
Most instructors, on the other hand, find it difficult to compel learners to join in the discussion forum because students attend the classes at their own speed. However, there are strategies that you can employ to gradually increase participation and, ultimately, create a genuine sense of community in your organization. What you need to do is make some adjustments to your course design and incorporate collaborative learning activities into your curriculum.
Ways of Community Building
There are multiple ways of online community building and initiating conversations between course members. While you can choose to use one of these techniques, we recommend that you use a combination of multiple of them. One of them is asynchronous debates. They give participants time to contemplate and encourages them to give more careful attention to the responses they provide. Instead of needing to react instantly, students may take their time and ponder on their answers.
Another way is to incorporate a discussion board and organize smaller group chats for your students to engage with each other. You can invite members of the community to write or record a summary of how they came up with a solution to an issue, and then distribute it to other groups. Problems and problems from each learner’s personal or professional life might be introduced in this way.
Finally, you can encourage your students to ask questions so you can engage with them. The established presence and availability of the instructor will urge your students to ask more questions and engage with each other.
We recommend that you combine these techniques along with social media and message groups as well as a discussion board on your course website to build your community.
