Building+an+Online+Community



=Why build an online community and how do you do it?=

A great deal of research has suggested that building an online community is necessary for a successful online course. Because our courses will be blended, this will happen much more naturally than it would with a totally online course. Still, to make sure we keep that sense of community, which I believe is something that makes Crummer successful, we need do some very specific things in the online portion of our courses. Two important components are **instructor presence** and **student-to-student interaction**.

First, even when our students don't //literally// see us, they need to //figuratively// see us. They need to see our comments in the discussion forums and perhaps hear or see us in audio chats or video lectures. These types of activities reduce what is often called the //transactional distance// between us and our students.

Second, the students need to have interactions with their classmates. Again, the discussion boards provide one opportunity for this, but there are others. Pairing students for assignments or having students review classmates' assignments can help sustain that sense of community during the weeks when the students are not face-to-face. Our common use of team projects will also make a positive contribution to community building in our blended courses, just has they have always done in our face-to-face classes.