How Community Based Platforms Can Increase Engagement
The first thing I recognized when opening up my first learning platform at school was that there was no community to interact with. How can I talk with my fellow classmates, create a group to go over our project or interact with clubs and organizations on campus?
Why is this the case?
Most learning platforms today focus on just the classroom and academic portions of school. So, the companies that build these platforms are simply providing solutions on one part of the school experience. However, there is a huge area with the learning platforms that they can really take advantage of: a community.
In some schools, we use other applications that try to drive engagement outside the classroom for extracurriculars like clubs and organizations and then co-curricular experiences like student newspapers, case competitions, contests and more. Problem is, are people using these applications? Answer is, mostly no.
Why is that? Well, because the learning platform is a requirement, most students use that on a daily basis. It’s hard for them to think about using something else that is not a requirement and that not everybody is on.
Why do you need a community inside your learning platform?
If you provide a community based platform with the academic experience combined, it connects the two together and the requirement to use a single platform. And by taking this approach, you can connect the campus relating to co-curricular opportunities or extracurriculars to happen both online and offline. Instead of just hoping by luck that you run into an opportunity or by will, you can get better opportunities catered to you personally. This makes for a much more enjoyable experience for students. And by making a great experience for students, it’s likely that they will become more engaged, leading to them feeling at home at an institution and staying.
How this impacts your campus
Most students that I have talked to always tell me they wish they did several things earlier in college but that it was way too late to get started now. What if we can fix that problem and give students the ability to find the opportunities, events, organizations, clubs, departments or studies they want to get involved in earlier in their career? What if you could interact with the community to get help, suggestions and answers on questions that you never would have gotten otherwise? What if you were shy and did not want to ask those questions but just wanted to view them instead?
With a community based platform, those realizations can come to life. Students, faculty and administrators can start building out a knowledge base of information for their campuses. To help in relation to academic success or the student experience. This will go a long way to engaging students in and out of the classroom. Ultimately, leading to improved performance in class, and better retention across the board.
What this can do for Student Life
There are so many departments working to engage students across the many activities that are going on in a college campus. What a community based platform can do is allow those departments to finally have a way of reaching the students where they like to receive things. You might ask…where do students like to receive messages? A majority of them like to receive information on their mobile devices. So, instead of sending emails where a vast amount of them never get read, send notifications to their phone through a platform that allows that to happen!
Making it easy for students to access notifications, events around them and opportunities for success will help your school find the right opportunity that engages each student. If you can do that, you are increasing your engagement across campus and increasing efficiency while doing so.
How about academic advisors?
Ever wished you could communicate with students at ease and manage them at a glance? Well the future of engagement is all about community. And if you have a community of students getting notifications and messages about the best events around the campus in one place, it makes it not only easier for the students to receive the information and know where it is but helps advisors not duplicate efforts. Instead of advisors messaging out via listservs, those listservs turn into communities on a learning platform. And guess what? That learning platform is a requirement to be on daily. So they are more likely to receive it because they are on it all the time. And secondly, they receive it to their phone, where they read messages like that. This also leads to utilizing this community to have students help each other solve daily challenges and promote solutions.
When you combine a community environment with the learning platform, you really take strides in revolutionizing the student experience and improving their chances at success — in and out of the classroom.
