Building Communities--Strategies for Collaborative Learning
By Soren Kaplan

In a recent survey by the Masie Center, nearly 2000 learning professionals ranked online communities as one of the top three most important components of e-learning portals. But the term community remains ambiguous, and CLOs are unsure how to start building and integrating them into their organizations. Here's a model that describes a number of practical applications for including community as part of a learning plan and specific strategies for building learning-focused communities.

According to Webster, a community is "any group living in the same area or having interests, work, etcetera. in common." While communities have existed since the dawn of humankind, the growing interest around the concept today is largely a result of a breakdown of the geographic assumption underlying this simple definition. Most communities, whether online or traditional, share a number of qualities and characteristics. For example, they're held together by distinct operating norms, members are distinguished by their formal and informal roles, trust must be built to ensure quality interactions, and a shared sense of purpose serves as the glue that bonds the community together. In my opinion, communities that focus on learning must possess these same characteristics and engage people in a learning process over time.

As the term community has become an ambiguous buzzword, the concept has become synonymous with online discussion boards and chat rooms. When put into a learning context, however, community can be a vehicle for connecting people to other people’s stories and experiences, as well as mentoring, all of which result in accelerated learning and the sharing of tacit knowledge within an organization.

Here are three reasons why you should consider building community into your overall learning strategy:

• Approximately 70 percent of what an employee needs to know to do his or her job successfully is learned outside of formal training, according to Peter Henschel's article "Understanding and Winning the Never-Ending Search for Talent: The Manager’s Core Work in the New Economy." Therefore, communities extend learning by creating a structure in which people can learn from informal interactions.

• Tacit knowledge, which is informal knowledge about how things really get done, is extremely difficult to capture, codify, and deliver through discrete learning objects and traditional training programs. Communities are a way to elicit and share practical know-how that would otherwise remain untapped.

• Creating and structuring opportunities for people to network, communicate, mentor, and learn from each other can help capture, formalize, and diffuse tacit knowledge. Communities become a boundaryless container for knowledge and relationships that can be used to increase individual effectiveness and a company’s overall competitive advantage.

Indeed, for most learning professionals, the question isn’t whether building communities will deliver value to the organization, but rather what kind of community does it need and what steps does the company need to take to build one.

Types of learning communities

For communities to yield results, they must be integrated fully into the core learning strategy--from creating e-learning content that connects to community technologies and processes to extending face-to-face training into blended learning solutions that include pre- and post-event online community-building tools.

E-learning communities are groups of people connected solely via technology. All interactions begin and occur over the Internet, through conference calls, via videoconferencing, and so forth. These communities promote virtual collaboration that's focused on addressing a specific topic, and they are supported by one or more online learning and media tools. For example, a group of learners may be assigned to meet for a one-hour Webconference. Following the meeting, learners are assigned an interactive Web course. To work through the program, the group must use a discussion board to relate their own experiences and advance to the next learning phase.

By integrating live Webconferencing, streaming video, narrated PowerPoint presentations, and facilitated discussions, it becomes possible to deliver a conference entirely online, over several days. Similar to face-to-face professional or industry conferences, online conferences allow learners to receive compelling content from experts, ask questions, network with other attendees, and obtain practical resources and information. Unlike face-to-face conferences, however, people can attend from anywhere and at any time, which is ideal for geographically dispersed groups. The overall costs of an online event can be far less than its physical equivalent. Online conference communities typically have life spans of a few days to a few weeks.

Blended learning communities integrate online learning and face-to-face meetings. Two core assumptions of this type of community are 1) deep personal relationships between learners create richer collaborative learning experiences and 2) relationships between learners can be strengthened through structured group interactions that employ technology before and/or after a face-to-face learning event. This can involve pre-event activities in which consultants and trainers facilitate warm-up exercises to kick off meetings. The goal of these events is to establish norms, ground rules, and an esprit de corps among participants. From a group dynamics perspective, ice breakers accelerate a group’s ability to think as a team, which increases its ability to perform the given task quickly and effectively. Engaging learners in structured introductions and prework via Web conferences, online discussions, and conference calls makes it possible to accelerate openness, sharing, and collaborative learning when participants finally come together in a traditional classroom setting.

In another instance, a follow-up community can extend relationships and learning after a face-to-face event. Rather than end the learning experience when participants walk out the door, a structure and process is provided to keep people engaged, connected, and productive for a designated period of time. These communities can act as vehicles for developing group projects, discussing research findings, and mentoring peers.

In addition, end-to-end communities include pre-event and follow-up learning activities. Some learners liken the end-to-end community to a digital sandwich because the face-to-face meeting is typically sandwiched between group interactions that are supported by collaboration tools. For example, a leadership development program might include an ice-breaker community to provide prework and introduce participants, a face-to-face experiential workshop to help clarify and define individual development objectives, and a follow-up community that focuses on coaching and mentoring to overcome challenges as participants achieve their objectives.

Creating collaborative communities

When creating collaborative learning communities, developers should consider more than just the technology. Ideally, the conversation begins by clarifying the business objectives and how the strategy translates into group and individual competency requirements. From there, learning objectives may be defined that support competency gaps.

Although differences between online and face-to-face facilitation definitely exist, seasoned facilitators often discount their skills regarding online community building. Common group process skills that are familiar to all trainers, such as facilitating introductions, setting expectations, and ensuring equal participation, need to be applied in the online world. However, there are several approaches that can help engage learners in collaborative online learning environments. Although not all of the following design principles may apply to a given community, the framework is intended to serve as a basic starting point when creating e-learning or blended collaborative environments.

People approaches

• Clearly define roles. Describe the relationship between the different roles in the community, including the instructor, subgroups, group leaders or facilitators, and individual learners. Be sure to detail responsibilities and interdependencies.

• Create subgroups. Create a breakout group of learners that has its own online space for small group learning activities and group project collaboration.

• Support individuality. Provide a way for learners to create personal profiles that include photos and salient information to the topic. For example, a course on marketing might ask participants to identify their favorite innovative television commercial.

Process approaches

• Establish operating norms. Include guidelines for online and offline etiquette and obtain agreement on the behavior that will lead to successful group and individual learning outcomes. For instance, ask each community member to log in three times per week and post one question and one response on the discussion board.

• Foster trust. Establishing and aligning learners’ expectations around shared objectives, including how individual contributions tei in to the broader success of the group, helps create an open and sharing environment. Using the entire group, explicitly define the common values and behavior that will help the community achieve a shared goal and also build trust.

• Create a buddy system. Keeping learners engaged in an online environment can be challenging. Create a support structure to keep people involved by employing a system in which pairs or groups of learners are responsible for joint participation and contribution, such as codevelopment of a case study or alternating postings in the discussion area.

Technology approaches

• Provide an easy-to-use collaborative environment. Online learning environments come in all shapes and sizes. In addition to features, simplicity and user-friendly access are the most important attributes to consider. The goal of technology should be to serve the community through its precision. Community members should spend more time learning about the topic than about how to use a given technology. In addition, technology should be transparent to the instructor as well as the learner; no technical knowledge should be required to customize or manage the environment.
  
  The following table outlines some typical features of Web-based environments:

As workgroup collaboration, knowledge management, and learning technologies and processes converge, communities increasingly will become prevalent. The challenge facing learning professionals is to link business strategy to learning strategy in ways that seamlessly incorporate community as a means of capturing the informal or tacit knowledge that exists within the organization but isn't accessible through formal training programs. Whether creating a community for e-learning or one that supports a blended learning approach, community builders must consider a variety of factors related to people, group processes, and technology--if they're to design and orchestrate online environments that inspire collaborative learning.

Published: August2002