On the Craft of Online Communities in Education.
I did not know how the students would be with each other in person. We had invited them to give feedback on how their experience as online students could be improved. Some of them had never met any of their classmates in real life. It was a diverse crowd. Some had just finished high school before they had to flee as refugees, while others had abandoned well-established careers. They are all learners at Kiron Open Higher Education and refugees who are seeking to get a higher education outside their country of origin.
Many of these learners do not have any educational alternatives to Kiron. They may not know the local language of the country they are located in well enough, they may have lost their educational papers while fleeing or be forced to stay at a certain physical location while their cases are being processed. What was meant to be a feedback focussed session soon turned into a lively social gathering as Kiron learners and staff started connecting and chatting. They shared stories of hardship and success, discussed tips and tricks relating to study habits and started organising themselves.
I felt a growing sense of community when I walked away from that meeting. It reminded me of the importance of community in learning. Many great learning experiences we hear about are tied intimately to a feeling of being part of a community or immersing oneself into a culture or a craft. For me, that points to the fact that there is a richness of learning that only human interactions can reach. It seems that the process of establishing personal ownership over a field of knowledge is intimately linked with acquiring a vocabulary, work culture and habits of thinking, which often happens through engaging with other people.
The Kiron students’ thought that a strengthened community would be one of the best ways of ensuring their future success. It was clear to these students that their success was directly related to that of others. Much of the discussion tried to pinpoint the barriers that would have to be overcome for a better community to emerge.
It was clear to everyone that the greatest challenge in creating a sense of community at Kiron is not the immense diversity of experience, age or cultural origin that Kiron students have, but their physical separation from each other. It turns out that it is immensely challenging for these students to learn deeply and continually if they are isolated. If all that individual’s share is a subject of study and an official institution, it is very difficult for communities to form naturally without physical closeness and presence.
The challenge of creating learning communities that aren’t based on physical proximity is universal to the whole field of online learning. We simply aren’t good enough at creating the circumstances in which learners naturally form strong online communities. Developing a capacity to establish such communities will be vital in determining the potential and success of online education across the globe.
Where might we find indications of what can be done to improve our communities?
The Edsurge Independent community, the group of students producing the articles on this medium page, is a strong example of how community can be built while also providing insight in its shortcomings. We are a small selected group who are actively engaged in projects in education. We are all very inclined to form and participate in community. We all meet using a large conference format once a week either to have discussions amongst ourselves or have discussions with external speakers. These large scale spaces in which the whole community meet are of vital importance. On their own, however, the large meetings are not enough to build a strong community. The intimacy created from individual relationships are missing. A feature which has addressed this well is the Donut bot which is active on our community slack channel. Each week it prompts two participants in the channel to connect with each other. As we get deeper into the program more and more of us get to have personal talks together as prompted by the bot. This way personal connections are created between individual members of the community.
How online communities treat the spaces they inhabit can tell us a lot about the nature of the community itself. The EdSurge slack channel has been surprisingly barren given that the program has been running for more than a month. Despite our cohorts immense interest and passion in education it is hard to sustain a vibrant discussion.
Some communities clearly have this figured out though. My current roommate is part of the current batch at the Recurse Center who I think are re-thinking learning in great ways. They have a community channel like ours and at first glance the are very similar. However, it quickly becomes clear that their channels are very different from ours. They treat their channels with care and dedication. Their channel has turned into a living body of knowledge, insight and wisdom. The members of the community care deeply about this space. Their care is shown in the length of every comment which may consist of several paragraphs in length. The comments that are posted prove that the commenter has read and considered the points brought before them.
As communities created based on knowledge and purpose, the success of the both EdSurge Independent and the Recurse Center will in many ways be illustrated by the beautiful bodies of knowledge they will generate. Both EdSurge Independent and the Recurse Center have community spaces whose conditions were created very intentionally. The established community rules, conventions and frameworks determine, in what they encourage and limit, how the community develops.
Though this article points to what creates great communities, what is more important is how these organisations prioritise knowledge about community creation. They accept that community is something worth investing time and dedication in reaching. Going forward it would make sense for organisations to have an almost scientific approach to determining how to create great online learning communities. Especially as community rarely is a comprehendible linear process.
In specific ways, the challenge of online education is tied to the original vision for the internet as an enabler of communities spanning physical borders. As online education gains in momentum, the stakes for this vision to become reality will only become higher.
