Insights
Centre for Innovation Launches Community Building Online Course
A new course on Community Building has been launched and created by Centre for Innovation expert, Tanja de Bie. The course, Build Your Own Online Community, is a free self-guided training hosted on Leiden University’s Articulate Rise 360 platform. It equips teachers, support staff and students with the tools and techniques to build, maintain and engage online communities.
Overview
Online community building is more important than ever as many aspects of day-to-day life are moving to the digital realm. This includes teaching, student associations, interest and professional groups, and other social associations. The transition to online communities can be a daunting challenge. Build Your Own Online Community provides academic and support staff, as well as other community and association leaders with what they need to successfully build and maintain digital communities.
Course outcomes
Create a project plan for a community to pitch to management
Design an engaging community for all participants
Create a sense of social presence
Apply different moderation techniques
Start and build out your community
Understand how you can maintain and improve your community
What’s in the course?
The training consists of readings, knowledge clips and presentations. There are multiple choice quizzes included to check if you have understood the content. We also provide templates to create your own community.
The training is online and self-paced, meaning you can start and finish whenever it suits you and there is no requirement for attendance at a specific location or time. There will however be optional Q&A webinars offered synchronously on 20 August at 9:30 (CET) and 26 August at 13:00 (CET) as a companion to this self-paced material. We estimate the basic training is about 4 study hours. There is no certificate of completion or participation offered.
While originally designed for creating learning communities, the design techniques can be applied to other forms of community, and the further reading section will give opportunities to explore those possibilities more in depth outside this training with a collection of resources and literature.
Update: Online Community Moderation Course
A new course (launched October 2020) aimed at teaching and supportive staff, student assistants, and senior students, will teach you the fundamentals of online community moderation.
More insights on online community building from the Centre:
Get in touch with the author
Tanja de Bie
Online Learning Expert
t.de.bie@sea.leidenuniv.nl
