Building online communities of learning

I presented a webinar for EDEN's series on education in the time of a pandemic' earlier today, and was pleased to see almost 300 participants from across the globe. I covered a lot of theory and related it to practice, offering some worked examples of how I had previously conducted online learning in undergraduate and post-graduate education programmes.

I paid specific attention to the building of community, touching on issues around empathy, tutor knowledge, teacher passion, social presence and immediacy - all of which are key elements, I would argue, in the success level of online learning.  I also worked through some classic neo-Marxist perspectives and explored the extent to which they are useful as explanations in contemporary online education.

Some excellent, searching questions ensued at the end of my presentation which you can see me attempt to answer in the video link below. Ultimately, it is the sense of community and belonging that can make the difference between those students who persist and succeed, and those who drop out. I'm very grateful to the EDEN community for inviting me to present at this event, and I hope the YouTube video below is useful to you.





Building online communities of learning by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's